Tag: mac

I
bought a couple of X10-building blocks : a tranceiver, an appliance- and
a lamp-module, a computer-interface and a motion detector and started
playing using the Indigo help-page. All modules worked immediately
and getting them under Indigo‘s control was also no problem.
Clearly it is fun to control a living room lamp and the coffee maker
from your computer but it gets even better when you program actions.
With Indigo you can let your home automation system react to
incoming emails. For example, if it is a rainy workday and I want to
have a cup of coffee when I bicycle home I can just send an email with
subject “Make coffee”. Indigo checks at home my email every
two-minutes and when it scans this subject-title it will send a signal
to the coffee maker to turn on (assuming I filled it with water and
coffee beforehand, otherwise it may result in a fire…). One can also
program it the other direction. For example, with Indigo I can
program things so that when the motion detector detects movement from
opening the front door, I can ask to send an email to work (or to a
mobile but as I am not using these things this is no option) with
message “Someone just walked in…”.
Getting the
motion-detector (MS13 for the experts) working was so far the second
hardest thing to do. I couldnt work out how to give it a home&unit
code but I found a readable manual page which made everything work. I have to
remember to change the other default options of the detector.
The hardest thing to solve was to get the Indigo Web Interface working. Following the
instructions on this page to the letter I thought that I could control
my X10-stuff from any other computer (assuming Indigo is running
on my iBook) by accessing the
URL

http://iBookLieven.local/cgi-bin/Indigo.acgi

but all I got
was a ‘Server Error’. I figured out that the mistake was caused by the
acgi
dispatcher program. The first time this is run, it asks for your
admin password to write some extra lines to the httpd.conf
Apache configuration file, but for some strange reason it didn’t want
to accept my password… Changing permissions on httpd.conf and
even creating a genuine root-account didn’t help so I was stuck
for a while. But then I found the Mac OS X
hack #91 which not only explains the use of the dispatcher tool but
also explains what it adds to the httpd.conf-file. So, I just
copied the following lines manually at the end of
httpd.conf

#BEGIN acgi dispatcher Include
/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/dispatcher.app/Contents/acgi.conf\r\
nEND acgi dispatcher

did restart the Apache webserved by a

sudo apachectl graceful

after which the acgi dispatcher
tool started up without problems and I got a working Indigo Web
Interface. I must remember to put both Indigo and the
dispatcher into my StartUp items.
The Web Interface is
very basic compared to other house automation programs such as MisterHouse
which makes up for its sexist name by being open source! It is entirely
written in Perl
but as I am only halfway through the Learning Perl book at the moment, this will have
to wait a bit longer…

I\’ve barely managed to implement the six
great tips for homemade dot mac servers by Alan
Graham or he is already off on a new project : Home Automation
with Mac OS X. I thought that home automation only could be
installed in new, highly wired, houses but I was wrong. In part
1 Alan Graham gives an overview why you might consider home
automation, gives the set-up in his house and outlines the hardware
necessary to do it. Clearly, most of his hardware is American but even
in Belgium it is not difficult to find vendors, for example intellihome.be. One can either control the
X10-machinery by remote control or via computer. For Macintosh Alan
Graham suggests to use the indigo program, of which one can download a fully
functional version for a 30 day tryout. The only piece I could not find
(yet) in Belgium was the PowerLink USB device but there is a serial-port
alternative available which seems to work just fine using a USB to
Serial cable (which are fairly expensive). In part 2 Alan Graham explains the basics of X10 technology and how you can
install all the hardware. In part 3 and later he promises to explain the
software part of things (if he hasnt started a new project by
then…).

Carbon Copy Cloner is a tool to make a full backup
of your hard-disk on an external firewire disk or iPod. Here’s
how it sells itself

Have you ever wanted a simple, complete,
bootable backup of your hard drive? Have you ever wanted to upgrade to
a larger hard drive with minimal hassle and without reinstalling your
OS and all of your applications? Have you ever wanted to move your
entire Mac OS X installation to a new computer? Then CCC is the tool
for you! CCC makes these tasks simple by harnessing the Unix power
built into Mac OS X. In addition to the features that CCC has provided
in the past, version 2 offers synchronization of the source and target
as well as scheduled backup tasks.

I didn’t try it out yet
but was interested in the final sentence and scrolling down the page I
discovered that the synchronisation is done using Dan Kogai’s psync program, which does not seem to work under
10.3 but has on the page a patch to this. Rather than using the
psync-page to install it, one can use the unoffical psync for Panther dmg-file from the
Carbon Copy Cloner-page. It installs without a problem and to
learn how to use it, there is a manual page. Here is what I do when I want to
synchronize my Documents-folder on iMacLieven to the
backup-machine tweedledee over the Airport-network

psync
/Network/iMacLieven/lieven/Documents /Users/lieven/docsLieven

Watching the packet-flow on the Activity Monitor it seems to be
slightly quicker than the rsync tool. But most of all : it seems
to do a much better job. When I compared the end-result of the
synchronising session with rsync to that of psync I was
surprised to find a 20 Mb difference (on an original .5 Gb Folder) in
psync‘s favour! But even psync seems to have dropped 0.6
Mb in the process…

More
than a month ago I started a long term project trying to make the best
of our little home network. The first couple of weeks I managed to get
iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie-files flowing from any computer to the living
room (the TV-set for photo and mpeg-files and squeezebox for audio files). The last couple of weeks I
have been making my hands dirty with some hard-ware upgrades. The key
problem being that some of our Macs have a too small hard disk for
present day needs. For example, PD2 could no longer play The Sims (and
their never ending extensions) on her 6 Gb iMac, so one day she simply
decided to get rid off most things in het Applications-folder, a
desperate cry for attention. Together with Jan I took our two 6 Gb
slot-loading iMacs apart and replaced them by a 120 Gb resp. 80 Gb hard
disk, giving the Sims ample virtual space to expand (I hope). Beginning
of this week I finished the slightly more daunting task of upgrading an
original 4 Gb front-loading iMac to a performing 120 Gb potential
Server. But I knew that the worst part was still to come : my old
(colored) iBook was making so much noise that I didn’t use it anymore
for anything demanding some kind of concentration (like writing papers).
So I wanted to replace the old 6 Gb noisy disk with a silent Hitachi
2.5 HDD 20GB 5400RPM ATA100 8Mb Cache-hard disk. However I did read
the instructions and was a bit put off by this.
Luckily, I had to wait because I didn’t have the appropriate material.
Whereas any super-market sells Torx- 10 and 15 screwdrivers, I needed an
8 or 9. Eventually I found one in a good shop (they even have torx 6 and
7, it seems you need those to take your mobile apart), so no more
excuses. Tuesday afternoon I had a first try but already between stage 2
and 3 of the instructions I cut an essential connection (for the
trackpad)… and quickly assembled everything again (I could still use
my iBook with a USB-mouse…). This morning, when the rest of my family
left at 8 o’clock, I had another go (btw. never try to do this unless
you can afford to loose your iBook). The whole process is pretty scary :
you have to take out your keyboard, modem, CD-player, display and a few
minor ingredients before you get at the hard-disk. At the time you do,
the whole table is filled with parts and several cups containing some
screws which you will hopefully remember to put back in the correct
place. Still, in less than two hours I managed to replace the harddisk
and put everything back together (I lost some tome because at the end
one needs to remove some bolts and I didnt have a good tool available so
I had to improvise). I didn’t expect anything when I powered up the
iBook but somehow it reacted ok, I could start up from a System9 CD and
initialize the harddisk and even put System9 on it, but there was
something strange : all message-windows appeared at the lower right hand
side of the display… When I did restart from the HD, it became
apparent that I lost about 30% of my screen, including the part where
one normally sees the HD, CDs etc., so I had a small problem. But, after
my success of conquering my hard-ware phobia, I was not alarmed, I
cycled to the university and had a chat with Jan about it. He suggested
zapping the PRAM which I did in the afternoon, without any effect
on my partial display. So, perhaps it was a hard-ware thing after all
and I had to take my iBook apart again until I got at the connections
for the display (which is step 6 out of 8 of the instructions). Then,
the problem became clear : in reassembling the display-connectors I had
used a bit too much force so that some of the spikes were bend. But,
after repairing this and closing up the iBook again, the problem was
solved. So I have now a 20 Gb iBook with a nice quiet harddisk and I
“only” lost my trackpad and sound in the process… a good deal I
would say.

For
someone as clumsy as me, it is no real surprise to loose one in three
hard disks, but what happened yesterday was a bit puzzling at first. I
tried to replace the original 4 Gb hard disk of an original iMac (a tray
loading iMac) following the instructions of the MacWorld : how to upgrade an iMac-page I used last
time together with Jan to replace two hard disks in slot-loading iMacs.
The whole process is a bit scary : unplug 4 connections, remove the
motherboard, remove the CD-driver in order to get at the hard disk, but
to my own surprise I managed to do all this fairly quickly and replaced
the hard disk by a 120 Gb Seagate Barracuda hard disk. I
put the iMac back together and started up from the OS 9 CD (last time I
forgot this and it is becoming fairly impossible to get a working
System9 defacto on 10.3). I opened DiskUtility and to my surprise the
utility found the new disk, so I managed to install everything properly.
I could even initialize and partition the disk (to run OS X on a first
generation iMac one needs to install it on a partition which is no
larger than 8 Gb) in two partitions (one 8Gb, the other the rest) and
installed System9 on the first partition. So far, so good but when I
restarted the iMac, a blinking question-mark appeared on the screen
indicating that it could not find the installed System9! Then I tried to
start-up from the 10.3-installation disk, started up the DiskUtility and
this time it found no hard disk at all. So I started up again from the
System9 CD and the two partitions appeared on my Desktop, seemingly in
perfect order. What was going on? There was an hard disk, I put System9
on one of its partitions but somehow it refused to find it, and starting
from the 10.3 CD it looked as if there was no hard disk whatsoever. If
you are knowledgeable, you know already where the problem was situated
but as I am more a software than a hardware guy I looked for similar
problems on the net and found an entry in which the solution was
obtained by installing System9 on the larger partition. So I tried this,
but again met the same problems.

So it must be a
hardware problem and I downloaded the product manual and began browsing through it until
I found one of these marvelous computer-terms : the master-slave
jumper settings. Who invents this kind of terminology? The
master-slave jumper… Anyway, here are the possibilities for a
Barracuda
I
admit I didn’t look at the jumper-setting when I inserted the hard
disk. The previous two times it was not necessary and I assumed that the
default position would be the master-setting but wasn’t certain. Hence,
there was only one way to find out and that was redoing the whole
replacement-process… So, this morning I did this and found out that
the jumper-settings were set at Cable select which according to
Geert is the best setting for Windows-computers as
they then automatically decide whether to use the disk as master or
slave, so perhaps for Seagate there is some marketing logic in choosing
this as their default setting. Hence, I changed the setting to
master, quickly put back the iMac and in the end discovered that
I was left with two screws… As they must have been the screws
connecting the hard-disk cage to the motherboard I had little choice but
to redo the whole process a third time. Surprisingly, I began to like
the whole procedure, one should be forced as a computer-user to take
your computer apart a couple of time before working on it. Finally, I
tried to install OS X again, the DiskUtility recognized the two
partitions without any problem and the installation went smoothly.
Probably System9 can find a Cable-select connected hard disk, whereas OS
X cannot…