A while ago i have bought a license of SuperDuper!. An awesome application that can copy entire hard disks, make a clone, to another. This can be done to quickly move files but also to make a rock solid bootable backup.
I have used this app for a while on my iMac and now i entrust my server to it. I have a few schedules running there. Yes SuperDuper! also does scheduled copies.
Every monday, wednesday and friday the main system disk is cloned to the second disk in the computer and every Tuesday and Thursday the system disk is cloned into a restorable disk image which is stored on an external drive.
SuperDuper is also very handy to copy disk images to a hard disk or thumb drive to take the actual DVD or image out of the equation. Imagine, installing OS X from a USB 8GB thumb drive. It’s like 4x faster than from the DVD.
So even if my server breaks down, say the hard disk breaks. I could simply replace that disk. Boot up from the other disk and perhaps restore the backup in the image if that one is newer. And be on my way fixing the server. Simply cloning the disk back to the newly placed hard disk. Amazing!
With the recent buzz about worms and malicious stuff coming in through your own fault for not changing the Root password on your iPhone or… Installing BSD tools/SSH In the first place. It’s easy to see if you’re vulnerable or not.
The first thing to check is if your iPhone is jailbroken. If it’s not you’re safe. If it is, continue.
If your phone is jailbroken. Connect your iPhone to your Wifi network and with a SSH enabled computer, any Mac/Linux machine by default, try to connect to your iPhone.
Simply open a Shell/Terminal and type:
Obviously replace ‘tachikoma.local’ with the hostname or IP address of your own iPhone.
If you get a reply like this:
ssh: connect to host tachikoma.local port 22: Connection refused
SSH is not allowed and thus disabled. You’re save.
If it however prompts you for a Password or asks you to save a Secret Key. Then SSH is enabled. If you then can login with the password ‘dottie’ or ‘alpine’, you’re vulnerable to the various worms and any idiot on your wifi (or whatever wifi you connect to on the way).
To fix this, simply open the terminal on your iPhone or log in via SSH using the above method and change the password by typing:
Follow the onscreen instruction to actually change it and restart your iPhone.
That’s all.
On a sidenote: Despite what others say, it is highly recommended that you do not bother with the 3rd party software made available when your iPhone is Jailbroken. This software is considered instable. I’ve seen many iPhones go crazy from all the springboard hacks or software that wasn’t written properly. While it may be an easy fix for the various “flaws” in the iPhone it also can bring a lot of misery along with it.
Every Mac OS X comes with several dictionaries. You can ofcourse open the app everytime you see an unknown word and look it up. But you can also do it quicker and faster.
Here’s how. Open the Dictionary application and go to preferences. Change the following setting as indicated on the image:
Now whenever you right click an image in Safari, Adium, Pages or whatever other application that supports it and select “Look up in dictionary” it should pop up a miniature menu like thingy that explains the word and offer some buttons to opt for more information.
If you’ve bought a new Mac lately, one that ships with significantly new features like a 4 finger trackpad or otherwise is a different model. Hold your horses on cloning your Harddisk to the new computer.
Usually this should be no problem at all… Just fire up Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper… but it seems there are some “under the hood changes” that make the booting process go bad.
On various models including the Aluminum MacBook and very latest model MacBook Pro the cloning of data failed and required an Archive & Install to fix it.
On my newly bought MacBook Pro this screwed up the login password as well, the keychain somehow remained untouched.
The best guess is to either use Apple’s Migration Assistant. Which is slow and might fail at times if the system is messy or even skip things altogether. However, it converts any files to the right stuff and keeps drivers and system specific files intact.
I prefer this setting for my image folders but they work for any of course. Bigger thumbnails, so you can see what’s up without previewing or opening the images. Very handy indeed!
It’s easily set and on a per folder basis.
In the folder you want to set this setting in press cmd-J, or in the View menu click the ‘Show view options’ option.
Basically you just tick the option up top “Always open in icon view” and slide the icon size slider to the right and the grid size to the left. You’ll see instantly what this does. Find the setting you like and close the options screen.
Voila, instant previews of (image) files without using iPhoto or other gallery-ish apps.
New in safari 4 is that everything opens in a new tab, especially popups. This can be very irritating as for me i want some popups if i open them myself to be an actual popup and not a new tab.
Here’s how to fix it:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool false
This command should be run in Terminal (which can be found in Spotlight by typing ‘term’).
And changes an apparently hidden setting. It is unclear to me why they force this behavior upon us.
As Wifi gets used more and more chances are that your signal is being pushed away by other networks or that your house/location just won’t work well for Wifi. This can be caused by a million different things varying from a Dect Telephone to a Military Radar nearby. A concrete wall between you and your basestation or simply an active microwave.
To enlarge the changes your Mac will connect to your network you could lower the doorstep for it by lowering the Multicast Rate.
Usually this is set pretty low, say 5mbit, but that means that when your signal dips below that your connection is often lost.
Thus changing the setting to 2 or even 1.5mbit could enhance your Wifi experience. Keep in mind that this will NOT upgrade your signals quality, if anything the signal is less. All this setting does is lower the bar for when the signal is good enough for a computer to connect.
You can change this setting in Airport Utility by opening it up. Double clicking your Basestation in the left column and accessing the Wireless tab under Airport. Then click Wireless Options and set the Multicase rate to 2mbit or something in that area. As seen in the Orange oval.
Additionally you could experiment with the “Interference Robustness” setting. This COULD help boost your signal a bit. However, for me this caused the network to only slow down dramatically!
If you, like me, just have music you can listen to everyday, all day and any time. But you want diversity at the same time. You can easily solve the problem of manually picking music and spending hours and hours to make playlists with smart playlists
In iTunes click the File Menu and click New Smart Playlist. You’ll see a screen pop up where you can set the rules for your playlist. Obviously the rules i use may differ to your wishes but you’ll get the idea.
As you can see i have set some rules for a cycle. Also i exclude some things because i don’t want the very long mixes or radio entries on my iPhone. To prevent hearing the same songs over and over i have selected to only include tracks that have not been played in the past 4 days. So if i play a track today i’m sure i won’t hear it in the next 4 days. Also i don’t want video files in the playlist so the file must be audio. I want the playlist to be no bigger than 3GB because my iPhone has a lot of other data and i don’t want to tangle up the space and get warnings about not having enough space.
And voila. Now every time you sync your iPod or iPhone it will automatically put the songs matching that playlist on your device. You can include other playlists for the songs you absolutely want on your device no matter what. But that’s up to you!
In OS X, turn of the automatic joining of Wifi networks, and thus the scanning if one is available, in order to save a little battery life and don’t have it nag you for a connection.
To disable this go into your System Preferences and click Network. Inside Network click the Airport adapter and untick the “Ask to join new network” option.
Press Apply and you’re done. OS X will now no longer see what network is available and ask you which one to join.
Obviously this won’t affect the performance of your airport card as it will still scan for networks when you invoke the dropdown menu in the Network Preferences or Menubar.
