Years ago, we used iGo adapters around my office and they seemed to work well. I found used iGo adapters readily available and cheap on eBay – it seems most people believe these adapters aren’t compatible or worth using with modern devices and computers. I picked up a couple on eBay and figured I’d rig them to work with my MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads.

A Juice 70 or an iGo auto/air85 worked with a MacBook Pro by connecting the A3 adapter (19 volts) A4 adapter (16.6 volts) to a couple additional items:

1. An adapter I found on eBay, a DC 5.5mm to 5.5 mm power plug coupler/extender/adapter (Female to Female):

http://www.ebay.com/itm/191164201422

2. A MagSafe to 5.5 mm DC adapter cable from Amazon (MagSafe2 is shown in photo below):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JQ5F0ZU

I plugged the iGo’s and cables into two vehicles and they all seem to work fine.

I was also able to get an iPad 2 charging with the legacy iPod adapter (iGo A61 adapter) connected to the iGo dual power accessory, but I think it was limited to 500 ma for charging.

I also tried to attach an iPhone 6s and iPad 4 to the iGo dualpower accessory using an iGo A46 adapter and a Lightning USB cable, but neither would charge.

I’m curious what else I can power up with these iGo power adapters. iGo only said what devices their tips could power up, but the voltages were never attached. If anyone has a complete list of voltages for all the tips, I’d love to see it. In the interim, I’m developing my own list and I invite you to contribute to it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FqNx8Fy8wYQG7PRS7hv3gnOUO2JoffU4k5_uDDIRO9w/edit?usp=sharing

I was lucky enough to pick up the above-referenced printer on Amazon for a good price. It’s been a great machine, except for envelope-printing and the exorbitant price to operate. The primary reason for the latter issue is Samsung’s firmware, which calculates how much toner remains (rather than measure it) and doesn’t allow you to use a refilled cartridge without also replacing the chip on the cartridge.

Not one to be hampered by an electronics manufacturer, I set out to jailbreak my Samsung CLP-415NW. I wasn’t hoping to root the printer, but just find a way to disable the ability of the printer to read chips on toner cartridges. I knew about this nifty hardware hack for the 315, but I was hoping for something through software to avoid voiding my warranty.

I knew of people who used firmware to disable the ability of the printer to read cartridge chips, but I wasn’t sure which vendor to trust. I decided to dive in and take a chance with “printserv”, but the firmware I received didn’t work. I tried to resolve the issue for several days using Google Translate, but never got it working.

Somewhat defeated, I waited several months and when my yellow and magenta cartridges ran out of toner, I resorted to eBay and found the seller c-h-i-p-t-o-n-e-r. I requested firmware version 4.00.01.48, but I was told this version of firmware was not yet available and my money was promptly refunded. I then downgraded to version 4.00.01.41 and bid on another firmware fix listing from c-h-i-p-t-o-n-e-r and sent the following information:

1) printer model – CLP-410 Series (CLP-415NW)
2) the serial number of the printer – Z9A0BJED111111CN
3) The firmware version of the printer – System Firmware v4.00.01.41 Feb-15-2013
4) serial CRUM –

Yellow:
CRUM-13021560982
Magenta:
CRUM-13021560858
Cyan:
CRUM-13021570036
Black:
CRUM-13021569444

The next morning, I received an email with a link to download my modified firmware. The directions were wonderful and I used my Mac with VirtualPC to download the modified firmware with a USB cable. SUCCESS!

After the printer rebooted, I was successfully able to print from previously “empty” toner cartridges! Knowing there wasn’t much toner left, I promptly ordered new toner for about 1/5 the price of Samsung’s toner cartridges and I also ordered a toner tool so I can pour the new toner into my near-empty cartridges. I’ll post again when I get the new toner and tool.

While in my shop and rebuilding components on Ella’s bike, I was disturbed by the fans on my Mac mini. Taking a closer look, I opened “top” from Terminal.app and found devicemgrd running away with one of the cores on the machine. Looking for a quick fix and reading Apple’s Discussions, it appeared a reset of the SMC was in order.

After pulling power, waiting about 10 seconds, pressing and holding the power button for 5 seconds, and then plugging the machine back in and pressing the power button again, it booted up and devicemgrd was behaving nicely again.

Back to bike repair.

At the moment, my only bike is a Surly Big Dummy (probable model year is 2009). I ride it year round and, unfortunately, the paint job takes a toll regardless of how good Surly’s paint jobs are. I’m planning to do a fair amount of touch up work this summer, so I figured I’d check in with Surly to see what color my Big Dummy actually is. I sent them my serial number and they told me the paint job is european color code RAL 6014.

Thanks to Josh for passing my color along! For anyone else out there looking to get touch up paint and having a military green paint job like mine, I’m heading to the local hobby shop tomorrow to pick up some Testor’s RAL 6014 Gelboliv Nato Semi-Gloss #2175. I’ll try to post back this summer if the touch up work goes well.

My beautiful bride accidentally created duplicates of every photo in her iPhoto Library; her machine was running Mountain Lion (10.8.x). She was unable to undo the madness and a week went by before I was able to take a look at it. Bragging that our Time Machine backup would be able to bring us back in time, failed; when I had iPhoto launched, I tried to enter Time Machine, but every time I tried this, a new window called “Desktop” would appear and then the Time Machine would be opened based on the Desktop.

This was no good. I then tried to recover her entire iPhoto Library from her backed up Pictures folder, but that too failed over permissions.

Enter Terminal.app and rsync. To get around the strange permissions issue, I synced the iPhoto Library using sudo and rsync:

sudo rsync --archive --stats --human-readable --progress /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups/Backups.backupdb/Tina\'s\ MacBook\ Pro/2014-03-07-081254/Macintosh\ HD/Users/christinaschwie/Pictures ~/

It worked like a champ and she’s happily using her iPhoto Library without duplicates again.

This might come in handy for people using owncloud or Dropbox that want their files to occur in the cloud and somewhere on their machine. If you want to make a certain directory path see files in the actual location they exist, run the following with Terminal.app:

ln -s path/where/files/really/exist path/you/wish/would/work

If you’re doing this with Owncloud or Dropbox, the first file path should be the directory path of your Dropbox account and the second directory path should be where you want your files to appear.

So, I recently updated to Server 3.0 and my PHP installation was obliterated. Since PHP in Mavericks server is something like 5.4, I decided to take this opportunity to upgrade to 5.5.5 through the liil project. To upgrade, fire up Terminal.app and run this script:

curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.5

Still in Terminal.app, use pico and modify the Apache .conf file:

sudo pico /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2/httpd_server_app.conf

While you’re in pico, press “control” and “w” and search for “php5”. Add a hashtag to the line your search results hit and add the line below, as shown here:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

LoadModule php5_module /usr/local/php5/libphp5.so

Finally, press “control” and “x” and save your changes. To reload with your upgraded PHP, run the following:

sudo apachectl restart

To be sure the syntax in your modified .conf is working properly, you can test it this way:

sudo apachectl -t

The key to my 2001 New Beetle broke off the remote housing a couple days ago. The RFID chip and radio inside the remote were fine, so I ordered up a replacement housing on Amazon. After following instructions on YouTube to carefully swap the internals, I found that the buttons on the new remote didn’t appear to lock/unlock the vehicle, nor was the RFID being acknowledged by the vehicle. Ironically, my backup master key/remote would also no longer lock/unlock the vehicle, so I figured something else was going on.

As recommended by VW, I reset the non-working remote by following page 31 of the manual. For those that don’t have it handy:

1. Press either the lock or unlock button on the non-working remote one time for one second.
2. Lock or unlock the vehicle with the master key (non-working remote).

The non-working remote should now be able to lock/unlock doors! Repeat as necessary for additional non-working remotes. I also started the vehicle and the RFID appeared to be acknowledged, as it was no longer tripping the vehicle’s security system as indicated by the dashboard.

Digi is working on version 6 of XCTU that runs on Mac OS X. Get it here:

http://ftp1.digi.com/support/utilities/40003027_1P.dmg

I’ve been using it on Mountain Lion and it works fine for me, but I’ve only begun to test it out.

I’ve had the need to append pages to PDFs encoded with DRM. A great tool for removing DRM one file at a time is a service called pdfclean for OS X, an installer of the command line utility included with mupdf’s MuTool clean. I successfully installed and used the service under Mountain Lion and found it effective. Thanks, be3n!

For macOS Sonoma and later, be3n’s tool works as an Automator app, just drop an encrypted .pdf on it. I’m having some trouble with it removed the encryption under Sonoma and am checking with be3n on a potential solution. Right now, when pdfclean attempts to remove encryption on a .pdf, it makes a new file that takes the form “old_file_name.pdf.broken” – removing “.broken” allows the file to open, but the encryption is still there.