Resolving Liquid and Hyperwords errors – com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree

Even on a Mac things can go awry. The nifty Liquid app was spewing out errors in the Console

com.apple.xpc.launchd: (com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree) Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Console errors

Others have observed that just deleting the Liquid app will not remove the errors. You will need to dig a little deeper and delete…

com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree from the Containers folder in your Library

~/Library/Containers

com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree.plist from the Preferences folder in your Library

~/Library/Preferences

com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree from the system’s…

/private/var/folders/vx/qbl8t4dn1dsbjqc4_67vymg80000gn

(that last bit may be different for you).

If you have trouble finding these folders the nifty PopClip app can, once you have selected the text, offer you a folder icon that will take you straight to the desired location.

Alternatively the nifty Hazel app will find all those extraneous files, when you have moved the main app to the Trash, and ask if you want to delete those too.

Once it is all cleared out a fresh install from the App Store and all is well again.

Today’s secret word is Nifty.

X is for OS X

Who does not love a good computer operating system? I know I do – every day.

As the classic Mac OS grew in to an ever growing tangle of code it was decided to find a replacement and start again. Several options were available and a likely contender was the Be system but ultimately Apple decided to buy NeXTSTEP which had been created by NeXT the company that Steve Jobs had started after leaving Apple – effectively bring Jobs back to Apple. NeXTSTEP was reworked in to a new version of Mac OS. As it would be the tenth version, was based on a UNIX system and was a departure from the last version Mac OS 9 it was called Mac OS X rather but still pronounced 10. The name was later shortened to just OS X. It is now expected to revert back to Mac OS so as to fit in with iOS, tvOS and watchOS.

O is for Oscillators

Who does not love messing about building software synthesisers? I know I do and a basic component for these are oscillators.

Oscillators are used in all manner of things but it is the wobbly wobbly oscillations that can be used to produce a sound that are of most interest. Such things have been around since the late 1800s but today one can recreate their functions with computer software. Here is a simple example I made using the excellent Audulus app.

Yosemite on a 2007 iMac

One star reviews in the App Stores are a constant source of fascination and the release of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) has provided rich pickings. Of course it is frustrating when things are not working properly but many reviewers seem to imagine that the problems they experience with their computers are universal and affecting everyone – there would be rioting in the streets if that were the case. Some even seem to suggest that positive reviews are some form of Apple inspired conspiracy…

who wrote five star

The reviewers share their homilies so the rest of us can benefit from their wisdom and insights. One common theme is that Yosemite should never be installed on an older computer as it will be unbearably slow…

Mediocre

I write this on a 2007 iMac with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor which is the oldest Mac that is able to run Yosemite. It is used and abused on a daily basis. The update to Yosemite was going to be the excuse to clear it out, reformat the drive and have a fresh clean install but I chickened out as it would be too much hassle to set everything up again and so Yosemite was just slapped on top of everything else…

Over 40000 emails (I did not notice the palindromic number when I took the screen shot)…

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 20.10.28

Over 1000 apps in the Applications folder…

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 20.11.06

A couple of hundred bits and pieces installed with Homebrew and a menu bar full of stuff half of which I have forgotten what they do…

Menu bar icons
Menu bar icons

Not to mention half a dozen terabytes of external storage hanging off the back.

So how does Yosemite run on this aged, under powered, over loaded wreck? Splendidly…

A couple of minutes worth of Activity Monitor monitoring the activity (that is what it does best) recorded with Screen Flow – so they both occupy high ratings but nothing too taxing.

Thankfully some reviewers manage to figure out that their frustrations are fixable…

15 min fix

Whilst others plant their tongue firmly in their cheek…

Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 10.34.03

Set up Xiki with Aquamacs

Step by step set up using Aquamacs editor with the awesome Xiki…

From these instructions.

Ingredients:

A Mac running OS X Mavericks which should have Ruby 1.9.3 as the default version.

Jewellery Box to manage your Ruby versions (RVM) and gems

The Aquamacs editor.

Xiki

Recipe:

Open the Terminal and install the Xiki gem…

$ gem install xiki

Verify that all is well…

$ xiki

A Xiki directory will have been created in your Home folder so jump into that…

$ cd ~/xiki/

Then run the set up script…

$ bash etc/install/el4r_setup.sh

You will now need an editor that will see an invisible file (the dot at the start of the name hides the file from being listed in a Finder window: .el4r). I use BBEdit but the free version called Text Wrangler will do the job…

Show hidden files
Select the Show hidden items option

Add these lines to the end of the init.rb file in the .el4r folder within the xiki folder within your Home folder…

$LOAD_PATH.unshift “~/xiki/lib”
require ‘xiki’
Xiki.init

KeyBindings.keys # Use default key bindings
Themes.use “Default” # Use xiki theme

Fire up Aquamacs and it should drop you straight into Xiki…

Welcome to Xiki in Aquamacs
Welcome to Xiki in Aquamacs

Happy Birthday Mac!

Can it really have been 30 years ago today that the world was introduced to the Macintosh?

Before the presentation the 27 year old Steve Jobs was shaking with fear and anticipation; “I’m scared shitless” he uttered and then stepped on stage and changed the world – a feat he would repeat several times.

Today, when all computers work like the Macintosh it is hard to imagine what was so special about windows, menus, scrolling text, graphics, speech synthesis etc. all chugging along on an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor and 128 Kb of RAM. The wonderful Cathode can take your modern Mac back to those wonderful pre-Mac days…

Jobs and Steve Wozniak had defined what a personal computer would be like and how it would work. IBM dominated the world of computing and were venturing into the fledgling personal micro computer market (micro computers as opposed to the mainframe and mini computers widely used at the time). The Apple II dominated the personal computer market of the day; introducing the world to the Spreadsheet and providing work for a small company called Microsoft..

microsoftcard1980

The Apple II would continue to sell well despite the appearance of the Mac. The personal computer belonged to the individual and would empower them in their daily lives; liberating them from the corporate controlled IBM computers operated in the basement by boffins. That was the Big Brother that the Mac was designed to destroy….

Jobs saw the personal computer as something you could pick up and carry – the Apple II was a wedge shape so you could tuck it under your arm and the Mac had a built in carrying handle. The IBM personal computer models fail this basic requirement…

Just one year later Jobs will be sacked not to return to the then nearly bankrupt Apple in 1997.

Shove Lemur from an iPad on a Mac

Adapted from this Windows tutorial…

It is much the same procedure but as the Mac speaks fluent MIDI there is no need to add anything.

Ingredients:

A Mac
Ableton Live
iPad
Lemur app
Shove template
ClyphX/Push folders
(Requires a RAR Unpacker if you do not have one)

Procedure:

Right click on the Ableton Live icon and select Show Package Contents

showpack

Drill down to the MIDI Remote Scripts folder

contents

appres

MIDIrem

Rename the Push folder as Original_Push

Unpack the RAR file containing the ClyphX/Push folders and put those folders in the MIDI Remote Scripts folder

If your WiFi network is liable to interference/lag you should create an ad-hoc network. The video below just connects via the regular WiFi network.

adhoc

In the iPad’s WiFi settings select your ad-hoc network if you created one

Start the Lemur app and load the Shove template from the Lemur editor on the Mac

In the Mac’s MIDI/Audio set up Utility select the Network button

Connect the iPad to the Session

Open Ableton Live and then its Preferences

Select Push and Cyphx as Input Devices and the network session as Input and Output

livepref

Shove away…