Archive for June, 2008
« Previous EntriesUse wireless networking in safe boot mode
Monday, June 30th, 2008My friend has a much-loved 12″ PowerBook G4. Unfortunately, it has developed a VRAM error (confirmed by Apple Hardware Test) that makes it impossible to boot in “normal” mode. However, it can boot in Safe Mode, which seems to bypass the VRAM. The graphics are obviously not as good, but the computer is quite usable in Safe Mode.
My friend wants to use it as a surfing/email computer for his wife — but doesn’t want to shell out the $300+ for a new logic board installation to fix the VRAM. The only problem is that Safe Mode disables wireless networking! I searched in vain (via Google) for any tips to enable AirPort in Safe Mode. After a bit of thinking, I found a way to get wireless running in Safe Mode (on OS X 10.4, at least).
Open Terminal and enter:
$ sudo kextload /system/library/extensions/appleairport.kext$ sudo kextload /system/library/extensions/appleairport2.kextThen open the Network pane of System Preferences, and …
10.5: Enable https on 10.5’s Apache2 web server
Monday, June 30th, 2008
This short how-to explains how to get HTTPS/SSL working on Leopard, which uses apache2. First, follow the steps in this hint, but instead of following Step 5, do the following:
- Edit /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf, and uncomment the following line (it’s line 473 in my installation):
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf - Edit /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf, and make sure that:
- SSLCertificateFile points to newcert.pem
- SSLCertificateKeyFile points to webserver.nopass.key
- SSLCACertificateFile points to cacert.pem
- SSLCARevocationPath points to demoCA/crl
Be sure to include the full pathnames for each entry. Optionally…
Overclock your Mac Pro from 2.8GHz to 3.24GHz with easy tool
Saturday, June 28th, 2008In the PC World, it isn’t tough to get overclocking tools they have existed for years and can with cooling apparatus and other neat tricks double the speed of a typical CPU.
The Macintosh world and Apple’s EFI BIOS replacement make overclocking more difficult - well at least more rarely attempted. A few products have popped over the last few years but they have been very limited.
Earlier today, ZDNet.de released a tool that looks very promising in this regard.
Canada’s Rogers taking (rightful?) shellacking from Internet over iPhone pricing plans
Saturday, June 28th, 2008Just about everyone in the universe hates their mobile provider. Lock-ins, hidden charges, nickel and dime-ing and abysmal customer service plague most large carriers the world over. Rarely, however (Australia’s Telstra excluded) do we see the level of reactions that Rogers’ 3 Year/limited download iPhone plans have garnered.
10.5: Run a Time Machine backup then shut down
Friday, June 27th, 2008Here’s an AppleScript I use to run a Time Machine backup, and then shut down the machine. As is the case with most shut down scripts, I suppose it would be a good idea to quit whatever programs you know of that are open before running the
script.property querylist : {"backupd"}
property app_is_up : missing value
set app_is_up to false
do shell script
"/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-help
er > /dev/null 2>&1 &"repeat
delay 10
repeat with i in querylist
set the_ps to paragraphs of (do shell script "/bin/ps -acx")
tid("/")
repeat with _line in the_ps
...Post iTunes track info to del.icio.us via AppleScript
Friday, June 27th, 2008I work in an office with lots of Macs with iTunes libraries, and often play stuff off other people’s libraries to check it out. But I don’t want to be busy looking up bands when I’m at work, so I wrote two AppleScripts to post a link containing a Google search for the current iTunes track info to my del.icio.us account.
By default, the posts are given the tag musictoget. Then every couple of weeks, I check out what I’ve accumulated under my musictoget tag. One script works with regular tracks, and the other one works with streams (provided the stream contains artist and title information).
Script #1 (for regular tracks):
(*
"Track info to del.icio.us"uses del.icio.us API v1 - http://...
Create the illusion that Bonjour works over a VPN
Friday, June 27th, 2008If you’re a Mac user who often uses VPN connections, you’ll notice one very disappointing thing about connecting to your corporate or personal network over such tunneled connections: typically, Bonjour-style addresses (such as computer-name.local) don’t work. This is because multicast DNS (or mDNS) doesn’t work over a tunnel. Though there are ways to get it functional, they are pretty complicated and require that you have a lot of esoteric networking knowledge.
However, if the services you typically access via Bonjour use static IP addresses, then there is one age-old networking technique you can use to simulate Bonjour-style naming conventions without actually using Bonjour. This, of course, is the /etc/hosts file.
The /etc/hosts file is a simple, static, text-based mapping of computer names to IP addresses. It does exactly what Bonjour does, except it doesn’t keep itself up to date when things change. Of course, if you’re us…
Create the illusion that Bonjour works over a VPN
Friday, June 27th, 2008If you’re a Mac user who often uses VPN connections, you’ll notice one very disappointing thing about connecting to your corporate or personal network over such tunneled connections: typically, Bonjour-style addresses (such as computer-name.local) don’t work. This is because multicast DNS (or mDNS) doesn’t work over a tunnel. Though there are ways to get it functional, they are pretty complicated and require that you have a lot of esoteric networking knowledge.
However, if the services you typically access via Bonjour use static IP addresses, then there is one age-old networking technique you can use to simulate Bonjour-style naming conventions without actually using Bonjour. This, of course, is the /etc/hosts file.
The /etc/hosts file is a simple, static, text-based mapping of computer names to IP addresses. It does exactly what Bonjour does, except it doesn’t keep itself up to date when things change. Of course, if you’re us…
Revised theme now live…
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Those of you who visit here as guests, or who have the “Hints1″ theme selected in your preferences, have probably noticed that we’ve got a slightly revised appearance as of, oh, about five minutes ago. New logo, new story title colors and topic icons and text, and some links to other Macworld sites in the header are the most visible aspects of the changes we’ve made.
Going forward, we’ll probably be tweaking things a bit more as we move to the just-released Geeklog 1.5 — hopefully including a CSS-based theme that eliminates (or greatly reduces, at least) the use of the <table> tag in the current theme.
-rob.
Jailbreaking iPhones for business use
Thursday, June 26th, 2008What I do in my personal time is my business. If I choose to jailbreak my personal iPhone, that is my prerogative. For some reason, this is frowned upon somewhat by the mainstream business community. However, I’ve run into a case where I am going to have to insist on jailbreaking an employee’s iPhone….
Limit OS X Server VPN connections to one per user
Thursday, June 26th, 2008VPN in Mac OS X Server (all versions, I think) allows users to have as many sessions from as many different computers as they want to the VPN server. I didn’t like this, so I tried to find a way to restrict them to only one session. I tried looking at plists, thinking maybe Apple had some hidden option for this, but I couldn’t find it. I then dug around in man files for vpn and pppd and such, and found something of interest in pppd’s man page:
/etc/ppp/auth-up
A program or script which is executed after the remote system successfully authenticates itself. It is executed with the parameters:interface-name peer-name user-name tty-device speed
Note that this script is not executed if the peer doesn’t authenticate itself, for example when the noauth option is used.
Great! All I need now is some code and a way to find out which users are currently onlin…
Avoid a VirusBarrier slow down with Time Capsule
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I have a couple of machines that are using Time Machine to back up to a Time Capsule. Backups go fine, but restores have been painful. When I open up Time Machine, it appears to hang. Navigating to a particular date and then to a particular file takes a long, long time — it’s slow to the point where I usually end up Force Quitting it, thinking it was hung.After some research, I discovered that Intego VirusBarrier is responsible for the slow down. As you navigate, it must be actively scanning the Time Capsule backup. It is not noticeable on USB drive Time Machine restores, but it’s very noticeable on Time Capsule over the wireless network.
I disabled real time scanning and the restore flew. One can list the Time Capsule directory (mountpoint) in VirusBarrier’s exclude list, but that could be considered a security risk. A safer bet would be to just temporarily disable real…
Avoid a VirusBarrier slow down with Time Capsule
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I have a couple of machines that are using Time Machine to back up to a Time Capsule. Backups go fine, but restores have been painful. When I open up Time Machine, it appears to hang. Navigating to a particular date and then to a particular file takes a long, long time — it’s slow to the point where I usually end up Force Quitting it, thinking it was hung.After some research, I discovered that Intego VirusBarrier is responsible for the slow down. As you navigate, it must be actively scanning the Time Capsule backup. It is not noticeable on USB drive Time Machine restores, but it’s very noticeable on Time Capsule over the wireless network.
I disabled real time scanning and the restore flew. One can list the Time Capsule directory (mountpoint) in VirusBarrier’s exclude list, but that could be considered a security risk. A safer bet would be to just temporarily disable real…
Avoid a VirusBarrier slow down with Time Capsule
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I have a couple of machines that are using Time Machine to back up to a Time Capsule. Backups go fine, but restores have been painful. When I open up Time Machine, it appears to hang. Navigating to a particular date and then to a particular file takes a long, long time — it’s slow to the point where I usually end up Force Quitting it, thinking it was hung.After some research, I discovered that Intego VirusBarrier is responsible for the slow down. As you navigate, it must be actively scanning the Time Capsule backup. It is not noticeable on USB drive Time Machine restores, but it’s very noticeable on Time Capsule over the wireless network.
I disabled real time scanning and the restore flew. One can list the Time Capsule directory (mountpoint) in VirusBarrier’s exclude list, but that could be considered a security risk. A safer bet would be to just temporarily disable real…
How to access Time Machine files from Linux
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Recently after switching from Mac OS X to Debian, I found I needed to restore a couple files from the Time Machine backup that I kept. The drive works just fine as an HFS+ mount, but I couldn’t figure out how to retrieve anything within. When Google didn’t yield the answer, I began to explore on my own.
It turns out Apple does a couple slick things with the file system to make incremental backups work, including hard linking to directories, which isn’t allowed in Linux. So for anyone that needs to access their Time Machine from something other than its associated Mac, here’s how you do it…
[robg adds: The following details were reproduced (with minor editing) using the author’s original blog post, with his permission.]
- Mount the drive. On linux, it should automount if you have gnome-volume-manager installed. If you don’t see it in /media, then run nautilus and check the deskt…
New poll on iTunes Music library item counts posted…
Thursday, June 26th, 2008In looking through the polls we’ve posted here over the years, I was shocked that we’ve never asked about music collections. That oversight is fixed with today’s poll, which asks how many songs are in your iTunes Music library. Note that we’re interested just in Music, not Movies, Audiooks, Podcasts, etc.
To cover a wider range of music collection sizes, the poll also uses a non-linear spread of answers. Smaller sizes are separated into 500-count buckets, which increases to 1,000-count and then 5,000-count buckets for the medium and larger collections. While this means you can’t read the results in a linear fashion, it will show more detail for those with larger collections — otherwise, this poll would’ve maxed out around 10,000 songs, which I know a lot of people are well over.
Yours truly? 3,920 songs, and not growing very rapidly at all — so far this year, I’ve only added 14 so…
Why I love Apple’s Time Machine
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Water and computers do not mix. But when, on occasion they do, you’d better hope the computer in question — in this case a 2006 Mac Book Pro — has Time Machine installed.
Dear Microsoft, thanks for the help, Linux
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will ho ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You’ve given us the best shot we’ll ever have of taking the desktop.
Avoid repetitive repagination in long Word documents
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008I write long structured documents using Word for Mac. One of my big gripes has been how Word seems to repaginate every time you look at it funny, and how long it takes to do that repagination on long documents. I am a heavy user of styleref fields to automatically generate text for me.
On a hunch, I removed the styleref entry I was using in the footer, and simply typed the text in directly. My 370 page document now repaginates in less than two seconds, compared to the thirty seconds it was taking before. So, on the odd chance that anyone else might be suffering the same issue, I thought I’d pass on what worked for me.
Toggle Wacom tablets’ dual/multi display support
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Display toggle and screen switching via ExpressKey or button activation is only available in the Wacom driver for professional products, and (unfortuantely) is not included in the driver for the Graphire series and below. An alternative way to switch between screens/tablet setups is AppleScript GUI scripting, and some people have been successful with this method. However, with driver version 5.05-3, it seems impossible to reach the GUI elements in the “Details…” sub-menu with AppleScript. Direct scripting of the PenTabletDriver.app should also be possible (according to the AppleScript Editor’s Dictionary function), but does not work.
So I looked for an alternative, and ended up with the following, which I use to toggle between my two screens and “all screens” — and it can easily be changed to fit other setups.
- Launch the AppleScript Editor and save three empty scripts as applications to your preferred place (e.g. Applications in your home-directory). I’ve named min…
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- Launch the AppleScript Editor and save three empty scripts as applications to your preferred place (e.g. Applications in your home-directory). I’ve named min…