iPhone not booting up anymore – Dock connector may be broken

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iPhone Dock Connector closeupIf you end up in a situation where your iPhone just won’t boot up anymore (not even showing the empty battery icon nor the Apple logo) – or it is simply not recognized in iTunes anymore – it might be, that some of the pins in the Dock connector are be broken. At least that was what happened to me.

Fortunately you can get a replacement of the exact same iPhone model at your local Apple Store for some bucks (which are a lot below the price you would have to pay for a completely new iPhone model).

Thanks to my friends @dikk and @appleadvisor for their kind support!

iCloud: how to sync Contacts and Calendars to Android OS

Android iCloud Sync LogoDon’t worry, I didn’t move away from Apple devices ;) But due to my current job, I got an Android OS based mobile phone. And of course I wanted to be able to access my perfectly organized contact cards there – and for free, not with some kind of costly synch tool.

Turned out to be not so easy – something I generally think about Android so far, but that is another story and shall be told another time – but I got it working anyway in the end. Credits and thanks goes to Jeremy and his blog post “Sync iCloud Contacts/Calendar with Android“.

Here’s what you need to to, in order to sync iCloud Contacts and Calendars to Android OS:

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OS X: how-to fix unrecognized User Password

OS X Lion LogoOS 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.

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Microsoft Word: Mail Merge into single documents

Microsoft Office Word LogoRecently I had to create a lot of Microsoft Office Word documents based on the same template, so I decided to use Mail Merge. Unfortunately when you generate a document from a defined Mail Merge template in Word, you end up having all the pages inside one huge document. But I wanted to have each form in a seperate word document.

To achieve this non-standard behavior, I wrote a little helper: execute the following VBA Macro on your Office Word Mail Merge template to have Word generate & save every record into a single file.

Attention
There is one thing to do manually, because I couldn’t solve it programmatically: you have to manually set the “Mail Merge Output” setting to “Current Record”! (default is “All”)
Office Word Mail Merge VBA manual output setting

Here’s the VBA code for the Macro:
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OS X: Remove delay of the Dock

OS X Leopard Terminal Icon

Mit folgendem Befehl im Terminal.app lässt sich die kurze Verzögerung entfernen, bevor das ausgeblendete Dock angezeigt wird (sofern man es natürlich standardmässig ausgeblendet hat):

defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock

Vor allem in den Fullscreen Apps in OS X Lion erscheint danach das Dock auch umgehend… ich persönlich hatte da schon Probleme, dass es wilde Mausgesten benötigte, bis es endlich eingeblendet wurde.

Verhalten rückgängig machen über den Terminal Befehl:

defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay && killall Dock

Quelle: macworld.com

OS X: USB Mouse not responding

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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.”

OS X: How-to remove unknown Login Items

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.

OSX Unknown Login Item

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 :)