For transferring files, I’ve tried SMB, NFS and WebDAV, which have all worked, pretty much, but were all also fiddly to set up, unstable and generally bloody annoying. (Interestingly, most of the problems have been on the Mac side.)

Today, I happened upon ExpanDrive, a new application for OS X that installs, and provides a simple setup interface, for MacFUSE and SSHFS. In plain English, that means I can mount the Eee PC - and any other computers on my network - just like an external disk drive, SMB or AFP, so that it is completely integrated into the Finder.

Setup is easy.

If you haven’t already, install openssh-server on the Eee PC:

1. Install it: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
2. Then start it up: sudo /etc/init.d/ssh
3. Then make it start up whenever you switch on your Eee PC by opening /etc/fastservices in a text editor - eg. sudo nano /etc/fastservices - and adding a line that says ssh.

Then, back on the Mac, install and launch ExpanDrive, and fill in your server name, username and password. For some reason, your username for SSH purposes is ‘user’, not your actual username, though your password is the same one as usual (I have no idea why, and it took me bloody ages to guess that it is when I first started using SSH to log in to the Eee PC).

That’s it. As far as your Mac is concerned, your Eee PC is now part of the filesystem, so you can open and edit files on it, move stuff between the computers, even play MP3s stored on the Eee on your Mac. Very nice.

As well as the simple setup - especially when compared to getting MacFUSE and SSHFS set up using more manual means, which is a right sodding chore - ExpanDrive scores points for speed and stability. In terms of speed, I really can’t tell the difference between working on a file stored locally and one on the Eee, which wasn’t the case when using other protocols. And ExpanDrive is rock solid, much better than the Finder when it comes to dealing with stuff over a network: you can put your Mac to sleep, or disconnect from the network, without having to fear the spinning beach ball of doom. ExpanDrive will just silently reconnect when you wake up the computer or rejoin your network. Very clever.

When it comes to keeping stuff in sync, I’ve taken a slightly peculiar route: Subversion.

This is a very clever synchronisation thingy, usually used by groups of people who write code, so that they can all make changes to files they’re all working on without buggering everything up. It’s probably overkill for one person writing reviews for the paper, but I’ve really taken to it.

Subversion works by keeping all your files on a server in a “repository”¹. You can then “checkout” the files, work on them, and “commit” your changes, which updates the copies on the server. It doesn’t matter what computer you’re on when you do the checking out/editing/committing routine, as long as Subversion is installed, which it is by default on Macs running Leopard. To get it on the Eee, you just do the usual sudo apt-get install subversion thing. And, because your files are living online too, you can access them through a web browser on any old machine you happen to be sitting in front of.

This is, obviously, fabulously convenient, and for a basic user like myself, there’s only a handful of commands to remember. On the Mac side, though, after the first time you import your files into your repository and check them back out, you don’t even need to open a Terminal, let alone remember any commands, thanks to three of my fave applications, Path Finder, TextMate and Quicksilver², all of which have Subversion support built in.

So, it’s taken a while, but thanks to the release of ExpanDrive, and the (er, relative) ease of use of Subversion, I have everything set up to easily share and sync files between my Eee PC and Macs over the network.

The days of walking around the flat carrying an SDHC card like some primitive data-ape are over!

Now, I really must start reading up on rsync and Unison…

1. Donny very kindly made me a repository on his server, but I only saw his email after I’d set up my own. Cheers Don!↩

2. Textmate and Path Finder both cost money, Quicksilver is open source. Free alternatives to using Path Finder’s Subversion support include SvnX, SCPlugin and this collection of AppleScripts ↩

I think this post sets a new record for TLAs and other acronyms on Submit Response!

1. MacBook Air It sure is purdy, the ‘Remote Disc’ feature is brilliant, and so is the multitouch trackpad. I’m not bothered by the fact that it has hardly any ports, or that you have to send it back when the battery dies, either. But in all the fuss about its pretty, skinny ways, no one seems to have noticed that it’s still really quite big, bigger than a MacBook in terms of its footprint, in fact. So while it’s more portable by virtue of its low weight, it’s still an unwieldy great thing (unlike a certain dinky little computer of which I am not unfond). Oh, and it’s preposterously expensive. Will doubtless sell like meth in a trailer park.

2. iPhone 1.1.3 Showing off the exciting new capability to send texts to multiple recipients is fucking embarrassing, no? Still, with the iPhone taking such spectacular strides towards actually working as a proper ‘phone, and the SDK coming next month, I’m edging closer to maybe thinking about considering buying one when my current contract runs out. (Can you tell I’ve never had a proper go on one?)

3. Movie Rentals/Apple TV Upgrade I couldn’t even muster the energy to stifle a yawn during this announcement.

4. Time Capsule To awkwardly paraphrase Prince, it’s the dream we all dream of, computers plus device in the World Series of wireless backups! Sod a laptop that’s a bit thinner than other laptops, this is the real deal: hugely useful and reasonably priced. I’d be pre-ordering one right now if I hadn’t bought a 1TB external drive the day Leopard came out, due to getting all giddy about Time Machine. It could do with some clever .Mac integration though, for your really important files—those slickly automated backups wont be much use if your Time Capsule melts in a house fire.

In summary: Time Capsule is as exciting as backup solutions get; everything else, rather less so.

Can we have a cheap and tiny sub-notebook next year, Steve?

Diamond is a quirky little app that, roughly speaking, works like a cross between Stickies and ‘distraction free’ editors like Write Room (which I gushed about a year ago), blocking out your desktop, other applications and the Menu Bar.

The most unconventional feature is the one I like the best: as you can see in the screenshot above, text is automatically broken up into columns, and so you scroll horizontally through a document, not vertically. Writing a review this morning, I used a near-fullscreen Diamond window, and found that having what you might call a holistic view of the piece helpful—re-ordering paragraphs was easier, repeated words leapt out, and proof-reading generally felt a lot quicker. It also has the only feature I really need in a text editor, a running word count, which floats unobtrusively at the bottom of the editing window.

Sure, there’s a certain lack of polish—you have to relaunch after changing a preference setting, for example—but Diamond is well worth checking out. It’s simple to use, customisable to suit your needs, and, best of all, lets you concentrate on writing without distractions.

Here’s a way to do it.

You’ll need Skype installed, and some SkypeOut credit (which you only need to make a call to a real ‘phone, this won’t cost any money).

#!/bin/sh
osascript -l AppleScript -e "tell application \"Skype\" to get URL \"callto://+447967XXXXXX\""
sleep 30
killall -m "Skype"
exit 0

Save the above somewhere handy in your path as ringring, do chmod 755 ringring so you can execute it.

Now all you have to do to get your ‘phone to ring for 30 seconds is type ringring in the Terminal, or, to make it even easier, you can set up a Quicksilver trigger to run the command whenever you hit a key combination.

Mere words cannot express how happy this makes me!

Admittedly, wodging some Applescript inside a bash script, then killing Skype to stop it from connecting and wasting your money on a silent ansaphone message isn’t very pretty. But I’m not clever enough to work out how to make Skype hang up after a set interval with AppleScript, and this way works, so it’ll have to do.

So far, it’s set up to:

1. Work as a sort of Airport Extreme-equivalent, serving up my iTunes Library from an external drive.
2. Run Azureus, which is slurping down telly programmes as they appear in various RSS feeds, or controlled manually with this handy Dashboard widget.
3. Work as storage for automatic backups of important stuff on my new computer using rsyncx.

This is all rather boring and easy to achieve, but I can’t think of anything exciting and difficult to have a go at, which seems a waste of what is still a pretty powerful wee computer.

Any ideas?

It turns out that there’s really quite a big difference between a five-year-old iBook with a 700MHz PowerPC G3 and 640 MB of RAM and a brand new MacBook Pro with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM.

Thanks Mom and Dad. Best. Early. 30th. Birthday. Present. Ever.

WriteRoom’s key feature is that it doesn’t really have any features¹, it just turns your computer into a screen for writing on, with no distractions². You don’t have to think about anything but writing. Not even saving: WriteRoom automatically saves your work whenever you stop typing for five seconds, and when you open the applications all your ‘rooms’ appear just as they were when you last quit. (That’s not to say that all your data is trapped inside the application: you can export to plain text files when a piece of writing is finished.)

Managing multiple ‘rooms’ is simple too, with each open document assigned a command key—Command+1, Command+2, and so on depending on the order the documents were opened—which means you can quickly switch between notes and a draft. You can also, of course, cycle between documents with the standard Command+`.

In it’s raw state, WriteRoom is great for getting down ideas quickly, or using in place of cramped text fields on the web, but with the help of a few of Services and utilities, I’m so taken with this full-screen, distraction-free writing environment that I’ve been using it for everything—reviews and features, longer emails, weblog entries and comments, the lot.

If you want to do the same, the following will come in handy:

• WordServices will give you a word count, among other things.
• Following this tip switches the spellling checker to English (as opposed to American English).
• HumaneText converts text written with the Markdown syntax to XHTML.
• ServiceScrubber lets you assign command key combinations to the above Services, as well as WriteRoom’s inbuilt ‘Send Selected Text To WriteRoom’ Service.
• Jumpcut gives you control over the Clipboard.

With all that in place, for my needs at least, WriteRoom is the perfect application for writing.

Update: Here’s a good piece on WriteRoom and stripped-down user interfaces

1. The preferences let you set font size and colour, background colour, and specify page width, height and margins. That’s it. ↩

2. Here’s a screengrab of this post being written in WriteRoom. (Please excuse the unholy admixture of XHTML and Markdown.)↩

That black paintjob comes at a premium, you see: if you upgrade a white MacBook to exactly match the specs of a standard black iBook, it’s £89.99 cheaper. Really.

On the one hand you almost have to admire Apple’s chutzpah, flogging a computer at a premium simply by changing the colour and implying it’s the top of the range is a wonderful bit of smoke and mirrors manipulation.

On the other hand, what will you think when you see someone with a black MacBook? You’ll think, ‘Ha ha, that total cock blew nigh on a ton to get his computer in black! He’s a CockBook user! Ha ha! CockBook!’ Or similar. Which might harm sales a touch. No one wants to look like a total cock, after all.