Opening a Tab-Delimited "CSV" in Apple iWork Numbers

I like Numbers, from Apple's competent and beautiful iWork suite, but there are still things where it is different from Microsoft Excel, and hence it feels somewhat unfamiliar at times. For example, although Excel has never been good at handling text files saved in UTF-8 format (a big deal for those of us who work in Asia), it does have a nice Wizard for importing CSV or TSV text files.

Some applications export text files with tab-separated values, and put a CSV extension on them. Actually, CSV stands for "Comma Separated Values" where these are really "TSV" or "Tab Separated Values." When you try to import such a CSV file, Numbers will mash all the fields into one cell in the left-most column. That makes sense, because it's looking for commas judging by the CSV extension. Finding none, it just lets the data pile on.

How to Import a Tab-Separated "CSV" in Numbers

If you have a tab-separated CSV, here's how to open it:

1. Save the file somewhere you can find it.
2. Rename the file in Finder, so that it has a .TXT extension.
3. Ctrl-click the file and choose "Open With" and "Numbers".

Now the data will open correctly, with each field getting its due, and you'll get the added benefit of Numbers not munging any Japanese or Chinese characters.

Hope this tip helps someone. Enjoy!

Fixing an Unexpected Prompt Hostname in OS X

In Mac OS X, you may have noticed if you use the Terminal that OS X automatically picks up what it thinks your hostname should be and sets it. This is nice, but the problem with it is if any utility uses your hostname to set config files, you'll have a different config file every time.

How to fix a "Strange Hostname" in an OS X Prompt

If you are getting varied prompts that look like this...:

rcogley@em60-123-194-6 ~>

...where what you're expecting is something like this:

rcogley@rickmac ~>

To fix this, you can use scutil. Here's how I did it:

scutil --set HostName "rickmac.esolia.net"

Substitute the rickmac bit with your own hostname and domain and you'll be good to go with a static prompt. Try these also:

scutil --get HostName

scutil --get LocalHostName

scutil --get ComputerName

man scutil

I hope this helps someone. Enjoy!

Aperture 3 Upgrade Observations

My upgrade to Apple's Aperture 3 came over the weekend so I upgraded and started letting it analyze faces using the iPhoto-inspired "Faces and Places" feature.

Here's a few observations from the upgrade process and just a little use of the Faces feature.

• Aperture 3's icons are colorful, compared to its predecessor. I think they still look professional, but they are a little "friendlier" and more iPhoto-like.
• Aperture 3 itself is just under 1GB in size but the sample library is about 7GB.
• To use the new features of Aperture 3, you must upgrade your Aperture 2 library. This can take several hours and did for me on a 50GB library.
• Backup "Vaults" seem to also require a full refresh, probably due to the library upgrade. Vault backups still run in that irritating modal dialog box that pops up and interrupts. Best to freshen Vaults when you don't have to work on anything else, but I still love the ability to have multiple Vaults. Note, Vaults are freshened in serial - it seems to do one, then do the next.
• Both TimeMachine and Spotlight indexing get kicked into overdrive because they detect upgraded files from the Aperture 3 upgrade activities.
• With the new Faces feature, you have to train Aperture 3 to use it. If you pick a folder of photos in your library with people you commonly photograph, and spend the time to tell Aperture who is who, you can then use the "Confirm Faces" feature to drag-select vast swaths of matching faces, or, to toggle a face to be "not Jim" or "not Jane". It works better the more you train it, and it's fun to see who it "thinks" you are. Family resemblances can be telling :-). Faces also links to Address Book entries.
• Aperture 3 is most definitely snappier compared to its previous version, and registers in Activity Monitor as Intel 64-bit. My library uses about 250MB of memory.

I think it's a worthwhile upgrade just for the speed increase.

Set MBR Correctly to Backup Successfully with OS X Time Machine

If you use Time Machine on OS X, you need to ensure your target drive is formatted with the correct Master Boot Record type. Time Machine requires either "Apple Partition Map" (works with PowerPC or Intel but is best for PowerPC) or "GUID Partition Table" (works with Intel).

There are a couple of problems which lead to this requirement biting people on the you-know-where.

• Pre-formatted drives that will work with a Mac are not often formatted with "Apple Partition Map", but will be recognized by your Mac, lulling you into a false sense of success and security.
• Time Machine rudely does not warn you that your drive has a problem. It will happily back up for a while, then fail with some not-so-useful error.
• Re-formatting a drive in the normal way using "Erase" in Disk Utility will just erase the content and not re-do the partition map.

So, when prepping a drive for Time Machine use, you need to use the "Options" button to set the Partition Map.

Formatting a Drive for Time Machine Use

Here's how to set it up.

1. In Disk Utility, select your new hard drive (the drive, not the partitions below it in the selection tree).
2. Select the Parition tab, which you can see in the accompanying graphic, and choose the number of volumes from the "Volume Scheme" pop-up menu.
3. Click "Options", then choose "GUID Partition Table" for an Intel-based Mac or "Apple Partition Map" for PowerPC- or Intel-based Macs. Then click "OK" and "Apply".

I hope this helps someone avoid the trouble I had getting Time Machine working smoothly. Enjoy!

Fixing Slow Snow Leopard Mail

Many upgrading Mac users have reported that Mail is "slow" in Snow Leopard 10.6. There are several things you can do to remedy the situation. Here's what you can try, but please make sure you have Time Machine backing up your system, or are running an alternative like SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner.

Reset SMTP Mail

One thing that sharp users observed on Apple's forums was that newly-created Mail accounts were not experiencing the slowness to send, that upgraders were commonly experiencing. You can export your mail, recreate your accounts and re-import everything, but another way to mimic creating a new account is to re-set SMTP credentials. It's a bit voodoo, but it seems to work.

• In Mail app open Preferences, choose the Account you are having trouble with, and then choose "Edit SMTP Server List" from the "Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)" drop down, in the Account Information panel.
• Select the SMTP server you are using, and re-enter its credentials.
• Click OK to Save.

Do this for all your SMTP servers, and remember you can always use Keychain Access to confirm saved passwords.

Vacuum That Index

Mail keeps an index of your messages in a sqlite database, and you can "vacuum" that index regularly to compact and clean up. This is especially useful if you regularly delete mail, and is well-documented on various Mac-related web sites. Quit mail, then from Terminal, run these commands.

yourhost:~ youruser$ ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index 
yourhost:~ youruser$ /usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;
yourhost:~ youruser$ ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index 

The bookend "ls" commands just show how large your Envelope Index is in megabytes, so you can see the before and after, when running the vacuum command. The middle sqlite3 command vacuums the index. For reference, recently vacuuming my mail envelope index required about 10 minutes, but reduced its size from about 70MB to about 40MB.

Run Cocktail

And finally for general performance, you should regularly run Cocktail. From Maintain's site:

Cocktail is an award winning general purpose utility for Mac OS X. It is a smooth and powerful digital toolset with a variety of practical features that simplifies the use of advanced UNIX functions and helps Mac users around the world to get the most out of their computers. Cocktail is installed at more than 200 000 computers world wide. The largest part being private individuals, but Cocktail can also be found at large international companies (Puma, Sony), educational institutions (Harvard University, University of Texas) or newspapers (The New York Times, Business Week).

The application serves up a scrumptious mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface. Most of Cocktail's major features are arranged in five basic categories. In addition, a Pilot lets you clean, repair and optimize your system with one click of the button.

Cocktail's Pilot is where you can schedule commands to run. I do a weekly Cocktail run, to reset disk permissions and delete caches. It seems to keep things running smooth, but you should note that for certain system cache resets, you should restart the system afterwards.

At any rate, I hope the above information helps someone out. Enjoy!

Fixing Aperture Vault Errors from Terminal

Apple's pro photo management application Aperture 2 is long overdue for an upgrade, and I hope that we'll see Aperture version 3 before long. But while I'm itching for new features and functions, Aperture 2 covers the bases for me, in spades. Aperture has a nice feature called Vaults, which lets you automatically back up your photo library with all metadata to an external drive or drives. Except when it doesn't. For whatever reason, I was having trouble saving to one of my vaults saved on an older external FireWire hard drive, and it was returning errors about not being able to create folders or write files. This sounded like a permissions problem, so I looked into it.

An Aperture vault is a "package" file in OS X, which means the file is a collection of folders and files, which appear in the Finder as a single file. The original Aperture library, the iTunes and iPhoto libraries, and files from applications like Keynote or Pages are like this. Note I'm using OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2, but these instructions should work on Tiger or Leopard as well. Here's how I dealt with the error.

How to Refresh Permissions on your Aperture Vault

The first thing is to shut down Aperture. Since Aperture grabs the Vault file and holds it open, it might be locked. Looking at the MyVault.apvault file in Finder, I can see it's locked by doing cmd-I and digging around in the information panel.

Recursively unlock. Because you need unlocked files to perform permission settings, you can start by recursively unlocking a folder, like this. Use sudo if you are not logged or su'ed in as root (run "sudo bash" to do this but be careful), and you can unlock files in an entire volume by cd-ing to /Volumes first if need be. Of course you can do this in the Finder's information panel as well.

chflags -R nouchg /path/to/folder/MyVault.apvault

Set POSIX owner and group. Comparing to a working Aperture Vault, the basic permissions were your usual user account, and "staff" as the group. Change the owner to your account with the group as staff. The -R makes it recursive even inside the vault package file.

chown -R rcogley:staff /path/to/folder/MyVault.apvault

Set POSIX basic perms. After setting the owner and group, I set the vault's permissions to 777.

chmod -R 777 /path/to/folder/MyVault.apvault

After that, I re-opened Aperture, refreshed the Vaults, and it worked without a hitch. I hope this hint helps someone. Enjoy!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

• blog:Cogley - Handle Leading Zeros in Apple Numbers

  Apple's iWork '09 Numbers spreadsheet is a versatile app with a lot of power available if you open your mind and don't expect it to be Excel. It does not quite do everything Excel does, but it handles UTF-8 well (where Excel does not and has never), and I take advantage of that often. I also love the formatting options and the multiple-sheets-per-document paradigm, but that is a different post. One challenge in both Excel and Numbers is how to handle fields with numbers with leading zeros. For instance, a part number 001234 will come out as 1234 when you import it from a CSV in either app, and lose meaning if the actual part must include the leading zeros. You can set a cell or column format in Excel as 000000, and this works the same way in Numbers, except the method's a little unfamiliar. How to Format a Part Number Field to Preserve Leading Zeros

  tags: apple, iwork, numbers, zeros, text, format

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Handle Leading Zeros in iWork Numbers

Apple's iWork '09 Numbers spreadsheet is a versatile app with a lot of power available if you open your mind and don't expect it to be Excel. It does not quite do everything Excel does, but it handles UTF-8 well (where Excel does not and has never), and I take advantage of that often. I also love the formatting options and the multiple-sheets-per-document paradigm, but that is a different post.

One challenge in both Excel and Numbers is how to handle fields with numbers with leading zeros. For instance, a part number 001234 will come out as 1234 when you import it from a CSV in either app, and lose meaning if the actual part must include the leading zeros. You can set a cell or column format in Excel as 000000, and this works the same way in Numbers, except the method's a little unfamiliar.

How to Format a Part Number Field to Preserve Leading Zeros

Here's how to not maim your part numbers.

1. Select your column to format, and open the Cells inspector.
2. Select Custom Format from Cell Format then click Show Format.
3. Give the format a name, and choose the base type.
4. Delete whatever format is in there by default and drag up an Integers type lozenge.
5. Open the disclosure triangle, and choose "Show Zeros for Unused Digits" and you will see the #,### change to 0,000. Click Show Separator to deselect it and remove the comma. Add two digits.
6. Click OK to save and apply the format to the selected column.

If you set the format as 000000 for a field that includes six digit numerics with leading zeros, and a mix of text with numeric part numbers, such as:

001234

P098765

005544

R-09-PCX

... the latter will not be affected by the format, which is just the right behavior we need.

I hope this tip helps someone, because not being able to set this really drove me a bit batty. Enjoy!

CocoaTech's Path Finder - Versatile Encoding Helper

CocoaTech's Path Finder tool is a versatile Finder replacement. One problem that you might have if you do any work with data, is importing CSV files that are in the UTF-8 format, and which contain multi-byte characters such as Japanese, into Excel.

To import a UTF-8 CSV into Excel, you need to re-save into a format that Excel will accept, because it ironically does not accept the quite-universal UTF-8. I tried opening my UTF-8 CSV with TextMate and Text Edit to do the re-save into a different encoding, but neither of those allow me to save to Shift JIS, which renders Japanese characters so Excel can import them properly.

I saw that Path Finder has a native Text Editor, and thought I would try it. Sure enough, it allows you to re-save a file in Shift JIS and with a TXT extension, which can then easily be imported into Excel, unmunged.

Thanks CocoaTech!

Greylisting in Snow Leopard Server, or not

Apple's OS X Snow Leopard Server 10.6 implements Greylisting, an anti-spam technique based on forcing sending SMTP servers to "slow down" before they can deliver. This is great for reducing spam, but it also has the perhaps undesired effect of causing delivery delays. Sometimes really, really loooong delivery delays.

In SLS, when you enable anti-spam in your Mail server (which is postfix), greylisting is automatically enabled. Because there are no readily available manuals on how to use this feature, from Apple, you may want to turn it off. Note that I'm skittish about changing config files like in a normal Unix server in an Apple server, because Apple is known to simply change vast portions of their server products without much notice. It's possible that you'd spend time implementing, and they change the way it has to be done so you have to redo it. Anyway, here's how to disable:

How to Disable Greylisting in Snow Leopard Server

Of course, as implied above, you can stop Greylisting by turning off spam filtering altogether. However, to be more specific and just disable Greylisting, do the following:

1. From Terminal on the server (ssh'ed in or direct), do "sudo bash" to login as root. Then use nano to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf
2. Remove the "check_policy_service unix:private/policy" string from the line that starts with "smtpd_recipient_restrictions" near the bottom of the file. Save, and exit nano.
3. Issue a "postfix reload" to reload the configuration.
4. Use the "exit" command to quit the sudo bash root shell.

I'm a little miffed that Apple would enable this by default and not implement any easy way to edit the greylists or whitelists. At any rate, you can read a couple articles on greylisting, or just wait for Apple. Time however, waits for no man. :-)

Textmate Regular Expression Search and Replace

I use and love the text editor Textmate, which has some powerful functions. One thing that it can help with is quickly editing text files, and for example today I used it for searching lines in a mail system's "aliases" file. I wanted to remove 50-odd lines with the word owner in them, so I used the Find command with Regular Expression checked.

The search string is:

^.*owner.*$

If you enter that string which means to find the lines with owner in them, check "Regular Expression," and leave a blank in the Replace box, Textmate will blank out the lines for you. Convenient!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

• blog:Cogley - Recovery of Corrupt Apple Leopard Server Open Directory

  Corrupt Apple Leopard Server Open Directory Services Thu, Oct 15 2009 22:24 | LDAP, Open Directory, tips, software, Troubleshooting, apple | Permalink I had a Leopard Server crash and burn so that nothing was responding, and when I forced the server to reboot (as well as rebooting a bunch of other ancillary servers and services just in case), I found an ominous sign in Server Admin, along with no user accounts in Workgroup Manager. Eek! Server Admin's Open Directory showed:

  tags: open, directory, apple, leopard, server, recover, crash

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Corrupt Apple Leopard Server Open Directory Services

I had a Leopard Server crash and burn so that nothing was responding, and when I forced the server to reboot (as well as rebooting a bunch of other ancillary servers and services just in case), I found an ominous sign in Server Admin, along with no user accounts in Workgroup Manager. Eek! Server Admin's Open Directory showed:

LDAP Server is: stopped

Password Server is: running

Kerberos is: stopped

Not good. Never fear, though.

How to Fix a Corrupted Open Directory

First, don't panic. Apple's forums show you can use "

slapd -Tt

" to check the configuration.

myhost:~ administrator$ sudo bash

Password: ********

bash-3.2# /usr/libexec/slapd -Tt

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

bdb(dc=myhost,dc=mydomain,dc=com): PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery

bdb_db_open: Database cannot be opened, err -30978. Restore from backup!

bdb(dc=myhost,dc=mydomain,dc=com): DB_ENV->lock_id_free interface requires /

an environment configured for the locking subsystem

backend_startup_one: bi_db_open failed! (-30978)

slap_startup failed (test would succeed using the -u switch)

The "run recovery" here means to run the

db_recover

command (a.k.a.

slapd_db_recover

on other *nix LDAPs). Use the -v switch to make the result verbose.

bash-3.2# db_recover-v -h /var/db/openldap/openldap-

openldap-data/ openldap-slurp/

bash-3.2# db_recover -v -h /var/db/openldap/openldap-data/

db_recover: Finding last valid log LSN: file: 6 offset 4190936

db_recover: Recovery starting from [6][4190795]

db_recover: Recovery complete at Thu Oct 15 21:57:41 2009

db_recover: Maximum transaction ID 80000225 Recovery checkpoint [6][4190936]

Ah, that looked nice. Then run

slapd -Tt

again to test, and if all is well, exit out of the sudo'ed bash shell.

bash-3.2# /usr/libexec/slapd -Tt

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

config file testing succeeded

bash-3.2# exit

myhost:~ administrator$

After a few minutes

launchd

should kickstart the Open Directory services again so that you see:

LDAP Server is: running

Password Server is: running

Kerberos is: running

A couple of tests shows I once again have Wiki Server, iCal Server, Jabber Chat etc, all the Open Directory and Kerberos-based services back on line. Breathe a sigh of relief if this helped you and let me know in the comments!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

• blog:Cogley - Linking File Types and Apps in OS X

  How to Re-associate File Types with Applications in OS X - If you are an OS X user, and you find files of a certain type, say PDFs, are opening in one applications but you want them to open in a different one, you can easily change the association using Finder.

  tags: os, x, apps, association, file, type, tiger, leopard, snow

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Linking File Types and Apps in OS X

If you are an OS X user, and you find files of a certain type, say PDFs, are opening in one applications but you want them to open in a different one, you can easily change the association using Finder.

How to Re-associate File Types with Applications in OS X

Here's how:

1. Select a file in Finder and ctrl-click it.
2. Select "get info" from the context menu.
3. Find the "open with" section in the "get info" menu that appears.
4. Select your desired application from the drop down list.
5. Click "change all" to set the association between that file type and the application you selected.

This has worked in OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. You can use this method to, say, open all PDFs in the native OS X "Preview", Adobe's Acrobat, or Skim, for instance. Please leave a comment if this helped you. Enjoy!

Safari Makes it Trivial to Download All Images on a Page

Of course it should not be used for nefarious purposes, but Apple's Safari browser makes it trivial to download all the images or files on a web page you are visiting. I had The Logo Factory create a special logo for my company eSolia's 10th anniversary, and they prepared a page with the deliverables on it. I did not want to download each one individually, and I remembered that the Safari Activities window allows you to access the objects on a page directly, such as various file attachments on a page.

O' Sensei of Safari, How Do We Achieve this Magic?

You can use Safari's Activity and Downloads windows, both available in the Window menu in Safari, in this way:

1. Browse the page you want to download from, then open Activity from the Window menu.
2. Find the page among the other pages if you have multiple tabs open. Use the disclosure triangle to open the outline of the objects on the page.
3. Find and select your download targets. Press Cmd-C to copy to clipboard.
4. Display the Downloads dialog, also available in the Window menu, then paste into it. Cmd-v.

You should see the images or files start to download in the Downloads window. I hope this is helpful to someone.

Directory Utility MIA in Snow Leopard?

Is Directory Utility, which has been available in /Applications/Utilities, missing in action in Snow Leopard? No, it's just been moved to Core Services. Access it this way:

1. Open Apple Menu, System Preferences.
2. Enter Accounts, clicking the lock to authenticate as needed.
3. Click Login Options at the bottom of the accounts list.
4. Click Edit, to the right of "Network Account Server."
5. Click Open Directory Utility.

You use Directory Utility to connect to Active Directory, Open Directory, or other LDAP servers.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

• blog:Cogley - Changing a Bike Inner-tube

  I got a flat the last hill of my 100 km bike trip last Sunday. Thank heavens it did not happen at km 50 or something. I went to a bike shop in Shinjuku today to get a replacement tube, and they were kind enough to tutor me on how to replace it. How to Change that Tube Here's the process I learned at the bike shop: Purchase a tube, tire levers (they come in sets of three, usually) and rim tape of the appropriate size. My rims are 26 inch with 1.5 Schwalbe Marathons on them now, and you just have to be sure what you buy is the right size. If you can give them the rim size, that's better too. The tubes come with various valves, and I have "French" valves now so that is what I got. All told, the cost to buy the parts was about JPY 1300 (USD 13).

  tags: bike, cycling, inner-tube, change, rim, tape, spoke

• blog:Cogley - Fixing EMobile USB Dialup on Snow Leopard

  I just installed Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 with no problems after getting a replacement for a bad Family Pack install disk (the Shibuya Apple Store said that many people reported the same), and found that my EMobile Huawei D02HW USB Wireless Dialup card, which was fine in Leopard, died when Snow Leopard was installed. Reinstalling the EMobile Huawei D02HW on Snow Leopard Here's how I fixed it:...

  tags: emobile, d02hw, apple, snow, leopard, huawei

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Changing a Bike Tire Inner-tube

I got a flat the last hill of my 100 km bike trip last Sunday. Thank heavens it did not happen at km 50 or something. I went to a bike shop in Shinjuku today to get a replacement tube, and they were kind enough to tutor me on how to replace it.

How to Change that Tube

Here's the process I learned at the bike shop:

1. Purchase a tube, tire levers (they come in sets of three, usually) and rim tape of the appropriate size. My rims are 26 inch with 1.5 Schwalbe Marathons on them now, and you just have to be sure what you buy is the right size. If you can give them the rim size, that's better too. The tubes come with various valves, and I have "French" valves now so that is what I got. All told, the cost to buy the parts was about JPY 1300 (USD 13).
2. Remove the wheel with the flat from the bike. I have Shimano Deore XT rim brakes, and there's a place you hook the brake wire's flange in, which if released, gives you the leeway to get the tire off.
3. If you have French valves, completely remove the bolt that keeps the valve in place in the rim.
4. On the opposite side of the wheel from the valve, insert a tire lever between the rim and the tire, and use it to lever the tire out, in that area. Take care not to pinch the tube while you do it, just in case you want to fix and reuse it. You'll notice there's a kind of hook on the one end of the lever - this goes onto a spoke to keep the lever in place, holding the tire edge out and away from the rim.
5. A couple of spokes away, do the same thing again with the second lever, to get more of the tire out.
6. Now you should be able to slide the third lever under the edge of the tire, and rotate it along the rim and tire edge to get the tire out. You can keep the one edge of the tire in the rim.
7. Slide the flatted inner tube out, taking care not to damage it if you want to repair it.
8. Inspect the tire inside and out for damage. There could be something sharp embedded in the tire. Remove any sharp objects puncturing the tire. In my case there were two pieces of a broken spoke embedded in the tire and in the rim tape. I could only find the one embedded in the tire by running my hand along the inside. The rim tape problem was quite obvious!
9. If you either remove the tire completely or just push it to one side, you should be able to see the rim tape, which prevents the inflated tube from working its way into the nipple bolts for the spokes. Rim tape prevents flats, but, in time it gets worn out too. If it has been mashed into the nipple bolts too much, and there are sharp edges, replace it. Rim tape is basically like a big rubber band with a hole for the valve. You can use a flat blade driver or an awl to work old rim tape out, and to lever new rim tape on. In my case, the yellow rim tape was two years old and starting to get dry, and, it had been punctured by the old spoke bit, so I replaced it.
10. Put a little air into your new tube, because it is easier to work with the tube if it is slightly inflated.
11. Insert the valve through the rim tape and rim, and put the valve bolt on to secure it.
12. To put the tire back, this time start on the valve side (removal starts opposite the valve). You can use the tire levers to get started putting the tire back into the rim, but be careful not to pinch the new tube. Having the tube slightly inflated will make things a little easier to maneuver. Once you get the tire in a little, use your hands to kind of "knead" the tire back in, working around it. Schwalbe Marathons are a little tough, as they have Kevlar inside and are consequently a bit harder rubber.
13. Check that the valve is 90 degrees to the rim. If it is angled, work the tire and rim until you can rotate it so it is perpendicular to the rim.
14. Inflate the tube to the correct psi pressure. Confirm that it's holding air and that you have not damaged the tube.
15. Deflate the tube once, then re-inflate. The bike shop said this last step really helps to prevent flats.
16. Go ride!

Hope this procedure helps someone with their tube troubles. Happy riding!

Fixing EMobile USB Dialup on Snow Leopard

I just installed Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 with no problems after getting a replacement for a bad Family Pack install disk (the Shibuya Apple Store said that many people reported the same), and found that my EMobile Huawei D02HW USB Wireless Dialup card, which was fine in Leopard, died when Snow Leopard was installed.

Reinstalling the EMobile Huawei D02HW on Snow Leopard

Here's how I fixed it:

1. Deleted /Applications/EMobile D02HW Utility.app.
2. Deleted /System/Library/Extensions/HuaweiDataCardDriver.kext
3. Deleted Huawei folders and files in /System/Library/Modem Scripts and in /Library/Modem Scripts
4. Emptied the Finder trash.
5. Rebooted the system.
6. On plugging in the USB Modem, the system mounts it in Finder as a USB memory. Ran the installer EMobile D02HW Utility.app and got an error regarding AutoOpen. Bypassed this by opening the installer package via "Show Package Contents" in Finder, and ran the Contents/Resources/EMOBILE_D02HW_Drv_App.pkg, which is the actual installer. Now it runs with no errors. AutoOpen be damned.
7. After the install, rebooted again.
8. After the reboot, I can add the Huawei Mobile modem in Network Preferences. Phone number for these devices is "*99***1#", user name em, password em.

I read a report that you can simply change tone to pulse dialing in the existing Huawei Mobile settings (from Leopard, for instance), so maybe the failure just has something to do with a plist not working somewhere and changing that setting refreshes it, but removing and reinstalling works fine too.

Give it a try if you have trouble, and I hope this short tip is helpful for someone.