Today I decided to upgrade my iPhone 4 from iOS 5.1.1 to iOS 6.1. Since I am on the AT&T network, I had no fear of baseband updates or even losing my jailbreak by going through a completely stock Apple update. Big mistake.

No sooner had I put my faith in Apple’s update process that I discovered a “The iPhone could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (-1)” error in iTunes. I saw my iPhone go through an endless cycle of turning on with the Apple logo and displaying the iTunes logo with connector cable screen. Even putting the device into DFU mode (iTunes logo indicates recovery mode) and restoring did no good. It just yielded a different error code.

I then figured it was because of my Windows configuration so I disabled the antivirus and turned off the firewall. I also checked to see if my Windows host file was re-routing gs.apple.com… it wasn’t… and it still didn’t work.

Thinking it was Windows I then tried booting into Mountain Lion and updating through there. Though iTunes detected that the iPhone had the latest 6.1 firmware installed, it would perform an update and restore for 30 minutes before spitting out an error on its own. I even busted out my old Macbook to try with similar results.

The error codes I encountered on this excruciating journey to update my iPhone 4 included: (-1), (1600), (1601), and (3194) at some point or another. I ended up restoring and updating my iPhone maybe five more times before I realized I had seen this problem before.

In past updates when this happened, I used TinyUmbrella’s “Fix Recovery” and “Exit Recovery” features to boot it out of the broken recovery loop. I downloaded the latest TinyUmbrella and while it did seem to load some text on the console regarding greenpois0n, it didn’t fix the problem.

I then downloaded redsn0w knowing it had the same capability. As of this writing the latest version was 0.9.15b3. It won’t do an untethered jailbreak for you (leave that to evasi0n) but it did have the same feature to kick it out of recovery mode using “Recovery Fix.”

Unfortunately when I used the featured, that’s when I discovered a “Missing Keys.plist data for this build” error pop up in redsn0w. I had never seen this error before. I elected to use the “Select IPSW” feature thinking that perhaps it would somehow solve the problem. The only thing was when I pointed redsn0w at my 6.1 IPSW file from Apple, it said that it did not support it.

Being a bit desperate I downloaded 6.0.1 and 6.0 IPSW’s as well. 6.0.1 didn’t work either but redsn0w did take 6.0. After trying the recovery fix again it went through this time and my iPhone sprang back to life, fresh and anew on iOS 6.1.

Apparently the Keys.plist data is present in the iOS 6.0 IPSW package which redsn0w needs to perform the recovery fix. Even if you are updated to 6.1 already, the 6.0 data can be used to “trick” redsn0w into behaving properly.

If you use Terminal frequently, you may notice that the forward delete key inserts a “~” character into the terminal. That’s because it’s not mapped to the proper key binding that you expect. What you really want to do is perform a Control-Option-D which will truly forward delete a letter rather than insert junk into the console. You can try it first in the Terminal to see if it’s correct.

The fix is in the Terminal.app settings. Open up your terminal app and in the menu bar go to Terminal->Preferences.

On the right hand side, click on the “Keyboard” tab.

Look for “forward delete” and double click it or click it and then click the “Edit” button at the bottom. You should see the key mapping currently as “33[3~”. Highlight select the text there and enter the Control-Shift-D sequence, replacing the existing string with “04″.

Close out of everything and try out your working forward delete button in the terminal!

If you’re receiving the “503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA” error in your Outlook like me, you may have overlooked one very simple setting in your email account settings. I’ve added so many email accounts to my Outlook in the past before (for each new device, for each new clean OS install) and while I may be pretty practiced at the task, it doesn’t prevent a forgetful error from happening every now any then.

In an effort to fight spam, most SMTP mail servers will require you to log in first with your email credentials before it will send your message. That’s what this error means. To fix it, you may have forgotten to enable the “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication” checkbox.

If that doesn’t work try double-checking your SMTP settings, making sure you have the right server, port, and security type for your email service provider.

If you are lover of Apple hardware and Microsoft software, you’ll often find yourself trying to balance delicately between the two corporate giants. One of those little things you miss on a Windows keyboard is the “Insert” key, especially if you are a frequent Vim user. After all, how else are you supposed to copy and paste a text from your desktop to your Vim terminal?

While I love how the sleek aluminum Mac Keyboard looks and types, the buttons aren’t fully mappable to a traditional 102-keyboard. One of those major glaring differences soon becomes evident in the “Fn” key, where the “Insert” key traditionally sits. This key is special, and isn’t even mappable to something else, at least not with my trusty key remapping tool KeyTweak.

There is a fix, however, and it lies within the “F13″ key. You know that Windows keyboards only map to “F12″ so you definitely won’t be missing this one. Plus its location is conveniently close enough to the “Fn” key that it is an easy adjustment to make.

To get back your “Shift-Insert” capability, first download KeyTweak.

Launch the software and click on “Half-Teach Mode.” Don’t rely on the existing key mapping layout at it isn’t accurate to your Apple keyboard. That’s why we use the half teach mode, so there aren’t any mistakes. You’ll see as you read on.

In the dialog that pops up, click on “Scan a Single Key” and then press the “F13″ key on your keyboard.

Go the the drop down menu and select the “Insert” function. Then click “Remap.”

Now you’ll see it as a pending key tweak on the right hand side of the program.

While you’re at it, why not remap the “F14″ key on your Mac keyboard to “PrintScrn” so you don’t have to be doing “Shift-Alt-Fn-F11″ all the time?

Hit “Apply” and KeyTweak will as you if you want to restart your computer to save the changes.

Next time you start up, you’ll have Shift-Insert capability again by hitting the Shift-F13 key combination!

When I am creating my WordPress sites one of my favorite things to do is enable the featured images for posts. This allows me to take advantage of a whole host of WordPress plugins which can auto-display these thumbnails. The trouble is, this isn’t enabled by default. In fact, it’s really up to the theme you are using to support it.

Regardless of whether your theme will support it or not, it doesn’t hurt to enable this feature yourself if you need. All you have to do is edit the functions.php file of your theme.

Find a good place (not between functions) to add the following line:

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

Once you complete this edit, you’ll see in your posts that the feature images feature will be enabled. I love pairing this with the Related Posts Thumbnails plugin. It really spiffs up your site and adds a nice graphic feature at the end of your posts to keep your readership on your site longer. It’s especially great for graphic heavy websites.

I’ve been a user of RoboForm for a few years now and find it an indispensable tool for web browsing. It’s more than just a password manager as it can create custom search cards as I documented in the past.

I had just installed IE9 but found out that I was forced to manually attach the RoboForm toolbar each time I started up. Not only that, I was forced to do this individually to each tab in Internet Explorer!

After some quick digging in the settings, I found the settings to resolve the problem. Click on the gear icon and then “Manage Add-ons.”

You should get a screen like this. You’ll hopefully see that RoboForm is installed as a series of add-ons. If you see that their status is disabled, as I do in mine, then all you need to do is enable them.

If you select all of them, you can enable all of them with one button click. Now RoboForm should automatically load up for each IE9 tab.

By default, Mac OS X Mountain Lion has the ability to read from an NTFS partition. Unfortunately, if you wish to write to this Windows formatted disk, there is no innate capability provided by Apple. Equally unfortunate, there are solutions that exist to enable Mountain Lion to write to a Windows NTFS disk but they require you pay for the software.

Being the stingy geek that I am, I set out to find a free solution that worked as well as NTFS-3G did for me on Snow Leopard. I had hoped it would work out of the box when I used migration assistant to bring it over to my new Mountain Lion install but unfortunately after a few errors about not being to read an NTFS formatted USB stick, I discovered the NTFS-3G was no longer being actively maintained. In its place, you can use something called Tuxera NTFS but it cost $32.

After some research I discovered another great tool to enable NTFS writing called Paragon NTFS but it too cost money, though a little cheaper at $20.

Well it turns out you can whip together enough tools to get the same job done without having to pull out your wallet. You see, NTFS-3G requires MacFuse, which I also used on Snow Leopard to much satisfaction. Since it is out of development though, it won’t work any longer on Mountain Lion. Instead, you can use something called OSXFuse which gets the same job done.

There will still be mounting errors but thankfully a helpful developer has released a patch for OSXFuse to remove them on github. This patch is called Fuse Wait. With this workaround, your free solution is complete and you will be able to write to any NTFS formatted hard drive on Mountain Lion without any errors.

In summary, to enable OSX Mountain Lion to write to an NTFS partition, follow these steps:

1. Download and install NTFS-3G
2. Download and install OSXFuse
3. Download and install Fuse Wait

When you Boot Camp a partition on your Mac system to run Windows, the Windows OS needs drivers to be able to use the hardware correctly. I recently did this but while everything just about worked, including the wireless and ethernet, my sound was missing.

I knew there was no problem with my set up (loose wires, bad speakers) since it worked while booted into Mountain Lion on the Mac side. After I took a hard look at the Boot Camp drivers again, I realized the problem.

Since I did not have a Mountain Lion install DVD or even a Superdrive for that matter, I was forced to manually download the Boot Camp 4.0 drivers separately. It turns out I did not properly read my hardware model ID so I ended up downloading the wrong Boot Camp file. While 99% of everything worked fine, the audio did not. It’s a hard error to notice since there are no other issues present.

If this sounds like you, I highly recommend you try re-downloading your Boot Camp drivers again. Even if you are 100% sure you have the right file for your hardware, it won’t hurt to try it again.

To do so, you first have to uninstall your existing Boot Camp drivers. Doing so will cause your hardware not to be recognized again so a task like going online or connecting to your Wi-Fi can be an issue. Be sure to have the Boot Camp 4.0 files downloaded first before you proceed.

On Windows, when you have downloaded the BootCampESD.pkg file as indicated in this post, use 7-zip to extract the contents of the file. Then follow these steps to get the drivers you need for Windows.

1. Extract Payload.
2. Within Payload, extract Payload~ (no this is not a typo).
3. Within Payload~, extract Library/Application Support/BootCamp/WindowsSupport.dmg
4. Within WindowsSupport.dmg, you will get 0.Apple_ISO. Rename that to BootCamp4.iso
5. Now you’re getting close, extract BootCamp4.iso and run setup.exe. Hopefully this installs all the right drivers for you including sound. If that doesn’t work, you can try to install BootCamp directly.

A blog post ago I talked about how to get your hands on the Boot Camp drivers for Windows without having access to a Mac OS DVD. This post starts from where that one left off. I’ve separated the two as they each solve different problems.

To refresh yourself, go ahead and read through it first if you had a similar issue.

Now at this point, I double clicked the setup.exe file and encountered this error: Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer model. I call BS! I had encountered this very same error the last time I did this and of course I had forgotten how to overcome it.

To make matters worse, I was still waiting for the Boot Camp drivers to install and without an external mouse I had no right click button.

You see, what you need to do is browse to the Drivers/Apple/BootCampx64.msi file and right click, Run as Administrator it to bypass the error. Since I had no right click, you can instead click on Start, then type “cmd”. Instead of typing “Enter” to run it, instead press “Control-Shift-Enter” to run it as the Administrator. Then browse to your folder where the BootCampx64.msi file is in the terminal and type the file name to run it.

That did the trick for me!

Today I had to go through the trouble (again) to Boot Camp another Apple machine and (again) I encountered a very familiar error when attempting to install Boot Camp drivers. Wait, hold on. Let me back up a bit.

I recently had to go through the trouble of installing Boot Camp on my Macbook but as I never received a copy of the Snow Leopard installation DVD, I had to make do with a USB bootable version.

However, since the USB is bootable for installation on a Mac computer, that means your Windows Boot Camp partition will be unable to read the USB. As it happened to me, Windows asked me if I wanted to format it when I inserted the USB drive into the laptop!

So I needed to procure the Boot Camp drivers that Apple provides on the DVD, but without the DVD. I stumbled upon a few links where I could actually download those files directly from Apple. Based on the type of computer you have, be sure to download the correct link. Also be sure to do this in Mac OS as it downloads a pkg file which Windows won’t be able to read.

To get your model number click on the Apple icon in the task bar in the upper left corner. Then select “About This Mac”. Then click “More Info” and “System Report” (this is for Mountain Lion, others should be similar). Then in the hardware tab you should be able to see something like the model numbers you see above. Download the proper one as it contains the correct Windows drivers for your particular Apple hardware.

Once the download completes, open and install the BootCampESD.pkg. When the installer completes, copy the files over to a USB stick and boot into your Windows. Those files will be familiar .exes and such and will be readable by Windows.