10.5: Safer sleep during networked Time Machine backups
The problem: You have Time Machine set up using a sparsebundle on a network drive, such as a Time Capsule or an AirPort Extreme-connected hard drive. Most of the time, everything works great. Consider this reproducible scenario, however:You are working away at home and a hourly backup starts. Time machine automagically mounts the sparsebundle.You need to leave and put your laptop to sleep, not paying attention to the fact that time machine is working.You move your laptop to work/school and wake it up.The sparsebundle is still mounted, but obviously does not work. Finder and Spotlight grow increasing stuck until you have to reboot your machine. It occurs to you that the image back home was not closed properly and that eventually, this will corrupt your backups!Solution:Install SleepWatcher (I ...
published on Wednesday, the 19. November 2008, macosxhints
Print PDFs directly to iPod touch (and iPhone)
I frequently want to print copies of maps, directions or other things to take with me on the road. Since I found the app Air Sharing for my iPod touch, I can save the docs to PDF, and then copy them to my iPod touch for offline viewing. I put together an Automator workflow [65KB download] that allows me to do this directly from the print dialog box. To configure the workflow, put the (unzipped) downloaded file into the /Library/PDF Services folder. Open the workflow in Automator, and then set the IP address of your iPod touch or iPhone in the first line of the AppleScript action, and set the save to location in the last action to the desired location on your iPod touch/iPhone. (Note that you need to have the iPhone/iPod touch mounted via Air Sharing to use this workflow.) Finally, save the workflo...
published on Tuesday, the 30. September 2008, macosxhints
How to access Time Machine files from Linux
Recently after switching from Mac OS X to Debian, I found I needed to restore a couple files from the Time Machine backup that I kept. The drive works just fine as an HFS+ mount, but I couldn?t figure out how to retrieve anything within. When Google didn?t yield the answer, I began to explore on my own.It turns out Apple does a couple slick things with the file system to make incremental backups work, including hard linking to directories, which isn't allowed in Linux. So for anyone that needs to access their Time Machine from something other than its associated Mac, here?s how you do it...[robg adds: The following details were reproduced (with minor editing) using the author's original blog post, with his permission.] Mount the drive. On linux, it should automount if you have gnome-volume-manager installed. If you don?t see it in /media, then run nautilus and check the deskt...
published on Thursday, the 26. June 2008, macosxhints
10.5: Set a FireWire drive's mount point
This is a tutorial on how to automatically mount your FireWire drive to a custom mount point on OS X 10.5 Leopard. Variants will probably work with USB 2.0 drives, and internal SATA drives, and probably for IDE drives for G4 or G5 Macs. For this, you will need a little familiarity with the UNIX side of OS X, and more specifically, with the Terminal application. You will also need to know how to use vi, I think (though there's a very brief primer included in this hint). If that is beyond you, then you probably shouldn't be reading this. Connect your FireWire drive and then log in to your favorite account to mount the FireWire drive. Get the UUID of the drive in Terminal; MyFWDrive should be replaced with the name of your FireWire drive: diskutil info /Volumes/MyFWDrive. This command is going to spew out a lot of info, but the stuff you want is ...
published on Tuesday, the 3. June 2008, macosxhints
One way to monitor a child's use of Gmail
Some email providers allow parental controls, that is, a way to monitor a child's use of email. Gmail, however, does not. Here's one way to monitor the amount of time your child spends on Gmail. First, if you have not already done so, create a Gmail account of your own. In iChat preferences under accounts, create a Gmail jabber account -- Google provides more detailed instructions about this on their site. Then, make sure that chat is turned on on your child's Gmail account. This is easy to do, as the button is located at the bottom of the Gmail inbox page. Make sure that your child does not disable chat, obviously. Then, make your child a buddy who appears in your buddy list. iChat will now show when they log in and out of Gmail, so long as you keep iChat open. You can even make a customized sound to alert you when they log in. You can make note of the time when they log in, or start a chat with them, and iChat will automatically note the exact time. This...
published on Wednesday, the 28. May 2008, macosxhints
Auto-Remount Disconnected Shares
Some server administrators set share drives to auto disconnect users after a set time of inactivity (ie fifteen minutes). As a user it’s super frustrating to connect to a server every time you need access. I’ve written an AppleScript that first checks to see if the share is mounted, if it is mounted [...]
published on Thursday, the 15. May 2008, apple-blog
VPN Tracker 5.2 adds SonicWALL support
equinux has released a new update for VPN Tracker, its IPsec-based Mac VPN client software. The tool is deliberately designed to mimic iChat, and can automatically connect to a VPN based on current location, as well as perform routine start-up tasks such as checking mail and mounting appropriate volumes. equinux claims to support over 300 VPN dev...
published on Tuesday, the 29. April 2008, macintosh-news-network
10.5: Eject drives and run iSync before sleep via script
This is a little AppleScript that I wrote to check and ask if the machine should unmount peripheral disks, and optionally perform an iSync, before sleeping. I was motivated to write this after about the fifteenth time I woke my laptop up after taking it home from work only to be greeted with a warning that I did not properly disconnect my Time Machine Disk. Additionally, since I use iSync to sync my date book and address book with my Nokia cell phone, I thought it would be a good idea to have it auto-sync before I put the machine to sleep. If you are capable with AppleScript, you can go in and make modifications for your system (e.g. turn off iSync, or the options to unmount). One caveat: if your home disk is not the same as the startup disk (unlikely on a laptop), the script will ask if you would like to unmount that disk before sleeping.I packed the script as an application bundle (with a 10.5-sized icon) for optional placement directly into the dock -- download ...
published on Friday, the 25. April 2008, macosxhints
Fix path to home folder after external drive mount failure
In Leopard, if you've changed your home path from your Mac's internal hard disk to an external hard disk, as in this hint, and maybe you turned off your drive or maybe it unmounted for no specific reason, you'll see that it isn't sufficient to turn it back on to see all your preferences back to normal. Why? As an example, let's assume you had moved your home folder here: /Volumes/HD300GB/users/yourname. When Leopard realizes the drive is missing, it automatically creates a folder named /Volumes/HD300GB (in this example). Then when you logout/login or restart your Mac, Leopard will remount your original drive with a different name; in this example /Volumes/HD300GB 1. Consequence: You'll not have access to your home directory and your desktop, preferences, etc. will be (falsely) lost. Here's how to fix it: Login as a different user (with admin rights) ...
published on Friday, the 11. April 2008, macosxhints
Automatically eject/mount disks on sleep/wake
Using a laptop with permanent external drives can be a bit annoying when you leave the desk -- you have to manually eject all your devices, otherwise you get that dreaded 'Device Removal' dialog. With a little bit of Terminal magic, though, you can automatically eject disks when you sleep the laptop, meaning you can just put the lid down and go. Disks are also reconnected automatically on wake, for when you're just sleeping the computer without going places.It's all thanks to a little utility by Bernhard Baehr called SleepWatcher, which runs in the background and is triggered by sleep and wake events, calling scripts to perform required actions. Download and install SleepWatcher and its StartupItem. Next, you're going to create ~/.sleep and ~/.wakeup files which SleepWatcher will call upon. Pull up your favourite text editor and paste the following in ...
published on Friday, the 4. April 2008, macosxhints