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Having bought my second Western Digital MyBook 1TB, I faced an annoying issue: I couldn’t get rid of the virtual CD. This may seem a small problem, but I dislike when I have to deal with stuff, I didn’t ask for in the first place.

My first thought was to delete the part of my hard drive that contains the files. That didn’t work out well, not to say not at all. Not even my beloved gParted could get rid of it.

Step two was the visit of Western Digital’s website for more information. (Only a geek would understand why this wasn’t my first step. ) I ended up here but wasn’t happy with that solution. Yeah I know, I’m difficult.

My final solution was the cleanest in my opinion and includes typing the following into the terminal:

sudo sh -c "echo UUID=`diskutil info /Volumes/WD\ SmartWare/ | grep 'UUID' | awk '{print $NF}'` none hfs rw,noauto 0 0 >> /etc/fstab"

After a restart there’s nothing but a clean desktop and my Finder isn’t unnecessarily cluttered either.

Facebook is a versatile social utility to keep in touch with your friends, share information and also to play games. While it is interesting to read news about something you’re interested in or participate in as well, I don’t need all updates. I’m not saying I don’t like my friends, I just don’t need to know whenever someone found a lonely duck in Farmville. There are different ways to achieve an uncluttered wall and following I would like to indroduce 2 of them:

Hide unwanted applications

Go to your wall and hover your mouse over the message you would like to ignore. Now click on Hide and choose to either hide messages from that person or just the application.

Install a Greasemonkey script

Visit this page to find out how to install this script and remove quiz messages or other unwanted updates.

Seems that I’m in a spacer / blank icon mood lately, but they really help if you’d like to cluster your apps and therefore ‘unclutter’ your working space. (I just wrote an article on how to add a spacer for iPhones here.)

Here are the few steps it takes to achieve this:

1) Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal

2) Type or copy/paste the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{tile-data={}; tile-type=”spacer-tile”;}’

3) Press enter and type or copy/paste this:

killall Dock

4) Once you pressed enter, you will realize that you have just created a spacer.

5) Repeat as you wish (restarting the dock in-between isn’t necessary) and exit the session by typing:

exit

6) Now the Terminal can be closed. The icon(s) can be treated like normal ones (moving and deleting).

Enjoy your new found tidiness.

Since I started using a Mac, my mouse (Logitech G9) didn’t work as well as I was used to when I was still using a PC. The reason was the inability to use and / or configure the mouse buttons. I tried to install Logitech’s driver but that didn’t end up well. (Maybe because there isn’t a dedicated driver for this mouse.) Directly after I restarted my machine, I had the feeling that it isn’t running smoothly. I uninstalled the software and lived without features such as going back one page by clicking a mouse button within Firefox.

Luckily I found an app called SteerMouse. This fine piece of software allowed me to set the mouse buttons up the way I like them to work. Now I can not only go forth and back within Firefox, I can also zoom in and out. This finally allows me to use my mouse the way I was used to and even gives me features (zooming, switching between apps) that I wasn’t used to, but that make my daily life a lot easier.

This should work with most mouses  (or mice – to find out more about that topic read this) and help you to get all the features you would expect from a mouse that has all those buttons that await to be used.

During my pre-Christmas cleaning I decided to sort my Mac mini as well. I really like it clean and fast. A nice article at lifehacker.com may also help you if you find your Mac sluggish, or if you simply are a neat ‘freak’ like me.

The article describes how you can find programs that take a lot of your system resources, and how you can make your Mac start faster by disabling programs that start automatically when you switch on your system. On top of that, software that will delete unnecessary left-overs from uninstalled apps and system checks is introduced to you. While the article isn’t the newest, the hints offered are still up-to-date.

I bought a Time Capsule (an AirPort Extreme is essentially the same, just missing the harddisk) and it’s working flawlessly, after a little work on setting it up. The following article should make it clear how to  set up the router (Siemens) that is provided by the German DSL provider Alice (Hansenet).

To set up the TC, simply follow the explanation given in the setup guide. If you can’t be bothered to read that – and I assure you I know that feeling – just plug in your ethernet cable and install the software that came with your device, as weird as that may seem. I didn’t install it in the first place but was warned that I have an older version currently running. After installing it, I went to:

Applications -> Utilities -> AirPort Utilities

Just click yourself through the process. If you should encounter issues or have questions, this may help (and eventhough it’s quite old, it sure helped me). The most important thing to set up is DHCP. Even if you have PPPoE in mind, just use the suggested option. Now your internet should be up and running (because you Mac will still connect via your entered PPPoE network settings, as the cable is still attached).

Now log in to your Siemens router that Alice sent you, by visiting the following IP with your preferred web browser:

192.168.1.1

Then set up your login details:

Username: YourTelephoneNumber@alice-dsl.de

Password: YourBirthdate (ddmmyyyy)

While you’re at it, set up a password for your router, if you haven’t done so already. Nothing is worse than setting up a secure network and leaving the router open for others to change the passwords.  Simply save your configuration and you’re basically good to go. Basically. You will also need to log in to your own, just created wireless network with your Mac. Now you can plug out your ethernet cable if you made the initial backup already. Otherwise I’d suggest leaving it plugged in until you finished that. I then restarted my Mac, but it should work without doing so.

As you can see, there isn’t much to it. I expected it to be either really difficult or impossible, after reading many discussions about this online. If you still encounter problems setting it up, or if you have further questions, please leave a comment and i’ll get back to you a.s.a.p.

Using iTunes as my main – and most likely only – media player started off quite badly. Not only that I had to change every single video I have into a *.mov-file, I also found *.mp3-files that would neither play on my iPod nor within iTunes. Trying to add these files via iTune’s automatic adding function would move them to the not added folder instead.

The MP3 Validator for Mac OS X neatly solved this issue for me. Just download the software and open it, before you can simply drag-and-drop your mp3-files into the program. It will show which failure persists and repair it. Just checked my whole library and found quite a lot of failures on files which I didn’t suspect in the first place.

PS: Windows-user might be happy to read that MP3 Validator is doing the same for them.

PS:PS: Thanks to Trevin Chow for this helpful piece of information.

Since I got an invitation to Google Wave and didn’t have much time to test it properly yet, I decided to start a public wave for blogable.eu readers.

To find the wave simply search for:

with:public “Welcome to the blogable.eu reader public wave”

If you encounter problems (like not finding the wave) I’d like you to let me know, since I also just started testing it. The wave is supposed to let blogable.eu readers test Google Wave, experience the possibilities and share the experience with other readers.

Hope to seeing you there soon.

From the first day mobile phones allowed multiple numbers and further information to be stored under one name, I wondered why it wasn’t and still mostly isn’t possible to automatically add details such as birthdays from the contacts’ details to the mobile phone’s calendar.

Using Google and its products finally solved that for me. Entered contact information such as birthdays are automatically syncronized with Google Calendar. All you need to do, is to enable that calendar. To do so, please follow these steps:

0) Create a Google account, if you don’t have one already.

1) Visit Google Calendar via your Gmail account or visit Google Calendar.

2) Click Settings and visit the Calendars tab.

3) Now follow the Browse interesting calendars link.

4) Under the More tab you will find Contacts’ birthdays and events.

5) Subscribe and enjoy.

Syncronizing your mobile phone contacts and calendar with Google is a great way to keep track of birthdays and other events you entered into your contacts’ details. No need to create an extra calendar entry any more. Was about time someone solved this gap between the calendar and contacts syncronization if you ask me.

Since the beginning of mankind, people tried to communicate as efficently as possible and the introduction of the e-mail, which enables us to share information worldwide, sure had a massive impact on how we see and live communication today. Google intends to take it a step further and creates something new: Google Wave.

If you don’t know what Google Wave is, watching the following (unofficial) video may help:

I was happy enough to receive an invitation and currently I’m trying to understand all the features and possibilities that Google Wave offers at the moment. A nice to know information for new ‘Wavers’ is the following search:

search:public

This will enable you to find publicly written waves, as you may not know many people that have an invitation yet. This way you will get to know the features and can help to make this preview a beta soon.

If you still have no idea what Google Wave is, where it fits in between Facebook and Twitter, or if you simply would like to read more about it, you will find a good article here.

At the moment it’s quite slow and I encounter some issues once in a while. Nevertheless, this seems to be the next big thing and I’m looking forward to seeing the impact it will have on the communication over all and for me.

Just one more thing.

The so-called Web-Apps for the iPhone aren’t really newsworthy, but in regards to Google Wave it may be interesting to know that an added Google Wave home screen bookmark will not show the Safari wrapper, but look like an independent app.