Duplicate Database Structure in Bento 4

Bento 4 comes with a nice set of templates. It is also easy to customize these templates; however, once customized, there is no straightforward way to duplicate a database. For instance in my case I customized the “Vehicle Maintenance” Template by replacing the ‘Location’ field with a drop down menu populated by various places I go for my car service. I did not want to set this up from scratch for another vehicle. Continue reading

Finally a Store that knows its Grammar

How many times have I wondered if there are any stores that don’t say “xx items or less”

20110703-095415.jpg

Up-Button in Windows 7 Explorer

Having been recently converted to Windows 7 one of the first thing I noticed is the lack of the “up” button in explorer. Since I have many shortcuts to frequently used directories, the “back” does not do the same thing in most cases. Fortunately, there is an easy shortcut key as I found out here:

Use ALT-(up arrow)

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/up-keyboard-shortcut-for-windows-vista-explorer/

Unfortunately, ALT-(down arrow) does not bring you back again.

Maxima, Octave, and Gnuplot in OS X Snow Leopard

A nice collection of free math software for the Mac, covering both symbolic and numeric math and graphing. When you go to the main project pages from Maxima, Gnuplot, and Octave, it seems that no well supported Mac versions are available, at least not without compiling it yourself. Fortunately, this is not quite accurate. Read more to see how. Continue reading

Repair “All Contacts” Bug after iOS 4.2 Upgrade

After upgrading to iOS 4.2 on my iPhone 4 I noticed a strange behavior. When going to your Contacts App and selecting the “All Contacts” group, only 26 contacts show up, one each under one heading of the alphabet, i.e., one for ‘A’, one for ‘B’ and so forth. The names that showed up were not even the correct ones for those letters.

The weird thing is that all contacts were there. Searching for them revealed them without a problem. Continue reading

Backup and Transfer ScanSnap Profile Settings

You want to move your detailed ScanSnap profile settings from one Mac to another one (or back them up), yet, the ScanSnap Manager has no built-in functionality to do so.

Not too surprisingly, profile information is stored in a preference file, but the trick is to know which one. The answer can be found here:

http://www.documentsnap.com/how-to-backup-your-scansnap-profile-settings-on-the-mac/

The file you are looking for is:

jp.co.pfu.ScanSnap.V10L10.plist

Simply copy it to the other Mac and you are all set.

White Apple Bluetooth Keyboard Not Compatible With iPhone 4

The title says it all. Here’s the official statement from Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4112

This is very upsetting.