If you're having a problem with a wireless USB mouse skipping, double-clicking instead of single-clicking, or otherwise acting weird, and you've tried fooling with the software and the dongle to no avail, consider whether the problem might be with the keyboard...even if the mouse dongle is plugged into the computer, not the keyboard. And even if the keyboard is wired.

I had Logitech send me two mice which seemed totally flaky until I happened to unplug my keyboard, and found that the mouse worked like a champ. Now, whenever the mouse seems fritzy, I unplug and replug the keyboard's USB plug and it all gets better.

Weird, but there you go....

For those of us who must use Lotus Notes (LN) on Mac OS X, it is the bane of our existence. The installer is basically broken, and it's not configured for multi-user setup. But today, all that changes! I have devised a series of procedures to make LN easier to install, and also to make it "multi-user aware." These notes are known to work with LN 7.0.3, but may work with any R7 flavor, and may be able to be altered for 6.5.6, which is the last 6.5x version for OS X.

Some of the problems with the LN installer :

1. Sometimes LN does not ask for authorization
2. Running as a non-admin user does not work correctly
3. Only installs the templates and seed files (referred to as seed files) to the directory of the account that installed it.

The third one is really a problem. The installer assumes that the person who is going to use LN is the same person who installed it, and to install it, you need to be an admin. Read on to see how I fixed this mess...

I have six mail accounts that I check on with my iPhone, and for months, I've moved read e-mails to the Trash. What I forgot was that the trash needs to be cleared periodically. I regained a couple of hundred megabytes of space by cleaning all the accounts.

To empty the Trash you must enter each account, then enter the Trash and tap Edit. You are then given the option to Delete All. Select Delete All, then confirm the Delete All. A simple tip, but one that may free up a fair bit of space on your iPhone.

I just bought a new aluminum MacBook, and discovered that I couldn't get an IR remote control to pair with the notebook. This is optional, but it prevents other remotes from controlling your Mac.

If you go to the Security System Preferences panel, you'll find a Pair/Unpair button. Clicking on Pair brings up a message instructing you to press and hold the Menu and Next buttons on the remote until a "paired" icon appears.

I tried this several times with no luck. Finally, I found that you have to be running an admin account for this to work -- there is no indication that you can't pair from a non-administrator account. As a matter of fact, the panel is disabled until you click the lock and enter an admin account and password. But even after unlocking, you still can't pair from a standard account.

So if you have trouble pairing a new remote, make sure you log into an admin account first.

It is now well-known the four finger gesture to change apps. You swipe four fingers, right or left, and a bezel with open apps appears, as with Command-Tab. Then if you swipe with two fingers, you will select a different app, which can be switched to by tapping with four fingers.

One thing I saw today is that you don't have to release all your fingers after the four-finger swipe and the two-finger swipe. Simply make the first swipe and only release two fingers; the system will recognize correctly the new gesture, and you save a bit of time.

A similar thing happens with the zoom gesture in some applications such as Preview: you can zoom-in and zoom-out without release your fingers. Safari behaves a bit differenlyt: you can zoom-in/out without releasing your fingers, but it will only increase/decrease the page size once (Preview performs a continuous zoom). For larger zooms in Safari, you need to release your fingers.

On the other hand, a change between zoom and scroll is not possible, at least not in Preview or Safari.

One of the things that makes Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) so useful it that it can integrate, to varying degrees, with all broswers via its JavaScript bookmarklets. Many other sites also use these -- for example, I have bookmarklets for Digg, FaceBook, and more. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to activate these from a keyboard shortcut? You can!

1. Add a bookmarklet to your Bookmarks menu, not to your favorites bar.
2. In System Preferences, go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, and add a keyboard shortcut with the exact name of your bookmarklet. You can specify the application as either your chosen browser, or for All Applications if you use multiple browsers. If you choose All Applications, just make sure the bookmarklet has the same name in all browsers.

Now I can post to Delicious by pressing the same keyboard shortcut everywhere. Yay!

[robg adds: This works, of course, and can be extended to create keyboard shortcuts for any site in your Bookmarks menu, not just bookmarklets. It was mentioned in a footnote to this older hint, which covered a possibly quicker (but definitely not GUI-based) method of creating keyboard shortcuts in Safari (and any other program).]

The problem: You have Time Machine set up using a sparsebundle on a network drive, such as a Time Capsule or an AirPort Extreme-connected hard drive. Most of the time, everything works great. Consider this reproducible scenario, however:

1. You are working away at home and a hourly backup starts. Time machine automagically mounts the sparsebundle.
2. You need to leave and put your laptop to sleep, not paying attention to the fact that time machine is working.
3. You move your laptop to work/school and wake it up.
4. The sparsebundle is still mounted, but obviously does not work. Finder and Spotlight grow increasing stuck until you have to reboot your machine. It occurs to you that the image back home was not closed properly and that eventually, this will corrupt your backups!

Solution:

1. Install SleepWatcher (I used the MacPorts build; don't forget to specify the server variant!).
2. Modify /opt/local/etc/rc.sleep or /etc/rc.sleep to include these two lines:

   logger -t $0 "Ejecting any mounted Time Machine images"
   hdiutil info -plist | grep /Volumes | sed 's/<string>/\"/' | sed 's/<\/string>/\"/'|xargs -I {} bash -c "if test -e \"\$0/Backups.backupdb\";  then hdiutil eject \"\$0\"; fi" {}

I am sure that someone better than I at script-fu can clean up that mess, but basically, it finds disk images that are mounted and are being used for Time Machine, and ejects them. backupd notices this automatically, and cancels the backup gracefully. The image is then safely offline before the machine disconnects from the network, as validated by console logs.

Skype always irritated me with its automatic microphone volume changes. The Windows version has the ability to disable this option in the preferences pane, but the Mac version does not. Today, I spent some time trying to solve this problem. After some searching on net, I found a solution for the Windows version which also works on the Mac.

Quit Skype and open the folloving file with TextEdit: ~/Library » Application Support » Skype » shared.xml. At the end of the document, you'll see this section:

<VoiceEng>
  <MicVolume>77</MicVolume>
</VoiceEng>

Simply change this section to look like this (adding one new line):

<VoiceEng>
  <AGC>0</AGC>
  <MicVolume>100</MicVolume>
</VoiceEng>

AGC means Automatic Gain Control, and setting it to 0 disables this feature. Set it to 1 if you want to enable it again. The MicVolume can range from 0 (mute) to 255 (full volume). Save the file and start Skype.

Note: I'm using Tiger and Skype 2.6.0. I have no experience with other OS X and/or Skype versions, but I hope this hint will help some frustrated Skype users.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

For those of us who miss being able to cut and paste in the Finder, I just found a pretty functional way to do it through Quicksilver triggers. Here's how:

1. Invoke Quicksilver (probably by pressing Control-Space)
2. Press Command-, to open its preferences
3. Go to Preferences » Application, and make sure 'Enable advanced features' is checked
4. Go to Catalog » Quicksilver and make sure 'Proxy objects' is checked
5. Go to Triggers and click the plus sign to add a new trigger and select Hotkey
6. Start typing Current Selection, and when the item pops up, press Tab
7. Start typing Move to... and then press Tab
8. In the last box, press Command-X clear the field. It must be completely empty for this to work -- no text, nothing
9. Click Save
10. Click the 'i' at the bottom right of the screen to show the trigger options
11. Under hot key, choose your preferred key command; I've chosen Shift-Command-X (see note below)

You're done! Select an item in the Finder, press your key command, then just start typing to move the selected file/folder to anywhere in your Quicksilver catalogue. Remember you can type '/' to access your computer and '~' to access your users folder from within Quicksilver.

Note: Quicksilver has a Scope function for the triggers which can limit the trigger to one app. In this case, the scope should be limited to the Finder. The Scope function, however, is broken under Leopard. If you're using an older version of OS X, you might be able to limit the trigger to the Finder and just use Command-X as the hotkey. Setting it to Command-X under Leopard, however, will break the Cut command in all apps.

I love Wunderground.com's forecast. You can read all of the numbers, and look at radar all you want, but 95% of the time, it's too much info. Wunderground has a one-line forecast that relates today or tomorrow's temperature to today's. "Today is forecast to be colder than yesterday" is all I need to know.

Once you've installed GeekTool, you'll also need Lynx, a popular text web browser. Once GeekTool and lynx are installed, create a new shell entry in GeekTool and enter this code, substituting in your zip code for 12345: This will tell Lynx to go retrieve the Wunderground site and cut out every line that dosn't start with "Tomorrow is." Of course, if you check the weather in the morning, you'll need to change it to "Today is." Either way, the GeekTool entry will disappear when that text is not present. I guess you could have the weather appear in different places on your desktop depending on wether it's forecasting today or tomorrow, but that's left as an exercise to the reader.

[robg adds: I tried this, and it works as described. It's probably possible with curl instead of lynx, but you'd then need to do more parsing of the output to strip out the HTML characters. Given this data probably won't change during the day, you should set the GeekTool refresh to a really large value.]