[gdw-mac]

Hello all, I am still a Noob (got it right this time)

I have really 2 questions,
1 - On the taskbar at the bottom of my screen, I see a little thing that looks like a calandar, but the date on it is 17, and when I click on and open iCal the date changes to the correct date. How do I make sure that the date is always right without haveing to open the program ?

2 - I have an Ext USB 40gig HDD that is from my PC, someone told me that I could use this on my new laptop, but when I plug it into the USB port on the back of my PowerBook it is not recognized. I do not see a picture on my screen, as I do when I put a DVD in. Is there something that I have to do to the HDD, or am I just SOL ?

Thanks
George

[albook]

1. iCal's icon is static. Afaik there are no way to get it to display todays date.
2. The USB disk have to use a filesystem that is recognized by Mac OS X. FAT32 and HFS will work, unsure about NTFS and EXT3 etc. Open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app and see if its detected.

[Fusion]

Yeah, albook answered everything correctly.

The easiest way to get the icon right all the time is just to leave iCal open. Set it to open when you log in through the Accounts preference pane, and you will never see the wrong date again.

Once you open Disk Utility, select the drive in the left hand pane and use the erase option. Choose either HFS+ or FAT32. This will erase everything on the disk so make sure you have a backup. With FAT32, the disk will work between your Mac and PC natively. With HFS+, there is a program on the PC that will allow you to read/write to the disk and it will work with the Mac natively.

My guess is that the disk is formatted with NTFS, which OS X 10.3 and above can read just fine but cannot write to.

Oh, and P.S., that "Taskbar" at the bottom of your screen is known as the "Dock" and the bar at the top of the screen is known as the "Menu Bar."

[Since EBCDIC]

This MacOsXHints hint shows how to start and quit iCal via AppleScript, leaving the Dock with the correct date.

Setting this to be a cron job (also in the hint) to run at 00:01 daily would have done the trick.

But, alas, it seems that iCal has been "fixed" in Tiger so that the Dock date reverts to the 17th.

This seems like such a glaring ugly oversight on Apple's part that I'm surprized it's survived this long. The Steve and his minions is rarely so sloppy.

Sorry.

[tooki]

Or just leave iCal open all the time. It's not like it uses any noticeable amount of RAM or CPU.

Or just remove it altogether and click on the menu bar clock when you want to know the date. Or use Dashboard...

tooki