As Macworld is closed today and tomorrow in recognition of the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA, there won't be any new hints until Monday morning. If you're celebrating the holiday, have fun, be safe, and we'll be back as usual next week.

-rob.

With Snow Leopard, some multifunction printers will only print, because the new drivers from Apple do not support any other functions. But you can still get some older models to work, provided they were released prior to the switch to Intel in 2006.

I managed to get my HP PSC 1110 printer to work this way under Snow Leopard:

1. Get the new Apple printer driver for your model using Software Update and install it.
2. Install Rosetta, if you haven't done so already.
3. Make a backup of your system, in case something goes wrong.
4. If you don't have the PowerPC driver and software (not the Universal version) from the CD or DVD that came with your printer, get it from the manufacturer's website.
5. Install the software as normal. This will give you a second printer for your model of printer in System Preferences. It should also install all the related scanning software, etc.

Now test if it works. As an added bonus, I have an old PowerPC program on my system which crashes every time I try to print from it to the 'new' printer, but it works fine with the 'old' one. (Note: for ink printers, you mght need to realign the catridges).

Perhaps it would also work if you force the scan programs to start in PowerPC mode (by deleting the Intel configuaration using e.g. Tinker Tool System), but I haven't tried that.

This may be old news, but I just found out about Flash Cookies (otherwise known as Local Shared Objects), and a way to delete them, and to prevent more from being created.

You can control Flash cookies via Macromedia's Flash Player Settings Manager, which is an actual Flash application you load in your browser (that is, the picture you'll see on that page is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager).

Set Global Storage Settings to 0, and then select the Website Privacy Settings tab (the fourth tab from the left), and select Delete All Sites to remove prior-stored history.

Note that the 'cookies' are (or were) stored in ~/Library » Preferences » Macromedia » Flash Player » #SharedObjects, and the settings are stored in ~/Library » Preferences » Macromedia » Flash Player » macromedia.com » support » flashplayer » sys.

I wanted to find a way to use the Home and End keys to go to the beginning and end of a line, as I find that more convenient than using Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow. Here's how I solved it...

First, install Butler, then create two new "Keystroke" Smart Items -- click the Plus sign, then select Smart Items » Keystrokes from the pop-up menu. Set the first to map Home to Command-Left Arrow, and the second to Command-Right Arrow.

[robg adds: You could use any keyboard macro tool to do this; Butler is probably overkill if you just want to set up these two simple macros. And obviously, you can extend this to reassign any keyboard key to a functionality you prefer, as long as it has an existing OS X keystroke.]

I have both Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 installed on my machine for compatibility reasons. However, both versions of the application show as, for example, Microsoft Word in the menu bar when running. I wanted to change this, and found an easy way to do so. This only works for the Office 2008 apps, not for the Carbon Office 2004 apps (as you can't drill down into their packages). There may be another way to change those, but I only needed to change one of the two to be different, so it's OK for my purposes.

In Finder, Control-click on the application bundle (i.e. Microsoft Word), and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Drill down to Contents » Resources » en.lproj (or English.lproj as some apps may use, or whatever is appropriate for your language). Control-click on InfoPlist.strings and use the contextual menu to open it in TextWrangler, BBEdit, or TextEdit.

At the very bottom of the file, change both the keys for the display name you want. For example, for Word, I used:

CFBundleDisplayName = "Word 2008";
CFBundleName = "Word 2008";

This changes both the menu bar name and the name that shows up in the Finder's Open With menu, and other places. Hope this helps someone out.

[robg adds: I believe that if you use this trick on a signed application in 10.5 or 10.6 (such as any of Apple's apps), it will break code signing, which may then cause some Keychain issues.]

Recently, any time I tried to run Safari on 10.6 caused all apps and the Finder to hang with the spinning beach ball. Force-quitting Safari stopped the problem, but it would occur again on the next launch. Googling around, I saw many folks reporting similar problems, but no solutions.

The /var/log/system.log file shows something like this when this hang occurs:

Nov 13 09:51:16 bvmbook Safari[394]: INSERT-HANG-DETECTED: Tx time:46.498542, # of Inserts: 0, # of bytes written: 0, Did shrink: YES

Sounds like a database problem. So I looked at which database-type files were opened by Safari, with this in Terminal: I found that if I quit Safari and deleted the *.db files in my home directory, the problem goes away: I'm not sure which of these files were corrupt, but launching Safari seems to re-create them.

Navigon not only produces navigation software for the iPhone; their (probably) much bigger business is selling GPS navigation units for cars. These units can currently only be updated from Windows operating systems. However, an out-of-the-box Parallels installation running Windows may not be able to use the device.

My newly-bought Navigon 7310 mounts on the Mac as a removable drive, and contains some awful Mac software which basically only opens the manual using a browser. To update the device and the maps, you'll have to download Navigon Fresh from Navigon's web site -- sadly, a Windows-only app.

When I tried to run this via Windows in Parallels, it seems Parallels' SmartMount capability interferes with the Navigon USB device: if SmartMount is active, Windows only shows two drives with no data on them. Consequently, Navigon Fresh is not able to connect to the device.

After disabling SmartMount, I was able to install updates on my Navigon unit.

If you need to search for something you chatted about in Skype, but do not remember exactly who or where you chatted with, it's hard to do right now. But here's one way to do it with Spotlight.

The latest version of Skype for Mac has a history button for each contact -- click the Gear icon, then select View Chat History. When you select this menu item, Skype creates an HTML file in your user's library; you'll find it here: ~/Library » Application Support » Skype » skype_acct » IMHistory.

Once the file's been created, Spotlight will index its contents (you'll have to include System Files when searching via Spotlight in the Finder), thus making chat conversation history searchable for any contacts for which you have generated a history file.

[robg adds: Based on my testing, it seems this history file isn't updated when new conversations occur, which means it will be out of date relatively quickly. Still, this at least provides one way to search Skype chats.]

Sometimes the trash won't be emptied, or a volume refuses to eject with a "file in use error." There have been hints on how to find that out in Terminal with lsof, which is not necessarily for the faint of heart.

Here is a nice Automator workflow that runs some AppleScript and shell commands and can be used in contextual Finder menu. So when a file is reported used, control-click on it and run the Automator workflow and see who is to blame. It will use user process space (no prompt for admin password), but will also revert to system process space if needed (prompting for the password). It will display the application/process that is using the file, and the account that started the program (could be you, could be root, could be another local user).

I was looking for a quick way to rotate only the even numbered pages in a document that I had scanned in using my Brother MFC's scan-to-email feature in duplex mode -- I found that it had flipped every second page, and they needed to be unflipped. It turns out there's a not-so-obvious way to do this rather easily.

Make sure the sidebar is showing on the side of the document you want to work on in dual column mode (Control-click in the Thumbnail column and select Columns » 2 Columns), and you will see that all the even pages line up in one column. You can then drag a square around the entire column, and keep going down until you've highlighted all the pages you want to rotate.

Next, press Command-R twice to flip the selected pages upside down, or once to rotate them to landscape mode (90 degrees). This works pretty much as it does on a single page. There is a also a menu command to rotate pages if you don't like using keyboard shortcuts.