Open Links from Mail in the Background
Tired of switching back and forth between Mail and your Web browser every time you click a link in a TidBITS issue or other email message? Here's an easy workaround. Hold down the Command key when you click links in Mail to open them in your browser without switching away from Mail. That way you can keep reading in Mail and then read all the Web pages you've opened.
Written by
Adam C. Engst
Recent TidBITS Talk Discussions
- Alternatives to MobileMe for syncing calendars between iPad/Mac (1 message)
- Free anti-virus for the Mac (20 messages)
- iTunes 10 syncing iPod Touch 4.1 (2 messages)
- Thoughts about Ping (16 messages)
Published in TidBITS 970.
Subscribe to our weekly email edition.
- MyAlltop Enables Personal News Aggregation
- Sony Reader Gets 500,000 Free Public Domain Titles from Google
- Kodak Gallery Joins Parade of Free-with-Payment Services
- WeatherCal Inserts Updating Forecasts into iCal
- Apple Previews iPhone 3.0 Software
- EMC Ships Modernized Retrospect 8
- TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 23-Mar-09
- ExtraBITS for 23-Mar-09
- Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk for 23-Mar-09
AirPort Firmware May Resolve Time Capsule Disk Problems
The 7.4.1 firmware update for all Apple 802.11n AirPort base stations - any model released since 2007 - combined with Mac OS X 10.5.6 may fix Time Capsule disk corruption problems that some people have experienced. Colleagues Shawn King (Your Mac Life) and John Gruber (Daring Fireball) have recently explained to me problems they had with Time Machine disk image integrity and kernel panics. I also saw repeated disk image corruption in my testing last year.
While Apple provided no details on how or why corruption might occur in disk images that Time Machine writes to a Time Capsule internal or external drive, this update is designed to avoid problems that led to such corruption. If that sounds overly circumspect, well, we are talking about Apple here, but I was assured that a small number of edge cases like mine should now be resolved. (Note that Apple still officially supports only external drives connected to a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups, not drives connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station.)
One piece of advice if you've had problems in the past: Back up any existing Time Machine disk images to an external disk using the Archive feature in Disk Utility, erase them from the drive, and start fresh with new Time Machine backups.
In some cases, mounting the Time Capsule volume via AFP, launching Disk Utility, dragging the corrupted disk image into the program, and then using the Disk First Aid > Repair Disk feature may correct errors, although it could take many hours for a large backup disk. I recommend the fresh start approach for most people, though.
Time Machine works as an incremental backup system, writing all files on a selected system to a disk image in a first pass, and then creating only copies of files that have changed each hour while Time Machine is active.
But Time Machine also creates what's effectively a snapshot of a hard drive for each backup, which necessitates making vast numbers of hard links, which reference any unchanged files. This can be difficult to do reliably over a network and may have been part of the trouble with corruption occurring over time.
![](/file/11593/db.tidbits.com.tar/db.tidbits.com/images/badges/StuffItDeluxe2010.gif)
share, and compress all of your photos, audio and documents.
Compress it. Secure it. Send it. Try StuffIt Deluxe 2011 today!
Click here for a free 30-day trial: <http://stuffIt.com/tidbits/>