Odds & Ends: iPod glitch; @Home and Excite; Excite & cookies; CD-R hack; more
Odds & Ends: iPod glitch; @Home and Excite; Excite & cookies; CD-R hack; more
@Home and Excite portal This page notes: "The @Home start page and online portal will no longer be available as of December 27. All home.excite.com content will be retired, and you will be redirected to a new start page maintained by your local cable company." (Thanks, Richard August.)
Excite cookie corruption? Mo Mehlsak claims that the "newly reborn Excite.com deposits a cookie for registered users that can corrupt Internet preferences. The result is that Explorer (and perhaps other Internet applications) crash on launch with a Type 2 error. A MS tech support staffer I spoke to confirmed this and said they had 'dozens' of calls about it today. The fix is to move Internet prefs and files in the MS Cache folder to the Desktop or Trash, launch the Internet control panel to create a new prefs file, and either enter a new home page under the Web tab or choose 'None.'" This will likely delete all cookies, as the cookie data is stored in the Preferences file. Jeffrey Flamm confirms the Type 2 error problem. Others report deletion of cookies for specific sites (such as Yahoo) by the Netscape site.
Unsupported CD-R hack Cliff Mould writes: "I've managed to get a Philips CDRDVD2010 (CDR/RW combo) to work on my B&W G3-350. It's a fairly simple hexedit hack to the "authoring support file" Philips CDR (and a similar file in OS X). This page explains the details."
UMAX scanners and VueScan A reader asked the author of VueScan why the software has no support for UMAX USB scanners. The answer: "These scanners use the National Semiconductor LM983X chip to control the scanner. It turns out that this is very complex to program, and it will be at least a few months until I can look into adding support for this."
SoundSticks and headphones The Harman-Multimedia SoundSticks FAQ explains why you can't use headphone jacks when the SoundSticks are plugged in: "When the SoundSticks are plugged in, it will disable all audio jacks. To use your headphones or the audio jack, disconnect the SoundSticks." We have noted this before. The FAQ offers additional troubleshooting advice.
G4 slowdown and 1.5GB RAM? Martyn Arnold recently run into a number of G4's that slow down dramatically when 1.5GB of RAM is installed. I have heard of this from others as well, including on the Apple Discussion boards. I have come the conclusion that the issue is ATM and/or ATM Deluxe 4.6 or higher. The issue only appears with the following configuration: 1.5 GB RAM, File Sharing enabled, and ATM and/or ATM Deluxe 4.6 or higher installed."
MacSOHO not good with XP Jonathan Cohen writes: "Windows XP has dropped support for NetBEUI, which makes MacSOHO useless with this operating system. Thursby Software said the solution is to upgrade to DAVE for $99.95."
Update: Chris< vargas replies: "I don't have first-hand experience with this, but according to the this article, WinXP still supports NetBEUI, it's just very well-hidden. So you might be able to continue using MacSOHO with WinXP after all."
Update: Brian Whaley (of Thursby Technical Support) confirms: "Microsoft does not support NetBEUI, but they do provide it, and yes, it is very well hidden. The article from MS is located here. In the first line it states, "It is important to note that the NetBEUI protocol is not supported on Windows XP." Since MS does not support NetBEUI, we do not support MacSOHO with Windows XP. The good news is that we have been able to install NetBEUI and use it with XP, as most of our customer base has reported as well. So, while it is not formally supported, it should work."
iTools down? It appears that iTools is down as of this morning. This could affect mac.com mail. It will likely return soon.