phi kappa

HOWTO Pair Apple Bluetooth Keyboard with Windows 7

Friday, October 30th, 2009 | technology | No Comments

People on the internet (e.g. here and here) seem to have noticed that in Windows 7, pairing your Apple Bluetooth Keyboard is not an easy task.

If you find difficulties such as timeouts etc, there is a reason. Windows 7 wants to pair with the keyboard by giving you a code that you have to type on the keyboard, same procedure as in Mac OS X.

Now, the not-so-secret is: this does not work. After selecting the keyboard in the Add Bluetooth device wizard and clicking “forward”, you meet an eternally spinning waiting icon or some other error after a little while. Solution of the problem is to actually type a numeric code like “0000″ or another one of your choice on the BT keyboard just after you clicked on “forward” and then hit enter (once or twice…). Windows 7 should ask you to confirm the key you just typed and voilá. If it does not work the first time, switch the keyboard on and off and give it another go.

Worked for me

Tags: apple, mac os

Make keywurl 1.4 (beta 7) work with Safari 4.0.3 on Tiger

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 | technology | No Comments

Keywurl is great. Safari is great. Tiger too. Leopard, too. Etc.

For those of us who still use Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), Apple was nice enough to give us a version of the new Safari (Safari 4 or 4.0.3, to be precise).

Keywurl on the other hand is THE must-have extension to Safari. Now, keywurl 1.4 adds Safari 4.0.3 compatibility. But only on Leopard. Thus, when updating Safari to its version 4 on Tiger, the old version of keywurl you installed will not load anymore. The new keywurl version (as mentioned, 1.4 beta 7) is compatible with Safari 4.0.3 but when trying to install the 1.4 beta 7 Keywurl.bundle on Tiger it does not work. So far, no surprise.

I found a quick fix to make the 1.4 beta 7 Keywurl.bundle for Safari 4.0.3 work in Tiger. To do this, show the Keywurl.bundle’s package content, open the “Contents” folder and open the Info.plist with an appropriate text editor (may I suggest Smultron?). The part that needs fixing is:

<key>SIMBLTargetApplications</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>BundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.apple.Safari</string>
<key>MaxBundleVersion</key>
<string>5531.9</string>
<key>MinBundleVersion</key>
<string>5530</string>
</dict>
</array>


Simply substitute under MaxBundleVersion and MinBundleversion the first 5 for a 4, i.e. 4531.9 and 4530 instead of 5531.9 and 5530. Save, close/reopen Safari in case and voilá, Keywurl loads (and works).

Obviously, this is a quick hack with no guarantees, there are no problems on my machine besides the keywurl configuration pane in Safari’s preferences not working. But you can manually edit the /Library/Application Support/Keywurl preferences file (Keywords.plist) and in every case your previous configuration should still work.

Tags: mac os

getting (old) iPatch patches to work in Leopard

Thursday, September 11th, 2008 | technology | 14 Comments

There are some no dvd or hardware check disabling patches for Mac OS X games that aren’t working anymore in Leopard, crashing on start if not launched with rosetta and failing the verification of SHA1 checksums for the files to be patched even if they are the correct version. Some examples for this issue are the patches for Civilization IV and Call of Duty 2 for Mac OS X released by… (argh i have to check this at home).

As I found out, in order to fix them download iPatch 3.7.1 from http://www.ipatch.org/US/index.html and then explore the package’s content. You will find under /Contents/Resources an app called iPatcher, explore that file’s content again by right clicking and find a nice unix executable-style file named, you’ll never guess it, ipatcher under /Contents/MacOS/. You’ll need to copy this file over to the /Contents/MacOS folder inside the patch application package, overwriting the old ipatcher (size 204 or 208 kb) with the new one (size 212kb).

Now launch the game patcher thus modified and voilá, it will happily patch away.

Thanks to the author of those patches whose name i will add here in a couple of hours.

Tags: cracks, games, mac os

Caffeine

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 | technology | No Comments

one computer caffeine for my computer friend, one normal caffeine for
me because i’m normal.

http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

Tags: mac os