This user’s experienceby Matt Henderson, since 2003

My wife and I each have a Macintosh on our home network, yet for the longest time we’ve been unable to share information such as contact and calendar information.

I’ve recently been asking around and have learned that with a single .Mac account and Apple’s iSync software, up to three computers can share Address Book data, iCal calendar and todo list information, and Safari bookmarks. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Be sure to have the latest Address Book, iCal, Safari and iSync installed on each of the computers.

2. Enter the shared .Mac account information in the Internet panel of the System Preferences on each computer.

3. Click on the .Mac icon within iSync (on each computer) and configure the desired synchronization settings for each computer. (The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to register the computer on Apple’s synchronization server.)

4. Click the Sync button.

My wife and I are now sharing Address Book, iCal and Safari bookmark information, and life is grand. :-) This synchronization service is the final touch that makes .Mac’s $99 annual charge seem (for me, at least) worthwhile.

And this story wouldn’t be complete without mention of BuddyPop, the amazingly wonderful $5 utility that gives you instant on-screen access to your Address Book data.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about Mac OS X is watching the emergence of tools that tie the GUI applications to the Unix interface. For example, StuffIt, Speed Download, and Interarchy all come with command-line interface (CLI) tools. In the case of Interarchy, for example, I can type the following in the Terminal and have Interarchy download the file in the background (putting it in my Downloads folder and post processing it for me):

interarchy -b this_url

Today a great new utility was released, called contacts. Contacts is a CLI utility providing command-line access to the Mac OS Address Book. Very convenient! There’s no faster way to get someone’s phone number now than to type the following in the Terminal:

contacts Jones

What’s also quite nice is that many of these CLI utilities (like contacts) are free, and even delivered with the source code (in case you want to modify them, or just learn something).

On June 2nd, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Mars Express space probe. The probe is now on its way towards the red planet, with rendezvous planned for December 24th. This is particularly exciting for us, as our company produces the equipment, known as the Intermediate Frequency & Modem System (IFMS) that communicates with the satellite from the ESA ground stations!

Since this website also serves as a technology playground, I’ve recently integrated iTunes reporting. You can see both the currently playing track in my local iTunes, as well as a listing of the last 30 recently played tunes. Neat.

How is this done? I’d love to tell you it’s based on a CORBA ORB that I single-handedly conceived and integrated with a SOAP/XML-RPC interface running on my blog — but, those who know me would KNOW I’m lying. So I’ll fess’ up — Most of the work is done with a little MacOS X utility called Kung-Tunes.

Earlier this week on Monday, my Powerbook’s hard drive began making odd chirping sounds. By Wednesday the chirping had degraded to thumping, and on Wednesday night the disk died. Fortunately, due to an external mirror that I maintain, I was quickly up and running with almost no data loss.

In order to maintain this mirror current, I run a script from cron each night that mirrors my startup volume to the external Firewire disk. This script was generated by Carbon Copy Cloner. During the day, I run another script, every two hours from cron, that uses on psync to mirror my /Users/ directory to the mirror:

#!/bin/bash

# The following variable holds the name of the target volume

NAME=TiBookMirror
PART=`diskutil list|grep $NAME|awk '{print $6}'`

if [ -z `ls -1 /Volumes/ | grep $NAME` ] ; then     
  exit 1
else   
   if [ `file /dev/$PART | awk '{print $2}'` = "block" ] ; then  
    /usr/local/bin/psync -d /Users/ /Volumes/$NAME/Users/
  else
    exit 1
  fi
fi

A failure of the startup disk then can result in a maximum of two hours of lost work.

In my case, after the TiBook’s drive died, I booted from the external Firewire mirror (hold the option key down at boot, to get a list of available startup volumes.) I ran from this mirror until my new drive arrived. Later, installed the new drive, booted from the mirror, quit all running applications, and used CCC to mirror the mirror to the new internal drive. Shutdown and started from the new internal drive. Smooth as silk.

A few random notes (for myself, should this happen again):

(1) Buy Disk Warrior 3. Apple Disk Utility isn’t sufficient to repair seriously damaged disks.

(2) Don’t lend your Torx 8 screwdriver to anybody

(3) Enrique Tous (+34 915445660) at Multiple Zones España is very fast at shipping out a new Powerbook drive. I had a new 60GB drive delivered to my house the next day for 229 Euro (excluding VAT).

(4) Don’t forget that subvolumes defined in Retrospect are not path based, and will get screwed up when you install a new disk. You have to go back and redefine those subdirectories, and update any Retrospect scripts that reference them

(5) Be careful about using fsck -y from the command line. Doing this made the damaged drive disappear (not even appearing any longer in the volume list). I noticed that when you run Disk Utility, and do a ps -aux | grep fsck, that DU is actually running fsck-hfs in the background to do the work. First time I’ve heard of “fsck-hfs” Should we as Mac OS X users be using that instead of fsck?

I’m looking for a MacOS X GUI utility to facilitate the launching of shell scripts. Ideally, I’d like to have something running in the menu bar, whose contents reflect a listing of the shell scripts (sh, bash, php, etc.) that I have stored in a particular folder. Selecting an item from the menu would switch to Terminal and execute the shell script in a new window.

That’s the basic requirements. Getting fancy — it would be nice to be able to drag-n-drop a number of files on any script name in the menu, and have those files passed as command-line arguments to the script.

Anybody know if such a utility exist?

All I can say is — wow. This morning I’ve discovered an application for MacOS X that is simply awesome. (Ok, maybe the initial wow factor still hasn’t worn off.) It’s called RadioLover.

RadioLover, in a nutshell, allows you to record streams to MP3. If the information is available in the stream, it will create separate MP3s for each song — including sensible naming of the file and tag assignment. The quality of the recording is a function of the stream bitrate, so for a 128 kbps stream, you’re going to get something close to what you buy from Apple’s Music Store.

Possible uses: Let it run overnight and keep a fresh supply of music available for your iPod. Use its “scheduler” to schedule the recording of a late-night talk show, and listen to it later in your iPod.

If the iTrip (for iPod) is the best $35 I’ve spent lately, RadioLover is certainly the best $15.

For anyone interested, attached below (in the Extended Entry) is the script I run nightly from cron that informs me by email when my current iPhoto Library is getting big enough to consider taking an action with iPhoto Library Manager to create a new one.
A couple of notes:
(1) Yes, the script uses the CLI version of PHP. I’m much more familiar with the PHP language than I am with tools like Perl.
(2) The script uses the knowledge that I name my iPhoto Libraries according to the form “iPhoto-Library-20030521″, so that the last entry in a directory listing is the currently used Library (and the one whose size should be calculated).
(3) I’ve removed the < ? ?> PHP delimiters from the script example, to prevent execution when you view it (since my blog is parsed by PHP). Continue reading →

As mentioned on Macintouch, a Cnet column titled “Steve Jobs’s Half Note”, Evan Hansen writes that the iTunes Music Store’s innovation falls far short of the ideal for an online music distribution system:

So, what should the ideal music store of the future look like?
  At the very least, it should provide unsecured MP3 downloads; reams of information about artists and music, including trusted reviews and recommendations; numerous opportunities to sample before buying; concert schedules and tickets; and access to lyrics and sheet music. [...]   How revolutionary might all of this get? One idea that’s been discussed recently proposes creating a real-time pricing scheme for music, with song prices based on their popularity. Hot new singles might spike up to $3 or higher during the first hours or days of their release, while unpopular titles would be substantially discounted. Demand pricing could increase sales for otherwise overlooked works, or at least lower the cost of trying out something new, while rewarding top sellers.   I don’t know if this would work. But it sets the bar pretty high for innovation. By comparison, Apple’s music store is rather modest.

What Evan Hansen doesn’t understand, that (thank goodness) Steve Jobs does, is that the innovation (and challenge) of most successful design is — simplicity. Minimize the options available to users. Create a path of least resistance to the objective. “Reams of information” will distract me. “Concert schedules and tickets” is an obstacle to my purchase of music. “Real-time pricing” will confuse me (Hmm, maybe I’d better keep looking for a better buy.)

2 million songs sold in a two weeks? I think Jobs and Apple got it about right.

There’s a discussion going on at NSLog(); containing tips about shell aliases. I keep going back, so I thought I’d add it to my blog.