the "Help the helpless cow" thread

My macbook just arrived today. I'm pretty sure I'll like it, once I get past this touchpad. This touchpad, and my inability to maximize windows. Can anyone help me with this touchpad? O_O

My problem is that it's too slow, until it jumps into acceleration-mode, at which point it is too fast. Also, if I turn on dragging, it's way too sticky. It takes a good second to let go of whatever I'm dragging, which is intensely annoying. Also, my fingers skip when I scroll upwards, instead of sliding. You've all already dealt with these things, right?

Please help me. I want to use this thing comfortably without a fullsize external keyboard and mouse.

edit: also, is there anything I can do about these blurry fonts? It's as though they're anti-aliased, without enough pixels to be anti-aliased.

 

Step1: Download iMousefix: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/30303
and uncheck the enable mouse acceleration box.

And could you please show a screenshot of these 'blurry fonts'? Take a screenshot by: Cmd+Shift+3 or Cmd+Shift+4 then press the space bar and click on the window you want to shoot.

 

iMouseFix seems to have helped a little. I think I'll give it a day and see if I can get used to this. It still feels a little bit floatey/excitable, but it doesn't feel completely out of control.

I attached a screenshot. Thanks for the help!

edit: Oh, what about the dragging? Surely others have tried to use the touchpad to drag without the button... sort of a doubleclick, with the second click being movement. The scrolling is ok as long as I use my fingertips to scroll instead of the bottom of my fingers.

 

My E1505 is the same way, but it's because i have the dpi set at 120 instead of 96. Might be the same reason for yours looking like that. Switch your dpi to 96 and see what you get.

 

Well, the 'blurry fonts' is how Anti Aliasing normally looks. If you enabled TrueType on Windows, it would look the same.
You might prefer Strong anti aliasing as opposed to Medium (default). Simply go to System Preferences>Appearance and choose Strong in the Font Smoothing Style drop down box.

 

Now, this is creepy. The fonts are looking better now. The screenshot I took earlier is looking better now. Apple is making me blind!

I guess I'll get used to clicking when I'm done dragging something. I'd still be interested if anyone figures out how to turn off that delay. Thanks!

 

Remember, you bought an Apple, there to tempt humanity from the garden of Eden onward. The helpless cow - well thats another manufacturer ;-)

I still don't like this touch pad on my MacBook as well as the one on my SZ but I was able to tweak the stock settings to my liking.

As to fonts, play with the anti aliasing cutoff and degree in system prefs. Some folks actually see non anti aliased fonts more clearly, so try lower settings and higher cutoffs as well as what others have suggested.

 

I've got a new issue. This one's more interesting, I think. I'm a bit stumped honestly.

I thought I'd pull my iTunes library over to this macbook, while leaving the files physically on the server, just to fiddle around. What I wound up doing was, exporting the library on my desktop to xml. Then, I opened it up in text wrangler, and replaced all instances of files://J:/path/ to /Volumes/volumename-1/path/ -- it worked. Now though, the songs won't play. Nothing happens to tell me what's going on, and it's not drm -- they're straight mp3s I ripped myself.

I remember this behavior just rarely on my desktop. A single file wouldn't play for some reason. This is with all of them though.

edit: or maybe... maybe I'm just stupid What's a dim wireless icon next to a track title mean? It's next to all of them, so I assume it's indicative of or related to the problem.

ah... I had the idea of clicking a song on the share and letting it play, and then seeing what its path looked like in the "get info" dialog. Colons, huh? I'll have another try then.

 

There's got to be a better way to do this... I need to, within string tags that start with "file://localhost/J:/" replace all the forward slashes with colons. This must be something regular expressioney. How do I do this with a mac?

edit1: turns out clicking "find" and then checking "use grep" in textwrangler is the regex option. i'm halfwayish there... very very rusty with these buggers. (?<=<string>file://localhost/J:/[!\r]*)/(?=.*</string>\r) doesn't work because lookbehinds can't be indeterminate length, apparently. I guess I need that backreference thing... or whatever it was called.

edit2: so, (?<=<string>file://localhost/J:/)([^/]*)/(?=.*</string>) catches the text immediately following the lookbehind, up to the first "/"... I'm of course assuming I can use the backreference thingy to just copy the text I'm not replacing... what do I do to somehow catch subsequent "/"s?

Mac users are into scripting and related stuff... right?

edit3: I used textwrangler, did a search for

HTML:

(?<=file://localhost/J:/)([^\r]*)/(?=.*</string>)

and replaced it with \1:, using multiple passes to move back through all the forwardslashes. Then I just replaced the first bit of the string with the corresponding volume name.

 

l33t_c0w - Somehow you don't seem like a helpless cow ;-) What I've seen so far is a resourceful , inquisitive, fast learning tech savvy dude.

Of course it never hurts to ask those that might have been there before as it can be a real timesaver.

 

Thanks for the compliment. As it turns out, though I got the regular expressions worked out, that wasn't the problem. So, why is iTunes marking those songs as "remote" or something, and refusing to play them? (It's not that it can't find them. It gives me a dialog for that.)

This http://hifiblog.com/past/2006/05/11...ou-dont-let-itunes-manage-your-music-library/ worked, the second time I tried it. I'm sure there's some nuanced thing I did differently the first time. Anyways, hurray.

Now, about the mouse. Does OS X know about button 4, and button 5?

 

Well, the Mighty Mouse has a few buttons (5 or so, of which the two on the sides are considered one afaik) that you can use, but I have no idea how a third-party mouse with more buttons is handled. Connect one and see what comes up in the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane? Might require special software, but it's worth a try.

 

A 1337 c0w indeed! I personally just copied the whole thing over NFS. You might just leave iTunes running on the server as well, then it will automatically stream the library; if it is not Windows, then there are some streaming apps on linux that would do the same, with Bonjour support and everything so it is very transparent.

 

Yes, so, I plugged in my Logitech Wireless LousyTracking v7 mouse (I forget the actual model). The back and forward buttons don't back and forward. There's got to be a setting somewhere for that, right?

 

I wouldn't be too sure of that, unless Logitech made a Mac driver for the mouse.

 

You will need an OS X/Intel driver to get those to work. Microsoft (ick) offers such a driver for some of their multi button laser mice and trackballs, but I do not know if logitech does - check their support site.

 

Hey l33t,

In regards to your iTunes issue, perhaps this lifehacker article will be helpful.

Regarding your logitech mouse under OSX, I know that the VX Revolution works under OSX using an app called Logitech Control Centre. Perhaps you could check the Logitech site to see if it's available for download?

 

Ted, thanks for that link. It's not exactly what I was trying to do, but it's something I'd like to do, and I think I might be able to adapt the article to my mac/windows situation with a little elbow grease.

What I was trying to do, was leave all my music in the same place on a network share, and move my metadata from my pc to my macbook. I was able to do so fairly easily following the directions from the link in post #11.

I've got a working logitech mouse now too. Again, thanks.

 

Ah, crap. Here's something else I don't seem to be having any luck fixing myself. I really hope this is because I don't know where to look, and not because Finder is a Satanic device, sent from hell to torment me:

Finder. SMB shares. "Server connection interrupted". The **** beachball. Also, this happens several times a day, and the entire system can go unresponsive until OS X finishes whatever cruel bouncy ritual it gets involved in. Also, I'm connecting via an applescript, on the offchance that's relevant.