I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place » Mac

Fixing The Windows Media Player vs. iTunes Album Art Mess

bryan — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:20:43 +0000

Years ago, I built the majority of my digital music library under Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (WMP). Since then, I’ve switched to Mac and iTunes as my digital media of choice. Generally, importing your MP3 music folders created by Windows Media Player into iTunes on the Mac works just great. Pretty much all the track [...]

SOLVED: VMWare Fusion, Windows Vista and Boot Camp

bryan — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:49:23 +0000

It took a ton of Googling, but I finally figured out how to get past the errors I was seeing trying to launch my Boot Camp partition in Fusion. When I did a Safe Mode boot of Windows in Boot Camp, I could see that chkdsk.sys was in my way, but I could not figure [...]

Qwest + DIR-655 = No Windows Messenger

bryan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:48:11 +0000

After many hours debugging, I traced it down to the combination of the Actiontec M1000 modem from Qwest and my D-Link DIR-655 Wireless N router . With those two together, I could get out to the Internet seemingly fine in Firefox, Skype and AIM, but could not connect to Windows Live. ... After a long, confused call with Qwest techsupport (she clearly had no idea what I was asking about) and a fair amount of Googling, I finally determined that my initial guess was correct: the Actiontec M1000 does not support DHCP reservations. ... The magic solution was this: Call Qwest to get my PPP password (you can get the user name on the M1000 screen) Configure the M1000 to be in RFC1483 Transparent Bridging Mode Reboot the Airport Extreme to get the PPPoE option you need Configure the Apple Airport Extreme with the PPPoE username and password from the M1000 Voila! You'll get connected with just a single NAT (the Apple router) which also supports DHCP reservations. So now, things are in great shape (I think): Windows Messenger is now running just fine over the Qwest connection.

ReadyNAS now has Time Machine support

bryan — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 02:49:55 +0000

I haven't been brave enough to switch over to it, but the new ReadyNAS firmware has both Time Machine and Tivo Home Media support. Now if only you could easily push video to the Tivo, I'd be set; I could drop the XBOX 360 completely.

Fusion & Boot Camp Annoyance

bryan — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 01:21:27 +0000

I keep getting the same error trying to start my Boot Camp partition under VMWare Fusion: "The Boot Camp partition is not prepared to run as a virtual machine. ... Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a clean solution to this if you are unable to get Windows to run as a startup disk via the normal Boot Camp boot. ... There are no shortage of comments on the topic , but even the terminal & fdisk solution didn't work. Booting to Windows directly just hangs during chkdsk (I let it sit 24 hours to no avail.) I had my old Parallels Boot Camp virtual image files laying around, so now I'm trying the crazy trick of reimporting those. (long shot at best.) Drop me an email if you know a solution for this!

Windows 7 install succeeded

bryan — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:08:33 +0000

Thanks to the helpful guide from the VMWare Fusion team, I was finally able to get Windows 7 installed. It had to be installed as a clean Windows install though, so none of my apps are there yet. At first blush, it seems to work just fine. I haven't really dug in a lot yet to see what the fuss is about.

Upgraded to iPhoto ’09

bryan — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:05:00 +0000

I’ve upgraded the laptop and desktop to iPhoto ’09 (yay for family plans.) So far I like: “Do not copy files to iPhoto library” checkbox: I don’t know if that was there in ’08 or not, but was always a pet peeve of mine about iPhoto. I manage my photos via the file system first. [...]

Windows 7 Fusion

bryan — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:04:22 +0000

My first attempt to install the Windows 7 beta in a VMWare Fusion image failed. When it got to the Windows 7 install, I think it couldn’t find all the right drivers to get itself going. I’ve recreated a new VMWare image and hopefully got all the necessary drivers and OS updates in place first [...]

Windows-L Lives! (Mac Version)

bryan — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:45:52 +0000

Where have you been all my (mac) life, LockTight? One of the couple features I’d been missing from Windows since switching to Mac has finally been addressed. I always used the Windows-L hotkey to lock my machine when I walked away from the keyboard; a habit I picked up in my days at Microsoft. Given [...]

There’s hope for my NetShare

bryan — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:51:02 +0000

I was one of the lucky few folks who managed to get a copy of the NetShare iPhone application before Apple banned it. I’ve never been able to get it to actually work though so I’d pretty much given up on that idea until my trip last weekend. The gentleman next to me was also [...]