Automatically launch X11
I just saw this tip in a comment for this hint on macosxhints. By adding these lines to your .profile, your shell will automatically launch X11 when you start a shell, and you are not connected via ssh.
# if we’re NOT ssh’d in
if [ ! ${SSH_TTY} ]; then
# make sure X is running
if [ "`ps -x | awk '{print $5}' | grep X11`" = "" ]; then
open /Applications/Utilities/X11.app &
# then refocus Terminal.app
osascript -e ‘tell application “Terminal” to activate’
fi
# if DISPLAY isn’t set
if [ x${DISPLAY} = x ]; then
export DISPLAY=:0
fi
fi
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.
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.
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]
Verbose boot
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]
smtp proxy for sending mail
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:
- Help train the bayesian spam filter with the good messages that I send
- Potentially help reduce the risk of any of my machines being used to relay spam.
unison
I have been using unison to synchronize files between my computers where the the files may change on any of the computers. It is very similar to rsync, but it allows two way synchronization.
I use this to synchronize our iPhoto library between our two laptops. From each laptop, I run unison to synchronize the iPhoto library to our linux sever (via ssh). Since this is a two way synchronization, all of the laptops have access to the same iPhoto library. (I generally do all additions to the iPhoto library on one of the laptops, so I don’t have to deal with potential conflicts.)
View ip address in GeekTool
In the course of reconstructing my computer from the bad hard drive, I needed to find all of the GeekTool scripts that I had been using. The macosxhints hint describes a script that will display the local ip address as well as the public ip on the desktop.
XM installed in Honda Odyssey
Today, we had XM installed into out Honda Odyssey. We deicded to go with the XM Commander, since we didn’t want to change our head unit, and we wanted a small interface. One of my main goals of this will to have the van still look stock, and not make it look like there is a lot of aftermarket equipment installed.
The XM commander interface was installed into the sunglass holder, above the rear view mirror. With this installation, when it is closed, noone would be able to tell if XM had been installed at all.
While the XM was being installed, I asked the stereo installers to move the sound output of the DVD player from FM modulation to line-in though the CD changer port. (The FM modulatio that was installed with the DVD player appears to not be shielded well. While driving near high voltage lines, a lot of static can be heard.
The XM commander is using its FM modulator, but I am not that concerned about this one. I had an XM Commander installed in our Jetta, and there were no problems with interference.
Hard drive failed
Yesterday the hard drive in my laptop failed. I knew that it was coming, as my computer was making a lot of noise and would slow to a halt. With hindsight being what it is, I know I should have taken care of the problem when the noise started happening.
Since I needed to get a new drive, I decided to get the largest one that I could. I got a 100 GB drive for $179 at Fry’s Electronics. I spent a lot of time last night attempting to recover the data from the bad drive. Since the drive was still readable, I was hoping that I would be able to copy all of the data off the drive onto the new one.
