Chris Gonyea » Computer Fixes

iTunes keeps triggering ‘allow incoming connections’ dialog from OS X firewall

Chris — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:48:28 +0000

Ran into an interesting bug with Mac OS X’s Firewall. Every time I launched iTunes, I would be prompted by the firewall whether I wanted to allow incoming connections. Every single time I launched iTunes.

Luckily, there is an easy fix according to this Apple support forum post:

Doing so has worked perfectly well for me. However, there may be a specific sequence of actions that will work. Mine was:

1) Wait for the dialogue to appear, then deny access. Quit the application in question.

2) Open System Preferences>Security>Firewall, and remove the application in question from the list entirely.

3) Wait for the dialogue to appear again, then grant access. This should be the last time you see the dialogue.

Problem so far has been resolved!

Updates

Chris — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:40:23 +0000

A few updates since I last wrote a couple of months ago:

Been extremely busy at work.
Site is now running on Dreamhost again (but of course still using DynDNS Custom for DNS) after about a year and a half on my own server. This site should be much faster now and have fewer quirks. I have learned that maintaining an web server is a lot tougher than it looks. Time to leave the server and backend stuff to the experts. I will stick with what I know now, which is running WordPress and configuring my own DNS.
Reloading my server so it can be a test instance of BIND for me.

Disabling zoom with scrollwheel on Mac OS X

Chris — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:59:06 +0000

Ever since I have switched to using spaces on my Mac, I have had a maddening intermittent problem that I couldn’t figure out a solution to. Occasionally when I switched spaces using control-arrow on the keyboard, my screen would zoom in and I couldn’t figure out why.

Turns out, I apparently sometimes move to fast on the keyboard while at the same time, not moving fast enough! That sounds confusing, but let me explain. I would switch a space with control-arrow, lift up on the arrow key, but manage to sometimes to keep the control key press long enough for me to use my mouse’s scrollwheel.

For the longest time, I couldn’t connect all of these dots, but I finally found the preference to turn off the control-scroll zoom feature. Open up your Mac’s System Preferences and click on Mouse. You will see an option for the zoom on scroll feature at the bottom of the window. Just uncheck it and you are all set!