OZAKI announces IP858 clock for iPhone, Touch

OZAKI has announced the IP858 iMini Timber 3G iPhone Speaker, a portable wooden case design with a mirror-coated casing. The device is actually an alarm clock, which lets users wake to music from an iPhone or iPod touch, FM radio, or a straight buzzer. The LCD display on the clock is backlit, and a USB connection can be used to sync with a computer, unlike many such devices. Pricing and availabil...

published on Friday, the 17. October 2008, macintosh-news-network

LG joins external HDD race with XD1 drives

Normally making just PCs and their displays, LG today expanded into external hard drives through the XD1. The notebook-sized disks are designed to be stylish with a unique, gradiated color scheme in black or red that mirrors the look of the company's Scarlet HDTVs. All the hard drives are completely bus-powered but are still thin enough to slip i...

published on Monday, the 21. July 2008, macintosh-news-network

Toggle display mode on newer laptop keyboards

The new keyboard found on MacBooks and MacBook Pros now contain Dashboard, Exposé, and media controls on the function keys, but removed the toggle between mirror mode and extended desktop mode. On the prior keyboards, the toggle display mode function was located on the F7 key. On the new keyboards, you toggle display modes by pressing Command-F1. This only seems to work from the built-in laptop keyboard. [robg adds: From the "coming full circle" department, this behavior existed way back in 2002, then apparently was either forgotten about or disabled on newer laptops, only to make a return on the new models. I'm running this one now because the keyboard layout on the new machines lacks the mirror function on F7, so you may not think to try (nor perhaps be able to find) a 2002 hint as the solution.]

published on Monday, the 14. April 2008, macosxhints

iMirror wireless iPod remote ships

Bexy has unveiled its iMirror wireless remote control docking station that displays, controls, and plays iPod music as well as video while connected to entertainment systems. The iMirror is designed to serve as the center for a music and video home entertainment system, allowing users to remotely navigate and control all iPod music/video via the iM...

published on Wednesday, the 22. August 2007, macintosh-news-network

NewerTech unveils Guardian MAXimus storage

Newer Technology (NewerTech) today unveiled the Guardian MAXimus, its first low-cost FireWire and USB 2 external RAID 1 storage solution. The Guardian MAXimus provides "live activity" backup/data redundancy via RAID 1 hardware mirroring to provide uninterrupted full data accessibility in the event of a hard drive failure. A front panel LED display ...

published on Friday, the 18. May 2007, macintosh-news-network

One way to 'mirror' DVI displays on a Mac mini

I am in the process of creating the "ultimate" Mac mini-based home entertainment system. One issue with using a mini is the lack of dual-monitor support, which is a real hassle if the mini is attached to a projector -- turning on the projector to see the screen each time is expensive and time-consuming. Since the mini only has one video output, I came up with a way to effectively mirror the video to both the DVI projector and a DVI-input LCD monitor: Buy a DVI "splitter" cable (I got mine on ebay). You want a two-female to one-male DVI-D splitter. Plug the monitor into one fork of the splitter. Take the cable from the projector, and break off pins 6 and 7 (pinout chart). This will disable the monitor sense function, and the mini won't "know" the projector is connected. Plug it into the other fork of the splitter. Make sure the LCD monitor's resolution matches the projector's native re...

published on Tuesday, the 27. March 2007, macosxhints

Growl for SoftRAID and other apps that use system.log

I use SoftRAID for mirroring (part of my backup scheme for my PowerBook), but was missing some notifications on missing or out-of-sync disks. Since SoftRAID reports changes of disk status in system.log, I wrote an AppleScript that reads the system.log and filters out SoftRAID messages, displaying them via Growl. This can also be used for other applications that report things to system.log, or even to Growl all system.log messages. You can set the filter for the syslog messages, the amount of time to look back in the system.log, and other things like that. Basic usage instructions are in the script. [robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

published on Thursday, the 1. March 2007, macosxhints

Toggle external screen mode on iBooks

By chance, I just discovered that although there's no special marker on the iBook's keyboard, it is possible to toggle between the mirror- and the screen-spanning mode with one keystroke: Install the Extended Desktop patch to use screen spanning on your external display. Press Shift-Command-F7 to toggle between screen-spanning and mirror modes. By pressing the shortcut twice, it's also a nice way to put all your windows back on the notebook screen, in case you won't power on your connected external display. Maybe this is some new feature introduced with the MacBook that back-propagated to the older consumer notebooks. I use Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a "late G4 iBook" (Sep 2005 edition). [robg adds: I can't test this one...]

published on Monday, the 6. November 2006, macosxhints

Use a CGI script to display SNMP information

Many devices connected to the network have an SNMP agent running that can give out some information about said device. This information can be accessed from the command line, but the commands are not really user-friendly. So I have written a small CGI script that displays basic SNMP information in a web page. To use the script, simply install it into /Library -> WebServer -> CGI-Executables/ and access it using the local web server. The linked web page explains how to install the script. [robg adds: To run the script, just make sure that Web Sharing is active, then enter http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/hosti... in your browser's URL bar. I tested it, and it seems to work (though none of the machines on my network return any interesting info). I've also mirrored the file on macosxhints.com, in case the source vanishes someday.]

published on Tuesday, the 3. October 2006, macosxhints

View today's iCal events on the desktop via a script

Here's a small script (macosxhints mirror) that reads the data files that iCal dumps to, and prints out a small, text-only version of today's events. I use it with GeekTool, and have it display the output on my desktop. You need to edit the script a little for your own machine. See the comments at the top -- it shouldn't be too hard. You'll also need to make it executable (chmod 755 script_name) before it can be run. [robg adds: The customization required is identifying which calendar belongs to which filename. An easy way to do this is to open the Info.plist file in a text editor (or Property List Editor) and look for the value next to Title. Once you know that, you can copy the corestorage.ics file in the Finder, switch to Terminal, ...

published on Monday, the 25. September 2006, macosxhints