Dan Loewenherz

Solved: iMac Restarts instead of Shutting Down

I would’ve posted this on Twitter if I could have managed to squeeze it into 140 characters, but I’m not that skilled, unfortunately.

My 27” iMac from late last year started having an issue where it would restart instead of shutting down. Clicking shutdown from the log in screen didn’t pose any issues—that worked as expected.

After perusing forums, collecting data, and trying out almost every fix imaginable, I’ve found a solution. The issue lies in the com.apple.Boot.plist and com.apple.PowerManagement.plist files in the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration directory. Boot.plist is the “configuration plist for the Mac OS X booter” and PowerManagement.plist stores “power management settings”.

Whether it was from downgrading from Lion to SL, or something else, for some reason these plist files got corrupted. The best way to solve the issue is to remove those files. By deleting these files, OS X will fall back to default boot and power management settings.

I’d recommend strongly that you backup to Time Machine before doing this. That said, this solution worked fine for me. I’m on Snow Leopard 10.6.7.

Read more about power management settings and Boot.plist here and here.

Search Google securely on Chrome

You may or may not know this, but if you’re using a site and the URL doesn’t start with https, someone could intercept and alter the data you send (without you knowing) as it flies across the Internet. In computer security terms, this is known as a man-in-the-middle attack.

I’m not super comfortable with this idea. The thought of my search queries being eavesdropped on is a little creepy. Like most other people, I search for pretty sensitive stuff on the Internet—things I’d rather not broadcast to a random stranger.

But wait, there’s a solution! There exists an encrypted version of Google at https://encrypted.google.com/. Safety at last!

If you use Chrome’s omnibar, however, you’ll quickly discover that insecure Google is used by default. No worries, there is a quick fix. I’m using Chrome 11 beta on OS X, so directions may vary.

1. Go to Chrome -> Preferences. A button called “Manage Search Engines” should appear. Click that.
2. Add a new search engine with these parameters:

   Name	Encrypted Google
   Keyword	gg
   URL	https://encrypted.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

3. Make this the default search engine.
4. You’re done! All your searches are now encrypted. Happy searching!

What Firefox 4 is Still Missing

Yesterday, Mozilla released Firefox 4. It’s a top-down redesign of a browser that was doing really well in the browser wars…until Chrome started eating its lunch. Over the last day, I’ve been using it as my primary browser.

Here are my thoughts. I’d say Firefox 4 launches more quickly than Chrome and is generally just faster (I’m using Mac OS X Lion). I love the repositioning of the tab bar to the top of the window, the new extension management interface, and the ability to group tabs. Another cool thing you can do is set up Firefox syncing between your phone & your computer. It works fantastically.

Despite these & many other improvements, there are still a few things that annoy me just enough to make me want to go back to Chrome.

1. Private browsing closes all currently open windows. In practice, this means users can’t be logged in and logged out of the same website at the same time side by side. Chrome nails this feature, which is immensely useful when logged into multiple Google accounts.

2. Inconsistent results using the Awesome Bar. Last few times I tried to search a single word in it, Firefox assumed it was a TLD. Here’s an example (I searched for “test” in the Awesome Bar). The odd part is that if you search for 2+ words, the search goes to Google. A little inconsistent.

3. Integrated search & URL bar. This ties in a bit with #2. Firefox should take a page from Chrome’s playbook and just combine the search field with the Awesome Bar. Makes for a far more user-friendly experience.

Once these are addressed, I think Chrome will have some serious competition.