iSight Silliness

I love my iMac. Really. Truly. Love it. Every so often it does something to test my patience.

When the mood strikes me, I like to take a self-portrait using Photo Booth, the cute little app that Apple has built. I send the photo of to friends and loved ones. It is a more interesting way of saying hi than:

Hey –
What’s up?
I’m bored.

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At any rate, I wanted to do that this afternoon. I fire up Photo Booth and it tells me another application is using the iSight camera, please close that application and try again.

  1. What a very Windows-esque uninformative error. How the hell was I supposed to know which application had the camera pinned?
  2. Why didn’t I get the choice to close the mystery app from the error message?
  3. WTF? See #1

I searched the process list to no avail. I went so far as to log out and log back in. Nothing. I deleted Photo Booth’s plist. Nada.

So I used the intarwebs to go to the Google. Sure enough, people are having the same issue I am. “Solutions” range from zapping the PRAM to renewing your DHCP lease. As my dad would say, “That’s about as helpful as pig in shit” – no idea what that really means but it sounds appropriate.

I took the very drastic action of rebooting. REBOOTING! My Mac. Yes, I rebooted. This, in my opinion, is an admission of total and utter failure.

And now I can take silly picture with Photo Booth. Aren’t you glad?
It works!