Dictionary.app is broken. What’s likely occurred is that you signed into Wikipedia in Safari, are using their Beta for usability, and now scrolling or resizing your Dictionary.app window doesn’t show any text that wasn’t rendered to the display upon first opening that Wikipedia article in Dictionary. To test that your conditions are similar, hover over some links to other articles in a Wikipedia article within Dictionary, and you’ll notice a yellow info popup. Cool feature, but Apple hasn’t updated their software to understand the new beta pages. So now the OSX dictionary content looks like this:

… even when you resize the window like this:

Scrolling, keyboard arrow keys etc. will not work.

It was annoying trying to figure out what was happening here. Naturally, the lonely adolescent Mac users on Apple’s support forums (Apple’s idea of “their support”) chiming in with random busywork advise to feign knowledgeability and seem important never helps. Those types of search results were common for all queries imaginable.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Go to Wikipedia.org in Safari make sure you’re signed out of your account by clicking here.

2. Quit and re-open Dictionary.app and you are usually good to go.

   
   

3. If your results are still broken, deleting ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Dictionary/Cache.db may be helpful.

If you’re curious what you’re deleting, and you should be, /Library/Caches//Cache.db are cached server responses. For the completely green, the tilde “~” character represents your user or home directory. So if your usershortname is “smartass” then you’ll delete /Users/smartass/Library/Caches/com.apple.Dictionary/Cache.db. You can open Terminal.app (Spotlight is your friend) and type / paste: rm -r ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Dictionary then hitting enter.

Comment and rate this post below, to let me know how it went for you. (o:

To prevent this, you can:

a.) Be awesome, and less lazy than me. Fix /Applications/Dictionary.app/Contents/Resources/WikipediaSupport.js file and ping back here to reciprocate with some knowledge love!

b.) Exit the Wikipedia beta for usability in Safari. Frankly, this option sucks since parts of that are useful and I fear some analyticstard at the foundation is looking at those figures thinking “people exiting the program =usability is poor, don’t commit these changes” vs “Apple is a cathedral, not a bazaar and moves at a glacial pace through technology.” Within the dictionary, I found the beta features very useful.

c.) Cross fingers. Well, this happened before – many times. Never cared to track down causation, but before the explicit beta for Wikipedia started here I’d had issues in the past. FYI – I learned many a moon ago whilst making customizations to the Dictionary, that its Wikipedia access is just a big ugly JS/CSS hack. Presumably some changes were made to Wikipedia that broke things temporarily, but other factors could come into play. Am I the only one that finds this annoying for a commercial product?

For anyone trying to find this (or to help me find this again some day), searches I used in vein to see if others had a solution to this were dictionary.app cache snow leopard cut off scroll bug issues problem wikipedia dictionary scrollbars os x osx.

via smartassism.com

In my quest to soil my Mac Pro for the sake of science, I decided to install Windows 7 via BootCamp yesterday. One thing that I felt was a necessity was read and write access to both systems from either system. Snow Leopard has NTFS read support out of the box, but in order to enable write support you must get out the chicken bones and voodo stick.

Here’s how:

1. Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. Type “diskutil info /Volumes/volume_name” and copy the Volume UUID (bunch of numbers).
3. Backup /etc/fstab if you have it, shouldn’t be there in a default install.
4. Type “sudo nano /etc/fstab”.
5. Type in “UUID=paste_the_uuid_here none ntfs rw” or “LABEL=volume_name none ntfs rw” (if you don’t have UUID for the disk).
6. Repeat for other NTFS partitions.
7. Save the file (ctrl-x then y) and restart your system.

And that’s it!

[UPDATE]

After a few days of running with NTFS write support using Boot Camp, I started to experience random lock ups and program crashes. My Mac became completely unresponsive at times. Especially when running Disk Utility permission repairs.

If this happens to you, I suggest removing, or renaming /etc/fstab

Here’s how:

1. Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. Type “sudo rm -f /etc/fstab” to remove fstab, or “sudo mv -f /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak” to rename it.

Looks like someone made a boo-boo. Two weeks after the release of Apple TV 3.0, Apple has pushed out 3.0.1.

Symptoms

• You are using Apple TV software version 3.0 and all of your movies, TV shows, and songs appear to be missing,

  

or

• You are using Apple TV software version 3.0 and all of your movies, TV shows, and songs appear to be present, but you have not yet updated to Apple TV software version 3.0.1.

Resolution

There is an issue with Apple TV software version 3.0 that can possibly cause your content to disappear after a period of time. All customers running Apple TV software version 3.0 should immediately restart their Apple TV and then upgrade to Apple TV software version 3.0.1.

For either symptom, do the following:

1. Restart your Apple TV by unplugging the power cord and plugging it back in.
2. Select Settings > General from the main menu.
3. Select Update Software.
4. Select Download and Install when prompted.

   Note: Your Apple TV will restart; this is followed by the Apple logo and a status bar.

If the issue persists, try disconnecting your Apple TV from your computer, and then connecting it again. To disconnect and then reconnect a computer:

1. On your Apple TV, go to Settings > Computers.
2. Select your iTunes library to disconnect.
3. Select your iTunes library again to reconnect.

via Apple

27" iMac

We’ve had a few users tell us about performance lags that they’re experiencing with their brand new 27″ iMacs. Our own Casey Johnston even wrote a quick article about the problem last month. Now that everyone has had a few days to play with the issue and try the obligatory troubleshooting steps, we’ve been tipped about a possible solution.

One of our readers claims that this isn’t just related to Flash playback… it’s possible that this lag problem is consistent across the system. Flash taxes your system more than most applications so it would show the lag problem more consistently than another application — thus making it look like a problem only with Flash.

The suggestion at this point: cycle your wireless connection. By turning AirPort off and on again, some people are seeing the computer regain responsiveness. Obviously this isn’t a permanent fix because the issue will most likely appear again after you reboot your machine… we can’t say if the fix will persist for the entire session, either; the problem could come back before reboot.

Fellow TUAW blogger Joachim Bean suggests that the issues may be something related to PCI Express. Both the AirPort and graphics card are using PCI Express to communicate with the system. There’s a possibility that the lines of communication are crossing during use. I’m still betting on a software issue — at least, let’s hope for that.

via TUAW

iPhone

Well, something clearly broke down behind the scenes in the ongoing Apple/Google negotiations over Google Voice on the iPhone, because Google released one of two nukes it has been holding back. In a letter to the FCC today, Google disclosed previously unpublished information about Apple’s rejection of their Google Voice application.

There’s no longer any question – either Google or Apple is flat out lying to the FCC:

Apple: “Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.”

Google: “Apple representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone”

Our position is that Apple is the one full of it, which we stated way before this new information from Google. And it isn’t just he said/she said – Apple’s story doesn’t add up.

But Apple is standing firm, and even today told press that they haven’t rejected the Google Voice application, despite what Google says.

This doesn’t end here. As we’ve speculated, Apple will capitulate and accept the application with a few minor tweaks to save face. Because if they don’t we’ve heard Google has yet another nuke waiting on the sidelines – a screen shot of the actual rejection notice via the iPhone developers admin with the formal rejection. At that point, Apple will no longer be able to rely on nuances and misdirection. The FCC and everyone else will know that they lied in a government investigation.

via TechCrunch

As I continue on in the exploration of Snow Leopard to discover what’s new and what’s missing, (like double clicking the top of a window to minimize to the dock), I have found a website that is keeping tabs on…

Things Removed in Snow Leopard

Updated continuously; please submit new finds in the comments, but read the FAQ first. Or, in other words, “This document will be updated as more information becomes available.”

• PowerPC support
• The blood on the signature snow leopard’s mouth, except for in the wallpaper
• 32-bit screensaver support on 64-bit capable machines (in effect; it’s more of a replacement thing since loginwindow has to run under some architecture)
• Cocoa Java runtime support
• AppleTalk printing
• Creator code adherence when opening files

Read the full list at http://waffle.wootest.net/2009/09/05/removed-snow-leopard/

iPhone - Now with MMS from 2002!

AT&T has just announced that MMS — a much-ballyhooed feature of iPhone OS 3.0 — will finally be hitting AT&T on September 25. There’s still no date for tethering, though the company is holding the line that it’ll be offered “in the future.” Expanding on the logic behind the tethering delay, they’re saying that “by its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect.”

We’re no network engineers, but “exponentially increase traffic” and “AT&T” are two things we don’t typically like to hear in the same sentence — let’s hope the 850MHz, 7.2Mbps, and backhaul upgrades they’re cranking on right now go a long way toward sorting that out. As for MMS, they’re acknowledging that the release “does indeed fall a few days past the official end of summer,” arguing that their support of more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world made a positive launch experience a bit of a challenge.

Of course, virtually every other phone AT&T sells (and has sold for the past several years) supports the same tech, so this feels like a pretty active admission that iPhone users blaze through data-rich features at a pace that the carrier has been ill-equipped to handle.

Grab a Mac... any Mac!

Have you ever thought about just how much stuff is on display in an Apple store? Those Macbook, iPhones, and iPods are probably worth hundred of thousands of dollars. Apple products aren’t cheap, after all.

Maybe that’s why these crooks targeted an Apple store in Marlton, New Jersey for a seemingly well-plan heist. The result was that five men were able to nab 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones, and 9 iPod Touches. The kicker? The thieves were able to steal all of this stuff in exactly 31 seconds.

View the video: VIDEO: Thieves Clean Out an Apple Store in 31 Seconds.

µMonitor is a handy iPhone application that allows users to control their uTorrent client on the go. After putting months of hard work into getting the software ready for a public release, the developer Claudio was told by Apple that everything related to BitTorrent has been banned from their App Store.

“We’ve reviewed µMonitor and determined that we cannot post this version of your application to the App Store at this time because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” Apple wrote to the developer after a 4 month review process.

This is not the first time that Apple has excluded a BitTorrent-related product from its store. In May they also banned an application designed to remotely-control the Transmission BitTorrent client for the same reasons outlined above.

Interestingly Apple has no problem allowing Usenet related applications in their store. myNZB for example is an application that is available from the App Store although it’s similar in functionality to the BitTorrent apps that were rejected.

Despite Apple’s blockade, there is still a way to get µMonitor on your iPhone. Instead of throwing months of hard work overboard, µMonitor’s developer has recently decided to bypass the Apps Store and make the application available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhone users from the Cydia repository.

Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone. Detailed instructions on how to get µMonitor working on your phone can be found on Claudio’s website.

via torrentfreak.com

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has turned up the heat on the wireless industry expanding its probe of mobile phone practices following widespread complaints about a lack of competition, openness and innovation.

The “Notice of Inquiry,” announced during a Thursday agency meeting, expands on open FCC proceedings, including a look into exclusive contracts that lock phones to provider networks, and the anti-competitive blocking of applications and services.

With the new inquests the agency is broadening its investigation into innovation and consumer choice in the wireless marketplace. Issues that will come under consideration in this proceeding will likely include exorbitant text-messaging and termination fees, device and application blocking, and others.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are the two largest carriers in the marketplace controlling more than 60 percent of mobile phone accounts in the U.S. (continue reading…)