Today I setup a shared Fax modem on our OSX Server. Attached a USB modem and it recognized it just fine. Sending faxes was working great, but I couldn’t get it to receive. No matter what I tried, it just wouldn’t recognize that the phone line was ringing. According to Google a few other people had the same problem, but there were no solutions. So I dug around and found the problem. My modem was showing up as /dev/tty.usbmodem246802461. However, OSX expects it to be at /dev/tty.usbmodem. I couldn’t find anywhere to configure it. I tried creating a symlink to it, but that didn’t work. So what I ended up doing was modifying /usr/bin/fax and changing lines 37-38 from:

DEV=cu.usbmodem
DEVANSWER=tty.usbmodem

To:

DEV=cu.usbmodem246802461
DEVANSWER=tty.usbmodem246802461

Then killed the efax process and now it works. WTF Apple?

Ever since I got this MacBookPro (15” Rev A. 7200 RPM HD) I had noticed the harddrive makes a “clunk” sound. Not really a click, it almost sounds like a marble dropping on a table. Coincidentally, some things like youtube videos would periodically freeze for no reason. I had tried all kinds of things over the years and nothing helped. People in forums have talked about it, some said it’s normal, some said your drive is about to die. Well I just found hdapm!

I used that to set the APM (power management) to max performance and all my problems have gone away. Some tasks even seem a little faster, but it could be my imagination. Apparently, the OSX power management “better performance” doesn’t really set true max performance on some hard drives. What was happening is the read head was periodically trying to park even when disk access was happening. So it was parking and then unparking right away. It does that to try and save power. Well my laptop is almost always plugged in, so I don’t really need that.

Here is a recording of me saying “This is a test. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3”.

Why the hell does my voice sound like this when I record something using flash on my MacBook Pro? I think it has something to do with the Universal Flash plugin?

I’m trying to learn flash and flash communication server and I’m having the same problem. Yet it works fine on my mac mini. Driving me crazy until I remembered odeo was doing a flash based recorder too. Sure enough, happens here too.

powered by ODEO

Update: I figured out the problem. Run /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup and change the Audio Input format on the Internal microphone to 44100.0 Hz. It was at 96000.0 Hz. I’m not sure if it was like that by default or got changed somehow.

Right. And Pigs to ‘Fly’ Out of My Arse.

Dvorak, stay away from the brown acid, man.

This is so preposturous, is it even worth debating? One thing you have to admit, Dvorak is great at getting attention. This article he wrote is going to be huge and everyone will be talking about it for some time, I’m sure.