To cut the geek-speak, this simply means that you hard disk may have certain files that may have “bad sectors”, or are corrupted in other words.

Fortunately, this is a common enough problem in our technically advanced world of external storage. I recommend solving this on Windows (I use both XP and OSX Leopard at the time of this writing).

Step 1: CHKDSK

Use what Windows offers you by default. The chkdsk command. Just open an MS-DOS command prompt window and go to the drive you wish to check (I’m hoping you already know your way around a command prompt; if you don’t please consider Step 2 below). With the command prompt showing the drive letter of the disk you wish to check, enter this command:

e:> chkdsk /R

Here, “e:” is my drive to be checked. The “/R” attribute asks the chkdsk command to “recover” whatever bad sectors it finds during its scan. In most cases, and if you’re lucky, this ought to do it.

Step 2: CDCheck (Free)

Only if the problem you were facing still remains after you have run the chkdsk command, should you consider doing this. This is a freeware program that makes it super-easy to check/recover your disk. It can be any disk–your current hard disk, a CD or a DVD, or even an external hard disk. The interface is pretty simple as you can see in the screenshots here.

Step 3: SpinRite (US$ 90)

If all else has failed, just save yourself some heartburn and go straight to SpinRite. This is hands-down the best software for this purpose, as anyone in a dire need of data recovery will confirm. I would trust any piece of software from GRC. Only catch: it’s not free, but when you use it you know why it’s worth every last cent. It gives you a simple option to save an ISO file, which you can then easily burn on to a CD using any CD writer tool (including Windows’ own right-click). Then reboot your machine so it starts from the CD. SpinRite will automatically report and recover whatever is recoverable.

Next Steps

Basically, a CRC error is the beginning of the end. If this is on an external hard disk, I highly recommend that you consider backing up the data immediately.

Here is how I did.

1. First, close Safari. This is VERY important, as it does not work otherwise.
2. Start Terminal. (Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal, or type Terminal in Spotlight).
3. Under Terminal type “sudo -s” without the quotation marks to log in as root.
4. Then enter:

   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

5. Go to the blue (or gray) apple at the top left of the screen, then select Force Quit. From the menu of items, click on “Saft” and click on the Force Quit button.
6. Then, in the same Force Quit window, click on “Finder” and click the “Relaunch” button.
7. In the Finder window, on the top right bar (the Filter spotlight bar), type “saft” without the quotes. Delete with delight any file called Saft. Note: This may reveal a few other files that may contain the word “Saft” such as threads.py in my case (a Python file). Naturally, you want to NOT delete these. Just get rid of the Saft files.
8. Empty the trash. If there is a file that won’t delete because it’s in use, then Force Quit “Saft” again as in Step 5 above, and then Empty Trash again.
9. Go back into Terminal, and type “sudo -s” again without quotation marks. Then enter:

    defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

   This will set the Finder back to the way it was before. Then type “exit” and it will exit out of the root.

10. Now navigate to the folder: /Library/InputManagers. Note that this is NOT the “Library” folder in your Users folder. This is the Library folder from the root. Inside InputManagers is the “saft” folder — get rid of it.
11. Empty Trash (again). If it says Saft is in use, reboot the machine and empty it then. Or if you use some excellent utility like MainMenu you can “Force Empty Trash”.

Go back to your happy, problem free Mac! 

1. MainMenu. Free. Superlative. Creates a neat little menu item on the top bar. Better than most other tools I have tried for this purpose, especially in its clean interface. Sometimes, if you have the pleasure of experiencing a situation when the Trash won’t clean because OSX says that the “Application is still in use” but you’re sure you quit it and it’s not live anyway, MainMenu’s “Force Empty Trash” is a fabulous tool to have at your fingertips.
   
2. Little Snitch: Tells you everytime some program on your machine wants to “call home” and connect to some server. Great flexibility in allowing the program to connect to a server, a port, or in general. Allow (or Deny) it to connect only once, or until the application quits, or Forever.
   
3. RCDefaultApp: Just as it is on any OS from Windows to Ubuntu, it often happens that you would like to associate certain file types with certain applications. On Mac OSX, we do have the same right-click contextual menu as Windows that allows “Open with [Application]” and “Make this the default application”, but for some reason this doesn’t always work, and occasionally doesn’t even show up as an option. No matter. RCDefaultApp is the application that allows you to do that superbly, and then some.
   
4. Butler: Another small utility with a negligible footprint that allows for some nifty shortcuts to stuff already on your machine.
   
5. Perian: No Mac should be without this. This pretty much explains itself. There’s a nice video tutorial here that shows how easy it is to install and then forget it. Suddenly your Quicktime (and iTunes) will be able to play a whole raft of video formats. If you want to be really equipped, get the Divx codec, the 3ivx, and Flip4Mac which plays wmv (Windows Media Player) files on your Mac. Of course if you get really frustrated there’s always the tried and tested VLC Player.
6. CleanApp: The best application uninstaller out there, hands down. Don’t believe for a minute when the OSX manuals tell you that on a Mac all you need to do is drag the application into the Trash and you’re done. BS. Many applications (think Adobe) install several things in several locations. CleanApp 3 tells you all the associated trappings of these applications and allows you to uninstall them all together.CleanApp is not free, alas (there is always a poor man’s AppCleaner, which does some basic stuff) but it allows for much more granular control. The best part: CleanApp has a “Logging” service that keeps track of whatever you install, and then knows in granular detail everything that you need to uninstall later; you can enable and disable this logging service at will, so it is useful to keep it generally off and only switch it on before you are undertaking a serious install of software, such as Final Cut Pro from Apple for example.
7. TinkerTools: To modify the many system preferences in your OSX that should have been made tinker-able but are not. Us Windows switchers are used to modding everything, so this is a fabulous tool.
8. Transmission: The best torrent client for OSX. Very simple, no-nonsense, and yet pretty interface. BitRocket is all google-juiced as it has been around longer, but it went down more often than Paris Hilton’s pants.  Limewire now has an OSX version too, but I am done with crashing and slow download speeds unless you cough up a few dollars.
   
9. Candy Bar: If you really, really want to modify your icons. Panic is one of the better software developers for the OSX platform. Their Unison tool, a native OSX Usenet client is pure code poetry. There’s a lot of iconography available at their partner website IconFactory. CandyBar is not free though. If you are short on cash, you can always try the somewhat barebones LiteIcon.
10. Vienna: The best and most elegant RSS reader client for OSX at the moment. Now if only they could sync it with Google Reader, Bob might be my uncle. How long has the Google API been out now!?
11. Chicken of the VNC: The best VNC client out there, connects without problems to Windows VNC servers too.
    

    

12. OmniDiskSweeper: As you start using your OSX, and installing applications and such, your hard disk usage keeps mounting (no pun intended). The fast, small footprint OmniDiskSweeper does this job faster than anything else on the market, including the somewhat visually prettier WhatSize.
    
13. Monolingual: Like Windows, OSX also comes with about a gazillion languages preinstalled, which take several gigabytes on your hard disk. Likewise, OSX the operating system also comes with a number of architectures such as PowerPC even if you have an Intel system, because the same OS needs to support older Apple hardware. Anyone who has bought a new system with Intel’s architectures (the latest Macbooks or iMacs) can safely get rid of the other architectures. Monolingual is a simple, free utility that does exactly that.
    
14. Tech Tools Pro: Explanation coming soon.

On Windows, there is the fantastic SSH2 tool SecureCRT. Or if you’re cash crunched, a combination of Putty and Putty Connection Manager works for many.

On Mac OSX and Unix/Linux systems, one doesn’t truly need an SSH client at all, because the “Terminal” application is inbuilt. People talk of iTerm and such, but I have still to see a value add for such tools.

But one does miss the convenience of SecureCRT on OSX, because I have still to find a true SecureCRT alternative for the Mac platform. Something that allows me to make pre-determined connections so I can just click on them to connect (which tools like JellyfiSSH do) and then logs me in directly without prompting for a password (which JellyfiSHH does not do).

So I have simply made aliases in my [code].profile[/code] file, which gets executed everytime you start your Terminal window (so it’s a good place to put your shortcuts and any code you wish to execute when the terminal starts, such as paths).

1. Start the Terminal.
2. Open the profile file for the current user (you).

pico .profile

3. Enter a new line for our shortcut.

alias s='ssh -2 -p 22 user@host.com'

Quick explanation for that command in step 3. The letter “s” is the shortcut I make for connecting to the sniptools.com server. Change it to what you wish. This will mean that when I start Terminal, all I need to do is type “s” and it connects me via SSH to the sniptools.com server. The “-p” switch is an important one because some of us with paranoid security settings might have a different port number than the default port 22 for secure SSH. The rest user/host stuff is self-explanatory. The “-2″ is to force SSH2 connections instead of older vanilla SSH.

Now. Save the profile file and source it to try it out:

source .profile

Sourcing is only for this one time, for your current Terminal window, which had already executed the profile file *before* we added this alias. When you start a new Terminal session, these aliases et al will be automatically set for you.

Done. Now your profile has the alias for “s”. From now when you type “s” in your Terminal, it will connect, but it will ask you for a password. To get rid of the nagging password, we need to create public authentication key for the domain. This, in fact is what SecureCRT does behind the scenes on Windows too.

Here are the steps to accomplish this. Run these one-time commands in order from the Terminal window.

# generate pub and priv keys, leave the passphrase empty
# (simply press ENTER when asked for it)
ssh-keygen

#copy the pub key to the remote computer
#(change port number if different from the usual 22)
#change "user" to your user name
#change "host" to your domain name
scp -P 22 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@host:~/

#log on to the remote computer
ssh -p 22 user@host

#create the .ssh directory in the root login directory, if it doesn't already exist
mkdir .ssh

#append key to file
cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

#delete the public key file, no longer needed
rm -f id_rsa.pub

#log off the remote server
exit

#logon to the remote server, without password prompt
ssh -2 -p 22 user@host

That’s it. This is a huge timesaver. Now all I need to do to login to the sniptools.com server is type one letter, “s” in the Terminal, and I’m on! Follow these instructions for each host you connect to on a regular basis and you’ll love the convenience henceforth.

It’s called Audion: get it here.

It’s now a FREE software. Just use the free serial provided:

RNL07P0-030HWMV-4MAGDS3-4U17REX

Works perfectly.

To reinstall it, I visited the usual forums and searched Google. No solution. No downloadable file.

Well, the solution is simple.

1. Insert DVD 1 of your original Mac OSX software.
2. Click into the folder “Optional Install”.
3. Click on “OptionalInstalls.mpkg“.
4. Expand the menu item “Language Translations”.
5. Choose “Japanese”.

That’s it. It should install the input menu in about 2 minutes. When you’re done, eject the DVD and click on the “International” option in your System Preferences.

If the option does not show as English (romaji) “Kotoeri”, it should show up as original Japanese as in the screenshot below:

Apple is on to some exciting things. After the iPhone and the new eagerly awaited of the Max OSX, it even announced Safari 3 Beta for Windows!

The install was painless. Especially if you choose the no-Quicktime option (which Apple has no qualms about plugging shamelessly with almost every download it offers). I was also asked during the installation for ‘Bonjour‘ — a tool that supposedly allows better sharing of things such as printers.

The immediate uninstall

When I started the browser, it came up in some weird language. Greek, or Russian, or a specific kind of Celt. Who knows. I tried to reinstall, and it insisted on removing Safari first, which is ok, but it also required me to close Firefox, SecureCRT (for SSH) and WinSCP (for SFTP). I like my browsers to be independent of each other thank you. Opera never bothers with what else I am using.

The second and final uninstall

After the re-install, it showed up yet again in the strange language. Nowhere on my system is this language set up. All my browsers are set up to show only English, but support Japanese and Chinese. I guess it’s “beta” for a reason. It surely has a long way to go if it wants to be anywhere near decent contention to FF and Opera. Below’s a snapshot of what this gunk looks like on my machine:

Turns out these junk characters are not really a language at all. When I try to type something in the location bar, it comes up in this junk lingo. I try and rummage through these nonsensical options to see if one of the menus or submenus may have “English” as an option, but no luck.

Conclusion

This mutt is off my PC before it could even bark. So long, Safari, and thanks for all the fish.

Google is full of tools and utilities that allow MKV to AVI conversion. Many of them are shareware. You download them free but then you have to cough up $29.99.

I have found the FREE tool, All2AVI ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/alltoavi/ ) does the job and does it superbly. It’s fast, free, and the conversion from MKV and other formats to AVI happens pretty efficiently and reliably.

If you’re on OSX, you can use VisualHub or Submerge, but both of them are a bit unreliable. VisualHub in particular is a fantastic way to do any conversion on Mac OSX, but if it collapses with a cryptic “Sorry, could not convert for some reason”, then you may wish to use AlltoAVI inside an XP virtual machine.

Want a Mac look on your Windows machine? Skins and themes would be nice, but there’s more to that when you want to REALLY emulate a Mac OSX interface entirely. There are plenty of programs available to emulate specific features of OSX, e.g. Finder, icons, etc [example].

But Flyakite OSX is a project that’s looking mature, and it comes with a very complete theme, including sounds and mouse cursors and Explorer customization, things you don’t typically expect from a simple ‘theme’.

The website goes for a Mac look itself, which is a bit painful, but it’s worth the download.

Before you go for it, some caveats

1. The performance of your machine in general may be affected, of course. Not too much though.
2. The theme does fundamentally change some core files like Explorer.exe but (a) it makes a backup so you can go back with a simple uninstall, and (b) it doesn’t screw up any additional functionality like my Groove button on my Explorer bar.
3. I don’t like shadows under my windows, but that seems to built-in in the skin.
4. Some things like Windows Media Player will not change. WMP has its own skin, which remains untouched.