Archive for April, 2008
« Previous EntriesRoad warrior security
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008I see that a group calling itself the Association of Corporate Travel Executives is warning its members to limit the amount of proprietary business information they carry on laptops and the like because they’re afraid that government agents can seize that data at border crossings.
Apple gets a taste of its own medicine
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008Think Apple has a monopoly on clever, entertaining ads bashing the competition? Think again. A new Lenovo ad cleverly shows why the Lenovo X300 is sleeker and more useful than the Macbook Air. I’ve got the video in my blog.
Apple gets a taste of its own medicine
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008Think Apple has a monopoly on clever, entertaining ads bashing the competition? Think again. A new Lenovo ad cleverly shows why the Lenovo X300 is sleeker and more useful than the Macbook Air. I’ve got the video in my blog.
One fix for PowerPC apps that won’t launch on Intel Macs
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008If you can’t get a PowerPC application to launch on an Intel Mac, try this odd-sounding workaround: hold down the Command, Shift, and Escape keys together as it’s launching. In my case, I was not able to launch PowerPoint v.X successfully. I tried the solution documented in this article on Apple’s site, but it didn’t work for me. The odd keystroke combo, however, got PowerPoint up and running.
[robg adds: I have no way of confirming this, as I’ve never had an issue launching Office v.X (and I do have Motion 2.1 and Final Cut Pro 5.1 installed, two apps listed in the Apple article). If anyone can confirm or refute this hint, please comment!]
10.5: Integrate EyeTV with Front Row via PyeTV
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
PyeTV is a free (open source) Front Row plug-in which allows access to EyeTV from within Front Row on Leopard, adding an EyeTV item to Front Row’s top level menu. The plug-in gives access to EyeTV’s recordings (grouped by series), along with an image preview and recording metadata.
PyeTV also integrates with ETVComskip, which allows users of EyeTV to enjoy commercial-free recorded television. PyeTV provides capabilities for turning commercial skipping on and off from within Front Row, as well as starting a commercial search for recordings which do not have commercial markers already.
10.5: Use Automator to create audiobooks from PDFs
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008I have recently undertaken some training in which I have to cover a massive amount of material. Being the natural procrastinator that I am, I immediately went on the prowl for better books, better methods, and all other sorts of periphery that doesn’t actually count as studying.
One of these projects was to convert the text versions of my study guides to audio, so that I could listen to the text in the car while I drive (an ideal time to study). The process was actually surprisingly simple. Start by opening the PDF in Preview, then press Command-A (select all) and Command-C (copy). Open a new document in TextEdit and press Command-V (paste), then convert the document to plain text (Format » Make Plain Text). Save the file to a .txt document; for this example, we’ll name it rawfile.txt.
At this stage, you might want to do some clean-up on the text. For instance, you might want to do some additional regular expression hacking to clean up the document for things…
Use Address Book with Microsoft Exchange using LDAP
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008This quick how-to deals with getting Address Book to work with LDAP (Microsoft Active Directory in our case).
Step 1: Determine the default naming context (base dn) for the search. Fire up Terminal and issue an ldapsearch to determine the default naming context:
$ ldapsearch -h your.exchange.server -x -b ” -s base ‘(objectclass=*)’ ‘namingContexts’
Search for the lines beginning with namingContexts:
namingContexts: DC=mycompany,DC=comnamingContexts: CN=Configuration,DC=mycompany,DC=comnamingContexts: CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=mycompany,DC=comThe result you are looking for is the “base/root” and that is the shortest one in the case of Exchange (BTW, this will work on other LDAP servers, too). In this case, that’s the first line, ie. DC=mycompany,DC=com.
Step 2: Configure Address Book to query the server. Fire up Address Book and go to the Preferences (Command-,). Select the L…
10.5: How to use ssh using ‘Back to My Mac’
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008My iMac is behind a satellite internet connection, which is very slow. Rather than using Screen Sharing or Finder’s file sharing for Back to My Mac, I often find it easier to use ssh. Until today I didn’t know how to connect to a Back To My Mac computer via ssh. It turns out that it’s very easy:
ssh -vvv -p 22 hostname.username.members.mac.com.Where hostname is the name you gave to the machine (i.e. the name that appears in Finder), and username is your .Mac username (i.e. if your email address is steve@mac.com, your .Mac username is steve). Note that there is a “.” at the very end of the command — I’ve had more consistent success using it that way. You can also try Terminal.app » Shell » New Remote Connection (or press Command-Shift-K) and then look under ‘Secure Shell (ssh) for “Discovered Servers”‘.
As…
Use a free LDAP server with Address Book
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008There have been discussions about sharing Address Book contacts through LDAP, and there have been many suggestions such as running OpenLDAP, using .Mac, or running dedicated apps on your Mac. In this day and age of Google Apps, I would think that someone (Google?) would have come up with a shared LDAP server that is free or low cost. Yes, there’s Plaxo, but it’s not LDAP — standards exist for a reason, and Apple has included LDAP client capabilities in Address Book for a while.
Then I stumbled on FreeLDAP.org. I think this is the only free LDAP server available on the Internet that could be used by multiple users accessing the same database. The setup instructions on the site do not work with the Mac’s Address Book. However, while browsing through their forums, I found this setup which works for me on my 10.4 system.
First you have to signup for a new free account at …
10.5: Build your own keyboard-based app launcher
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008I used to call Spotlight to open my apps, but since i have a slow hard drive, I started to look for faster options. I didn’t want to install Quicksilver or Launchbar or any other program for that. I had two goals:
- I should rely only on what OS X could offer me.
- I wanted fast access using only the keyboard.
So here’s what I did: I dragged the Applications folder to the dock, creating a Stack. It was set to Display as folder and View contents as list. In System Preferences » Keyboard & Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts, under the ‘Keyboard Navigation’ section, I checked the Move focus to the Dock box and used Control-Command-D as my shortcut. That’s all it took.
Here’s how it works: Hitting the shortcut keys brings the Dock to the front (or shows it if it’s hidden), so you can navigat…
Enter SIM card PIN via script for Huawei 3G USB modems
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008I always found it annoying that when I start Huawei’s MobileConnect application, I must first enter the PIN for accessing the SIM card of my USB 3G modem before I can connect to the provider. Luckily, the program is rather verbose with debug output. So it was quite easy to retrieve the essential part for entering the PIN. It simply consists of some good old Hayes AT modem-communication commands.
I wrote a Perl script that fetches the PIN to your SIM card from a Keychain entry. In order to use this script, you have to create a Keychain entry under the account simpin. Here’s how:
- Open Keychain Access (in Applications » Utilities)
- Menu: File » New Password Item
- Keychain Item Name: Enter something useful to you.
- Account Name: simpin
- Password: Enter the PIN to your SIM card (usually a number)
- Press Add
Note: when the …
iPhone 3G code discovered
Saturday, April 26th, 2008Looks like some code has been found in the latest development release of the iPhone SDK which makes reference to both 3G and EDGE networking. The code…
Lossless rotation of JPG images and thumbnails
Friday, April 25th, 2008I have been very frustrated by OS X’s (Preview app) handling of image rotation. You can, of course, have Preview rewrite the EXIF tag and make the image appear rotated, but as soon as you go to put that image on the web or use it in Word, etc, that rotation simply doesn’t exist. What’s more, even after you apply new icons to a file (i.e. using CocoThumbX), the icons might not show up correctly.
Until now, I used a combination of Preview (to modify the EXIF orientation value) and PhotoToolCM (to do lossless JPG rotations) to achieve images that look correct both in Preview and in non-EXIF/web apps. Well, I finally found a program that both rotates the image and the thumbnail consistently! Enter the freeware Cheese by Stuffware.co.uk. This is a bare-bones program that has two basic purposes: rotate pictures prop…
Lossless rotation of JPG images and thumbnails
Friday, April 25th, 2008I have been very frustrated by OS X’s (Preview app) handling of image rotation. You can, of course, have Preview rewrite the EXIF tag and make the image appear rotated, but as soon as you go to put that image on the web or use it in Word, etc, that rotation simply doesn’t exist. What’s more, even after you apply new icons to a file (i.e. using CocoThumbX), the icons might not show up correctly.
Until now, I used a combination of Preview (to modify the EXIF orientation value) and PhotoToolCM (to do lossless JPG rotations) to achieve images that look correct both in Preview and in non-EXIF/web apps. Well, I finally found a program that both rotates the image and the thumbnail consistently! Enter the freeware Cheese by Stuffware.co.uk. This is a bare-bones program that has two basic purposes: rotate pictures prop…
Sync or eject iPods/iPhones in iTunes via AppleScript
Friday, April 25th, 2008I find it frustrating that there’s no quick and easy way to sync my iPod and iPhone in iTunes without a degree of mouse movement and clicking (someone please correct me if I’m wrong!). Since I’m a keyboard navigation fan, I wrote some very simple AppleScripts to either sync or eject all iPods/iPhones currently connected to iTunes. The scripts are identical apart from the type of action:
Sync iPod.scpt:
tell application "iTunes" repeat with s in sources if (kind of s is iPod) then update s end repeatend tellEject iPod.scpt:
tell application "iTunes" repeat with s in sources if (kind of s is iPod) then eject s end repeatend tellI personally have these scripts in my user’s Library/Scripts folder, and use Quicksilver to quickly invoke them when I want to force a sync or eject of my iPod/iPhone.
10.5: Eject drives and run iSync before sleep via script
Friday, April 25th, 2008This is a little AppleScript that I wrote to check and ask if the machine should unmount peripheral disks, and optionally perform an iSync, before sleeping. I was motivated to write this after about the fifteenth time I woke my laptop up after taking it home from work only to be greeted with a warning that I did not properly disconnect my Time Machine Disk.
Additionally, since I use iSync to sync my date book and address book with my Nokia cell phone, I thought it would be a good idea to have it auto-sync before I put the machine to sleep. If you are capable with AppleScript, you can go in and make modifications for your system (e.g. turn off iSync, or the options to unmount). One caveat: if your home disk is not the same as the startup disk (unlikely on a laptop), the script will ask if you would like to unmount that disk before sleeping.
I packed the script as an application bundle (with a 10.5-sized icon) for optional placement directly into the dock — download …
10.5: Eject drives and run iSync before sleep via script
Friday, April 25th, 2008This is a little AppleScript that I wrote to check and ask if the machine should unmount peripheral disks, and optionally perform an iSync, before sleeping. I was motivated to write this after about the fifteenth time I woke my laptop up after taking it home from work only to be greeted with a warning that I did not properly disconnect my Time Machine Disk.
Additionally, since I use iSync to sync my date book and address book with my Nokia cell phone, I thought it would be a good idea to have it auto-sync before I put the machine to sleep. If you are capable with AppleScript, you can go in and make modifications for your system (e.g. turn off iSync, or the options to unmount). One caveat: if your home disk is not the same as the startup disk (unlikely on a laptop), the script will ask if you would like to unmount that disk before sleeping.
I packed the script as an application bundle (with a 10.5-sized icon) for optional placement directly into the dock — download …
10.5: Set up Time Machine on a NAS in three easy steps
Friday, April 25th, 2008Here’s a three-step process to create a Time Machine backup on a network-attached storage (NAS) unit.
- Create a sparsebundle image on your local system. I’m not sure of the reason why, but I haven’t been able to kick Time Machine off just by specifying a network share. It “prepares” for a while, then says it was unable to create the disk image. The solution appears to be to create a sparsebundle image locally. Thankfully, you don’t need multiple Macs like another post suggested; you can accomplish this using hdiutil like so:
hdiutil create -library SPUD -size $SIZESPEC -fs Journaled HFS+ -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname $MACHINENAME_$MAC_ADDRESS.sparsebundleWhere…
3G iPhone, June 9th
Friday, April 25th, 2008Agam Shah, IDG News Service is saying that the 3G iPhone will be announced on June 9th at the Apple WWDC. This jibes with my early February predictions pretty well. Apple has typically had about a six week lag between announcing products and delivering them. That would put the release date (when you and I can get our grubby hands on them) at July 21st - thereabouts.
Resolve a ssh public key connectivity issue
Thursday, April 24th, 2008Last night, I was setting up password-free SSH connections (using, basically, the information in this ancient hint) between my machines here in the house — at some point during all the 10.5 upgrading, I’d broken it between a couple of the boxes. Everything worked fine on the mini and the MacBook Pro, and when connecting from the Mac Pro to the other machines. Connecting to the Mac Pro, however, still required entering my password. I double and triple checked everything with the key files, tried RSA and DSA keys, and ran ssh in triple-debug (-vvv) mode. Nothing was any help at all.
Turning to Google, I (ironically) found the solution right here on our own forum site — in a thread that had been updated with the solution only a couple days ago. In a nutshell, the problem was that the permissions on my user’…
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