sadevil.org

Because I keep forgetting them, here’s a list of buttons you can press during a Mac’s boot to change behaviour:

See also Apple article HT1343

For my PVR/HTMAC project, I wanted to auto-mount several shares from my NAS. After some searching I ran across this hint on the Mac OS X Hints website, which works perfectly:

Basically, you add the shares you want to mount to the /etc/fstab file, with this syntax:

excalibur:/music x url net,automounted,url==cifs://guest:@excalibur/music 0 0
excalibur:/photos x url net,automounted,url==cifs://guest:@excalibur/photos 0 0
excalibur:/videos x url net,automounted,url==cifs://guest:@excalibur/videos 0 0

That way, those shares will allways be mounted under /Network/Servers, and always available, starting boot-time. Works like a charm ;)

I recently acquired a Mac Mini, which I’m going to use as a PVR.

Together with an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid it works perfectly, attached to my good old analogue 21″ Sony TV .

Sofar it seems to work fine, using a DVI-to-svideo convertor. I’ve installed the EyeTV software, the PyeTV Front Row plugin (which allows me to controle EyeTV from within Front Row) and Perian (for more codec support in Front Row)

More on this can be found on the Hicksdesign blog ;)

On TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) they’ve got a nifty tips section, with today this tip that I rather like:

How to add recent applications as a Stack on the Dock:

Run this in Terminal.app:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

on one line, and then restart the Dock (killall Dock).

Et voila! If you don’t like it, just drag it off again.

After yesterday’s clone I noticed some applications behaved erraticly, amongst which Preview, Thunderbird, Appfresh… rather irritating.

After some searching I found the fix on this CCC Forum thread:

sudo chgrp wheel /var/folders/*
sudo chmod 700 $TMPDIR
sudo chown $USER $TMPDIR

In short, the permissions for that directory werent taken over correctly from the original, hence the problems. All fixed now ;)

Upgraded my Macbook with a bigger disk: from an 80gb Toshiba MK8034GSX drive (with which it came delivered) to a (secondhand) 320gb Hitachi HTS543232L9A300 (what’s in a name…). Long live diskspace! ;)

And thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner the migration was painless.

Here’s a short how-to to get the iodine dns tunnel working on your Mac.

In this short howto, I’ll assume you’ll be using a linux server to act as your gateway to the world. I’ll also assume you’ve read the iodine documentation and setup your DNS accordingly. For my example, I’ll be using a (nonexistant) DynDNS.org static DNS entry, iodine.rulestheworld.tld. I’ll also assume that you’ll be using a public internet address of 1.2.3.4, and a private subnet of 10.0.0.1.

1. Install the tun/tap driver for Mac OS X. Easy as doing *click* *click* done! :p
2. Next, install iodine on your Mac. Easy as download, extract, and typing make; make install
3. Now, install iodine on your linux box. It’s included in the package repositories of the usual suspects, for instance debian: apt-get install iodine.

   Start it (or configure it to use) with:
   iodined -P <password> <unused private IP> <dns name>
   or in our example:
   iodined -P mypass 10.0.0.1 iodine.rulestheworld.tld

   This should return the following:

   Opened dns0
   Setting IP of dns0 to 10.0.0.1
   Setting MTU of dns0 to 1024
   Opened UDP socket
   Listening to dns for domain iodine.rulestheworld.tld

4. Configure your linux box for IP forwarding: sysctl -e net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
(and add this to your /etc/sysctl.conf file), and configuring your firewall (iptables) for masquerading:
   iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
5. Next, download NStun.sh, a very handy script that does all the hard work of changing the routes and so on :p

   You’ll want to change the script: change the first lines as the script reads, and lower, change the
   

   NS=`grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf|head -1|awk ‘{print $2}’`

   line to read

   NS=”62.213.207.197″

Now, start NStun.sh on your Mac, and surf away! (well, slowly, but freely, atleast!)

I was trying to get xrdp running on my Linux box, so I could takeover the screen from the outside world. The rdp protocol is a (huge) bit more performant than VNC, which is why I wanted to use it.

Today I was trying for the 3rd time to get it to work, using CoRD as an RDP client, but I never got any image back - the client started, I saw the connection being built up, but I never got any image over. Starting rdesktop locally gave me the output I expected.

This gave me the idea of using Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 Public Beta, to see if it might be a problem with the client… and yup, it is.

Seems CoRD 0.4.3 (the current stable) is unable to handle the output of xrdp. I now installed the 0.5 beta 1 which works without any problems.

I got a company phone, a Nokia 3109 Classic, which is nothing less nothing more than a standard company phone. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles I’d like to have, but it works.

What didn’t work, was iSync on this phone. Real bummer, since I was hoping to sync everything between iCal/Address Book and this phone…

Google to the rescue, and i stumbled over this blog posting by James Lloyd, detailing how to get it to work.

Summary:

1. Download the script here
2. Right click iSync from the Applications folder in Finder and choose “Show Package Contents”
3. Navigate to: Contents\Plugins\ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice\Contents\Plugins\Nokia-6131.phoneplugin and choose “Show Package Contents” again.
4. Navigate to \Contents\Resources
5. Replace the content of the MetaClasses.plist file with the content of the script downloaded in step 1
6. (Re-)Setup your phone with your Mac

Done!

I still haven’t found any mail client I really like on the Mac… I’ve been using Thunderbird now for a while, but it doesn’t really have what I want in a mail client. I guess I’m spoiled, since I’m used to using KMail at home (and I’m forced to use Lotus Notes at work - a horrible client from a usability point of view).

Recently I’ve been trying to get Mail.app to work for me. It doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles I like, but after looking up some things online it’s getting there.

Here are some handy things for Mail.app to fix some of it’s shortcomings:

What I still need:

• A way to improve the threading - it’s horrible
• An easy way to switch from mailbox to mailbox through all the ones with unread messages

Let’s see if I find some way to fix those two… especially the threading.