You're browsing the “Tech Support Tips” category.

I don’t remember noticing this issue in the first several months of owning an iPhone, but lately it seems that the volume is way too low. Even when I max the volume many songs and podcasts are difficult to hear well. I suspected the ear buds were at fault, but lately I’ve been thinking that it might be software. I played around a bit and found that going into Settings > iPod on the iPhone and setting Sound Check to Off (and disabling Volume Limit for good measure) makes things louder.

I’m still not thrilled with the ear buds, and am shopping for new ones, but the software fix was a big help.

I updated my Mac to Leopard a few weeks ago. All good.

Yesterday I ran the update to 10.5.1. Not so good: It knocked out my Cisco VPN client. Permanently. Rebooting did not help. Reinstalling did not help. (I rely on VPN non-stop, even to retrieve my office email.)

So today I poked around for a while and after some deep searching found the fix. It’s easy, and worked for me on the first try. The solution was on Anders Brownworth’s site (thanks Anders!), and I’m reprinting an excerpt here in the hopes that it will make it easier to find for somebody else.

If you are running Cisco’s VPNClient on Mac OSX, you might be familiar with (or tormented by) “Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem”. The simple fix is to quit VPNClient, open a Terminal window, (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and type the following: sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart and give your password when it asks. This will stop and start the “VPN Subsystem”, or in other words restart the CiscoVPN.kext extension.

In Alex Russell’s latest blog post, When Utility Isn’t Enough, he writes that he’s “starting to focus more and more on the ’sharp edges’ of the web development experience.” I think he’s suggesting that we — tool developers and envelope pushers — might best spend our time reducing the pain points instead of always chasing the latest advancement. I agree. He continues that:

“rounding off the sharp edges is an exercise in usability: things are only useable (sic) when they do what you expect them to. A system that hurts you more than you expect isn’t useable.

I share his conclusion that “sacred cows and continually sunk costs” can’t continue forever.

Come to think of it, this is probably one of the chief issues of the past year, and forward too. A common manifestation of this syndrome is the ongoing struggle between “because it’s the standard” and “because it works.”

Heather Champ announced yesterday on the Flickr Blog good news for Flickr users Past, Present, and Future. If you’re an existing regular user, your upload quote rose from 20mb to 100mb. If you’re an existing Pro user, your upload quote rose from 2GB to Infinity. If you’re not a current Flickr user, it just got easier for people to gift accounts to you - and no longer just upgrades to pro.

Thank you Flickr!

Erik Bruchez on the XForms Everywhere blog walks through the steps necessary to make pdf files open in your dedicated pdf viewer instead of in Firefox. He also does a nice job summarizing why you’d want to do this:

• The Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin, like any Adobe application, takes ages to start. While it is starting, your browser is frozen and you can’t do anything else.

• When it doesn’t work, it crashes your entire browser, or just freezes it (the case with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 and Firefox).

• When it works, usual browser shortcuts don’t work, including those to close your window or tab, navigate between tabs, go back and forward, etc.

• To make things worse, there is really no reliable warning when you follow a hyperlink that you are going to open a PDF file. So you hang, crash or freeze without any courtesy notice.

There are two tweaks I made to my Mozilla Thunderbird client in the last two days.

By default, Thunderbird places “Joe Smith wrote:” at the top of your message when you reply. I’d prefer to have a date stamp there toom like “on 5/12/2006 10:03 AM Joe Smith said the following:”. Firefox is a great browser and Thunderbird is a great email client for more reasons than extensibility, but extensibility sure is nice. The change is nearly-trivial in Thunderbird by modifing the User.js file in your Thunderbird profiles folder, and restarting Thunderbird (not your computer). How? Change Your Thunderbird Response Header

Another nice extensibility feature is Mozilla’s Extensions system which Thunderbird also shares wth Firefox. Returning from another time zone the other day, my POP server got confused and sent me all my recent messages again. Which stinks, because I ended up with about 1800 duplicate messages filtered and spread throughout my inbox folder structure. In the past I’ve just accepted that fate, but this time I looked for an extension.

Sure enough, the perfect tool for removing duplicate messages exists. One tip: switch which message (older or newer) is discarded, lest you delete your metadata (read, flagged) along with the older message. By default it seems to keep newer, but I’d recommend switching that. Aside from that, it’s a blazing fast tool that without fuss does exactly what it advertises.

Thanks, Nate