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Safari isn’t saving my password – or, Keychain Access Adventures

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Update 10/3/13 I’ve been getting a higher and higher number of people asking about Safari flat out refusing to save passwords on certain sites where it used to.

A bit of research made me realize what I should have known: Safari 6 and up will respect a website requesting that certain fields not be autocompleted (such as PayPal and Yahoo). There’s not much you can do about it within Safari, although you could use a third party password manager such as 1Password or a free extension (that link will download it) that would make Safari ignore the autocomplete request.

Update: I’m getting a surprising number of people from around the planet hitting this article, searching for things like ‘Safari isn’t saving password’, ‘Mac keychain’ and ‘why oh why am I always being asked for my keychain password someone help me please’. Anyway, if the article doesn’t answer the question, don’t hesitate to drop a question in the comments.

Your Mac, much like, say, a sheepdog, is supposed to make your life easier by fulfilling your commands. And much like a sheepdog, when you give it a clear, distinct command, and it lopes off into the sunset ignoring it completely, it’s apt to raise your blood pressure.

Just to take an example: lets say you’re doing your daily check in on your webmail, and lets say you’re using yahoo mail. You cheerfully plug in your username and password, and when Safari asks you ‘Hey, would you like to save this password for later?’ you say ‘yes.’

The next day, you happily surf back to Yahoo webmail, innocently expecting that there will be no more password typing for you (after all, typing 123456 can get a bit old).

As an unusually perspicacious individual (evidenced by you reading this blog), you’ve probably already guessed the punchline: not only has your Mac NOT remembered the password, but it pretty much refuses to do it even after you go through the entire denial, rage, and piteous begging stages of troubleshooting.

What is up?

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Set your Google privacy settings

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Note: This is a quick and dirty guide. We’ll be improving it a smidge over the up-coming days, to make it easier to understand!   First, log into your google account. You should be able to do that from just about any page with the word ‘google’ in it, including plain old google.com. If you … Read more

Creating Symlinks to shared folders and volumes

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I like to keep resources for current projects organized in specific folders on my hard drive, but for projects in which I’m collaborating it makes a lot more sense to keep them on the server, where everyone working on the project can pool their resources.

Creating an alias to something mounted on an AFP shared, however, won’t work that well. It’ll work from within the Finder, but if you use some other application that is setup to automatically pull up the project folder (like, for example, Transmit) it will just error out. 

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iPhone Error 3014: Just because I’m panicking doesn’t mean you should.

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Udate: It’s come to my attention that a number of people are wondering what, exactly, it means if your phone DOES give you an error of 3014. 

In my case, it was caused by Apple’s servers being overloaded, and iTunes couldn’t complete a connection to verify the update – IE, if iTunes can’t talk to the server, you won’t be able to update your phone. The other thing to note is that even just a slow internet connection can muck up your update, or any firewall issues. Bottom line, make sure that your computer has fast, unrestricted access to the internet.

A couple of days ago I, like many other millions of iPhone wielding techies, gleefully downloaded the latest update to the operating system, iOS 5. And it promptly bricked my phone.

I knew something was wrong the moment iTunes informed me, with clinical detachment, that an error of number 3014 had occurred and to please try again.

This is the sort of thing that makes ice trickle down my back when I’m at a client’s house – interrupted installs are never a good thing, in the same way that half-baked meatloaf is never a good thing.

But this wasn’t a client’s phone. I was in the inner sanctum of my office, so to speak, where computers go to be healed, not corrupted. So I spent a few moments frowning and poking and only then did the ice start to trickle on the spine.

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Copying DVD’s to your computer – or iPhone, or iPad, or whatever

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I get a lot of questions about how to get videos onto your iPhone or iPod or iPad or iMac or what i-have-you. There’s actually a really easy way to do this, and it has an added bonus of letting you get your current DVD library stored on your Mac. Outside of potentially saving space in your house, it has the benefit of having all your movies instantly available, and if you connect to a large display or a TV, well, that’s pretty darn convenient. Movies, much like music, are one of those things where a strong argument can be made for letting your computing devices take over. Saves you space, and makes it a great deal easier to find what you want.

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