Update: Just after I posted this, the author of Colloquy posted on Twitter that the’s got a new Nightly that solves this problem in a “proper” way. Proves the power of Twitter works!

I just upgraded to Snow Leopard and loaded up my IRC client, which happens to be Colloquy, and noticed that Growl stopped working! Checked Growl, Adium was managing to use it just fine.

Turns out that you need to load Colloquy in 32-bit mode as there is no 64-bit Growl API at present.

To do this:

1. Go to Applications in Finder
2. Find Colloquy
3. Highlight it with a single left click
4. Hit CMD-I or go to File -> Get Info
5. Tick the ‘Open in 32-bit mode’ box
6. Close the window
7. Load up Colloquy

Can’t see why Colloquy needs 64-bits anyway. I’d rather it was limited to 4GB of RAM – the amount of memory leaks it tends to have!

MacRumors is reporting that the new Unibody MacBook Pros announced last week have an interesting issue:

Apple seems to have quietly downgraded the SATA Interface from 3.0Gbit to 1.5Gbit speeds in some of the new MacBook Pros introduced last week

As correctly highlighted in the posting, most drives can’t saturate it. Apart from, unfortunately, SSD drives. Although these little beggars are still beyond most people’s level of feasibility, they are useful for more rugged conditions. I’m hoping this is a bug in OSX rather than a purposeful hardware change. Or, maybe it’s to make the battery last a log longer?

13″ and 15″ MacBook Pros Have a Slower SATA Interface – Mac Rumors

If you have any bluetooth device that constantly wants to talk to your new Macbook Pro (like a headset/keyboard) – it will wake it from sleep constantly and thus drain your battery. Fun eh?

The new iTunes 8 came out yesterday! Excellent. Loving the new features – especially the Genius playlist thingie. Apart from… It’s not ACTUALLY that good. Sorry. If you’re listening to a popular artist (Say Coldplay, Michael Jackson or similar), it’s great. If you’re listening to one of the reams of Christian music albums, forget it.

Genius just pops up a message saying “Tough” (see the image for the proper text) when I click the little Genius button while Tim Hughes is playing. Tim Hughes is one of the most popular worship leaders in the UK (and a top guy to boot). I was hoping it would find other inspirational songs when I hit the button. Alas, just the error.

The iTunes store had no trouble finding other Christian tracks for me to buy in the Genius sidebar! Figures. Pandora (although that’s no longer available) and last.fm don’t ever have this trouble. So why does iTunes. I put to you that Genius is truly not Genius.

EDIT: It can’t even handle the Mark Ronson – Version album. That’s far less obscure than some big religion thing!

This morning I updated to 2.0.2 of the iPhone firmware (I have an original iPhone). My phone is unlocked to Vodafone using Pwnage – I won’t provide links to all that stuff here. Problem was, I put the phone into recovery mode, restored my new custom 2.0.2 firmware and iTunes went "Do you want to restore xyz backup?" Yes! This is what I usually do and it works every time.

Anyhow, it restored as normal and rebooted the phone. Only iTunes still saw it as a new phone! That’s not right at all! Anyway a quick Google dug up this thread with details on how to fix it. Appears it’s a common 2.0.2 problem then.

1. Click set up as new iPhone and hit Continue
2. As soon as it starts – CANCEL IT on the iPhone. Then cancel it on iTunes as well
3. Unplug phone
4. Turn off by holding the top button down then ‘Slide to turn off’
5. Turn on the phone by pressing the top button again
6. Once fully booted, plug in phone

And then it all shall work well again.

These days I use VirtualBox almost exclusively as the way I run Windows stuff on my Mac computers. MacWorld have posted a podcast video thingy (probably best to call them *casts) which sort of reviews it but also demos how it’s just as good as VMware Fusion but with a better price tag – it’s free.

Its worth checking out.

So, it appears that during the transportation of my laptop + other bits and bobs to CLUK21, I broke the spacebar on my Apple Aluminum USB Keyboard. It was actually quite an annoying breakage – If I tapped my thumb on the far right of the space bar, it wouldn’t work!

You might be thinking, why is that so bad? Well, try typing ‘cd ..’ in a Terminal as a touch typist and see where your thumb lands. I was constantly writing ‘cd..’ because of this!

Well, long story short I hobbled over to the Apple Store and got myself the little wireless keyboard that they do that is sans numeric keypad.

Not missing it – at all. Having even more desk space back is also nice! Considering it all works over Bluetooth, its very responsive. So I can’t really complain at all. All good.

Appears that calibrating the battery was not enough. Went into the Apple Store, saw an "Apple Genius" and he instantly replaced it. No questions asked. A "new revision" apparently.

Let’s hope this fixes it!