MacOSXPhiles

For European Mac users, or anybody outside of the U.S. for that matter, who use different time, date, and currency formats than us Yanks do, there is a glitch in 10.4 that causes custom settings created in the Formats tab of the International Preference Pane to be reset whenever you change selections. If you choose a standard group of settings for a certain locale, such as the U.S., or the U.K., they will stick just fine, but if you need to customize them, you’re pretty well hosed, because the changes will not stick. This causes big problems in Excel spreadsheets where columns that are formatted to reflect numbers or currency, and in FileMaker Pro databases as well, because those macros use the system preferences for date, time, currency, and number formatting. Users are finding that after migrating to 10.4, their databases and spreadsheets have all been changed, and there is no way to get around this problem.

There is actually a very simple way to resolve this. (more…)

Filed under: Mac OS X Tips
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Looking for an easy way to browse the files on your iPod? Of course, there are a lot of ways to browse the music on your iPod, but this one allows you to do it using Firefox, and you don’t have to worry about the fact that the files are hidden. It doesn’t work with Safari, and I haven’t tried it with any other browsers, but I suspect that it will work with Mozilla as well.

Basically, it’s as simple as opening a new, blank Firefox window and just drag your iPod into that window. All of your music is located in the /ipod_control/Music/ folder, and filed into subfolders /F00, /F01, /F02 etc. Because the iPod doesn’t use the same directory structure as your iTunes library, finding a specific song won’t be easy, but it is one way to recover a song that you accidently deleted, or just move songs to another computer. In fact, there are plenty of other utilities available to do this, but this is just one very easy way to browse the files on your iPod that you couldn’t otherwise see using Finder.

Filed under: Mac OS X Tips, iPod Stuff
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