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OK, let’s say you bought an AppleTV and while playing with its settings paired the remote to it. Let’s also say you decided to void your (modest and about to expire anyway) warranty by installing something like, oh say, Awkward TV. And after successfully installing it you maybe discovered that your remote didn’t actually work to control the AppleTV any more and had visions of having to really violate it by cracking open the case, hooking its drive to a Mac and directly manipulating the contents so you can restore it to factory defaults.

Before you do that you might try pressing and holding the MENU and |<< (rewind) buttons for a few seconds to unpair the AppleTV remote.

Not that you necessarily did any of that, but I’m just saying if you did.

Rumor is they didn’t sell out yet. There’s probably an aesthetically pleasingly arranged pile of them sitting on a shelf at the AT&T store not 5 minutes away (no way I’m braving the casinos on a summer weekend for the Apple Store.) I could instantly silence all those people who keep saying “you’re a tech guy and you don’t even have a cell phone?” while making them insanely jealous in about an hour, maybe less if I don’t bother with a shower (”I was waiting in the line and fell asleep and nobody woke me up at 6:00, the bastards.”)

I’m not running out to buy an iPhone today.

But next week, when that check comes. All bets are off.

UPDATE: I couldn’t resist, I’ve got my iPhone. More later.

From time to time I’ve downloaded Mac OS X Disk Image files only to have the system display a cryptic warning that it failed to mount because it was “Not Recognized”. It’s happened several times when I tried to download the Intel Mac version of the excellent free 3D package Blender and I wrote it off as corrupted files.

It happened again yesterday but this time today I bumped into this weblog posting by Unsanity that points at a server configuration issue as being the cause. Basically, the disk image is sent to Safari as a generic blob of data instead of being tagged as a disk image and Safari makes an (incorrect as it turns out) guess presumably based on the “bz” in the file name that the disk image was compressed using bzip2 after it was created and appends the extension .bz2 to the download when in fact the bz probably means the contents of the disk image use that compression method. OS X dutifully applied the bz2 decompression algorithm to the disk image data, strips off the extension and attempts to mount the resulting disk image which fails because it’s been thoroughly scrambled.

Now many compression methods include internal checks (looking for specific tags or verifying a checksum) to make sure you are applying them to bone fide compressed data but it appears bzip2 doesn’t, or at least the OS X archive helper doesn’t use them.

The proper fix is to let the provider of the file know about the problem, and point them at Unsanity’s post at http://www.unsanity.org/archives/macosx/mydmgisbwokenafter_download.php for details. The temporary workaround is to, when and only when you see the “not recognized” warning, remove the .bz2 extension from the original downloaded file leaving just the final .dmg then try opening file again in the Finder. If this was the cause of the problem the disk image will successfully verify and mount.

As to why only the Intel version of Blender had the problem, it turns out that the PowerPC version is served as a .zip with the correct MIME type rather than as a .dmg disk image.

Thanks to the guys at Unsanity for the heads up on this one.

Just wanted to say that I am working on an update to Remember?, tentatively to be released as version 4.3. No earthshaking new features but some bug fixes, AppleScripting additions and a few cosmetic changes. No timetable on when it will be released but hopefully sometime in the next few weeks.

It appears Comcast just modernized their web email site and in the process broke support for older browsers such as Internet Explorer for Mac OS. I have a few clients who still haven’t made the transition to Mac OS X yet (if it ain’t broke…) for whom this is a significant problem. Mozilla requires 10.2 or later, so the question was whether this is a deal-breaker or is there another “modern” web browser that still support pre-OS X Macs?

The answer happily is Yes! It turns out that iCab provides a version that works on Mac OS 8.5 through 9.x and displays the new Comcast web site just fine. It even brings other niceties such as tabs to the table.

At some point these folks will have to make the switch to OS X but at least for now it won’t be because of web browser compatibility issues!

2007-Jul-24 Update

1000x thanks to Gerry for his comment pointing me to WamCom:

When iCab doesn’t work I suggest trying the WamCom Mozilla 1.3: http://www.wamcom.org/latest-131

The person who has been using iCab for Mac OS 8.6 called complaining that it was not rendering some of his web pages very well and so far he’s very happy with WamCom.

He had one problem, it locked up when he tried to open Preferences. He’s increased the Preferred Memory size which we’re hoping will fix that.