This hint allows you to easily have a fully-interactive webpage as your desktop background.

Create a new web application using Fluid with the web site that you want as your desktop. Then launch that web application, and open its preferences. Go to the Appearances pane, and change the settings to the following:

• Window Style: Chromeless
• Window Level: Embed on Desktop
• Window Shadow: off

You may also want to adjust the opacity. I would suggest using DeskShdae to get rid of your desktop icons, setting your wallpaper to something the same color as your web app, and lowering the opacity as the page won't extend below the dock.

This hint isn't for everyone, but I like having my Google calendar with the Helvetical user script as my desktop.

Some notes after a day of working on the assorted upgrade-related issues here:

• I've made some changes to search, so that it works a bit more like the older version (year added to date display, author column removed, etc.). It's not perfect, but I expect we'll see more improvements in the near future. (I've opened a feature request for better control over search.)
• Search does, however, have a date-related issue right now. If you order results by date, the output is seemingly random. I've opened a bug with the Geeklog team, and it's being investigated.
• Searching for words with special characters, such as Exposé, no longer crashes the search engine.
• Activated a titles-only search -- it's a checkbox on the advanced search page. If you haven't tried it yet, it's quite useful for narrowing down hint results.
• Those who are seeing a narrow side column should now be seeing it at the desired width again.
• Fixed a huge problem with the My Account pages. Basically, no changes were taking, which is a bad thing. This should all be resolved now; please let me know if you see any lingering issues.
• Fixed a large number of character issues. No, not mine, but Geeklog's. I've searched and replaced all of the following: é; smart single and double quotes; …; « and » in text and AppleScript class statements; ¬ in AppleScripts; and em-dashes.

Aside from the search engine issues, the other big problem right now has to do with code snippets in comments and the submission page. It works strangely, but it does basically work -- you'll find your HTML characters get changed to entities in the input box, and they may preview as entities, but they'll publish correctly. I've opened a bug on this. The one exception is any code snippets within angle brackets -- that text will just vanish unless you use the special [code] tags. So please use that tag for any code in your hint. (For the first time here in nearly forever, backslashes will not be eaten, so that's something!)

-rob.

Whew. That was a huge project, and fraught with more peril than I had expected. Nonetheless, we're done now, at least for the most part. I'm sure there are some things I've missed. In particular, please let me know if you see a story or comments with odd looking characters in them; things like "é" or "’". There were some character set changes in the Geeklog core that caused us some trouble with special characters. I think we cleaned up most of them, but there may be some lurkers.

So what do you, the reader, get out of this? Quite a bit, but here are a few things to note:

• Comment editing - you can (for a limited time after posting) edit your comments!
• Comment notifications - receive an email notification if a comment is posted in a thread you posted in.
• Username changes - no longer do you have to email me to change your username.
• Account deletion - don't want to have an account here any more? You can delete it.
• Greatly improved user control panel.
• A much nicer article rating system, complete with AJAXified voting!
• Search by title only - I just added a new checkbox to the search form, which will restrict your search to only a hint or comment's title.

That's a sampling of the new stuff. So what did we lose? Sadly, the Classic theme is dead, at least for now. I just didn't have time to migrate it to the new system. I may at some point, but it won't be in the very near future. There may be some layout issues -- please let me know if you see oddly formatted pages, fonts too small/too big, etc. You can contact me using the Contact link on each page; please include the URL where you see the trouble.

Thanks to plattapuss for the expert assistance during the upgrade. At one point, I did something really stupid. Thankfully, he was able to come up with very slick SQL recovery, which saved me from having to start over from scratch! And finally, thanks to all of you for making this site what it is. It's been nearly nine years, and it's still a blast to "come to work" every day and see what all you brilliant folks have discovered.

-rob.

I've noticed in 10.6 that when I use Exposé in Application Windows mode, it shows me all my windows, not just the ones in the current Space. I always end up clicking on the wrong window and being whisked away to a another Space. To stop that from happening, open Terminal and run these two commands:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces -bool FALSE
$ killall Dock

From now on, Exposés Application Windows mode will only show windows in the current Space.

[robg adds: To reverse this hint, use defaults delete com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces and then kill the Dock again.]

This is a Snow Leopard update, and a bundling of, the hint on using Time Machine on a networked AFP volume and this comment about creating a bootable Time Machine backup.

Issues addressed:

1. I have a Time Machine backup disk in my office, and I want it to be encrypted in case of, for instance, theft of the disk.
2. I have a shared Time Machine server at my office, and I don't want others to access my backups.
3. I want to move my Time Machine backup to another disk (a larger one, or simply to have an extra copy)
4. I want it to be easy :-)

The solution (as has been pointed out before) lies in using disk images for backups, with a little bit of magic to make it work.

Although I'm doing most of my video projects in Final Cut Express, I decided to give the "new and improved" iMovie another trial run the other day, just to see if my generally negative opinions of the program have changed (they haven't). In the midst of my test project, I wanted to do something that was simple in iMovie HD: display a photo for a second or two, then apply a Ken Burns move/zoom effect, then pause on the zoomed photo for a bit before moving on.

In iMovie HD, you could do this by applying Ken Burns to a still, then copying the start and end frames of that photo and inserting them before and after the Ken Burns'd still. You could then modify the duration of the still frames as you wished, leaving a seamless hold-zoom-hold effect. My efforts to do the same in iMovie, though, were met with frustration (you can't make a freeze frame from a still, for instance). Thanks to Twitter user @2mutch, however, I now have the solution.

In words, the process is a bit complex:

1. Add the still to your project, and set up the Ken Burns effect as you'd like it to be.
2. Duplicate the still twice, so you have a total of three copies of your still.
3. In the "before" still, edit the Ken Burns effect so that the End effect is identical to the Start effect.
4. In the "after" image, first flip the Start/End effects by clicking the small-arrows-icon at the top of the frame.
5. Now set the End effect to be equal to the Start effect in the "after" image.

The end result is a still frame before and after the Ken Burns effect slide, though it can sometimes be tricky to get the frames set just right so as to eliminate all motion in the stills. I made a short demo movie (2.8MB) that shows the process visually, which may be easier to follow than the text version. If you know an easier way to do this in iMovie, feel free to post in the comments!

Address Book is a great app, and it is nice when applications use the Address Book database to create formatted addresses in form letters. However, sometimes you are just writing one letter, and you want to paste the name and address from the Address Book into your document -- such as when typing the inside address on business correspondence, or making a single envelope. I used to go to the address card entry in Address Book and click-drag to select, then copy, then paste into the document, and finally edit it so that it was correct. There is a much easier way!

Just go to the address that you want and either click on the tag that describes the type of address (like Home or Work), or Control-click on the address or tag, and from the pop-up menu select Copy Mailing Label. Then go to wherever you need the text and just paste. You will get the address formatted correctly, with the person's name, company, street, and city-state-zip on separate lines.

This option is in a pop-up menu, in a logical and intuitive place, but discovery of the feature may have eluded some -- as it did me until I looked for a better way.

Prior to the release of iTunes 9, iTunes would not allow two Macs to use the same iTunes library at the same time -- iTunes would report that the file is locked.

iTunes 9 (and 9.0.1) now allow two Macs to access the library at the same time! In my testing, I was able to run iTunes on both Macs, and play the same song, with no issues.

I accidentally discovered that the combination of an iWork '08 application and an OpenType Postscript (Adobe?) font installed by Font Book in a custom library (i.e. not the System or User libraries) produces a corrupted display (as the the encoding was wrong) of such a font. If the same font is installed in a standard library (e.g. User), the issue does not occur.

The problem does not seem to effect other applications (e.g. TextEdit), or other font types (e.g. OpenType/TrueType supplied with iWork itself). Here's the fix:

1. Using Font Book, install all the fonts from your custom library into the User library.
2. Disable the custom library.
3. Open Pages, and check that each font displays correctly. Quit Pages. (May not be required, but do it if just for reassurance.)
4. Back in Font Book, remove all the fonts you added to User.
5. Enable the custom library.
6. In Finder, empty Trash, and a reboot isn't a bad idea.

Now the fonts work in iWork '08 from the Font Book custom library. Extensive testing has not been done -- in particular, I don't know what, if anything, might cause the "feature" to re-appear. However, one might surmise a re-installation, wiping preferences, or clearing caches might result in having to follow these same steps again. (I've reported this to Apple.)

I, and a number of my friends, have notied that certain features in Quicksilver seem to be disabled for 10.6 users -- features such as the preferences pane. Going to the Blacktree web site and downloading the B56a7 version seems to fix most of the problems for us, though at the expense of more crashes. And unless you've attempted to access any of the problem spots, you may not have noticed the problems.