Knowhows

How to do things and make them work.

Swapping Backquote/Tilda and Section/Paragraph keys on MacBook EU/RU keyboard in Mac OS X Lion 10.7

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Recently I’ve changed my MacBook US keyboard to European one. Everything is fine with it except for the Tilda(~) key, which is located between Left Shift and Z keys on the EU keyboard, whereas usually it is located under Esc key on US and most PC keyboards. I do not know what was the purpose of this relocation or what historical background are behind it; I don’t care. What I care is that such location makes the use of Tilda key very annoying. And here is how I’ve solved it.

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MacBook Air 13″ mid-2011 (A1369) top case with US and RU/EU keyboard layouts

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MacBook Air 13" mid-2011 top case with US keyboard layout (flooded)

Here are MacBook Air keyboards with US and RU (EU) layout, so as internal side of MacBook Air so called “top case” with keyboard attached.

Recently I’ve flooded my MacBook Air 13″ mid-2011 with half a bottle of Coca-Cola 1L late-2011. Luckily, after immediate removal of the liquids, it was still working, more or less. Only “<” and “>” keys stopped working, keys’ lights persistently dimmed, and all the keys became sticky while typing.

To repair MacBook Air Unibody after such a flooding, you cannot just replace a keyboard. You have to replace the whole top case, which includes keyboard and all the whole aluminum plate with palm rests; the top case does not include the touch pad (only a hole for it).

At the same time I’ve decided to replace US keyboard layout (this MacBook Air was bought in US) with Russian one, which is a subkind of European. Here you can compare US and RU/EU keyboard layouts:

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NTFS-3G in Mac OS X Lion (10.7) with read-write support

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UPD 21.08.2011: There is even better way to solve the same issue with native Mac OS X drivers, but it has its own pros and cons. Read at the end for details.

UPD 12.09.2011 (IMPORTANT): Native driver makes NTFS unusable. Read below for details.

Mac OS X Lion (10.7) was released recently, in the end of July 2011. And many users had started to complain that their NTFS disks stopped working. And the much worse problem is that “old” solutions do not work well.

But after one or two weeks of researching of this issue, I’ve managed to make NTFS work in Mac OS X Lion (10.7). The key here is a proper combination of software versions.

So I will shortly describe the usual choices for external data storages, and what problems arises with each of them. And later I will show how you can get the most universal way — NTFS — to work where it does not work by default, with links and pictures.

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COM Surrogate has stopped working in Windows Photo Viewer

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Suddenly my Microsoft Windows 7 started to throw “COM Surrogate” error when I try to view any picture with its built-in Windows Photo Viewer. The advices which you can find in the internet says to reinstall Nero or codec packs. I have neither of them, but only more or less clean Windows installation and all its usual updates.

In a nutshell, “COM Surrogate” is DllHost.exe process created by any other process, which wants to execute some code from any DLL (code library), but it doesn’t want to execute the code in its own space since it does not trust the code in terms of stability. So it creates a “surrogate” to execute the code. If that DLL code dies during execution, only DllHost.exe surrogate process dies (giving us this “COM Surrogate has stopped working” error) and the initial process stills alive. If this killing code were executed in the initial process directly, then the initial process dies instead of surrogate.

Though actually we have no need to care what it is and what all this means and how things work. We want our photos being shown.

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