Paul's Time Sink

links for September 4, 2008
links for September 3, 2008
iPhone Gmail behavior
iPhone Syncing
iPhone
Squeezebox Boom
links for August 27, 2008
Windows Media Center
links for August 21, 2008
AAC, SqueezeCenter and Windows Home Server

specimen

Backup strategy

After my hard drive failure, I think that I have come up with a backup strategy that I can keep up with.  On a regular bases, maybe once a week, I will back up my whole hard drive to an external firewire drive.  The external drive, is large enough so I can have a partition for every drive that I want to have backed up.  I will use Carbon Copy Cloner to just make a copy of each drive.

Then daily, I will use Apple's Backup to backup my home directory to my iDisk.  (This is all of my home directory, except for my Downloads and Movie folder).  I don't keep my iPhoto or my iTunes library in my home directory.

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i3 Mac car interface

Engadget has a post about i3's application that is supposed to make it easier to use a Mac in your car.  It is pretty much a launcher that can launch any other applications.  I think that this is a start, but is not the ideal.  Just launching iTunes is not ideal, especially since the iTunes interface is not great for a car application.

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geektools.com whois proxy

geektools.com has setup a whois proxy that makes it easy to get good results from whois queries.  So if you want to find out who is responsible for a domain or ip address you can use this proxy.

To use the geektools proxy, use the following command:

whois -h geektools.com 1.2.3.4

Or you can create an alias like

alias gwhois="whois -h geektools.com"

[Via macosxhints]

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Verbose boot

Paul Westbrook | 27 March, 2005 12:24

Last week, I was trying to track down why my computer was so slow to boot (It turned out to be a failing hard drive).  Normally Mac OS X doesn't show you any feedback about what is going on during boot.  You can put Mac OS X into verbose boot mode by holding down the command and 'v' keys.  After doing this you will see all of the output that you should ever need.

[via Justin Blanton]

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smtp proxy for sending mail

Paul Westbrook | 27 March, 2005 12:02

I have set up a server to scan all incoming mail, for viruses and spam, for my and some other people's domains.  This is running on an externally hosted VPS, and runs Maia Mailguard.  This works perfectly for all of my incoming mail

I wanted to also use this server to scan all of my outgoing mail as well, for two reasons:

1. Help train the bayesian spam filter with the good messages that I send
2. Potentially help reduce the risk of any of my machines being used to relay spam.

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