Another, better display mirroring solution

http://www.fabiancanas.com/Projects/MirrorDisplays/

Put that in Utilities, use Spotlight to find it if the display gets garbled, you're away.

Return to password manager and backups

The Keychain file format is apparently open source and documented.

It is possible to access Keychain from Java, but it might not work very well. Problem could be that only part of Keychain is accessible. Apple mentions it here.

If I could use the Bouncy Castle APIs to create a password store, then this program could read the archives on my mobile phone: TinyEncryptor

I tried MiniCommander which is already on the phone but it doesn't handle encrypted ZIP files.

I remember that I also found ways to export Keychains by automator or maybe it was applescript. But I can't remember where I put that info now... nor how to automate sending files to the phone via Bluetooth, automated by a script (check rest of this blog though).

Or, how about KeePass, open source, multi-platform - but is it as good as Keychain? Well, I guess I don't really use Keychain all that much, and it looks better than truecrypt because it structures data. I can also get it on my mobile. (There is another J2ME version but it's not looking as good.)

And some clever person has figured out how to get Auto-Type to basically work using some URL-handling trickery. Very clever.

Potential help on 10.5.8 upgrade

http://www.hutsby.net/2009/09/msi-wind-updating-to-1058-on.html

Basically looks like video drivers get hosed, so need to reinstall the kernel extensions.

Projectors in os x on Advent

I found that when I connected a projector, display went all garbled. Found suggestions that this was the 'mirrored display' mode of OS X, which is known to be broken in the graphics drivers on the Wind/Advent 4211.

There was a suggestion to enable the "show display settings in menu bar" or somesuch, which I did, and then hover the mouse button over the icon when plugging a projector in, press down twice, then enter. That disables mirror mode, which seems to be enabled by default when a projector is plugged in.

Did that. It works.

Then had to use DisplayConfigX to remove the 100Hz settings that the monitor didn't like, reboot, mac says it's now at 1024x768 60 Hz, projector says 1280x768 (it is 1280x800 native), everything looks about right in terms of aspect ratio.

Recovering Safari crash at startup

Found that Safari wasn't starting up after one of the annoying crashes I have had lately. Google turned up an article that proposed deleting a whole host of files. In the end I just had to delete com.apple.Safari.plist from ~/Library/Preferences/ and it came back to life. The file did look like it had non-ascii garbage at the front before it was deleted, but the fresh version didn't (though it had some at the end).

Had to reset home page, plus settings like opening up browser pages in a new tab, fill in usernames and passwords when known, in Safari->Preferences.

MacFuse

A while back I installed MacFuse from Google. Now I want SFTP installed. But after downloading binaries from googlecode's page as suggested, it was a bit tricky to get the right settings.

Macfusion helped, because it does it all via a GUI. I initially thought I had to do it by the command line using -p 2222 and adding the defer_permissions option, because when I didn't have that option it thought everything was unavailable. See this page. Then I found that I could add -o defer_permissions to the SSHFS options in MacFuse, for that connection. Now it works fine!

Image programs for OS X

Wanted The Gimp, downloaded binary package. Needs 10.5.7 to run best - I have been resisting this upgrade in case it breaks my install.

Installed Hugin, which works really nicely.