Time Machine is Awesome and How to Reset the Administrative Password

The hard drive in my MacBook failed this weekend. I have the worst possible luck when it comes to hard drives. It's the fourth drive that's failed for me in under a year's use.

Thankfully Apple made it easy for me to back up and to restore a system. Time Machine is awesome. I plug my external hard drive in and it backs up my whole system without any hassle. But what was better is how well the restore went, well almost how well it went.

First, I had a new drive put in my MacBook. It's a good thing that hard drives are getting cheaper! And then I installed Leopard. After the base install Leopard kindly asks me if I want to restore from a Time Machine backup, and I say yes. After waiting for my data to copy over I get two surprises.

The first surprise is that my password for login does not work. That's bad; I'll explain the solution after. The second surprise is that after logging in, everything is exactly as it was before the failure. All my documents and settings have been restored. It's amazing how well that part worked.

Now the password bit. I don't know how, but the install seemed to have initialised my account with a password other than what I had set before the failure. Perhaps Time Machine doesn't store passwords? That would make sense from a security perspective, but I would think that the installer should have prompted me for a new one.

But, it turns out that an administrative password can be reset using an installer disc. Pop the disc in, reboot and hold 'c' as boots back up. This will cause it to boot from the disc instead of the hard drive. Then, when the installer pops up, there's a Utilities menu on the top bar. Under that menu is a tool to reset passwords.

After my password was reset, I'm happily again using my MacBook!

Phantom Front Row Entries

I've been finding a number of dead entries in the Podcasts menu in Front Row lately. Podcasts that I've listened to and have long since been deleted. Mysterious.

It turns out that there is an enigmatic sequence of events that cause the iTunes database to retain entries for deleted items. I never did find out what are the particular causes for this to occur. However, there is a way to fix these phantoms of podcasts past.

After a few dead ends, I found a thread on the Apple forums about this issue. No one knew why it happens, but one astute poster had a solution. Luckily, Doug has a script that searches the iTunes database and excises incorporeal entries. One run of the script neatly solved the problem. Huzzah!

Quicksilver Tip: Fix a Slow Quicksilver

Over the last week or so, my much beloved Quicksilver has gotten very, very slow and sluggish. I'd hit the hot key (option-space in my case) and start typing. And then I'd wait. After a few seconds, the command would register and the action would take place.

After snooping around for what the problem is, I found a few web pages that suggested reducing the catalog size. Yes, I did have a large number of items in my catalogue. Therefore, I promptly unchecked many of the items in my catalogue and issued a rescan command. However, contrary to my expectations, this had no noticeable effect.

Apparently deselecting items does not actually remove them. The whole lot is still sitting in memory. They are only cleared out after Quicksilver is shut down and restarted. Ugh. That's the way I had to fix things on my old operating system.

Gripe aside, here's the lesson. To really fix a dawdling Quicksilver, pare down your catalogue and restart the application.

Movie Tip: Rotate Movies With BitPlayer

I've run into a rather simple problem. When taking short movies with a digital camera, it is sometimes nice to film in a portrait orientation. However, digital cameras always assume movies are in a landscape orientation.

It turns out that there are a number of available tools to rotate movies. I'm sure that most top-end movie editors can do this, but iMovie doesn't. QuickTime Pro can, but I don't want to shell out for the pro tools just for a simple edit.

The solution I found is to use BitPlayer, a simple video player with the abilities to apply some transformations and re-encodings. All we have to do is rotate the video in the playback display and export it with the current settings applied. All very simple!

A Mac Desktop Picture Changer Using Flickr

My recent switch to Mac has so far been nothing but awesome. Generally, Macs are just better at everything. But, there is one application that I miss from the Windows world: a wallpaper changer that uses photos from Flickr. John's Background Switcher did exactly what I wanted, but that only exists on windows.

There is photocast trick over on Mac OS X Hints, but that has the limitation of only using recent photos out of a Flickr stream. I would really like to pull random photos out of my Flickr photostream, just like John's Background Switcher does. I'd also like to have some specific Flickr interaction, like jumping to the displayed photo, or showing the most interesting photos.

Unfortunately, I just can't find a good application on the Mac to do this. Thus, my only solution is to write one! I think that this should be a relatively simple application when it's done; however, discovering the most elegant way to put this together will be a small adventure. It should be fun and a good way to explore some of the principles of Mac development.

We'll all just have to see how this develops.

To keep the information about this project separate from the miscellaneous clutter of this blog, I've started a new blog specifically to journal my progress. You can visit this project journal at http://flickrdesktop.blogspot.com.