JAFDIP

Just another frakkin day in paradise

TechnoBabel

How to burn a DVD on Mac OS X using Diskutility

So you want to make a backup of some data you have on a DVD and you use a MAC. This is no where as difficult as it is made out to be, sure you could buy some cool software like DVDRemaster, or Toast Titanium 10 Pro. Or if you are a Unix pro you could install the MacPorts and roll you own solution using Handbrake and various other utilities, however; you could just use the built-in Disk Utility tucked neatly away in your Utilities folder.

Figure 1::Disk Utility icon
Figure 1::Disk Utility icon

Open Disk Utility (referred to as DU here after) and insert the DVD media you wish to backup. Once the media with your content has been loaded it will appear in the left pane of DU under the drive description. Refer to figure 2 for an example.

Figure 2::Media selection
Figure 2::Media selection

The next step is to select New Image from the tool bar above the right pane and the resulting dialog will ask you to title your new image. This step will copy the content from the media into a disc image file, that you could email to other Mac users, if you needed to send this to a PC or Unix/LINUX user then you would need to convert this image to an ISO. We will cover ISO images at a later date.

Figure 3::Create an image of the media
Figure 3::Create an image of the media

Once you are satisfied with your image name and select ‘Save’ it will begin the imaging process. Figure 4 demonstrates the action window that displays the progress.

Figure 4::Imaging Progress
Figure 4::Imaging Progress

Once the image of your content has been successfully created on your hard disk you will observe (see figure 5 for details) that it is auto mounted by DU and you may eject the disc in the DVD drive at this point.

Figure 5::New Created Disc Image
Figure 5::New Created Disc Image

At this point you can insert a blank media and select the ‘Burn’ option from the tool bar above the left pane. It’s the one that looks like a radio active warning. If the media is properly loaded in drive a context menu as shown in figure 6 will display. Select the ‘Burn’ button to proceed with the operation and the disc burning progress will be displayed in a window similar to figure 7.

Figure 6:Disc Burning Menu
Figure 6:Disc Burning Menu
Figure 7::Disc Burning Progress Window
Figure 7::Disc Burning Progress Window

You will be notified upon success or failure. Assuming that all went as planned you will be able to mount your backup copy and verify that the content is intact.

Figure 8::Burn Success
Figure 8::Burn Success

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How to reset Safari’s Homepage

Have you ever experienced some sort of phenomenon that corrupts or otherwise inhibits you ability to safely open an application on your Mac? Recently a friend of my announced on twitter that she had clicked a link that ‘messed up’ her Safari and that she thought it was infected with a virus or trojan. I thought since the answer while obvious to me was not openly available on the net I would publish it here for future reference.

Unfortunately my Google search did not yield anything of consequence so I did some digging on the command line and found the following command through trial and error. Actually to be quite honest I nailed it on the first try but let’s just chock that up to blind luck. Honestly I just made a guess that the property name would be HomePage written in camel text.

defaults write com.apple.Safari HomePage https://www.jafdip.net

After executing the command I was able to confirm that this was correct by simply opening Safari on my machine and observing the result. Another option would be to use the Properties List Editor to open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist but if your system is not set up for development work then it is not likely you will have such a tool at your disposal. The following is a snapshot of what it would look like.

Unfortunately the file is a binary plist (property list) and should not be edited directly without the proper tool. If you do then you could render Safari completely inoperable under your ID on the Mac. Your options at this point would be to try deleting the file and let Safari creates a new default version or to grab a copy off of some one elses’ Mac ID but in either case you will likely loose any preferences you had.

In fact if resetting the homepage does not work then you will likely need to resort to deleting the plist and hope that a fresh start of Safari will result in the best. Open the terminal app which is located in Applications/Utilities. The following is a snap of what your terminal window might look like.

Enter the following command and you will be prompted for your password if you have one. I will not argue the necessity of having a strong password on your Mac rather I’ll just say that you are asking for trouble if you do not.

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist

Since Mac OS X is based on an open source UNIX (FreeBSD) it will return to an empty command prompt if the command is successful. Simply launch Safari as you normally would and enjoy the startup music as well as resetting all of your preferences… again.

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How To Back Up Your Twitter Stream

DDS-3 Data Cartridge

So there’s a lot of discussion about backing up your status update stream on twitter. There are several products available that you are certainly welcome to pay for but if you are a long time JAFDIP reader you will know that we like to offer some more frugal possibilities.

This simple twitter hack will backup your status update starting from the moment that you turn it on. It is not something that will dig into your past tweets and archive them.I my estimation it is a fruitless endeavor to try and pull back those ancient tweets as no program can dig beyond that last 3200 updates.

Before you begin you will need to inventory you personal computer to determine if you have an application that can not only read an RSS feed but download the content as well. The example system that I will use to demonstrated this simple hack is a MacBook Pro.

The first step is to change how your system handles RSS feed data. TO do this you must open the preferences panel for Safari. If left to the default then Safari will attempt to handle all of your RSS reading needs which is just not going to work for our purposes. By changing it to the Mail app you have much greater control. It’s actually one of the hidden gems of the Mail app. As you can see from the following image the change is simple and immediately effective.

One word of caution however it will not retroactively change RSS feeds you’ve previously viewed. From this point going forward any RSS feed you select will open your Mail app asking if you want to install the feed in your account. For obvious reasons you will want to do this. One of the main benefits of moving your RSS feeds to Mail is that the text can be viewed while you are offline so you can always catch up on your RSS feeds when other things aren’t working. Another benefit is that you can create rules that alert you when key content is received but that’s not really in the scope of this article.

As I have already mentioned the next step is relatively straight forward. Simply highlight and cut the following URL then paste it into Safari. Remember to substitute your ID for the XXXXX‘s and then hit enter. The Mail app will open and once you approve the feed it will download the recent updates.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx

Mail will automatically retrieve all subsequent updates based on the settings in the Preferences Pane. The default is every 30 minutes.

At this point you can experiment with various options and even try to setup some rules if you like, however; this is a topic I will discuss in a forthcoming article. The important thing is that as long as the machine has a reliable internet connection it will check your stream regularly and download those tweets. This can be very handy if you tweet URL or notes that you would like to review again at some later date. It really doesn’t matter what you reason for backing up your updates is at least you have a fairly reliable method you can control.

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How To Setup a Minecraft Server

Now let me set the record straight before I begin. I do not play Minecraft but my 11 year old son and ALL of his friend do. He actually ponied up the $20 from his allowance to buy the beta version of the game. Honestly I do not believe in paying for beta which is why I do not run anything produced by Microsoft but that is a different story entirely.

One of the main advantages of paying for a legitimate license for this beta is that when the game is actually released if ever then he should get an automatic upgrade entitlement. Whether or not the developers take the Microsoft model of charging for upgrades or not however remains to be seen. In any even it is irrelevant to this discussion. The point of paying is to unlock the multiplayer feature because who really wants to play a game alone? It’s really hard to cheat as the banker when you play Monopoly all by yourself.

The main problem with playing on multiplayer systems is new players tend to become targets for just about every other player. My son only wants to play with his friends who are around the same age and skill level that he is. Fortunately Minecraft does have a server available which makes this possible. What’s even more interesting is that the server is available in a java implementation which mean just about any system running the latest version of java in addition if you lack the expertise of deploying the server on a TCP port 25565 and programming the appropriate network address translation (NAT) through your firewall you can use a virtual private network VPN.  The documentation recommends using Himachi a VPN product released by LogmeIn.

Fortunately the Minecraft WIKI has a pretty good page detailing the steps necessary to set up MCS using the jar file provided. A couple of thoughts about the wiki page that I discovered while installing the the system. The first is that the user id you wish to run MCS as must have complete read & write permission on the entire directory where you launch mcs from. This is necessary or mcs will not launch properly. I also created my own startup script to make things a little easier. The following is a copy of the start_mcs script that I placed in /usr/local/bin.

#!/usr/bin/env /bin/bash

MCSPath=/Volumes/Data/media/minecraft/
MCSJar=minecraft_server.jar

cd ${MCSPath}
exec java -Xmx1G -Xms1G -jar ${MCSJar}

Notice in the above script that I left off the -nogui option and this is because when you first start mcs you should watch the server console to ensure that things are working properly. Honestly there is no reason that you can not just run with the gui on but some people like their servers to be fully daemonized. This means that unless you look for the process specifially you won’t see it because it will be running as a service in the background.

As you can see these two screen shots display the gui on my Mac OS X Server.

One of the advantages of running the mcs gui is that you have access to console commands. The above is a listing the help commands. I recommend keeping this available until you become familiar with what each command actually does and how to manipulate the results from the command line. For instance if you make a player an op and then wish to remove that advancement you can use the gui or you can edit ops.txt in the mcs startup directory.

Once you have the console up and running you can attempt to connect your client computers (i.e. friends and other players). Think of the console as your safety net to remind you that everything is working. This was how I discovered the permissions issue because I installed everything as one user but launched the server as another and well things just didn’t work. I corrected the permissions and ownership and well now the kids are playing. Well they would be if they cleaned their rooms but that entirely a different issue.

One final advantage to running your own game server is that if someone becomes abusive in the game you have the ability to bounce them. In addition you can limit the connections to only your child’s friends which given the state of things on the internet these days is probably a good thing. Happy gaming!

 

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Why is a branded tweet manager good for business?

First off you are probably asking yourself. “Hey Mike, what in the hell is a branded tweet manager?”

I am so glad you asked and will explain. Have you ever closely examined the structure of a tweet? There is certain data is included that is not directly part of the status update but is available for various uses. There are the obvious operational buttons for marking the update as a favorite, replying or if it is your own message you can delete it.

What many people so not know is that the time stamp is also a button that contains the direct link to the update itself. The can be handy if you need to email an update to someone or even reference it in another update as you can link directly to the original. The interesting part is that if you click on the time stamp you will see the update on it’s own and you will reveal how the update was published.

In the above example you should not that the time stamp s no longer click able but the method next to the word via is. In this case it reads jafdip and if you were to click that link your browser will open the associated page. Obviously the above drill down method is a bit convoluted but if you use a twitter app like TweetDeck you will notice that the method is always displayed. In the following snapshot of the exact same tweet collected from TweetDeck you can see for yourself.

Interestingly enough you can click the same via link and receive the exact same result. While this may not seem like a huge bonus to your SEM plan consider the number of updates you publish on a given day. Now multiply that by the number of people in your organization that are also publishing updates. Those updates could ALL include a link back to your site which could equate to some important link juice building credibility for your enterprise. As we all know back links are not the magick SEO bullet they once were but considering how simple it is to add this to your plan would you pass it up?

There is a second importance to utilizing your own tweet manager. This one is slightly more sublime. Your company’s name is in front of every person reading those updates. It is a continual reminder of how you are connected. You have effectively stamped your brand on every update you submit. That my friend is huge and besides isn’t that what branding is all about?

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