david chartier
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Add an iPad mini with Verizon 4G to an existing Family Share Plan
Many of you may be receiving your iPad mini with WiFi + Cellular today or in the next few days, and there was some concern that people who already had a Verizon Family Share plan and were adding the mini to the plan would have to wait for postpaid SIM card to arrive from VZW prior to being able to use it. Well, David Chartier crossed his fingers and tried adding the mini to his plan from the Verizon website, and it worked just fine. While Chartier has all of the necessary screenshots and verbiage over on his website, here's the short version of how it works: Log onto My Verizon and select Activate or Switch Device. Add a new line. Type in your device ID, also known as the IMEI for the iPad mini. Chartier noted that he couldn't find it under Settings > General > About, and Megan Lavey-Heaton here at TUAW verified that it's no longer listed there (see screenshot below). You can get the IMEI from the box that your iPad mini came in ... you did keep the box, didn't you? Verify your current plan and that you want to add the line. At one point, you'll be asked if you want to upgrade your shared data plan to account for that extra data you'll be using. That decision is up to you. You'll be asked to verify your billing information and -- lucky you -- you'll get to pay another $35 activation fee. Verizon only shows that they'll charge you the standard $10 fee at the time you add the iPad mini to your plan, but they will also list the full charge that will be added to your next bill. Restart your device. At that point, your iPad mini will be on your Family Share plan and you'll be able to use your little device on Verizon's LTE network all you want. Thanks, David Chartier, for pointing out how to do this.
Terminal Tips: Rebuild your Launch Services database to clean up the Open With menu
Problem: Some piece (or pieces) of rogue software have cluttered up your Open With contextual menu, which you can see by right-clicking or control-clicking any document in the Finder. This problem seems to be most prevalent with virtual machines that allow you to open documents with Windows applications, but tend not to clean up after themselves. After having both Parallels and VMWare installed on my MacBook Pro, my Open With menu was a mess. Solution: Lucky for me, I noticed David Chartier's question about this on Twitter around the same time as I was wondering what to do about it. Some friendly person pointed him to a posting on Apple's discussion forum (also noted on Mac OS X Hints here and here), noting that running a specific command in a terminal window will rebuild your launch services, which repopulates the Open With menu with a current list of applications, without duplicates. It worked perfectly for me, but beware, on my system it took about 10 minutes to complete, and I suspect it could take more on a sufficiently gummed-up system. Here's the Leopard version of the command (the path to the tool is different in Tiger, see here). I broke it into three lines for readability, but the \ at the end of the line is bash-speak for "keep on going with the same command" -- you can copy and paste it directly and it should work, or if you type it on one line without the backslashes, it will also work fine. Just copy and paste it into terminal and it'll work just fine. /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain user If, preferring to avoid the Terminal, you want a handy GUI app to rebuild the Launch Services database with a couple of clicks, check out Titanium's OnyX or Maintenance utilities, both free of charge.
