Posts tagged ‘Apple Software’

I use MAMP daily. I love MAMP. I recently discovered how truly awesome MAMP Pro is too. But that’s a story for another time. I recently upgraded from MAMP 1.8.4 to 1.9. When I got MAMP 1.9 installed I started the servers. Apache came up but MySQL didn’t want to. I tried shutting down both servers and starting it back up again, which didn’t work.

Thankfully, there is a pretty simple fix. To begin with, make sure MAMP is shut down. Next, open Terminal. To open Terminal either open Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type “terminal” or you can find Terminal in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder.

Once you get Terminal opened, type the following:

ps aux | grep mysql 
lsof -i 
killall -9 mysqld

That’s it. Start up MAMP and MySQL will come back up just like normal. Another option would be to simply change the port number MySQL is using in MAMP. Restarting your computer may work too but I did’t try that.

I guess I never noticed it, but I have a lot of menu icons! In order from left to right is:

Adium
Waveboard
Tweetie
BetterTouchTool
Alfred
Dropbox
Google Notifier – Calendar
Google Notifier – GMail
Caffeine
MobileMe Sync
Time Machine
Bluetooth
Wireless
Audio/Volume
Time
Spotlight

Check out a screenshot of all of them on my desktop:

When I first updated to Snow Leopard I was using a Logitech mouse. But I kept having problems with it. Some of the time it would read my single clicks as double clicks. So if I was selecting a bunch of files to be deleted, it would then open them all up. It became very annoying. So I started using the Mighty Mouse until the Magic Mouse came out. I use the Magic Mouse exclusively now.

I have to say the Magic Mouse is almost the best mouse I have ever had. I say almost because with both the Logitech mouse and Mighty Mouse, I had a way to do application Exposé without touching the keyboard. For most people, this isn’t a big deal. But I spend a lot of time on the computer. Shortcuts like that really help.

I’m pretty sure Apple is working on updating the Magic Muse driver to do it now, but in the mean time, you can use BetterTouchTool. I have it set right now to three finger click opens up Exposé. I can easily change it to a two, three, four, or five finger click, or tap, or swipe. It’s a pretty nice little program. If you gave a Magic Mouse, I recommend you try it out.

Even if you don’t have a Magic Mouse, you can still use it on multitouch touchpads on the Macbook and Macbook Pro.

[Update Jan. 11th, 2009] There is also MagicPrefs which looks like it does the same thing. I haven’t tried it because BTT is working great for me.

Soundstream is a free screensaver for Mac OS X that responds to sound input. When the screensaver is on, it listens for sounds around the computer using the microphone. The louder the sound the more spectacular the visualization. So if you have music playing, the screensaver will pulse to music. You can get the latest version from MacUpdate.