Well they said it can’t be done. They said the secret of the apple sauce was only known to Steve. Looks like Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri has it figured out. 1340 lines of code and you’ve got the Apple’s Ubercool keyboard on the N800…..gotta love open platforms.

Okay so how many times have you “deleted” a file on a USB drive under OSX only to find out later that the storage is still tied up in .Trashes directory. Well there is a easy way to fix this. Open terminal, cd to your USB drives root directory (mounted under /Volumes) and issue the following:
rm -rf .Trashes
touch .Trashes
This creates a file called .Trashes on your USB drive (don’t worry the file size is zero). The side effect of this is that if you delete files off the USB stick, OSX will delete them immediately (since it can not create a .Trashes directory).

Okay couple of quick ways to find the serial number of your mac.
ioreg -l|grep IOPlatformSerialNumber|awk '{print $4}'|cut -d \" -f 2
or
ioreg -l | awk '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ {print $4}' | sed 's/\"//g'
Very useful when you’re logged into your Mac remotely and call apple helpdesk with a issue.

Normally if you wanted to install OSX on a external drive, you’d probably reboot, insert the DVD and boot off the DVD. Well turns out you really don’t have to do that. You can actually attach a external drive to your machine while it’s running OSX, insert the DVD and install OSX to the attached external device. Here is how:

• Assuming your machine is running some sort of OSX, insert the OSX install DVD into the drive.
• Now attach the external device to your machine (ie: firewire drive).
• Now using finder navigate to “/System/Installation/Packages/” Folder and run “OS Install.pkg” (it might be “OS Install.mpkg”) by double clicking it.
• Go through the installation process and choose the external drive as your installation destination.
• DONE….

Okay these are bash goodies, so they’ll work in any environment. If you’re in a situation where you’re switching between two different directory paths over and over again, here is a quick tip
cd -
Another little annoyance that I’ve gotten around is when you want to edit a system file and you type in the command (ie: vi /etc/this/is/a/really/long/path/config.cfg), only to realize that you forgot to sudo. This used to mean that I would quit vi, curse, recall the command, insert a sudo infront of the vi command and try again….well here is the quicker way.
sudo !!
This will (re)sudo your last command. And if that’s not enough you can actually narrow the sudo down to the last command that started with a certain string.
sudo !apache
Which will look in the history file and (re)sudo the first command that contains the string “apache”.

This is another CLI command, so get your terminal ready. This gives you a quickway to check the DNS settings on OSX. Now one way is to just cat /etc/resolv.conf , but what if you wanted to see what the system is actually using (not just what it was configured for). Well scutil comes to rescue and gives us an interface to the “dynamic store” data maintained by configd. Here is the command:

scutil --dns
The output will list all four resolver your system is configured for. scutil is another one of those deep OSX commands, so I suggest you have a look at the manual for it (man scutil) or get on google and search for more details (Tech Zendo has a detailed article on how to perform actions during fast user switching, AFP548 also has a great article on how to setup NIC failover).

New day, new command. dscl is the command in question. It gives you access to Mac OSX’s Directory Services Command Line interface. Very powerful stuff for those of us who like the command line and hate to do the same task a million times. A useful example is the ability to grant Administrator privileges to a user from command line. Normally you would have to pull up System Preferences/Accounts/Click User and check the “Allow user to administrate this computer” box. Well not anymore….Here is how:

• First you probably want to check who is an admin on the machine in question:
• dscl . read /Groups/admin GroupMembership
• Next you might want to add a user (we call him uberuser here) to the admin list:
• dscl . append /Groups/admin GroupMembership uberuser
• And maybe you want to revoke the admin privileges for user uberguber:
• dscl . delete /Groups/admin GroupMembership uberguber
• To see all the Directory information for user www:
• dscl . -read /Users/www
• To see all the Directory information about group admin:
• dscl . -read /Groups/admin

There are probably a ton more things you can do with dscl, but that’s beyond the scope of this article (and my knowledge)…..so man dscl and have fun reading.

This is gotta be one of the coolest generative music projects. Make sure your browser has a working version of Java. Have fun and please don’t complain when you find out you’ve waisted your entire day at this site…….

So we’ve been waiting for this for a while now. In Digital Cinema applications display technology throughput has always been a problem. Pumping ~10Gb/s of data to a screen is an issue, be it a projector and/or monitor. There have been a number of “hacks” to get these types of setups working (Dual or Quad DVI/HDMI ports). The problem usually is the seam. It is very hard to sync four DVI output chips properly and even harder to display the pixel information back on the screen (inside the projector/monitor).

DisplayPort technology is one attempt to solve this problem:

The DisplayPort connector supports 1 to 4 data pairs in a Main Link that also carries audio and clock signals, each with a transfer rate of 1.62 or 2.7 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). The Video signal path supports 6 to 16 bit per color channel. A bi-directional auxiliary channel runs at a constant 1 megabit per second, and serves as Main Link management and device control using VESA EDID and VESA MCCS standards.”

As you can see from the Wikipedia Quote above, DisplayPort (in it’s quad configuration) can support upto 10.8 Gb/s of information….perfect for DCinema Applications. Samsung has just released a Press Release outlining their 30′ LCD monitor that uses DisplayPort technology:

“Seoul, Korea – July 25, 2007: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world’s largest provider of thin-film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panels, announced today that it has developed the world’s first LCD panel using the next-generation video interface – “DisplayPort.” Sanctioned by VESA (the Video Electronics Standards Association), DisplayPort will serve as a replacement for DVI, LVDS and eventually VGA.

For Samsung’s new 30-inch LCD, the DisplayPort interface transmits graphics data at a total data rate of 10.8Gbps. This speed enables 2560×1600 resolution without any color smear. By using a transmission speed more than double that of today’s interfaces, Samsung’s new LCD only requires a single DisplayPort interface, instead of the two DVI (Digital Visual Interface) ports now used.

In a joint undertaking with Genesis Microchip Inc. (Santa Clara, California), Samsung developed its 30” panel using a new four-lane, 2.7Gbps/lane interface chip. The interface technology processes 2560×1600 pixels of graphics data at up to 10 bits of color depth or 1.07 billion colors, a feat that would normally require at least three DVI or four LVDS interface chips.

“We are pleased to be the first LCD manufacturer in the world to create a panel with a DisplayPort interface,” said Brian Berkeley, vice president, Samsung LCD Business, who is leading the company’s DisplayPort development efforts. “We have received many inquiries from computer integrators interested in DisplayPort-based LCD panels, which prompted an acceleration of our R&D for this first DisplayPort LCD panel.” Samsung was the only LCD panel maker participating in the original DisplayPort working (standards) group formed in 2004.

Samsung’s new 30” LCD also offers the company’s proprietary Super Patterned Vertical Alignment (S-PVA) liquid crystal technology for 180° viewing angle, and 300nits brightness.

Mass production of the 30-inch panel is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2008.

Specifications:
Display size 30”
Resolution WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600 pixels)
Response time 6ms
Viewing angle 180°/180°
Contrast ratio 1000:1
Mode S-PVA
Brightness 300 nits
Colors 16,777,000
Color saturation 100%
Interface DisplayPort

It’s just too bad that we can’t buy this NOW

There is a great article over on Cnet.uk talking about Format Wars. So you want to know what would have happened if BeOS didn’t cost $400 million….Well maybe “it would make BeOS the operating system of choice for Apple Macs. It would also prevent Steve Jobs from returning to that company. In turn, this would put an end to all that silly iPod business and make MiniDisc the dominant force in portable music.”

Gotta love what if’s

I’ve run into this issue a number of times a year, including today again, and I have to dig up the email I sent to myself last year with the command line in it. If, like us, you have a bunch of headless Xserves and you’re trying to (re)install OSX on them you might have run into this. How the heck do you change the boot volume to the CD/DVD in the drive when you have no keyboard/mouse access or remote desktop? Well turns out it’s quite simple (as usual). Just issue the command below from a ssh session (make sure the install CD/DVD is in the drive first):

• Run diskutil list to make note of the CD drives partition number (usually /dev/disk1s2 if the system has one Hard drive only).
• Run sudo bless –device /dev/disk1s2 –setBoot (You can also add –nextonly if you want to do this for just one boot cycle).
• Run sudo reboot

You can also set a netboot server as your boot source:

• Run sudo bless –netboot –server bsdp://255.255.255.255 (for subnet broadcast or specific IP address for specific netboot server).
• Run sudo reboot

Bless the bless guy for blessing us with the bless tool

Before I start, this tip is Unix friendly (not just OSX), but requires you to know what shell scripts are and how you create/run them. Additionally you should be familiar with the workings of the “find” command in Unix.

I had lots of trouble getting the Google Analytics code onto my gallery site. The problem is that I use iWeb to create a front end that links to a discrete back end (ie: specific subdirectories generated by Photoshop, iPhoto or Aperture). I found this Automator script earlier, but it seems like every time I run the script on a Folder, the script only changes .html pages created by iWeb….Weird. So after some head scratching and googling, I found the following complementary scripts on RSVP – Xnews site. There is a certain amount of detail about what the script is actually doing on that site, but I just wanted to extract the meat and add a little garnish (yeah I made a couple of mistakes, that I hope you’ll avoid).

• First you need a new Analytics account or if you have one (with a existing profile) you might need to create a new profile for this new site you want to track. The mistake I made was that I had a existing account that tracks nerdlogger.com and I (by mistake) used it’s analytics ID in the script. Since my gallery site is a different domain, analytics creates a new ID when you add the domain (it actually increments the last digit).
• Then you need to create a script called insert (or whatever you like) and put this in it (just cut and paste from here):

#!/bin/bash

#INSERT SCRIPT#Your Google Analytics Code goes below.googleAnalyticsCode='UA-XXXXXXX-2'textToInsert="<script src=\"http:\/\/www.google-analytics.com\/urchin.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\">_uacct = \"$googleAnalyticsCode\";urchinTracker();<\/script>"textToReplace="<\/[Bb][Oo][Dd][Yy]>"#You need to substitute the path to the top of your webdirectory below.WebPath='/Volumes/idiskname/Web/Sites'

# this is where the actual work happensfind $WebPath -iname '*.html' -exec sed -i .bak -e "/$textToInsert/!s/$textToReplace/$textToInsert&/g" {} \; -print

• Now create another script called remove (or whatever you like) and put this in it (just cut and paste):

#!/bin/bash

#REMOVE SCRIPT#Your Google Analytics Code goes below.googleAnalyticsCode='UA-XXXXXXX-2'textToRemove="<script src=\"http:\/\/www.google-analytics.com\/urchin.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\">_uacct = \"$googleAnalyticsCode\";urchinTracker();<\/script>"#You need to substitute the path to the top of your webdirectory below.WebPath='/Volumes/idiskname/Web/Sites'

# this is where the actual work happensfind $WebPath -iname '*.html' -exec sed -i .bak -e "s/$textToRemove//g" {} \; -print

• Now we’re almost there. Create one last script called delback (or whatever) and put the folowing one liner in it:

#DELBACK SCRIPT#You need to substitute the path to the top of your webdirectory below.find /Volumes/idiskname/Web/Sites -iname '*.bak' -exec rm {} \; -print

At this point you should have three scripts insert, remove and delback. Use insert to insert the code into all the HTML files under a certain path ($WebPath). This will create .bak files and once you’ve verified the insert scripts operation you can delete/clean them using the delback script. Use remove to remove the analytics code from your HTML pages (if you decide later that you don’t like google analytics or something). Again this process creates .bak files that can be removed/cleaned using the delback script.

Keep in mind also that if you use iWeb to generate your pages and they are sitting on a OSX server that by default your web addresses get expanded after the browser requests them (ie: My gallery is http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/~mayromlo but gets expanded and rewritten as http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca:16080/~mayromlo/Site/Welcome.html). So you need to get google analytics to go to the expanded version by editing the profile information after initial entry and changing the website URL. This last issue is very mac/osx specific.

If you use the built-in Dictionary facilities of your Mac while creating content, you probably know about Ctrl-Command-D. You can use this key combo to look up a word in the built-in dictionary. Well, turns out that after you look up the initial word, you can keep holding Ctrl-Command (ie: let go of D key) and as long as you move the mouse around, your mac will look up the active word (under cursor) in it’s dictionary. Neat!!!

We’ve been covering quite a bit of Opensource/Linux/Hack-your-own GSM phones (some even with GPS), but here is the ultimate phone for the N.E.R.D’s out there….From the Press Release:

“Portola Valley, Calif., July 10, 2007 – Gumstix, Inc, today announced its integrated, open source cellular communications platform: the GoliathTM line of expansion boards. The Goliath-vx board provides GPRS/EDGE function while the Goliath-GPS-vx board combines GPRS/EDGE and GPS. Each Goliath board attaches to a gumstixTM motherboard (verdex only) using a 60-pin connector and includes audio, LCD, touch screen, USB host, 3D-accelerometer, and battery management. General availability is planned for late July and the company will begin taking pre-orders at gumstix.com starting on 16 July.

The Goliath boards are by far the largest gumstix products at 105.5mm x 67.3mm, the same dimensions as the Samsung 4.3” LCD touch screens that Gumstix will also sell. Goliath gives verdex motherboards full-speed USB access to the Siemens MC75 GPRS/EDGE module, the u-blox NEO-4S GPS module, and one external USB device.”

For those of you who don’t know, Gumstix has been manufacturing a couple of different embedded platforms around the XScale processor family. Their boards runs an opensource embedded Linux exclusively. Recently they have branched out into building lots of expansion boards. These expansion boards when combined with their motherboards can truly allow you to create just about anything. Sounds like you’ve got everything you need to build the “real” Iphone

Right on the heels of our story on reconstructor, a tool that allows you to create custom Ubuntu distribution CD’s, here is APTonCD for Ubuntu. It’s basically a graphical tool that allows you to create a CD of all the applications you’ve installed on your Ubuntu system since you installed the system initially. This used to be a pain, if you had to take care of a lab of machines. The drill was: install the OS, add all the required software and then created a master image, followed by multiple image installs.

Well thanks to APTonCD you don’t have to do this anymore. You can install the base CD/DVD (or make your own using reconstructor), add all the extra software from the repositories and then run APTonCD. At which point you can instruct it to create a CD/DVD of all the extra packages you’ve installed. The application can also create a CD/DVD of all the software on a specific repository or download all official Ubuntu repositories onto removable media. Very handy if you’re doing a install without net connection.

One more thing you can do with this is to get all the Ubuntu official updates/patches/fixes on a CD/DVD, so that you download them only once (if you’re installing mutiple machines). As usual the install is a simple one-liner:

sudo apt-get install aptoncd

Alex over at Tinkerlog has hacked together the coolest E-goodie I’ve seen in a while. A GSM powered GPS mobile tracker. Yeah I know, you can do it with your $1000 Nokia N95, well no you can’t….you see this little guy actually sends out SMS messages (over GSM) with it’s current location and since Alex has a AVR ATmega8 controller in there you can probably do some other neat hacks as well. All this for about $550, not bad. Detailed instruction/parts list to build your own are on his site.

Okay I was going to keep this clean up ’til a few minutes ago. You see I Purchased a 3Dconnexion space navigator personal edition a while back. At the time my understanding was that the personal edition can’t be used for in professional arena and since I was only using it to “play” around in google earth, I figured I save myself $60. Well, it looks like logitech (parent company) has rigged the driver with a “reminder” pop-up to bug you every 30 days. God I f***ing hate these companies….When was the last time that a driver for your hardware popped up with a reminder that if you are using the hardware device in a professional arena you owed the company more money.

LOGITECH….F U….YOU ALREADY HAVE MY MONEY….GIVE IT A REST.

Okay a little while back I wrote a piece about setting up custom DNS names on easyDNS.com and getting the plumbing to work with blogger. Well, there is some excellent news. You see, Mark Jeftovic (Pres. and CEO of easyDNS) contacted me today to let me know about modifications they have made to their DNS parking servers. These changes make it super easy to setup a blogger custom DNS name with them. No need for Mommy and Daddy….just use easyDNS

Here are the updated details:

1. Obviously first register your domain name. I went over to easydns.ca (.com is the same company) and registered nerdlogger.com (I use the DNS-Only service & Registry Fees).
2. Now login to your account on easyDNS. You should see the Members page and somewhere in there there should be a listing of the domains you own under domain settings. Click the DNS command next to the domain you want to use and you should see a page with a bunch of stuff relating to your brand new domain.
3. Scroll down to the hosts section and check that it has a entry for your domain with PENDING under has IP field. This is the default, so I would be very suprised if it is not there. Just double check.
4. Now on that same page under aliases setup a CNAME (alias) for www with the corresponding A Record (host) for ghs.google.com and press next to submit it. Make sure it says www only and ghs.google.com and nothing else.
5. Now you have to wait a couple of hours (I waited 4-6 hours) for the new information to propagate.
6. Log back into your easydns account and check the domain information page it should have a CNAME (alias) for www.yoursite.com. (Note the terminating DOT) and a Point to A Record (host) of ghs.google.com. (Note the terminating DOT).
7. Now log into your blogger account and switch to the settings page. Look under publishing tab and select Switch to: Custom Domain. Fill the Your Domain field with www.yoursite.com and press Save Settings.
8. Wait another 10 minutes and try going to http://www.yoursite.com and/or http://yoursite.com. Both should work at this point.

Before I start this segment I just want to mention that you will need Parallel’s Desktop for Mac for this to work. A new feature in parallels which I just discovered is it’s ability to fuse the two OS’es (OSX and WinXP) together so that you can tell applications in one OS (ie: windows) to open files in the other (ie:OSX).

For example let’s say you have a “Beauty and the Beast” setup on your laptop and you have parallels installed. Someone sends you an excel spreadsheet via email (assume you read your email on OSX). Further, assume you have installed office 2007 on your WinXP partition. Well now with Parallel’s Smart Select feature, you can save the file onto your desktop, right click on it and go to “open with” submenu, there you’ll notice Excel in the list and if you choose it, parallels will open the file in excel 2007 (under Windows).

The same idea works in reverse. If you’re in windows (under parallels) and right click on a icon you’ll see additional mac application volunteering to open the file for you in OSX. I’m relatively sure it works in both Coherence mode and non-Coherence mode, although I’ve only tried it in Coherence mode.

This is just such a gem I couldn’t help, but put it up. Head over to Briel Computers and have a look. Fully functional Apple I, KIM-1 and Altair PC cases. Man this just took me back in time.

Note that Replica I is actually an “upgraded” APPLE I. Their version has USB and serial and can be used with PC keyboard and power supplies. The Micro-KIM is exactly the same as the original KIM-1, but at quarter the size.