Archive for October, 2007

Macbook Pro audio irritation

Published at 2007-10-11 Uncategorizedin . 6 Comments

I had a really strange audio problem with my MBP yesterday.

To start with, here was what more or less happened:

  • I was about to put the laptop into sleep (standby) mode.
  • The speakers were plugged in via line-out.
  • I was lowering the volume with the keyboard controls.
  • I unplugged the audio cable.
  • And put the laptop into sleep mode.

When I turned the laptop back on, I hit Cmd+F1 to get Synergy to start playing music again and Growl dutifully showed the cover art for the current playing track… unfortunately, nothing else happened - aka no bloody sound from the internal speakers. I tried to change the volume with the keyboard controls and the volume control overlay (image below). Instead of changing the volume, the overlay displayed the No symbol centred at the bottom of the with the volume set to 0 (i.e. no bars filled in).

Volume control

More out of curiosity than anything else, I plugged in the audio cable from the speakers and lo and behold the speakers worked as expected - with sound…
After digging through the OSX System Preferences, I found a horrible looking error message for the internal speakers stating: “The selected device has no output controls”. I pushed through quite a lot of Google results and eventually stumbled onto this forum posting via another forum posting. For all intents and purposes, it’s a hardware problem on Macbooks. Macbooks and MBP’s have three audio outputs: 1 - internal speakers; 2 - line out; 3 - optical out. Both the line out and the optical out are driven by the same output port. In some strange circumstances, the sensor inside the port which determines if there is a jack plugged in or not becomes slightly confused and thinks that an optical jack is plugged in when there isn’t anything plugged in.

Thankfully, this somewhat irritating hardware problem can be fixed without having to go in for repairs.

With a toothpick…

That’s correct - to fix a really beautiful piece of modern electronics, you need a small piece of wood (or plastic in my own case). The irony wasn’t lost.

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QuickSilver Proxy Objects

Published at 2007-10-9 Uncategorizedin . 0 Comments

Stii recently posted a rather nifty trick for using the QuickSilver Dictionary plugin to search for a definition without having to open up Dictionary itself. I personally find it quite phenomenal how many new plugins and really useful ways of using QuickSilver keep on appearing.

That particular post reminded me about one really arcane QuickSilver setting that I had on my Mac Mini but never setup correctly on my Macbook Pro. This particular technique allows you to access the menu bar in the same way that you can access applications via QuickSilver. In other words, instead of moving your cursor (via a mouse or trackpad) all the way to the top of screen and selecting “File” and then “Save”, you could use a QuickSilver trigger and then just start typing out “Save”.

Here is a screenshot of what it would look like to select the “Preferences” pane within Firefox. (Note: I’m using the Cube interface)
QuickSilver Proxy

Now, to get this working correctly requires just a little bit of work.

Step 1:
Open up “System Preferences” and then select “Universal Access” (or just invoke QuickSilver and start typing “universal”), and make sure that the “Enable access for assistive devices” checkbox is ticked.
Universal Access

Step 2:
Within the QuickSilver preferences (Ctrl+Space Apple+Comma), check the “Enable advanced features” checkbox in the “Preferences” tab under the “Application” settings.
Advanced features

Step 3:
Enable the “Proxy Objects” within the QuickSilver preferences in the “Catalog” tab under the “QuickSilver” settings.
Proxy Objects

Step 4:
Install the “User Interface Access (+)” plugin within QuickSilver.
User Interface Access

Step 5:
Create a new QuickSilver Trigger hotkey. Select the “Triggers” tab within QuickSilver preferences, click on the “+” at the bottom and select “Hotkey”.
Hotkey

The three panes represent the three-tier depth that QuickSilver supports when chaining commands. In the first one, select “Current Application” and then “Show Menu Items” in the second box (the third box should be empty) and save it. Once saved, click on the “I” (info button) in the bottom right of the panel and edit the hot key to your liking. I’ve chosen Alt+Space for mine, but you’re allowed to put whatever you want in there.
Hotkey Chain

Now, you can invoke this part of QuickSilver by hitting Alt+Space (or whatever you set the hotkey to), and you can then browse all the options available within the menu bar. Be forewarned however - in certain applications (TextMate in particular), there could be hundreds if not thousands of options available within the menu bar and this may make it unwieldy to work with. Beyond that, this is one of the more interesting QuickSilver techniques that I’m aware of. Once I wrapped my head around what QuickSilver is doing in this instance, I could no longer think of it as “just” an application launcher.

In Chaos and Fun.

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