Kibbles & Bytes Blog

During the colder months, it’s important keep in mind that cold objects entering a warm, moist environment (like your home or workplace) will become damp with condensation. As liquid exposure of any type can void your warranty and result in costly repair, and as Apple now installs liquid exposure indicators inside each of its products, it’s vital that you keep your electronic gear safe.

If at all possible, do not keep your notebook, iPod, iPhone or other electronic gear in the car overnight in the cold. We’re beginning to see a few victims of condensation come through the shop, and it’s easy to avoid. If you find yourself with a moisture-covered device, the first thing to do is turn it off and remove the battery. iPod and iPhone users can only shut down and wait as their batteries are not removable.

Legendary data recovery firm (and Small Dog data recovery partner) “Drive Savers”:http://www.drivesavers.com notes that this exposure to hard drives is particularly serious: “Cold weather can wreak havoc on temperature-sensitive hard drives used in computers, game consoles, MP3 players and video recorders. Condensation buildup on the drive platters and frozen components can lead to drive failure and data loss.

Dashboard is a feature built in to Mac OS X 10.4 and up that allows you to customize a variety of widgets within a readily accessible screen overlay. This may seem like a handy tool to have on your desktop, but the truth is, these widgets can be quite the little ram hogs, slowing down your regular processes.

In order to fix this and increase the performance on your machine, it is possible to completely disable Dashboard from your system. It does require some basic Terminal work, and can just as easily be reversed, so don’t be worried about making any permanent changes. Note also that you don’t necessarily need to disable Dashboard completely; simply closing widgets you never use will help quite a bit too.

Now, if you’ve decided that you don’t need Dashboard, and would rather have the heightened performance, the first step is to open Terminal (located in *Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities*). Once open, type this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

and hit return. Now you can restart the Dock by typing the following command:

killall Dock

This command will allow the changes to take effect. Dashboard is a process owned by the Dock, so it is necessary to restart the “parent” process to see the desired change.

So there you have it–Dashboard has been completely disabled on your system. Later on, if you begin to miss this feature, it can easily be restored in a very similar fashion. Open up Terminal, and type this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Now, run the “killall Dock” command once again to restart the Dock, and there you go–Dashboard has been restored.

Several readers wrote in about last week’s articles on browser spoofing and Crossover. One reader asked if using the spoofing trick is sufficient for testing websites still in development. The answer there is a resounding “no.”

The spoofing trick works only sometimes, but often enough to be worth mentioning here. Websites in development should really be tested using each browser (on each platform) you wish to support. This means installing Firefox, Opera, Camino and others on the Mac, PC and Linux variants.

Crossover is especially nice for those websites that require ActiveX, which is incompatible with all flavors of Mac OS X. Reader Colleen made an especially keen observation about last week’s topics:

bq. “You can actually combine two of your tips in this issue into one. I’ve had two clients who had applications that required ActiveX in Microsoft Internet Explorer to work. ActiveX does not work on a Mac, even with browser spoofing. However, Crossover was a great solution for these people. I haven’t checked recently but Internet Explorer is one of the applications that Crossover supports, and if the website requires ActiveX, it will work under Crossover.”

This said, testing websites in development should still be done using all browsers on all platforms you wish to support.

By extension, another reader asked if the browser spoofing would allow him to access his FairPoint (a regional ISP) account on their website. They seem stuck in the late nineties by not supporting Safari or Firefox, and spoofing did not help. However, they do support Opera.

The real lesson here is that if a site doesn’t work in your preferred browser, try changing the user agent (spoofing); if that fails, try other browsers. If those all fail, Internet Explorer will probably do the trick for you.

Happy Tuesday,

Last weekend was one of those perfect Vermont winter weekends. Temperatures were moderate (high teens feel pretty nice after a -20 degree cold spell!) and visibility seemed unlimited. I gathered with a couple friends and a pack of our crazy dogs and spent some time hiking in the woods. Returning home to the smell of a long-cooking pot of lamb stew was a perfect ending to that day.

As I mentioned in last week’s intro to Tech Tails, we will begin offering iPhone and iPod repair to the general public very soon. I’d like to offer our services to Tech Tails readers to start, so if you have a cracked screen or a battery that’s just given up after hundreds of charge cycles, “send me an email”:mailto:matt@smalldog.com and I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. The services will be offered at all three of our retail locations, and you can choose to mail in your device as well.

As always, thanks for reading, and keep in touch.

Matt
“matt@smalldog.com”:mailto:matt@smalldog.com