Dustin’s Blog

In getting ready for the coming TV season I wanted to get my recording capabilities up to snuff. I’ve grown tired of trying to get MythTV working and decided to bite the bullet and buy a solution. I decided on a HD Homerun with some EyeTV software for mac.

The great thing about the HD Homerun is that I’m not tied to the Mac for watching or recording TV, I can use just about anything I want including MythTV (despite giving up on it for now), Windows Media Center and even just VLC. I post some more about it as soon as it gets here.

A few times a day I head over to craigslist.org and look in the computer, electronics and game & toys section for things people have under priced so I can sell it for more somewhere else. I’ve had really good luck doing this on a number of occasions and even though it is never a huge money maker it feels good to buy low and sell high.

Well last week I came a cross a deal too good to be true but bit anyway, a Power Mac G4 MDD that wouldn’t boot for $60. This particular model sports dual 1Ghz G4 processors, a SuperDrive and an 80GB hard drive. The machine has room for three more hard drives and one other 5.25 slot. With the onboard gigabit ethernet this machine is actually a pretty good performer.

After picking up the machine I got to work figuring out why it wouldn’t boot. The machine would actually turn on and tone but not the usual Mac start up tone. It would tone once and then flash the power button. I looked up the issue on the web and found that the single tone meant no RAM was present. This was odd since all four memory slots were filled with 256MB sticks of DDR PC2100 RAM. According to some docs on the web this was the correct type of RAM for the 1Ghz MDD model. On a hunch, I decided to try PC2700 RAM and viola, the machine booted into OS X (10.2) and has been running just fine since. It even runs Leopard quite well despite being about six years old.

Another nice new feature of Leopard is Spaces. For anyone who has used Linux at all you’ll recognize that Spaces is nothing more than virtual desktops. The problem with Spaces is that it isn’t enough like virtual desktops to really make me feel at home with it. A preferences panel add on called Warp fixes this.

http://www.ksuther.com/warp/

Using Warp I can now drag a window from once space to the next or go to the next space by pushing my mouse against an edge.

OS X is a funny system. So many things are very simple and yet there are some things that are more difficult than they need to be. Take for example mapping or mounting network shares. In Tiger (10.4) you could mount a share and it would show up in the sidebar. With Leopard (10.5) this isn’t so, you have to manually add it. This addition to the sidebar will stick until you reboot the system. This is a bit annoying. I like having direct access to the root of my share.

Fortunately OS X ships with automator and either I didn’t notice this in the previous version or it really is new but you can now call shell and apple scripts directly. I was already using automator to mount all of the shares I want mounted on login but I needed a way to get them into the sidebar. Click through to see my solution.
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There is a bit of buzz on the internet right now about Apple’s announcement of OS X Snow Leopard which is to replace Leopard sometime next year. Word on the street is that it won’t be luring people in with hundreds of new features but Apple is instead concentrating on stability of the OS. This is amazing to me for a couple of reasons. One, Apple seems to be admitting that it is out of ideas! Two, when is the last time you’ve heard of a big software company just going back and streamlining their OS? This is fantastic because as I wrote before, I’m liking Leopard more now than I did when it was initially released but compared to Tiger it’s just not as polished. Boot times for instance could be improved as Leopard takes nearly 50% to twice as long to boot compared to Tiger.

Along with the Snow Leopard client comes Snow Leopard Server and here is my prediction. Apple hasn’t told us everything (as usual) and based on the direction Apple is taking the iPhone, I believe Snow Leopard is going to be Apples biggest attack on the business/enterprise market yet. They have already admitted that ZFS will be included in Snow Leopard and they are talking about better Exchange support. Virtualization is a huge topic lately and I won’t be the least bit surprised to hear Apple announce virtualization support in Snow Leopard Server and maybe even in the client version. My guess is for the support of any OS including OS X itself..

What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments area!

Well by now it’s no secret to any of my friends that I’ve become a bit of an Apple fan but I’m not so much a fan that I can’t criticize what they do. I’m not that rabid yet.

So it was with trepidation that I gave Leopard a try, twice no less, before finally making the switch to it permanently. I wanted to be sure the kinks were worked out and that it would work as well as Tiger did. I had read about and had my own issues with Leopard on my mini including poor animations, apps failing to start and just a general clumsiness to it that just was not what OS X should be like. While I’m not convinced it is quite there yet, the latest update has brought it a long ways in my mind.

The latest update, 10.5.3, seems to fix a lot of the big issues I was running into with Leopard. The biggest issue was actually with some iLife apps like iMovie. Either through luck or an actual fix iMovie now runs on Leopard. In previous versions I couldn’t get iMovie to open fully and when it did working with video was problematic and importing video was terrible. While I have yet to import video since installing 10.5.3 I’m fairly confident it’ll work much better than it has in the past based on how well it runs otherwise.

By now you have probably heard about the digital tv switchover deadline in February of 2009. In case you haven’t, head on over to http://www.dtv.gov/ to get the long story. The short story is that analog TV signals will be turned off as of February 17, 2009. If you get your TV using an antenna, then there is something you need to do to get ready. You can either buy a new TV with an ATSC tuner in it already or you can purchase a government subsidized digital to analog converter box. To get your $40 coupon head over to https://www.dtv2009.gov/.

Last friday I received my coupon in the mail. The coupon comes in the form of a prepaid credit card and you can use it at any store that sells approved converter boxes. I took mine over to Best Buy and picked up their Insignia branded converter box. This box is fairly basic providing one digital input, one RF output and a composite video output but the box is proving to be quite up to the task. The composite output allows you to get stereo sound (surround sound in fact) from the device and an improved picture over the RF connection. It also offers just the current program and the next program on it’s very simple program guide.

Now you might be thinking there is nothing wrong with the current system and that just couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though your old analog TV isn’t digital, the picture will be virtually perfect and in some cases better than you’d get if you had dish or cable. Audio too will be improved and if you have a surround sound system then any show that uses surround sound will be available to you in surround sound as well.

While the analog to digital switch over is a bit of a hassle the quality improvement is very much worth it. If you have any old TVs that are still in good shape and you don’t want to buy a new one then I strongly recommend going the converter route.

A while back I saw a post on digg.com that talked about some new software that was currently in an invite only beta test called Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to synchronize folders between computers and if you watch the video over at their site I think you’ll be impressed.

But as I said, it’s invite only. So what is a guy to do right now? Well believe it or not Microsoft actually has something very similar and it too works with both Windows and Mac. Now if we’re to believe everything the the Dropbox video shows us, Foldershare isn’t quite as robust but it is free and and more importantly it is available now. Check it out at http://www.foldershare.com/

In my previous entry I mention my Super Smash Bros. Brawl testing and one of the other tests I wanted to do involved determining how much data is required to play a four way game. My home network setup is a bit involved yet I couldn’t find a way to route the Wii through a device that I could measure network usage with.

To make a long story short, I found that you can configure your Mac’s wireless to “create network” and unlike a Windows PC that would setup an adhoc network, the Mac will act like a normal wireless access point or wireless router. This was fantastic because the Wii will not join an adhoc network. With my Mac set to create a new network I was able to join my Wii to it and determine that a four way game in Brawl requires at least 10KB/s of network traffic in both directions.

I’ve been using my Mac Mini as what I’d call my “primary computer” almost from the moment I received it. While I have a laptop that I can use around the house or travel with, I use the Mac because it is so quiet, it’s hooked up to a 22″ screen and because I enjoy the OS X experience. Over the months I’ve managed to find a few software titles that help me get things done.

• iTerm - Nice terminal app that more closely resembles my favorite Windows SSH client, putty. Has tabs, etc
• Firefox - Who doesn’t know what Firefox is?
• Thunderbird - Mail just can’t compete with the speed of Thunderbird for IMAP accounts
• Gamepedia - I play games and I like to track them. There are other software options available, even some more generic but I just like this one
• Adium - Adium is a multi-protocol chat client using the same libraries as Pidgin
• Vienna - Great RSS reader
• Things - Simple way to track…things
• Mythfrontend - MythTV is my DVR of choice and I need a way to access it on the Mac, this it!
• Integrity - This is a simple link checker for OS X, similar to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is superior however.
• MacTheRipper - Best DVD ripping tool I’ve found for the Mac
• NeoOffice - This is currently the only way to run OpenOffice “natively” on the Mac. It’s slow but gets the job done
• Remote Desktop Connection - Sometimes you need to access a Windows machine. I use this primarily to connect to my XP VMWare guest running on my Linux server for web site testing
• Macfuse/SSHFS - Nearly identical to fuse and sshfs for Linux
• Transmission and Azureus - One bittorrent client just isn’t enough
• VLC - Great multi-platform video player. Perian is able to install many of the same codecs VLC will play but I have soft spot for VLC