Ask TUAW: using Lingon, Mighty Mouse problems, replicating Autofill,

For this edition of Ask TUAW we've got questions on password management software, writing to a NTFS external drive in OS X, autofilling an iPhone with smart playlists, mighty mouse problems, using Lingon, and more.

As always, your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X, as certain answers will vary between different Macs and Tiger vs. Leopard, etc. (we'll assume you're running Leopard if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

Rodrigo asks

Hey, I have a Macbook Pro running Tiger for now. I was wondering what is a good program for keeping all your passwords in one place, well secured.

As very many folks have already said 1Password ($34.95) from Agile Web Solutions is really the class leader in this category. I use it myself every day and I've found it to be extremely useful and constantly updated.

Big John asks

Is there something better than MacFUSE to write to NTFS volumes? I have an external drive that has to be read by Windows and OS X machines and has to store files larger than 4GB, so FAT32 is out.

I don't really know why you're unwilling to use MacFUSE based NTFG-3G, but I did run across Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X ($39.95). I've never used it myself, but it offers "full access (read/write, format) to NTFS partitions."

rdkrauss asks

How can I best achieve the AutoFill effect that you get with an iPod Shuffle with my iPhone? I have way more music on my computer than will fit on the 16GB iPhone. I want to create a Smart Playlist or series of Smart Playlists that will constantly update, keeping my iPhone music fresh each time I sync. Is there a good way to achieve this? AutoFilling my iPhone would be very helpful.

Yes the best way to do this would be a Smart Playlist. There are many different ways to make such a playlist so I'll just suggest one which you'll almost certainly want to customize. So here I've set it to randomly generate a 15GB playlist of all songs rated 3 starts and above. Obviously you can change the criteria, but it gives you the basic idea. Once you've created this playlist then just go to the iPhone preferences, select the Music tab, and sync only with that one playlist. Unfortunately, to refresh this playlist with something new you need to select everything in it (⌘+A) and hit delete (it will then automatically repopulate so long as you have the Live updating option checked).

KarlW asks

I've got a mighty mouse, and now and again the right mouse button just stops working. I've become used to lifting the left finger during a right-click, but sometimes it just plain doesn't work. I need to do to mouse preferences, and open the combo box to get it back. Is there a workaround for this, or is it a known bug that Apple haven't fixed?

A lot of people have had problems with the right-click on the Mighty Mouse (though personally I haven't really had any troubles). I found an interesting discussion over at Mac OS X Hints with lots suggestions.

The hint itself was to use SteerMouse ($20) to assign the right-click to the ball button, which apparently is much more reliable (there's apparently also a free way to do this). Other people suggest power cycling the mouse or deleting some kernel extensions. I'd suggest trying out some of the various suggestions and seeing which work for you (though be sure to make backup copies of anything you try deleting).

ESJ asks

I have a 2004 iMac G5 running OS 10.5.4 and an Airport Express powering a wireless network throughout my home. All the other computers in the house, including my iPhone, my Dell laptop and my mother's MacBook, can get perfectly fine internet connection speeds, while the iMac cannot. I've tried moving it to reduce wireless interference, and the iPhone gets normal throughput when it is held close to the iMac, so now I'm pretty sure it's NOT interference. I've also tried various fixes online (see here ) and none have worked. SO I'm now thinking it may be the hardware-the Airport card inside the iMac. Do you think this diagnosis is correct and if so, is the Airport card easy to replace? If not, what else might it be?

It does sound like a hardware problem. There are a couple of things you can do to check it. The easiest is to just create another account to test. If you're still having problems with a virgin account you can eliminate any userland problem. The next step would to try a virgin install of OS X. Obviously that's a bit of a problem and a lot more work. However, I have a suggestion. Try running the Ubuntu Live CD for PPC. If the wifi still doesn't work then you can eliminate a software problem. I suspect, however, that might be more trouble than it's worth.

As far as replacing it, Apple does actually have a manual (PDF link) that includes the instructions. A quick Google search turned up Airport cards for about $25, but be sure to confirm that this is the correct card for your machine before purchasing it.

Brad asks

Hi, my question involves the uPnP client Mediatomb. I very recently purchased a PS3 and wanted to be able to stream movies etc. from my iMac to the PS3. I found the 2 main options were Nullsoft's Medialink and the open-source Mediatomb. I decided on Mediatomb due to the freeware thing and because it supports transcoding on-the-fly. I eventually got Mediatomb installed compiling it from binary using Fink and it seems to be working well. However I can't work out how to get it to start on startup, I'm hoping it can be done using launchd or something, but I couldn't work it out myself, I gave Lingon a go, but I couldn't work that out either.At the moment I have an applescript run on startup that manually opens terminal and types in [mediatomb -d] then closes. There must be a better way?

You should be able to do this very easily with Lingon. Just create a new Agent and set it up as follows. The only problem I can imagine running into is a path error. In step 2, you may need to include the path to the mediatomb executable wherever that is located on your system.

Update: I need to research this more. This page (Google translation) suggests that launchd can run mediatomb with the "-d" flag. Has anybody actually done this?