Tag Archives: bugs

iTunes will not Shut Down

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I have a Mac Mini with Lion and the latest version of iTunes installed. Occasionally iTunes will do something strange and today was one of those days. I was on iTunes listening to some music and podcasts. When I was finished I went to shut it down. After I shut it down it popped back open. I tried to shut it down again and the same thing happened. I then tried to force close it and still it popped open. The only way I could get rid of it was to shut the computer down by using the power button. This is not a practical solution so I started to do some research.

I started to search the Apple forums for an answer. The first answer I found said to repair your disk permissions. To repair permissions you go under Utilities, then Disk Utilities and then choose your home hard drive and then click repair disk permissions. Repairing disk permissions took about twenty minutes and when it was done, I restarted iTunes and then closed it down and again it popped back open. Another person suggested moving the iTunes .plist from the Preference folder which is in the Home Folder to the Desktop. So I tried that and again iTunes popped back open. I went back and re-entered the search string and realized I had been looking at an older forum. I found a more recent forum from 2011 and one of the posters commented that on occasion a dashboard widget can cause this problem. The light bulb went off in my head, when I remembered that I had attempted to use the Red Alarm Widget earlier in the day. I deleted the widget and that solved the problem.  I still not sure why it worked since when I reinstalled the widget and restarted iTunes with the alarm turned on, I was able to successfully close iTunes down. The same thing had happened once before several months ago and that time the problem application was Plex. Again when I uninstalled Plex and then reinstalled it everything worked normally.  Have you run into this problem and did you find a different solution. Finally does anyone know what is causing this problem to spring up every once in a while.

Ghostery-Whose Watching You

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Have you ever been on a site and wondered who might be looking at your activity and tracking you as you browse about the Internet. Well now you can know by using an extension called Ghostery. Ghostery is available for Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Opera. It looks for scripts, pixels and other information that indicates a company’s code is present on the page. Often that information is not available in the source code and therefore is invisible to the consumer. Ghostery only collects information from users who opt in to GhostRank and then it is aggregated data. The information is never used for advertising purposes. Evidon who owns Ghostery uses the information collected to discover new trackers on the Internet. They also track whether the ads are compliant with the industries self-policing standards. You can see further detail on Ghostery privacy policy by visiting their site. You have the option to use Ghostery to block bugs if you want, however it is experimental.

I’ve been using Ghostery for about a month now and is interesting to see how many ad and other companies are tracking you as you browse the web. Most sites will have about five or six companies listed. There are sites that have over 20 tracking bugs on them. After using Ghostery for a while you will notice the same names coming up again and again; Google Ad-sense, Google Analytics, [DoubleClick are three of the more popular bugs. There are also names you will not recognize like Unica, which is part of IBM. When you are on a web site you can click on the Ghostery extension and then the company link and look at the code and scripts that Ghostery is seeing. You can also get further information on those companies by following the link on the script page. I have not used Ghostery to block scripts or bugs, so I don’t know how well that works. Based on my experience so far with Ghostery, I suspect it works well .

I like Ghostery because it is easy to use, it gives a lot of information and it is transparent in what it is doing. Do you an extension similar to Ghostery, what does it have that Ghostery doesn’t.