I really didn't want to do it, but after over 150 spammy story submissions in under an hour, I've had to enable a captcha on the story submission page, as well as on the new user registration page. For now, I'm using the "simple" images, and hopefully that'll be enough to stop the spambots.

The captcha shouldn't be active anywhere other than those two pages; comment spam, while problematic, isn't bad enough to merit that move (and thanks to everyone who uses the Report Abuse link to point out the spammy comments).

Again, sorry I had to take this step, but I don't have the time to manage all these fake submissions by hand.

-rob.

A recent hint mentioned that all keystrokes in Snow Leopard get sent to the remote computer when Screen Sharing. This means that Command-Tab and other keystrokes get sent along, and there isn't a keyboard method for returning control to your Mac. Instead, you must move the mouse out of the shared window and click on a local window.

Sometimes, though, you might want to keep the mouse in a particular location in the remote computer. In particular, when I'm helping my mom remotely, I don't want my mouse movements to make the mouse on her screen move.

The solution? Push the power button on your computer. The "Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?" dialog appears, and the mouse focuses on your local computer. Move the mouse outside the shared window, and then hit the Escape key, or just use Command-Tab to get to a different local window. (Be very careful not to hit the Return key, or you'll shut down your computer!). The shared computer mouse stays right where it was, and you're back to local control.

In Mac OS X 10.5, if you select more than 10 files and then choose File » Get Info from the contextual menu, Finder automatically opens the Inspector, showing a summary of all 10 files.

In Snow Leopard, though, Finder opens the Get Info window for each item, quickly filling the entire screen on smaller displays. If you want the summary style Get Info window instead, hold down the Control key before pressing Command-I; this changes the Get Info menu item to Get Summary Info, and you'll see one summary Get Info window for your selected files.

[robg adds: Control-Command-I works in 10.4 and 10.5, too. I marked this one Snow Leopard only, though, because it's related to Snow Leopard's handling of move than 10 selected items with multiple Get Info windows. A brief history of Get Info and multiple selections:

• 10.3: Get Info displays a summary window for all selected files.
• 10.4 and 10.5: Get Info displays individual windows for each selection up to 10 total, unless you use Control-Command-I to view the summary window. With more than 10 files selected, you always get the summary window. The only way (that I know of) to see more than 10 individual Get Info windows is to select files in batches smaller than 10, then do Command-I on each batch.
• 10.6: Get Info displays individual windows for each selection, regardless of how many files are displayed. Use Control-Command-I if you want the summary window, regardless of the number of files in the selection.

The Snow Leopard implementation seems like it's the most flexible, but it does require some training time to remember to hold down Control and Command when you know you want the summary window.]

I used to have a mobile phone which I synced all the time with iSync, where there was an option to only sync contacts with phone numbers. After getting an iPhone, I noticed this didn't exist. So why not use a Smart Group to do the job? Because they don't sync with the iPhone. But I also wanted everyone's emails and other details.

So I wrote up an AppleSript that updates a regular Address Book group with only people who have phone numbers. This worked great, then after a while, I wanted some numbers to not show up (people you want to keep in your phone but will never call, or whose name you don't want to see every time you scroll down your list). I created a group called Not Phone, and modified my script so that they are removed from the Phone group.

This script will create the groups for you. Warning: if you have a group called Phone already in existence, I suggest renaming the group (or changing the group name that the script uses in the first line), as that group will be modified. Here's the code: So now I can just leave the iPhone set to sync the Phone group, and I have no problems.

[robg adds: This worked as described for me in OS X 10.5.]

I love GeekTool, but ran into a roadblock when one of my geeklets caused it to freeze on startup, and I couldn't remove the offending widget from within the System Preferences panel. So, after digging around, I discovered that the geeklets are stored as plist files at ~/Library » Preferences » org.tynsoe.geeklet.*.

You can open these files in the Property List Editor (or PListEdit Pro), and look through the entries to find the problematic script, and delete the entry (or fix it, I assume). Then, save the file, restart GeekTool from System Preferences, and you should be good to go.

After having to do that a few times, you will probably figure out what is causing the freeze and be able to fix your script. For me, using $>tail -f <file_name>, caused it to freeze, but using a file geeklet with the same filename, I was able to get the same result.

In 10.5, you could bring up the Get Info window (or Inspector) for a file you downloaded with Safari, and view the URL from where you downloaded it (in the More Info section), which was useful. However, you could not copy or select the URL, and had to retype it to visit that address.

Now, in 10.6 you can now drag-select across the URL field, making it easy to copy and paste -- or you can Control-click on the selection and select Open URL from the contextual menu.

Snow Leopard not only lets you preview comma-separated value (.csv) files , but it displays them with table formatting. Try it out.

[robg adds: My 10.5 machine will preview CSV files, but only shows their contents; 10.6 shows how they'll look as a spreadsheet.]

This little hint is hidden away in a video tip (Exposé Basics) on Apple's Exposé page, but strangely, isn't covered in the built-in Exposé help.

While in Exposé's All Windows mode (F3 or F9), pressing Command-1 will sort the windows alphabetically based on window name; pressing Command-2 will sort them by application name. Doing the same in Exposé's Application Windows mode will sort the windows alphabetically (obviously, sorting by application won't work in this mode).

[robg adds: Command-1 works as described in the video, but I'm uncertain as to how things are being arranged with Command-2 -- it doesn't seem to be alphabetical by program name on my Mac. I pressed Command-2, and wound up with this sort order (going left-to-right, three apps per row): Path Finder, Preview, Activity Monitor, Firefox, Terminal, System Preferences. I couldn't reconcile this order to either the order of the apps in the Dock, nor their order in the Command-Tab switcher. Anyone have any insight into the Command-2 sort order, or is my machine just behaving oddly?]

With the upgrade from Parallels Desktop 3 to version 4 (I know, it has been a while), the ability to suspend a Boot Camp installation that was booted in a virtual machine was removed.

Actually, no virtualization program allows that -- to hinder the unattended user from messing up his Boot Camp file system. If you suspend a Boot Camp installation which was started in a virtual machine while running OS X, and then reboot into Boot Camp without OS X, your file system can take unrepairable damage, as some data might still exist in the memory that was supposed to be written to disk. So be warned -- always shut down the virtualized Boot Camp OS before rebooting in native Boot Camp! Nothing bad can happen if you just restart Parallels and resume a suspended OS, which is much faster than to boot it.

That being said, now comes the tip. First set up your Boot Camp installation as a virtual machine in Parallels, using the normal setup wizard. Parallels creates an entry in the filesystem (default location is ~/Documents/Parallels/) that ends with .pvm. With the virtual machine shut down, Go to the Virtual Machine » Configure menu in Parallels, and navigate there to Hardware » Hard Disk 1.

The option Boot Camp Partition is activated; change it to Image File and browse to your Parallels configuration file, normaly located in ~/Documents » Parallels » your_name.pvm. This file is actually a folder -- inside you will find another file/folder ending with .hdd. Select this (just the folder, not the contents), and voila! Parallels now allows to suspend your virtual machine, as it is tricked into believing you are running a normal OS from a file, not Boot Camp.

This works with Windows XP, Windows 7 in OS X 10.5 and 10.6, maybe even in more configurations, but those, at least, are my well-tested set ups.

In order for Snow Leopard's new auto-correction feature to work, you need to have both "Correct spelling automatically" and "Check spelling while typing" enabled under Edit » Spelling and Grammar. I searched in the OS help files and online, and I couldn't find any documentation that actually stated this. In fact, TextEdit's Help says:

To have TextEdit automatically correct spelling errors, do one of the following:

• To automatically correct spelling in the current document, choose Edit > "Spelling and Grammar" > Correct Spelling Automatically.
• To automatically correct spelling in new documents, choose TextEdit > Preferences, click New Document, and select "Correct spelling automatically."

Logically, this hint is pretty obvious: the system won't auto-correct if it's not checking while typing. However, allowing "Correct spelling automatically" to be checked and then having nothing happen is confusing behavior for users. It seems to me that a better behavior would be to have the option grayed out unless "Check spelling while typing" is checked.