iSync Sony Ericsson W880i with Feisar plugin

Bought and installed Feisar's plugin for my phone, then ran iSync.

I set up an address book group called On Phone which will have all my contacts that are on the phone in it. Got to sync with that at first, to avoid deleting anything on the phone - the group is empty at first.

Took a couple of hours to get everything well organised, but then did a sync and it seems to work fine now.

Calender syncing won't work seemlessly though, because it seems to be only able to sync with calendars on the mac, not my gmail calendar. The option to sync phone items to the gmail one isn't available, so I make one called On Phone just for things I add on the phone and want to move into another calendar at home. That's not the end of the world for now though. And the main thing is that todo items sync!

Toning down Kaspersky

Kaspersky's avp.exe process was hogging resources and causing windows to act like a dog. I turned off things like

anti-phishing
anti-spyware

and also changed so scans and on-access checking was a lot less aggressive, for example not checking every file, and only checking files when opened. I set it so that it paused while OneNote was starting up.

Getting Windows to recognise increased Parallel's Virtual Disk size

A week or two ago I increased the size of the virtual disk image that Windows XP was using - from 9 to 20 Gb - using the Parallel's image tool. Actually, I changed it from Expanding to Fixed size as well, as I found hints that it would improve performance, which is a bit slow in Windows.

Today I got Low Disk Space warnings, and found that C: was only 9Gb. I tried using these instructions to expand the NTFS partition up to the whole space available.

I also got into the Virtual Machine settings in Parallels and changed it so that it was using Shared Networking (VM and host appear on same IP), and Shared Folders for My Documents = Documents. Now My Documents is my Mac's Documents folder, which is much better than having to access a network drive (X:).

Dvorak keyboard layout for Advent 4211

Ukelele is a keyboard layout program. Download and run it from Desktop, seems to be able to do everything to do with keyboard layouts. This is the Apple kb document for the .keylayout files.

Could use Keyboard & Mouse/Keyboard preference pane to set Ctrl key to act as Cmd, which means that shortcut keys act when I press Ctrl, just like Windows. In Ukelele now when I press Ctrl it detects it as Cmd. So I need to set Cmd-Left and Cmd-Right to act as Word Left and Word Right. If possible.

Looking around, I think that it might not be possible by changing the layout file. The layout file doesn't really specify which command is done when Cmd is pressed - this seems to be in a key bindings file. But if that's the case then there is another way to do it, which works only for programs built on standard Cocoa text controls. That page also references a page for firefox key bindings which operate similarly.

I made the following key binding file for my system, which operates how I would like (with Cmd/Ctrl swapped so shortcuts are done with the physical Ctrl key):

{
/* Note that this file is also designed to work when Ctrl and Cmd are
swapped in keyboard preferences, so that pressing Ctrl key will
be seen as Cmd (@) here. */

/* home */
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
"$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
"@\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfDocument:";
"@$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfDocumentAndModifySelection:";

/* end */
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:";
"$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
"@\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfDocument:";
"@$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfDocumentAndModifySelection:";

/* page up/down */
"\UF72C" = "pageUp:";
"\UF72D" = "pageDown:";

/* up and down */
"$\UF700" = "moveUpAndModifySelection:";
"$\UF701" = "moveDownAndModifySelection:";
"@\UF700" = "pageUp:";
"@\UF701" = "pageDown:";
/* the ideal behaviour here would to move selection to bottom of
the paragraph, but that isn't supported. Instead, move selection
down a line, which is better than the native behaviour of
selecting to the end of the document.*/
"@$\UF700" = "moveUpAndModifySelection:";
"@$\UF701" = "moveDownAndModifySelection:";

/* left and right */
"@\UF702" = "moveWordLeft:";
"@\UF703" = "moveWordRight:";
"@$\UF702" = "moveWordLeftAndModifySelection:";
"@$\UF703" = "moveWordRightAndModifySelection:";
}

When I just created this myself and put it in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict, it didn't work. I had to use the KeyFixer script/app and then edit that file, to get it to work. Don't understand why. There were two files with apparently the same name there after running their script.

You can use 'pl -input filename' to check the property list file, it sort of compiles it.

This Windows kb article explains how to remap keys in Windows, looks like it would be possible to swap Ctrl and Alt there. But that's tricky and requires rebooting, so instead AutoHotkey is an option.

Download the AutoHotkey installer and use this script, with Cmd/Ctrl swapped in keyboard and mouse, and Ctrl, Alt and Windows keys work as they should do under Windows:

Ctrl::Alt
LWin::Ctrl
Alt::LWin

UK keyboard layout for Advent 4211

Paul @ Modaco made a keyboard layout that has the correct position of the @ and other keys, i.e. that matches what is actually printed on the keys. It's available here, and installed by following these instructions:

47. FIXING KEYBOARD MAP (UK keyboard layouts only): Change to the 'kaylayout' directory on my Wind driver and utility pack, and copy 'Advent 4211.keylayout' to '\Library\Keyboard Layouts'. Run 'System Preferences' -> 'International', and click 'Input Menu'. SCroll down the list until you see 'Advent 4211'. Click the checkbox, and you will see a flag appear in your menu bar. Click this to select the Advent layout.

Hibernate/sleep in OS X on Advent

Found I could change the HDD sleep time to 3 minutes using this command:

sudo pmset -b disksleep 3

Don't know if it works though.

10.5.5 update woes

Now the Advent 4211 won't boot after accepting Apple's update patch from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5. It goes to a blue screen with a mouse cursor, but flashes back to a terminal window every 10s with sometimes an error message, mostly blank.

There is some info in this forum topic that suggests various kernel extensions (kexts) need to be reinstalled:

http://forums.msiwind.net/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3722&view=next

However, that is mainly for video display issues - seems that special MSI display kexts get nuked by the update. This one is for exactly my problem:

http://forums.msiwind.net/mac/blue-screen-after-update-t4018.html

I deleted AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext folder from /System/Library/Extensions because I found that it in this post, from Biohead (at the bottom of page):

http://forums.msiwind.net/mac/released-t3551.html

You have to make the disk writeable first:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /

The first one does a filesystem check, the second actually makes the disk writeable. I tried this several times but it didn't seem to work (using rm -r to remove the .kext directory) - turns out you need to 'exit' rather than just turn off the computer by holding down the power button for a long time. It must flush a cache then.

However, this didn't change anything.

Second post above seems to suggest downloading a pile of kernel extensions and installing over the ones that are there, after someone had the exact same problem as me. Also on this page, grantonstar also says to reinstall all kexts. Will track down what that means exactly!

The download is for a whole lot of kexts and other things required for a fresh install, and requires running kexthelper.app, which is clearly impossible. Looking for other ways, I figure I could just copy the kexts.

Need to mount the USB stick:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030714194313542

I am moving all the relevant kexts that are going to be replaced to /Users/michaelfielding/. Natit.kext and ACPIBattery.kext don't exist on the Advent yet.

Now I exit, and instead of going back to another terminal-like thing, it actually boots OS X! Hooray! And the right screen resolution too!