Blog of Hamlesh

Right, so theres a problem that seems to be all over the internet, and on lots of mac user forums, even the Apple site has an article on it.  If you’ve found this, you know the problem, but heres a recap;

1. Photo Booth wont start the camera/iSight automatically, and doesn’t seem to respond.
2. iChat and other programs that use the camera work fine.
3. You’ve tried the CMD-OPT-P-R restart “thing” to clear your SMC.

Nothing seems to work right?

Well, one of my clients had the same problem today, and thanks to the genius way  mac apps are distributed (ie: in one .app file), my solution was to simply grab Photo Booth from my macbook, and copy it onto his.  Fixed the problem, see, simple is better

Now, where can you get a working copy of Photo Booth from without trawling the web, or looking for torrents, or reinstalling, or rolling back, well here of course

Download Photo Booth - compressed directly from my macbook which is running OS X 10.5.5.

If this fixes your problem, can you do me a small favor?  Post a comment, and/or follow me on twitter

PS: Before anyone chirps up about copyright issues, having Apple hardware entitles you to use mac os, and as such, allows you to use Photo Booth, so I don’t see any issue in making the .app file available if it helps other users out there, with what seems to be a common problem that no one has fixed.

Apple’s time machine is a brilliant app. The only downside is that you can’t (apparently) backup to a network share… thats what I thought, now I’ve found a way.

This worked for me, but ITS NOT A DOCUMENTED WAY (ie: use at your own risk).

1. Mount the network share (I have a share at work on Windows, and at home on Linux - both work).

2. Open iterm and run the following (all on one line!);

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Start time machine preferences, click “Change Disk” and you should see your network share, set as a target as you normally would.

I found that sometimes time machine can “forget” the share, then wont let you backup to it, to get around this reset the parameter using the following (all on one line!);

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 0

Follow step 2 again, and all should work - I guess this is the slightly buggy side of things, and why its an unsupported method. Hopefully an update will address this soon, as its really handy if you already have a NAS/storage and don’t want to spend cash on a Time Capsule.

Enjoy