Quick Solution: Follow other instructions on the Internet, but make sure that your Mac’s Ethernet address is manually set to “192.168.2.1″ with a subnet mask of “255.255.255.0″.

The Whole Story

So I finally upgraded the router in my home to wireless.  I am too cheap to buy the wireless ethernet card for the Xbox (it’s about $50), and since my Mac (13″ Macbook, the Aluminum series) has both wireless and wired ethernet cards (all Mac laptops do), I figured I could save some money by using my Mac to connect my Xbox to my wireless router.  People have been doing this for a while; I didn’t come up with that brilliant idea, I just wanted to make it happen for me.

… pause for a few.  I will update this later.

23May2009 – actually, it seems that I have forgotten to update this.  Well, the quick solution is the key point, so if you check out other tutorials, add my quick solution to the things you try before you give up.

Background

I use a Mac because it is much more stable than Windows.  Also, the open source community is well plugged into working with Macintosh, from what I can tell.

I usually don’t buy software, because in most cases a group of people have come up with a better, free and open source, solution.

I decided to shell out the $79 (which is a bargin) for Apple’s iWork ’08 because I hate using Microsoft Word for Mac, and I am not too fond of NeoOffice (I like the native feel of the iWork’s GUI, which is also found in software like OmniGraffle and Navicat).  As many others have pointed out, Keynote is great, and Pages is pretty good.

Why am I frustrated

I am frustrated because Numbers is slow and lacking in functionality.  I understand that it is only at Version 1.0.2 (at the time of this writing), but I still want more.

I am not trying to do anything fancy, just paste a few hundred cells of data and get some graphs.  Every time I try to do something with a graph, my CPU usage skyrockets and it takes me about 5 minutes to do something as simple as add another column of data to a chart.

I can live without some of the functionality found in Excel, because I don’t need most of the fancy statistical analysis every day.  What I do need is for Numbers to do what it can, well.

My recommendation to the developers (I know that they read this site nearly every day… [sarcasm]) is to tone down the CPU heavy graphical data selection, and just give me a text or simple menu way of manipulating graphs and charts.  Some added flexability with chart making would also greatly enhance the Numbers experience. For example, why is it so hard to get x-axis labels?  And why, if I do it wrong the first time, must I re-create the chart from scratch to get it to work properly?

At this stage in its life, Numbers seems to be working against the current Mac mantra: “Easy and intuitive”.

Begging the Developers

Please, if you can hear me, fix Numbers so that I can use it without pulling out my hair.  Until then, I will be running Software Update every hour…. hoping…

How about you? If you have this problem, please let me know about it so that I can feel better.

Quick Solution: Use Disk Utility to Restore your old drive to your new drive, then tell Time Machine that you want to use a different disk

The Whole Story

When I got the 1TB drive, it was formatted as FAT32. I had been using Time Machine (I am running Mac OS 10.5.2) and I wanted to use my new drive for Time Machine, but I wanted to keep my current Time Machine history. My vision was to have the exact same data, but now my external drive can hold more. I ran into a few issues while trying to do this, so here is how I solved them.

Note: The sections “Formatting the new hard drive”, “Transfer the files”, and “Transfer Problems” narrate the problems I had while trying to just copy files… see the following section, “Use Disk Utility Instead”, for enumerated instructions on how I actually solved the problem.

Formatting the new hard drive

When I first plugged in the drive, Leopard recognized it. I thought that I might just be able to dump the files from my old external hard drive (formatted in HFS+) onto the new one (FAT32). When I selected the files to move and dragged them to the new folder, I heard the “pang” sound that Finder makes when you copy files, but nothing actually happened.

Since I will only use this new drive on a Mac, I thought maybe I should reformat to HFS+ (I also thought that Time Machine might require it). Using Disk Utility, I ran into a few vague errors and the disk would never be successfully formatted. I found the solution on the Apple Discussion Forums .

This basically says that you must select the highest parent of the drive you want to format

and select the “Partition” page.

Then go to “Options…” and select the top option: “GUID”.

The formatting should only take a few seconds.

The next page goes over transferring your files.

Symptoms

• You just installed GlowWorm.app
• Your computer will not boot (or not reach the login window, but the mouse appears) in normal mode
  • You can boot into safe mode
  • You can boot into single user mode

The quick answer: boot into “safe mode” and run the GlowWorm unistaller.app and disable firewall; reboot.

Problem Summary

After installing GlowWorm.app from the Apple Downloads page, my MacBook would not boot, or it would boot up to the blue screen that appears just before the login window (when the mouse appears), but no login window would appear.

The Whole Story

I was browsing Apple’s Downloads and downloaded a program called GlowWorm FW Lite. After I installed it (and during which it required my admin password) I think I started to run it. GlowWorm.app told me that there was an update and I think that I told it to upgrade. There was some popup that asked if I wanted to allow something to accept incoming connections… but I said “Deny”. For some reason (not sure if it was related to GlowWorm), I had to restart my computer. When my MacBook started to boot, it got as far the blue screen where the mouse appears. The next thing that I expected was the login window, but it never came.

I tried all of the things you can do according to the Apple Support Page (tried again, reset PRAM, selected a startup disk, etc) to no avail. I was able to boot into Safe Mode (hold shift as the computer is turned on and hold until the apple logo appears and the progress wheel starts spinning) and backup my documents. While in safe mode, I deleted GlowWorm.app to the trash and then emptied the trash. I used spotlight to look for any files called glowworm, but there were no results so I restarted.Same problem.So I went back into safe mode and looked where another Apple support article suggested that there might be a problem,

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle

but there was nothing in that folder.

I remembered that earlier I was asked to either Allow or Deny something to accept incoming connections, so I opened up my System Preferences -> Security -> Firewall. At the bottom of my “Set access for specific services and applications” list, I found that service (I don’t remember what it was, but it did start with a “Q”) and took it off of the list. Because Safe Mode takes forever to boot, to be safe I also disabled the firewall by selecting the “Allow all incoming connections” radio button.

Then I thought it was odd that the GlowWorm.app didn’t have any support files when I looked earlier. It turns out, there is an app called uninstall.app located in

/Library/Application Support/glowworm/utilities/

I ran that and the traces of GlowWorm appeared to be gone. I rebooted and this time the login window appeared.

As I mentioned, I changed a few things before rebooting (firewall settings and installing), so I am not sure what the actual problem was, only that what I did seemed to fix the problem. Normally I might try to reproduce this error, but I don’t feel like flirting with the kind of danger that prevents my mac from booting.