sadevil.org

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 use Irssi on my mac with Terminal.app in Leopard. All very nice, except that in Terminal.app, the dark gray colour used in my Irssi theme shows black. Black on black doesn’t work very well.

So, I needed something to tweak Terminal.app’s ANSI colours.

Luckely, I found TerminalColor, a SIMBL bundle for Terminal.app. Unfortunately, it didn’t work with Leopard, but I found this developizers blog post on how to make it work!

Yay!

Tego from the userbase.be forum has created a Mac OS X widget for Dommel, my ISP.

It’s based on phptelemeter, my creation, and TeleMonitor (by Thomas Bouve)

You can download it here: zip / tgz

Apple has confirmed the 26th as the releasedate for Leopard!

I’ve already preordered my copy of this operating system, which has over 300 improvements.

Now go order yours! ;) (just kidding ;p)

Here’s a simple howto to get your Mac internet-connected using GPRS/3G on your bluetooth-equipped phone. I’ve only tested this with my Motorola V3 and Vodafone (Spain), so no guarantees about the other providers, but the main part should be the same.

First, let’s prepare:

1. download the necessary Modem scripts from http://home2.btconnect.com/Taniwha/. Decompress the StuffIt! file (eg. with The Unarchiver) and copy the files into /Library/Modem Scripts.
2. check your operator’s settings on this page (for Vodafone, it lists user/password: vodafone/vodafone, and APN airtelnet.es).

Now, set your phone to be detectable, and pair it with the Mac:

1. Go to System Preferences, Bluetooth, and use ‘Set Up New Device…’. Follow the wizard, and make sure to select ‘Use a direct, higher speed connection to reach your Internet Service Provider (GPRS, 1xRTT)’.
2. Set the Username and Password as found above (for Vodafone.es: vodafone/vodafone)
3. Set the GPRS CID string to the APN found above (for Vodafone.es: airtelnet.es)
4. Select the correct Modem Script for your phone. I used Motorola GPRS CID1
5. Check ‘Show Bluetooth status’ and ‘Show modem status’.

That’s it. Now you should be able to connect, starting ‘Internet Connect’ and clicking on Connect.