Fnord.

I just upgraded the 80GB drive in Chris’s iBook to a 250. Unlike my MacBookPro upgrade, it was quite difficult. Note the five pieces of paper with screws on them - those were the spatial maps for each layer. Total time around 4 hours, whew.

Working very well now, but set aside an afternoon for this one. I got instructions from this page and this one too. Both are nice and pictorial.

Not too bad. I’m now sporting a 250GB drive (!!), quite easy to do. Lots of Torx and Phillips screws, but not bad with patience and help from a co-worker.

Data transfer was via rsync:

  sudo rsync -axvE --progress / /Volumes/New

(Actually, the volume name is Rex Tremendae, a hat tip to Berlioz’s Requiem. Good stuff, that.)

After that, just go into Prefs and select the new drive as the boot volume. Almost too easy.

What amazing times we live in. 250 (marketing) gigabytes for two hundred and nine dollars!

BTW, the Hitachi appears to be quieter than the stock 120G it replaced. Speed seems about the same in casual use so far.


defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock


Worked!

Browsing the list of new features (300 claimed), a few jump out at me. I preordered my copy already on Amazon, and am really looking forward to this. Been a long time coming.

1. Although its not well known, 10.4 already supports SmartCards via the MUSCLE framework. (Apple page here) You can flip a (hidden) switch, and voila! Your login screen sports a government logo. I dug into this a few years ago, but foundered on the smart cards. You easily get cards and readers that Mac recognizes, but the code to program the cards is basically unavailable. Jumping back to the present, 10.5 supports the ‘PIV’ standard:
   

   Let your smart card do more. Now you can use a smart card to unlock FileVault volumes and your keychain, and configure your Mac to lock the screen when a smart card is removed. Leopard supports the PIV standard for Federal employees and contractors.

   PIV is Personal Identity Verification, AKA FIPS 201. It requires contact (magstripe or similar) as well as RFID functions. Eeeenteresting…wonder if mortals like me can program them? Update: Just found this page that covers card init and programming. Now where did I leave that hardware…

2. A small thing, but you can now embed calculations in the search window, just like google:

   

3. Dictionary app now integrates Wikipedia content when online. Handy! I use wikipedia daily, this’ll be useful.
4. iCal has gotten much stronger. Group scheduling, availability, booking resources (e.g. conference rooms) and a bunch of other useful additions. Looks like it wants a CalDAV server to do all this magic, dunno yet if there’s a free one out there. Update: there is. Several, actually. Even Apple’s code is OSS!
5. There’s something with Mail that allows notes to sync with iPhone, seemingly via IMAP magic. I still want real sync, because otherwise the iPhone notes are a dead-end. Waiting and seeing on this one.
6. Everyone now geotagging your JPGs, Preview is now up on your game:
   

   Get real information from your photos. If your image has embedded GPS metadata, Preview will show you exactly where that perfect photo was taken. Open the Image inspector and select GPS. Preview pinpoints the location where you took the photo on a world map. From there you can even open the GPS location in Google Maps.

   Kewl.

7. Terminal gets tabs. I’ve switched to iTerm, but I’ll have to try Terminal again.
8. RSS integrated into email. Interesting idea.
9. TextEdit opens and edits MS Word 2007 documents. Useful, that!
10. TimeMachine looks awesome. Time to buy more disks. They say it works over AFP, so maybe I can just backup to my Debian box running netatalk.
11. Kernel much improved - POSIX 1003.1, SUSv3, DTrace, better threading, 64-bit apps.
12. Ruby on Rails now shipped in the box! Xcode v3! Ruby support for Rendezvous/Bonjour.

There’s a lot more on the list, but those are the ones that jumped out at me. This looks good!

(This one is for Larry and Martin.)

Chris’s iBook battery had started to age out, and it was time to replace it. The stock Apple battery is 61 watt-hours, for $129.  This yields ~6 hours of runtime when new.

However, from my time with Nestor at Argonne, I knew of a company called Newer Tech. (Pun intended.) They make a line of high-quality batteries with higher capacities than the stock Apple parts, and the prices tend to match Apple’s.  So here’s their offering:

(Image is a link to the product page)

Looks the same, but 74 watt-hours for the same price. Kind of a no-brainer, eh? They also have a 60W-H, but for the difference in price its better to get the 74 IMHO. The new unit is producing ridiculously long runtimes on the iBook, much to my 3-hours-on-a-good-day-MBP envy.

What’s more, they include free recycling of your old battery, with prepaid shipping. I really like that.

Highly recommended.

…Via this ADC thread, news of the spiffy VNCThing, a rather nice client. Homepage seems to be lost-domained, but the software seems to work pretty well. I guess it’s greedy of me to wish that CoRD would add VNC support…

 

 

I’ve been considering a different firewall router for the home network, and am looking at the Linksys/Cisco RV042.

The unit ships with decent Windows software, but they’re silent on the issue of Mac support. From this excellent article come the instructions and three key tidbits:

1. It won’t work if your Mac is behind a NAT router.
2. You configure the router under ‘PPTP server’ and not VPN server.
3. Enter the username/password into ‘Internet Connect’ and you’re good to go.

If you’re lucky enough to have OSX server, a VPN server is built in. I’m not.

Hmm, looks like the RV042 is ~$170 as of 6/07. Not bad. It can do 5 PPTP connections at once, which’d be fine for me. It’d be nice to be able to print from offsite sometimes, and SSH tunnels are a PITA.

“CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.”http://cord.sourceforge.net/

…and it works better than anything else, including the MS client. An essential Mac tool.

Got a new mouse yesterday, the Logitech MX revolution. I’m using it today to code, email, and such, the usual stuff.

This mouse rocks. The scroll wheel has inertia, so you can scroll fast and easily (it spins freely when you want it to), and the one-button-search (aka ‘google button’) is very useful. You just highlight a word and press the button, and a new tab opens with a google search. You can also use spotlight or other net-based engines if you prefer. Damned useful for obscure OpenSSL API calls and such.

The side wheel does really well for application switching, and the tracking is smooth and precise.

It comes with a very small USB transceiver, it’d be nice if it were Bluetooth. Oh well.

The on/off switch on the bottom is really nice, means that you can toss it in your bag and not arrive with a dead mouse.

Highly recommended.

Mac OSX is very adept at PDF files; the OS can generate ‘em, search ‘em, etc, etc. And of course they’re everywhere on the Net for any application that requires formatting greater than HTML/CSS.

One consequence of this is that my hard drive now has an enormous pile of PDF files. It’s getting to the point where its a pain to locate the one(s) I need, even with Spotlight and Quicksilver. This is similar to the situation prior to iPhoto, in a lot of ways, but Apple doesn’t have a solution out for PDFs.

Enter a third-party program called Yep. Commercial, alas, but really cool. Tagging, searching, previews, all sorts of cool features. Incremental search really does it for me.

It’s 34 bucks, free trial download. I might have to buy this one.