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Frustrating eh ? Fortunately the fix is quick and relatively simple. First close the App Store the open Finder and go to your home directory then select the Library folder followed by the Caches folder. You should see a folder called com.apple.appstore. Delete this folder and restart App Store and you should be good to go !

UPDATE: Apparently some users have fixed this problem by simply logging out then back in again. YMMV

To correct the problem and enable access all you have to do is go to the iTunes store, and create a new stronger password. Open iTunes and click on the iTunes Store, then click on your Apple ID ( at the top right of the iTunes window ).Your Apple account information should be displayed, click on the Edit button next to your Apple ID then on the following screen create a new password and click Done. You should find that once you have done this you can now login to the Find My iPhone service ( either the iPhone app or through the http://www.me.com site )

Fortunately there is a quick solution to this using symbolic links. A symbolic link is a special file that points to a file or folder somewhere else on your disk. You cannot create a symbolic link from the Finder it is created using the ln command in a terminal window.

Open a terminal window and type the ln command as in the following code excerpt:-


ln -s /sourcedirectory ~/Dropbox/sourcedirectory


This will create a symbolic link in your Dropbox folder called sourcedirectory which points at the original directory located at /sourcedirectory.

To verify if this link is working open a Finder window and you should see a folder in your Dropbox folder called sourcedirectory with a small black arrow in the corner of the folder icon. If you double click this link file your Finder window should open the original directory.

If you later decide that you no longer want this directory synchronising with Dropbox just delete the link file in the Dropbox folder with Finder.

Firstname Surname <firstname@domain.com>

This is pretty annoying and to be honest it is hard to understand why Apple decided that this was a necessary change to the original Mail app behaviour. Fortunately there is a fix to restore the default behaviour. Fire up a Terminal window and copy and paste the command below to restore normality !

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

A quick fix to make switchers feel more at home is to download Right Zoom from BlazingTools.com. This small utility changes the default behavior of the green button to mimic the Windows way of expanding the current window.

Might even have a go at doing one of my own

Tunatic allows you to do the same thing on your Mac. It is a free download which when run displays a small purple search badge indicating that it is ready to identify a song. By default it will use the in-built microphone on the Mac to record the playing music but this can be changed to the line-input through the application preferences if preferred. Clicking the Search icon will start Tunatic identification and it will record and upload any playing music to the Tunatic servers for identification. Normally within about 30 seconds the Tunatic window will change to display the track name and artist. Recognition in my experience was very good with it only failing to recognize a few more obscure tracks.

A fun application that is both impressive and on occasion very useful.

One developer, Paul Battley from London, has come up with a neat solution to this problem though. When the BBC launched the iPlayer for iPhone site they had to provide a way of displaying videos on a device that did not have Adobes Flash Player, and so re-encoded the videos into MP4 files for display on the Jesus Phone. Paul used this site to create a small Ruby script that allows you to download the iPod playable videos and save them to your computer.

To use the script you first download and extract the tarball, then run two commands to install the libraries and command line script

ruby setup.rb config
sudo ruby setup.rb install

Once you have done this a script called iplayer-dl will be created in the bin directory. To run this you just enter the command :-

ruby iplayer-dl programcode

Where programcode is the last portion of the URL of the program you wish to download. To find this code go to the BBC iPlayer site and click on the program you wish to download. The url will be something like :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dyhs1/Jack_A_Soldiers_Story/

The programcode you require in the example above is the portion b00dyhs1. Once you have entered the command line the script will go away and download the file and by default save it in the same directory as the script. There are a number of commandline options you can use to download multiple files, specify the destination filename and directory and more. To find out more about the options available type :-

ruby iplayer-dl -help

The downloaded files are un-DRM’d and can be played and stored indefinately, which at the end of the day is what the Beeb should have allowed us ( BBC Licence payers ) to do in the first place. After all if I wanted to I could record the program onto my video/DVD recorder and keep that forever couldn’t I ?

Enjoy.