Authentication Required While Printing on OSX 10.5.2

Since I upgraded from OSX 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 I haven't been able to use my shared printer on on my Windows server. Every job I submit gives me an error saying On Hold (Authentication Required).

There's no way that I could submit the printjob to the server from my Mac.

It seems that there is a bug in the authentication mechanism on OSX 10.5.2. If you add a (network) printer by using the System Preferences, you get to browse to find the actual printer.

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Wordpress v2.5 Upgrade

Today, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. The upgrade proces was easy as usual. Before the upgrade I checked all the plugins used, and upgraded those first. The new features / layout of the adminpages are great. Also the new editor works like a charm (even on Safari). Somehow it feels a bit more intuitive.

Only downside is that the Wordpress Stats on the dashboard won't work in FireFox. It works fine in Safari. Instead of showing the graph in FireFox it shows the actual dasboard page from wordpress.com.

Nokia E61i Firmware Update - update

It's been a couple of days since my firmware update, so it's time for a small update on the subject.

The biggest advantage is that the mail client is very stable. I use (secure) IMAP and I have 3 mailboxes configured on the device. The mail client hasn't crashed yet.

The biggest downside (in my opinion) is that the 3G connection drops automatically, so you need to re-establish the connection every time. Sure, it saves bandwidth (and costs), but it's annoying that you actively have to monitor your e-mail.

Thankfully, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so I'm still happy with the Nokia E61i.

Winter in the Spring

More panorama's on my flickr page

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White Christmas... euh Easter

A first. At least for as long as I can remember

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OSX Update Galore

There are lot's of people who complain about the updates on the Windows platform, but Apple tries to compete I guess. In the last 3 days there was a big security update, Safari 3.1 (both Windows and OSX), Time machine and Airport Updates, and now a Camera RAW update for OSX 10.5.2. Thankfully no problems on my side with the updates. Looking for other updates from Apple? Just go here.

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Nokia E61i Firmware Update

Early this week, I found a new firmware for my Nokia E61i (out since October 2007). The version I had was v1.x, and this one was v2.0633.65.01 (press *#000# on your E61 to see the current firmaware version). Updating goes through a separate application, but it should also be possible through download over the mobile network (I haven't tried this). All you need to know is explained on the Nokia website, but there are some thing you don't want to forget;

• Use the Nokia Datasuite to create a FULL backup of the phone, because during the upgrade the phone goes back to factory defaults.
• Have lot's of patience (and some deodorant handy)
• Make sure the PC isn't doing anything else that might interfere with the update.

The first attempt failed for me. Even with all the warnings (DO NOT INTERRUPT THE UPDATING PROCESS OR DISCONNECT THE PHONE!!!) I rebooted the PC and disconnected the phone. Result, the phone didn't respond (this is where my deodorant came in). After this I restarted the upgrade process, and the phone got recognized (thankfully). After 10 minutes, the phone rebooted with the new firmware version. First action was to restore all data and settings on the phone. Since I had some issues with my network connectivity I decided to remove the Access Points and reconfigure them.... Well, don't. First of all, I wasn't able to receive the configuration parameters from the mobile operator (SMS 'ja' to 1300), so I had to reconfigure them manually. Their website has a step-by-step manual on configuring the E61i, but this didn't help either. MMS functionality remained absent, and none of the applications was able to connect to the Internet by itself. I had to initiate the connection manually before browsing the web. E-mail was even worse. Every time I had 'Packet Authentication' errors. So after a day I decided to restore the Access Points from my backup, and guess what... Everything worked again. And now for the thing that have changed (at least the ones that I've noticed);

• the e-mail application seems more stable
• camera and video are still crappy (the time between the snapshot sound and the actual capture is still multiple seconds)
• Idle connections are terminated. This is a bad thing (for me at least), because I had my UMTS connection open all the time, and this way I received mail throughout the day. Now I have to connect each time I want to check my e-mail.

I haven't tried VoIP yet, but will try to do so soon (that's what happens when you don't pay for your own bills :-) ) Conclusion is that the phone didn't get better. There are some improvements, and there are some new annoyances. But my e-mail is stable at this moment.

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Awesome Screensaver

I listened to the latest 'This Week in Tech' podcast today. They mentioned a screensaver called FlickrFan. This screensaver can connect to flickr account and images to use in the screensaver. But it also downloads current Associated Press images in high quality and more. This results in awesome pictures from around the world covering the news in HIGH-RES. B.t.w. it's much more than just a screensaver, but I liked the screensaver-part best.

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TrueCrypt Cross-Platform??

Since I have an iMac with OSX 10.5 (Leopard), I use TimeMachine for my backups. This works great actually. But I also need an off-site backup of some sort. Just in case the house burns down or that some f*cker decides to steal my hardware. So I bought an external Freecom 160GB USB2 drive (USB powered) for my off-site backups. I encrypted the entire harddisk with TrueCrypt 5.0 on my iMac, and copied the data I needed to preserve. After that I wanted to access the data from my work laptop (Windows XP SP2 with TrueCrypt v5.0)..... This didn't work. TrueCrypt didn't recognize the password, or the encrypted disk (AES / SHA-256 full disk encryption). I tried to access the data on my Mac and everything worked, so there's no data corruption of some sort. Eventually, I recreated the encrypted drive on my Windows XP laptop (lost the backup in the process). This time the disk would mount, and could also be read/mounted by my Mac. So, I guess that TrueCrypt is Cross-platform, but with the current version (v5.0a) you need to make sure to create the volume on Windows if you also want to mount it on OSX. I reported this through their bug-reporting tool to the developers. No idea if there are similar problems with Linux. UPDATE: Pretty soon they released v5.0a, and today v5.1 was released. So development goes on :-)

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