yamahito

I was looking at Lifehacker today (might have to add it to the ol’ RSS list) and found a great way to add all the old emails from outlook/thunderbird to my gmail.

I’ve been using gmail for almost three years now, and it completely changed how I deal with email within a day of using it. I had given up organising my inbox (a situation I find myself in in work) with gmail that doesn’t happen, and if it did, it wouldn’t matter.

Only problem now is that I’m going to use up half my quota in one fell swoop…

Contrary to popular opinion, there are some things about apple that really grind my gears. This one’s a good example:

I left a macbook backing up over firewire last night. I need to use that image to prepare nine or ten other macbooks for a course next week. So I kind of needed it done this morning when I got in (late, again - what’s wrong with me?).

You’ve probably guessed that it had failed. ‘Disk is Full’.

Well, OK, the mac server I use is old and recycled, and the second disk could be bigger in there. Plus I was surprised to find out that the image would be approximately 14 Gigs, compressed. Fair enough, since the machine is used for a lot of multimedia work, but the disk only had 9GB left.

Emptying the trash left it with 22GB of free space.

I mean, c’mon. The whole point of putting something in the trash is that you don’t think it’s worth as much as the space it’s taking up. Keeping it around whilst you’re not using that space makes sense, but as soon as an application needs that hard disk space, it should get it at the expense of whatever is in the trash. Running out of disk space when there’s 13 Gigabytes of data in there, that’s stupid.

End of Rant.

Home Theater PC.

I’ve had a machine sitting around the flat/bedsit/flat again for years now. I always meant it to be hooked up to the telly. Having it hanging over me has been stressing me out since 2003. So (just as soon as I get my home server up and running again), I’m going to have another go at building one.

I don’t need TV functionality. I don’t want another windows box hanging around (not sure I have the license for one, either). Just a nice interface to videos and music on the fileserver. Perhaps a quick script to rip a DVD for easy access. Maybe, MAYBE a snes emulator for shits and giggles. Simpler the better.

There seem to be three contenders (in the linux space, anyway:)

MythTV - The big one.. this is the one I always figured I’d end up using. It’s so powerful and feature-rich, but it really is set up to do Tivo-like functions and TV recording; apparently its use as a simple video-over-the-network setup is a bit poor.

Freevo, which looks to be more straightforward is based on Python, and their screenshots don’t seem to work properly - maybe I need to try it out a bit. Their plugin range looks pretty impressive, too.

Geexbox looks like the one I’ll most likely start with. Installation looks much easier than either of the other two, and the idea of something small enough to run from a compact flash card… well, one less hard drive in the box will cut down on noise…

Anyone have any experience with these? Opinions welcome as always

What goes around comes around

I love that the technical requirements for something that looks like WordPerfect on Dos are ‘10.4 or later’.

I’d love to know whether this made a real difference to those creative types who have to do some serious writing, writing you gotta get involved with. I like that idea.

Well, no luck on the apple forums, so I’ve resorted to working around the problem I talked about yesterday.
(more…)

As much as I like it, I’ve had a problem with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) for a while now. I administer a fairly large number of macs using it, and since I’ve started doing so, I’ve changed their DNS records. Before, their DNS names were more or less random. Now, they match the ID number stuck to the front of each machine, and can be used to rename the macs after imaging.

Only I can’t make ARD pick up the new DNS addresses.

The first time I asked for advice about it, someone suggested that it was the DNS cache on the server ARD was running for that was keeping the old information, but flushing that cache didn’t do me any good. I even tried deleting the computers from the list, and re-adding them by IP address, but something somewhere is still remembering the old DNS names. I can edit the DNS name for each computer manually, but that makes it a bit meaningless.

The DNS name information must be cached somewhere. It doesn’t seem to be on the client computers, as this problem has persisted through numerous reformats, reimaging and nv/pr-ram resets. It doesn’t seem to be on the server OS’ DNS cache. I’m reluctant to uninstall/reinstall ARD, as there’s a lot of configuration data and management tasks saved on there that I don’t want to lose: but I suspect the information is cached somehow within ARD itself.

The ARD manual says that the DNS name field is set using reverse-dns lookups when the machine is added. But this seems not to be wholly true. Reverse-dns lookups all seem to work correctly, from the web and elsewhere. Perhaps the reverse-dns happens when a machine is originally added, but after that point, it seems to remember details even if the computer they’re associated with is deleted from ARD’s management list.

I’ve thought of a nasty hacky way of doing it, but I’m going to give the apple discussion forums a bit of a chance before I try tackling it. Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, please be my guest…

Well, after talking about it to everyone I know for ages, I’ve finally gotten around to doing it.

I’ve got me a brand new macbook sitting on my desk at work; it has a windows partition on it and an evaluation copy of parallels installed on the Mac OS.

The ol’ green and blue fisher pricing looks even more wrong on a mac screen…

I’ll be having myself a little look at how well the thing integrates the two OS together - mainly in the context of the sort of windows installation that would be expected in the uni. That means I’ll get to see how well novell works inside windows inside mac… the mind boggles.

Suggestions Please!

I know I’ve been mouthing off about how good this thing looks for a while now to various people, and I thought this might be a good place to collect together all those questions and concerns that people posed me: is there anything that you guys out there want me to test or look into on this system over the next week or so?

The British Library have a very nice thing they’ve made with microsoft technology.

It’s called Turning the Pages. And it’s preetty. They have made an interactive ‘hands on’ touchy feely access to some of the world’s oldest, rarest, most beautiful books, from the original Alice by Charles Dodson to the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest printed book (well, scroll technically).

Of course if I were feeling vicious, I’d point out the strong design ethic that you’d be forgiven for mistaking for mac design. But I’m not, so I won’t

I think this (see the quote below) is a worrying trend: I suppose they’ve not blocked bittorrent traffic itself, but then again, they’d be hard pressed to.

I don’t use it much personally, but BitTorrent itself is not illegal. There’s lots of reasons you might want to use it. It’s alse pretty easy to track.

When I was working at a college in Oxford we used to have a fine passed on to the college each time one of our IP addresses was named in a cease and desist. We passed this fine - along with a hefty administration fee onto the infractor. The infractions didn’t cease, of course, but we didn’t have as many.

The point is that the real answer to this issue is user education, not technical restrictions that throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Dear All,

Following receipt of a number of copyright infringement notices, Information Services is taking steps to protect the University.

The principle source of these copyright infringements is inappropriate use of peer-to-peer file sharing, for example Bit Torrent.

A number of web sites have been identified which primarily provide access to a high proportion of copyrighted, pornographic or offensive material. Access to these sites, listed below, will be prohibited.

This policy is not aimed at restricting legitimate academic investigation. Should access be required please contact insrvAssist.

Sites with prohibited access:
http://www.torrentsearch.com/
http://isohunt.com/
http://torrentscan.com/
http://www.torrentspy.com/
http://torrent-finder.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://www.torrentreactor.to/
http://www.torrentportal.com/
http://www.mininova.org/
http://skflan.nl.tp
http://www.onlytorrents.com/
http://www.mybittorrent.com/
http://www.torrentz.com/
http://www.torrentradar.org/
http://www.demonoid.com/
http://www.smaragdtorrent.org/
http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.torrents.to/
http://www.torrentvalley.com/
http://www.torrentshub.com/
http://fenopy.com/
http://extratorrent.com/
http://btjunkie.org/
http://www.bittorrent.am/
http://www.astatorrents.com/
http://www.meganova.org/
http://www.bitdig.com/
http://torrentattack.org/

Your insrvAssist contact for this message is XXX XXXXX.

Thank you,
Security Team

At the day job I administer a classroom/newspaper newsroom with just over 30 macs. One of the recent complaints/problems I’ve had in there is with a network drive that disappears whilst students are working on a document - normally in QuarkXPress. We use a bespoke system for tracking work on stories and news pages that requires this drive to be present to work - it can even cause work to go missing a little more easily than it should.

I think the issue is that the drive is disconnected when machines go to sleep after 15 mins of inactivity. A student may work on a page for several hours, in which time they may be called for a news ‘conference’ with the sub-editors/lecturers, so this happens more often/with more justification than you might expect.

So here’s the challenge: what are the best ways to get a network drive to remain persistant, reconnecting when a machine restarts? A google brought up a few things I’d already been doing: dragging the drive to the user’s start up items to auto-mount at log in; a little applescript launcher for Quark that connected the drive before launching the program, that sort of thing.

Well, I don’t think I’ve cracked it quite yet, but here’s a start: I came across this thread, describing the behaviour I wanted as a ‘nuisance’. Turns out it was all about the screensaver on OS X. Apples do this rather nice thing with a folder of your pics where they zoom in on the pictures (I like it - really brings them to life) - they’ve got lots of default versions of their own, but you can also set it to a folder of your choice. If that folder happens to have an alias to a server, when the screensaver activates, it will remount that drive for you (assuming you have credentials in the keychain).

One hacked-together images folder later, and I think I have something working. I’m hoping that by setting a screensaver time that’s smaller than the sleep time on the macs it will remount the drive in the time between waking up and turning the screensaver off. Watch this space…