No sound on AppleTV with Airplay

Occasionally I have problems with playing videos or listening to internet music when I airplay from my macbook to the AppleTV. But if I listen to music through iTunes it will play fine through the TV. One way I've been able to get it working again is to run this command from the terminal (then entering password):

sudo killall coreaudiod

A reboot also sorts the problem out too when all else fails - but that's not very elegant, is it?

Geek stuff: How to backup iPhone to external hard drive via iTunes on MacBook

I've been having problems with backing up my iPhone (and iPad) via iTunes on my MacBook Air because I don't have enough space on my hard drive. So I thought, "hey, why don't I do the iPhone backup to my giant external hard drive instead?". To achieve this I had to create a symbolic link (or symlink). This is a special type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution. A symbolic link contains a text string that is automatically interpreted and followed by the operating system as a path to another file or directory. This other file or directory is called the "target". The symbolic link is a second file that exists independently of its target. BTW, I got all that info and description about symbolic links from wikipedia, so if you want to know more then click here.

Step 1

Firstly you need to create your destination folder on your external hard drive. I just set up a folder structure: MobileSync/Backup

Step 2

Remove the existing backup folder (I am assuming you've got necessary copy of your iPhone backups stored elsewhere). You can’t create a symlink file if another file in that directory has the same name.

The existing backup folder is located at: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

From the Mac OS X Finder, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the “Go To” window, type the following directory in:
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/

I'm switching to the terminal at this point and deleting using the command line:
sudo rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/

You will be prompted for your password.

Step 3

Now we'll create the symbolic link and set the target location. My external hard drive is called ExternalHDD. You will need to replace that with the name of your drive.

ln -s /Volumes/ExternalHDD/MobileSync/Backup/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup

After the symlink is in place, any browser (or other application) that tries to write to ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ will actually save the file to the linked location on the hard drive.

Did you find this information useful? I'd love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment if this post was helpful to you.

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How to update your photostream on all your Apple devices

Geek stuff: Photostream auto updating on all devices

If you have multiple devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook etc) one cool feature is that all photos you've taken on any device can automatically show in your photostream when you are connected to wifi. So why then was I occasionally having problems with my photostream not updating on one device or another?

If your household just uses a single Apple ID for all devices then once the innitual setup has been achieved for Home Sharing then everything should be well. But if your household is like mine then you've probably got several Apple accounts; a main account for all Apps Store goodies, individual accounts for each persons group of devices (I don't want to get Jef's stuff syncing to my devices or vice versa!)

Since I'm continuously switching between the "shared" home account and my personal account sometimes my device saves the last Apple ID I used. When I was having problems with my photostream not updating on my iPad (but my photos were already in iPhoto on my MacBook and in my photostream on my iPhone) the solution was this (from my iPhone or iPad):

Settings -> Music -> Home Sharing

The Apple ID saved there was our home account, not my personal account. I changed that to my personal Apple ID and presto, the photos were available in photostream.

Did you find this information useful? I'd love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment if this post was helpful to you.

Geek Stuff: Mac OS X - how to do a print screen

How to Print Screen to the Clipboard on a Mac

This is the typical Print Screen feature in the Windows world. If you want to do the equivalent of Print Screen to the clipboard so that you can paste it into another app, these are the commands to use:

Command+Control+Shift+3: take a screenshot of the entire screen (or all screens if using multiple monitors), and saves it to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere
Command+Control+Shift+4, then select (highlight) an area: takes a screenshot of selection and saves it to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere

If you don't have your sound on mute then you will hear the sound (similar to a shutter click) telling you the image was captured.