Category: Tip

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Mac Reviews Tech Tip

Netflix Woes

[Edit: If you are here to get some ideas on how to get Netflix streaming working, go to this article instead to see what finally worked for me.]

I’ve been meaning to post this article for awhile, but RL got in the way.  In any event, after performing my 10.5.6 upgrade I was very happy that, once again, I had a fully functional Hackintosh.

And then I broke it.

As some of you may be aware, that Netflix now supports Macs in their movie streaming service.  Since every workstation in the house is a Mac of one variety or another, I thought that joining Netflix to stream, albeit older, movies would be pretty cool.

Little did I know, this would lead me to a small tour of Hotel Grief …

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Categories
Blogging General Tech Tip

Dated Material

I’ve help develop a couple of websites lately and I’ve been bitten once again by dated material found on the Internet.  I seriously hate it when you are doing research and you encounter what you think is a great page with pertinent data only to find out you based all your research on ‘yesterday’s’ technology/views/opinions.  I guess I’ve been running out of patience to do thorough work in some aspects.  Yet, I do think that anyone that attempts to share information, they should put it into context or at the very least put a date on their article/comment.

On this blog, I’ve been a little re-miss as well.  I’ve taken the easy route and just have the blogging software display the date that the article was published or edited.  I think I’ll need to do more than that as a vanity search has proven that people have been reproducing info from this site (thank you btw for stopping by and I do hope you found the information useful) and basically the reproduce information was ‘archaic’ as one commenter mentioned.  Now I’m not saying that I have any control of what people do with the information I post – but I think I’ll make more of a concerted effort to inform all readers that the information on this site has a limited usefulness lifespan.

Thanks!
JT

Categories
Tip

VMWare – "Fail to lock the file"

I was lucky to get hit by a power outage today.  Nothing like running around the house putting out blinking 12:00s.  I thought that would be the worse of it – I was wrong.  As my Mac powered on it started throwing errors about not able to mount drives, etc.  Then I realized that some of my internal servers may not have survived the power outage. 

As it turn out my main VMWare server machine did just fine – and it spun-up a majority of my VMs that I have running on that server.  However, I quickly discovered that a crucial VM, my Active Directory-DNS-DHCP Win2K3 server, did not power up.  No wonder I couldn’t hit any internal servers.  Launching into VMWare Server console to launch the VM manually gave me the bad news – VMWare threw back an error of “Fail to lock the file” — the file being the VM.

A little Google search later, I found this blog article that seem to have the answer.  Basically remove the lock files.  The article mentions that the lock files end with a “.LCK” extension.  In my instance, running VMWare server, the lock files have an extension of “.WRITELOCK”.

I moved the “.WRITELOCK” files to a temp directory and attempted to restart the VM and – SUCCESS. 

I was so happy .. for 10 minutes then I got hit with another power outage.

-JT

Categories
Mac Tech Tip

MacBook Dead Harddrive – Lesson Learned

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The hard disk in one of the kids’ Macbook finally bit the dust.  No matter how many times you  tell them that they just can’t move their laptop immediately after closing the lid, they are still going to do it.  It does take a few seconds for the MacBook to write it’s RAM to disk before you can move the laptop.  Last week, the MacBook finally decided that it had enough of the abuse and killed the drive.

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Categories
Blogging Mac Tip

Font Site – dafont.com

da font Just a quick post…

I’ve been creating some new print and online projects and I found an absolutely great site for fonts:  http://www.dafont.com/

The site has a huge collection of donation-ware, free, and free for personal use fonts.  Once you set a category of the type of fonts you would like to see, you have the option of typing in custom text so that the site will preview the text in the offered fonts.  Very useful when you need to help a client research a font.

All in all – a great site!

-JT