“Licensing for this product has expired”
“The serial number you used to activate this product has expired”
“Invalid serial number. The serial number appears to be invalid”

- Adobe CS5, 2010

To stop Adobe CS5 calling home to Mother Ship on your mac in OS X you need to edit the hosts file as described in ‘Stop Adobe CS4 calling home to Mother Ship in OS X’.

Simply follow the instructions in the ‘Stop Adobe CS4 calling home to Mother Ship in OS X’ tutorial and use the list of hosts below for CS5:

# Block Adobe Activation
127.0.0.1 hl2rcv.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 t3dns.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sea.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sjc0.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 crl.verisign.net
127.0.0.1 CRL.VERISIGN.NET
127.0.0.1 ood.opsource.net
127.0.0.1 209-34-83-73.ood.opsource.net
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 tpractivate.adobe.newoa
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.ntp
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.ipp
127.0.0.1 ereg.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wwis-dubc1-vip60.adobe.com

Mac OS X Leopard only includes spell check support for about 9 distinct languages; English (4 varieties of), German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Danish, and Portugese (2 varieties of). You would think that if you did not speak any of these languages Apple would have provided some downloadable Apple Dictionary dictionaries (.dict) on their site which other foreign language speakers could install. Sadly this is not the case.Recently I was looking to provide Croatian language spell check for a friend and ended up finding a solution for almost all foreign languages!

The solution is the OS X port of Aspell, the open source spell check software, called CocoAspell. CocoAspell installs an OS X System Preference pane and comes bundled with a few dictionaries. Additional spell check dictionaries can be downloaded from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html

There are many Aspell dictionaries, including ones for Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Norwegian, Malay, Croatian, Macedonian, Indonesian, Welsh, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Kurdi, Romanian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic and Zulu.

Additional dictionaries are installed by placing the uncompressed dictionary folder in /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell and then re-launching the cocoAspell System Preference pane. Activate the dictionaries by ticking them in the pref pane.Once activated the language you wish to spell check must then be selected in the TextEdit’s ‘Spelling and Grammar’ window: Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar. Apps must be re-launched to recognise the change in dictionary.

CocoAspell only provides spell check support for OS X apps like TextEdit, Safari and Pages, and other 3rd party apps that hook in to Dictionary.app. CocoAspell does not provide spell check support for MS Office for Mac. Spell check solutions for unsupported languages in Word rely on creating a custom dictionary. A tutorial on this process will be published shortly.

Aspell is an active project and new dictionaries are being produced the whole time.

Enjoy!

[ ⌘ / ⌥ / ⎇ / ⏎ / ⌫ / ⏏ / ⌚ ]

We’ve all seen those cool modifier key characters / symbols / fonts / icons in OS X documentation for the command key, control key, shift key and alt key. So where are they buried and how can I get one into a document? Simple:

1. Open System Preferences

2. Go to ‘International’ then ‘Input Menu’

3. Put ticks next to ‘Character Palette’ and ‘Show Input Menu in Menu Bar’



4. Quit System Preferences.

5. Click the flag in the top menu bar and select ‘Show Character Palette’

6. In Character Palette select ‘View > All Characters’

7. Click the disclosure triangle next to ‘Symbols’ and select ‘Technical Symbols’. Here you will also find symbols for delete key, tab key, return key, eject key and many more.



8. Now you can see all your favorite modifier key symbols which you can copy/paste or drag/drop into documents you are creating.