Posts tagged ‘MacOSX’

I have an Epson WiFi multifuncional, and was very happy to see that I needed no additional software at all to make it work. OS X had everything built in. For scanning, I use Image Capture. It’s fairly basic, but it does the job of scanning a batch of duplex pages in to a single PDF.

Sometimes, however, Image Capture hangs on “Waiting for scanner…”. Restarting Image Capture doesn’t help; restarting the multifunctional neither, nor did turning the Mac’s WiFi off and on again. Restarting OS X entirely did solve the issue, but I don’t call that a solution.

Today, I came across a post of Packetrider on an HP forum. He figured out that killing the Image Capture Extension process solves the problem as well:

killall "Image Capture Extension"

I’ve started using tmux, but found out that the standard keyboard bindings to resize panes (C-b C-) doesn’t work in Mac OS X’s Terminal.app. I found this post very helpful.

Continue reading ‘Fixing Terminal.app to enable tmux resizing’ »

All of my data is stored on my NAS, from where it is automatically backed up daily. But doing photo-editing on a remote file was slow, especially over WiFi and/or VPN. So I decided to store all photo’s locally, but without loosing the automatic backups. I solved this problem with a Launchd agent to watch the directory for changes (and run every hour anyway), and rsync for the actual transfer.

Additional challanges were that user permissions needed to be synced across as well. (Usernames did match on both machines, but UIDs did not)

Continue reading ‘Automatically rsync from OS X to linux’ »

I had some difficulties creating a bootable USB stick on MacOSX. Most guides use hdiutil and dd to put the image on the stick, but this failed to boot on my linux machine…

This article was very helpful, and confirms what I was thinking. The main difference is that this method makes a MBR partition table, adds MBR boot code and puts the data onto the first partition (as opposed to putting the data straight onto the disk).

Continue reading ‘Making bootable USB sticks on MacOSX’ »

I found myself firing up a calculator every time I needed to base-convert a number from/to hex or octal. So I wrote a very simple HTML-page that I added to my dashboard that does just this.

Continue reading ‘Base convertor’ »

I often find myself changing routes on my OS X system. Usually, however, I’m systematically adding the same routes over and over again, because they were automatically removed after a reboot, network change or whatever. Enter LocationChanger.

Continue reading ‘Automatically doing things when you change network’ »

As mentioned before, when switching to IPv6 (or more realistically, to dual stack) one of the things that might not work out of the box is VPNs. I decided to put some effort in it to get it to work anyway.

Continue reading ‘Configuring OpenVPN to support IPv6’ »

Together with most of the internet, we tested IPv6 on World IPv6 day last week. I won’t go into details on what IPv6 is and why it’s important. Although IPv6 has been tested intensely in isolated networks, this is the first time it was tested on such a large scale. Technically, the participants would just add AAAA-records for their websites to DNS. This small change causes a huge effect. Since most browsers are configured to prefer IPv6 AAAA-records over IPv4 A-records, this causes all IPv6-connected users to suddenly connect over IPv6 instead of IPv4.

For the most part, this major changeover happened without as much of a hitch. In fact, if I hadn’t known it was World IPv6 day, I wouldn’t have noticed anything. But I’m not a normal web-user, so I did notice some issues.

Continue reading ‘World IPv6 day – lessons learned’ »

I was under the illusion that a Time Machine backup would do as they claim:

You can set up Time Machine to automatically back up all your important files, including your documents, music, photos, applications, and any other items you keep on your hard disk.

I consider my iTunes authorizations important, but apparently Apple does not. Seems that these are specifically excluded from backups… Removing the “SC Info” line from the /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist file solved this.

I know I should have de-authorized my machine before reinstalling, and I know you can “de-authorize all” to fix this as well; but it’s pretty disturbing to see iTunes remove all your applications from your iPhone…

I tried to upgrade my silverlight plugin from version 3 (3.0.50106.0) to version 4 (4.0.50917.0). I downloaded the DMG, followed the wizard all the way through, restarted Firefox as requested and saw that I was still at version 3… Strangely, Safari did load and use version 4, so the install was successful. So I searched my entire system fore some remains of Silverlight 3, without success.

The only place I could find the old version mentioned, was in the pluginreg.dat file in my firefox profile. I just erased this file, and it all magically worked!