Portions of our oven’s keypad were no longer acknowledging button presses. Sometimes power-cycling the oven would allow the non-functioning portions to temporarily work, but this only worked for less than a minute at a time after power was restored, not an ideal fix/workaround.

I decided to rip into the back of the oven and look at things. I started with pulling the button pad ribbon cables off the control board and noticing that the leads seemed to be oxidized. I took an eraser to the leads and cleaned them up, but the problems persisted.

The next time I pulled the back off the oven, I noticed the control panel had a serious blowout at some point, as shown below.

Blown Maytag Gemini Board

I looked into online services through eBay, but was deterred by the service details they provided: sometimes the services were only to assess the board’s condition and other times the services covered the control board but not the buttons. With this oven, the control board and buttons are considered one unit.

Not wanting to get screwed by one of these services, I decided to buy a new control board (with buttons) on Amazon. After installing the new control board, full oven functionality returned. The new board gives us a 1-year warranty and since it was charged with Visa, we will have coverage from years 1 to 2 as well.

Our El Capitan Server was shooting off the following error messages every 30 seconds in Console.app:

mds[81]: (DiskStore.Warning:127) Failed messaging flag writer

Thinking the error might have something to do with Spotlight, I went to System Preferences->Spotlight->Privacy, and dragged my startup disk to the Privacy pane. The error messages stopped immediately.

When I removed the startup disk from the Privacy pane and allowed my trusty Mac to re-index the startup disk – the error messages began to reappear.

This machine is my server, so I’m going to leave Spotlight’s privacy enabled for all of my drives, but I’m hoping to figure out what’s wrong, later.

I’ve put time into configuring routers and need to be able to quickly clone settings to new hardware. I was hoping to take a working router configuration, connect it to a PC (or device), and open a terminal session to use the following commands:

cd desktop

ssh  root@192.168.1.1

dd if=/dev/mtd4 of=/tmp/backup20160505.trx

scp root@192.168.1.1:/tmp/backup20160505.trx .
scp backup20160505.trx root@192.168.1.1:/tmp

mtd -r write backup20160505.trx art

But at the final step, my router throws up an error message that includes:

Could not open mtd device: art
Can't open device for writing! openwrt

If someone has a suggestion, I’m all for it. I’ll report back when I figure this out.

I’ve had a problem with the Bluetooth on my MacBook Pro where the menu bar icon is grayed out and it is crossed out and not functioning. Restarts and PRAM resets don’t seem to resolve the issue, but the following steps are pretty painless and fixed things for me:

1. Close System Preferences and/or any app that was trying to use or configure any Bluetooth device with the Mac
2. From the OS X Finder, hit Command+Shift+G to summon Go To Folder and enter the following path:  /Library/Preferences/
3. Locate the file named “com.apple.Bluetooth.plist” and delete it
4. (you may see a com.apple.Bluetooth.plist.lockfile too, if so delete that as well – this is a system folder so you will need to authenticate with an admin user)
5. Head to the Apple menu and choose “Shut Down” to power down the Mac
6. Wait a minute or so before booting the Mac again
7. Head to the Bluetooth menu or System Preference panel to resync your hardware

Thanks to Max108 for posting the fix.

If you’re running Adobe Illustrator CS5 on Mac OS X El Capitan, you may be plagued by the bug where Illustrator crashes hard when you try to normally quit it:

Perusing Adobe’s forums revealed this post with a workaround, which can be reduced to the following fix:

1. Quit Illustrator if it is open.
2. Open “Terminal.app”.
3. Paste the following command at the prompt:sudo mv /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/CS5ServiceManager/lib /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/CS5ServiceManager/lib.bak
4. Enter your password when prompted and then press “enter”.

Try launching Illustrator CS5 and then quit it. Hard crashes should be a thing of the past.

And for those not wanting to use Terminal, double click your hard drive icon on the desktop, and navigate to Library->Application Support->Adobe->CS5ServiceManager. Click on the folder named “lib” and rename it to “lib.bak”. You may be prompted for your password on your Mac. Feel free to launch Illustrator and it should quit like it should, peacefully.

We’ve had our trusty Bosch SHU 8805 (Stainless Steel) Dishwasher for over 15 years now, but recently several problems were apparent:

1. the dishes weren’t getting clean (the machine had become noticeably louder while trying to do so)
2. the detergent dispenser was no longer holding soap, and
3. the sump wasn’t properly discharging waste water.

I purchased replacement parts for all of these issues, even though I probably didn’t need all of them, more on that later.

To address the issues above, Bosch gave me this parts list over the phone and we purchased the following parts:

While running like a headless champion better than 99% of the time, I tried connecting a Mac mini (mid 2011) to an iPad 2 with Duet Display last night. After trying this, Duet Display didn’t project the display from the Mac mini to the iPad and, while viewing the connection over VNC, the Mac mini slowly became unresponsive and restarts didn’t help. Even after a couple restarts, the Mac mini was unreachable.

Putting the mini in Target Disk Mode and booting its system volume through a MacBook Pro allowed OS X to boot and I could view the screen, but when booting OS X on the mini alone, it failed to establish a network connection. Resetting the SMC and PRAM failed to help. After finding another display to attach (thanks, Mom and Dad!), the mini booted up and connected with AirPort, but the ethernet card wasn’t detected by OS X – as observed through About this Mac->System Report…->Ethernet Cards, the mini only said “This computer does not appear to have any pci ethernet cards installed”. Deleting the Ethernet port in Network Settings and rebooting only seemed to make things worse, as the Ethernet port couldn’t be added back through Network Settings.

Many reports on the web indicate that the NetworkInterfaces.plist and other files should be trashed, but I was worried that possibly other files were corrupted too. Rather than play roulette with plist files, I took the easy way out – I allowed OS X to reinstall itself while I slept. After doing this and revisiting “System information”, the Ethernet port shows it is in now recognized:

Fixed!

I’m trying to use Duet Display on a restored iPad 2 and a Mac mini. When I plug the iPad into the Mac mini and launch Duet Display on both devices, the Mac mini seems to acknowledge that the iPad is plugged in, but Duet Display freezes the iPad’s display and it looks like this:

What are my options to fix this?

The above-referenced apps are now running on my OS X Server. To get PHP 7 running, check out my previous post:

https://www.schwie.com/brad/?p=325

To get owncloud running, I downloaded the tar’d files from download.owncloud.org, moved them to the following directory:

/Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/owncloud

And then changed the permissions so that Apache can run the show:

sudo chown -Rv _www /Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/owncloud

From there, everything installs as it should and despite the warnings about Mac OS X not being supported, owncloud 7 and 8 have been running fine for me.

I thought I needed PHP version 7 for our machine running OS X Server and used the following steps successfully:

1. Launch Terminal.app and execute the following commands:

curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 7.0
sudo pico /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2/httpd_server_app.conf

2. Search (control-w) for “php5_module” (for my system, it was line 184 – press control-c to see the line number in pico) and make these changes:

#Comment out the PHP5 module
#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

#Enable PHP 7 module
LoadModule php7_module /usr/local/php5-7.0.0RC8-20151127-210333/libphp7.so

LoadModule php7_module /usr/local/php5-7.0.10-20160831-102733/libphp7.so

Search (control-w) for “FilesMatch” (for my system, it was line 292) and paste in:
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php

3. Execute the following commands in Terminal.app to see your changes live:

sudo apachectl restart
php -version

So far PHP 7 seems to be compatible with other services that rely on PHP, so that’s good…

** UPDATE 6-12-2020 **
php 7.0.10 ran on my macOS Server, now running High Sierra, until today when WordPress reminded me this version of php is out of date. For those updating to php 7.3.8, check out my updated post.