iPhone Stop Motion movie
So I got a little bored in a meeting this week. One of the new guys I’m working with, Lee, had brought in a bunch of art supplies for a design meeting and I got a bit carried away with the play-dough! The result was this short iPhone stop motion movie. It’s not exactly ground breaking, but was pretty fun to put together. The final movie was created in iMovie, which was ridiculously easy to use.
Bowled Over from Todd Papaioannou on Vimeo.
Damn Time Capsule
I got Time capsule errors again, but this time even my own advice did not work. I was forced to resort to a format and start again. Grr! What a PITA. Plus, the first backup took like 18 hours!
Filed under Mac | Comment (0)Zero Inbox Widget
I’ve recently made the push to get to Inbox Zero. It’s a productivity technique popularized by Merlin Mann for dealing with the ever increasing deluge of email. It feels great when you get there, but as with every productivity methodology you have to stick at it and continually do it. Sometimes I need a little reminder on things like this, so I created a very simple Dashboard widget to help. I have this running constantly and it acts as a visual reminder every time I flick to my Dashboard of what I need to do to maintain my Inbox Zero.
If you are interested, you can download the widget here. I hope it helps with your quest to get to and maintain your empty inbox.
Technorati Tags: Inbox Zero, Widgets
Mac terminal tips
I still love the power of the terminal and command shell. By default however, the Mac Terminal leaves a little to be desired. Luckily, you can use Terminal to er… fix Terminal. Here are a few handy tips.
Make your terminal window show you your current directory:
export HOSTNAME
export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}:${PWD}\007"'
Add some color to your prompt:
export PS1="\033[0;36m\][\u@\h: \w] [\033[0;36m\]\$\[\033[0m\] "
Make your ls commands show directories as color:
alias ls="ls -G"
alias ll="ls -lG"
Just add this into e.g. your $HOME/.bashrc file.
Technorati Tags: osx, mac, terminal
Mac Screen Sharing via SSH
With Leopard you can now use your .mac account to get back to your home machine using the Back to my Mac feature. However, I’m a little paranoid and don’t like leaving a bunch of ports open on my firewall. I still want to get back to my home machine though and can easily do so using SSH. This is great for most things I need to do, but occasionally I want to actually drive the desktop. This requires a bit more SSH magic:
ssh -L 8888:hostname.yourhost.com:5900 hostname.yourhost.com
will open a local port 8888 and pass all traffic from there to port 5900 on your remote machine. You can now use this to open a screen sharing session to your remote machine.
- In Finder select Go -> Connect to Server
- Then enter vnc://localhost:8888
This will start Screen Sharing and allow you to control your remote mac’s desktop. Neat!
SSH bouncing
The above example was pretty simple and should suffice for most people. However, what if your network setup is a bit more complicated? Let’s say you have multiple machines in your home network, but only one is visible to the outside world (pretty likely if you have just got a single IP from your Internet provider). You can still open a screen sharing connection using some more SSH magic:
ssh -L 8888:otherhostname.yourhost.com:5900 hostname.yourhost.com
this will open a local port 8888 and pass traffic from there to port 5900 on your other machine, bouncing through your first host. Follow all that? Easy really 
If you’re wondering how you can address your home machine and don’t want to have to keep remembering your IP address, use a DNS alias service like DynDNS to create an easy to remember name.
Technorati Tags: screen sharing, macos, ssh
Time Capsule errors
All of a sudden I started getting errors when backing up to my Time Capsule. Time Machine was only able to to mount the backup drive in read-only mode. Apparently it had got corrupted. No beuno! While I could have followed the recommended approach to format the drive (!) and start again, I didn’t really want to lose my backup history.
First of all I tried good ol’ Disk Utility, but that was unable to repair the disk. It did give me a valuable clue however with this cryptic message:
“Invalid siblings link”
Since this is just a file system, in this case HFS I figured there must be some command line utility to run that could have a go at fixing the problem. Enter “fsck_hfs“, which works in a very similar manner to it’s Linux cousin e2fsck. The only tricky part was figuring out what the path to the drive was, but luckily you can get that from Disk Utility by selecting the drive and choosing Info. In my case, /dev/disk2s2. Putting this all together I typed this into a terminal window as root:
fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk2s2
and waited. And waited and waited! A good 20 hours later fsck_hfs finally announced it had successfully repaired the drive. Whew! Worth the wait I guess.
Technorati Tags: time capsule, apple
