Submit Response » mac http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog Tue, 10 May 2011 01:19:15 +0000 en-us hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.1 Transferring And Synchronising Files Between A Mac And An Eee PC http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/27/transferring-and-synchronising-files-between-a-mac-and-an-eee-pc/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/27/transferring-and-synchronising-files-between-a-mac-and-an-eee-pc/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:08:41 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/27/1307/ The main, if not only, problem I’ve had with the Eee PC is sorting out a reliable way to transfer and synchronise files between the little laptop and my Macs.

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).

expandrive.jpg

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!

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Today’s Links (20/02/08) http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/20/todays-links-200208/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/20/todays-links-200208/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:22:03 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/20/todays-links-200208/
  • William Bennett: ACT FINAL
    Whitehouse are packing it in after their upcoming tour. Gutted.
  • You’re never going to believe this, but painting the Forth Bridge is almost licked
    Heh.
  • Max, 19, hits the road | Travelog | Guardian Unlimited
    I honestly thought this was a badly-done, sub-Nathan Barley spoof.
  • stevenf.com: Very Slow Airport Network
    I’m having the same problem, and wasted ages yesterday assuming it was caused by my new Home Hub rather than Leopard. (Transfers between an iBook running 10.4 and the Eee PC are fine, so it must be an 10.5.2 bug, I think.)
  • Oregon Art Beat — Circuit Bending · Oregon Public Broadcasting
    A nice short doc on circuit-bending.
  • Version Control with Subversion
    Really clear reference and howto guide for Subversion.
  • Devthought - Guillermo Rauch’s Blog » WP-o-Matic. The WordPress RSS Agreggator
    Slick WordPress plugin that makes posts from RSS feed items. (I’m using it to auto-post links to Tumble, including this one.)
  • Moderator says anti-English bigotry is ‘like sectarianism’ - Scotsman.com News
    No shit. Also interesting that the comments at scotsman.com are only a couple of notches above YouTube level.
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    Today’s Links (17/02/08) http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/17/todays-links-170208/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/17/todays-links-170208/#comments Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:18:12 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/02/17/todays-links-170208/
  • VirtualBox
    Open source equivalent of Parallels or Fusion - still beta, but looks to be usable.
  • Acorn
    Nice simple image editor. Not sure I edit images enough to justify spending $40 on it, though.
  • Lab Tick
    This is dodgy, so I’m still looking for a way to control the backlight on the MacBook Pro keyboard. Any ideas?
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    Obligatory Macworld Post http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/01/16/obligatory-macworld-post/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/01/16/obligatory-macworld-post/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:40:49 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2008/01/16/obligatory-macworld-post/ Like every other Mac-licking weblogger in the world, I watched the keynote, thought some things, and wrote them down:

    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?

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    Diamond http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/06/07/diamond-screenshot/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/06/07/diamond-screenshot/#comments Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:31:20 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/06/07/diamond-screenshot/ I’m always keen to try out text editors, and Giles Turnbull pointed to an intriguing new offering yesterday.

    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.

    Diamond Screenshot

    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.

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    RingRingFindMyBloodyPhone Part II http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/17/ringringfindmybloodyphone-part-ii/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/17/ringringfindmybloodyphone-part-ii/#comments Sat, 17 Feb 2007 11:02:28 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/17/ringringfindmybloodyphone-part-ii/ As no one will remember, back in May of 2004, I pinged the now-defunct LazyWeb site in the hope that some kind developer would write an application that would let me make my always-lost mobile telephone ring from my computer so I could find it.

    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.

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    What Should I Do With My iBook? http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/10/what-should-i-do-with-my-ibook/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/10/what-should-i-do-with-my-ibook/#comments Sat, 10 Feb 2007 13:25:21 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/10/what-should-i-do-with-my-ibook/ Now that I’ve got my new computer fully up and running, I’m wondering what I can do with the old one.

    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?

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    The iBook Stare http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/05/the-ibook-stare/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/05/the-ibook-stare/#comments Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:08:16 +0000 http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2007/02/05/the-ibook-stare/ A couple of days after upgrading to a MacBook Pro, I’m still doing ‘the iBook stare’—that’s the five, ten or twenty second pause where your brain switches off completely and waits for the computer to open an application, or for Firefox to render a web page; the human equivalent of the spinning beachball of death.

    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.

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    WriteRoom http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2006/07/13/writeroom/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2006/07/13/writeroom/#comments Thu, 13 Jul 2006 12:06:55 +0000 http://mottram.textdriven.com/weblog/?p=1123 WriteRoom has been getting a fair amount of attention recently, and, after using it for a fortnight, I’d say it deserves it.

    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.)

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    Introducing The All-New CockBook http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2006/05/19/introducing-the-all-new-cockbook/ http://submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/2006/05/19/introducing-the-all-new-cockbook/#comments Fri, 19 May 2006 17:31:11 +0000 http://mottram.textdriven.com/weblog/?p=1100 While the new black MacBook is certainly a shiny, pretty thing, I can’t help but wonder whether Apple’s pricing structure might backfire on them.

    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.

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