Skype always irritated me with its automatic microphone volume changes. The Windows version has the ability to disable this option in the preferences pane, but the Mac version does not. Today, I spent some time trying to solve this problem. After some searching on net, I found a solution for the Windows version which also works on the Mac.

Quit Skype and open the folloving file with TextEdit: ~/Library » Application Support » Skype » shared.xml. At the end of the document, you'll see this section:

<VoiceEng>  <MicVolume>77</MicVolume></VoiceEng>

Simply change this section to look like this (adding one new line):

<VoiceEng>  <AGC>0</AGC>  <MicVolume>100</MicVolume></VoiceEng>

AGC means Automatic Gain Control, and setting it to 0 disables this feature. Set it to 1 if you want to enable it again. The MicVolume can range from 0 (mute) to ...

The problem: You have Time Machine set up using a sparsebundle on a network drive, such as a Time Capsule or an AirPort Extreme-connected hard drive. Most of the time, everything works great. Consider this reproducible scenario, however:

1. You are working away at home and a hourly backup starts. Time machine automagically mounts the sparsebundle.
2. You need to leave and put your laptop to sleep, not paying attention to the fact that time machine is working.
3. You move your laptop to work/school and wake it up.
4. The sparsebundle is still mounted, but obviously does not work. Finder and Spotlight grow increasing stuck until you have to reboot your machine. It occurs to you that the image back home was not closed properly and that eventually, this will corrupt your backups!

Solution:

1. Install SleepWatcher (I ...
   
   
   

One of the things that makes Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) so useful it that it can integrate, to varying degrees, with all broswers via its JavaScript bookmarklets. Many other sites also use these -- for example, I have bookmarklets for Digg, FaceBook, and more. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to activate these from a keyboard shortcut? You can!

1. Add a bookmarklet to your Bookmarks menu, not to your favorites bar.
2. In System Preferences, go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, and add a keyboard shortcut with the exact name of your bookmarklet. You can specify the application as either your chosen browser, or for All Applications if you use multiple browsers. If you choose All Applications, just make sure the bookmarklet has the same name in all browsers.

Now I can post to Delicious by pressing the same keyboard shortcut everywhere. Yay!

[robg adds: This work...