links for 2007-08-31

• 
  
  macosxhints.com - Secure your internet connection at Starbucks
  
  
  (tags: howto security wifi mac hotspot osx starbucks tmobile)
  
  

links for 2007-08-29

• 
  
  September 1752, The Month That Wasn’t
  
  
  Why September 1752 is missing 11 days
  
  
  (tags: September 1752 calendar)
  
  

Inbox Zero

Here is a video of a talk on how to be more productive with email.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=973149761529535925&hl=en

[via Daring Fireball]

rsync over ssh

I wanted to start using rsync to mirror some our iTunes library across our computers.  On the main computer, I would rsync the iTunes library to our server, and then on all the other computers, I would rsync the library back down.

I also want to run rsync on the server in daemon mode, as there are some nice configuration options to specify "modules" for the different data that I wanted to synchronize.

After looking into this, there were a few things that I didn't like with the default solution.

1. I  didn't want to open the rsyncd port through my firewall.  (Even though I could have specified authentication crednetials.)


2. If I want to use rsync's ssh support, and want to define all of the modules in /etc/rsyncd.conf, I would have to give the root user the ability to login in through ssh.

Here is how I set this up:

Posting from within Google Docs

I just discovered this today, and I don't remember hearing about his before.  You can post documents directly to your blog from within Google Docs.  This is very similar to the functionality that Microsoft Word has.

You do this from the Publish tab for each document.  You can configure this for a hosted provider, or any blogging software that supports the standard xmlrpc APIs.

Publish settings:

Blog Site settings:

Restore from Apple Backup backups

I have not been able to restore files from the backups that I have made with Apple Backup.  When I attempt to restore, using Backup, the progress dialog appears to show the restore working correctly, but the resulting folder doesn't contain any files.

I found this comment on this post that describes a solution.  The backup files created by Apple Backup contain disk images with the files being backuped.  It is easy to get access to the files that you want to recover.

First use Backup to find the backup file that contains the file that you want to restore (if you are using incremental backups).  Then run the following command to mount the disk image:


hdiutil mount -readonly BackupFile.IncrementalBackup/Contents/Contents/Backup.dmg


links for 2007-08-11

• 
  
  Remote backups via rsync - Knowledge Base
  
  
  id_dsa_rsync
  
  
  (tags: rsync ssh rsyncd)