OS X nearly drove me nuts today, as it suddenly stopped accepting my Username/Password combination for authentication. First this happened when I wanted to relogin from the Screensaver, worked again after a hard-restart to login to the OS, just to come back when working inside OS X and trying to authenticate in order to delete a protected folder.
In case you have a USB mouse connected to your Mac and it’s not responding, check the Console.app in Applications > Utilities for USB related error entries. If you find the following text in the error log, it might simply be a broken/loose cord and doesn’t mean it’s an OS X software issue:
“The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in.
The IOUSBFamily was not able to enumerate a device.”
I noticed recently, that I had a grayed out item named “Unknown” in my login items list in OS X Lion, even indicated with a warning icon next to it. But I couldn’t remove this – obviously missing – item from the list, because the removal icon (-) below the login item list was grayed out/deactivated.
After browsing the web a bit, I surprisingly found a solution to remove such items on Apple’s support website itself: just reboot your Mac into Safe Mode (hold down the Shift key when starting up) – and the broken login item will be gone automatically afterwards! It seems like OS X cleans up such things on a Safe Boot – and I am happy again 
I started using the fantastic app “Wunderlist” for my personal Task Management on the Mac, of course with synchronisation to iPhone and the web.
Before I used to write all my To-dos simply into the Stickies.app – which worked, but was not too flexible. While migrating all pending Tasks from my notes, I realized that I’d love to be able to use the right-click-contextmenu to send the current text selection to Wunderlist. As I have done similiar things already for image manipulations, etc. using an Automator Service, I knew where to start for my new requirement
It’s a common problem between Mac and Windows users, when you create a ZIP archive under Mac OS X, that it will contain a bunch of unwanted files, which you don’t want to have included in the archive. In OS X’s Finder you won’t notice that, because the Finder is hiding them from you. But they will show up on the Windows side after unzipping the archive.
Fortunately there is quite a simple and straight-forward solution for Mac OS X to create so called “Clean Archives”, using a predesigned Automator action.
I already posted a step-by-step guide on how to delete old backups from your Time Machine drive in order to free up space. What I did not mention in that article was how you can delete single files & folders from within backups, if you want to have even more free space available for future backups.
The steps to do so are slightly different – especially the fact that you do not navigate to your backup drive in Finder, but use the Time Machine application instead.
Here are the instructions, if you want to delete specific files & folders from existing Time Machine backups:
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Recently I discovered, that my external hard drive for Time Machine backups is slowly running out of space – only ~20 GB left on a 320GB drive.
Searching through the web I did not find any up-to-date help on how to properly remove old backups in order to have more space available. But when trying the most easy and obvious way, I figured out that’s how Apple intended to do it:
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