Jacken's Blog » Macintosh

Disk that refuses to sleep in Mac OS X – how to fix it

Jacken — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:29:28 +0000

Image by DigaoSPBR

I replace my internal disk on my MacBook Pro with a SSD disk, which made a huge difference in speed. At the same time I removed the DVD unit and installed a new 500gb disk instead. The extra disk went to sleep when not in use, but then started within a couple of minutes or less. Here’s what I did to fix that problem.

Finding out the culprit

First of all I needed to change the time before the disk went to sleep. I set the value before sleep to one minute, so I don’t have to wait long between tests.

sudo pmset -a disksleep 1

This will set the time until sleep to one minute when using an AC adapter. Replace -a with -b for changing the setting when on battery power.

To find the applications that was accessing the volume, I opened the terminal application and started to observe the output of the following terminal command. To narrow the output I use grep to just show events and access to the extra disk. Otherwise your going to get a LOT of unnecessary output.

sudo fsusage | grep nameofvolume

Replace nameofvolume with the name of your disk. Enter your login password. The first thing I noticed was that fseventsd was logging information to the external disk. To deactivate the logging, just enter the following:
cd /Volumes/name
ofdisk sudo touch .fseventsd/nolog

Interfering software

I continued to look for applications or processes that accessed my disk, and one of them was iStat Menu. I checked the settings for iStat Menu, and the disk info part was disabled, but it still accessed the disk. So I had to disabled it. I love iStat Menu, so that felt a bit sad, but until they fix this it will be turned off.

I have a lot of links for stuff like the download folder, Final Cut Pro settings, buffers for applications and all my photos on the extra disk so naturally the extra disk will start when using applications using these files. But now when I surf the web or write, I no longer have to listen to the sound of the disk. Blissful silence.

You can now change the time before the disk goes to sleep. My 7200rpm disk starts very quickly so I kept mine on a couple of minutes. Added benefit? Much better battery life!

I hope this helps you if you have the same problem.

Force Syncing Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail Contacts

Jacken — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:42:05 +0000

If you setup your iPhone and iPad to connect to Google as an Exchange server, you get instant push notifications of mail and sync your calendars and address book. And in my experience it works great. But syncing under Mac OS X can sometimes be slow to update. So I wrote this little program to force an update immediately. It’s been useful to me, so I thought I put it here if someone else needed it.

Download Address Book sync with Google Contacts

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor review

Jacken — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:07:18 +0000

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor

To be able to really get the most out of your images, you need a color accurate monitor. You usually have to pay a lot of money to get a good monitor that’s factory calibrated and uses a IPS panel, a panel type that is better at showing correct colors than the more common (and cheaper) TN panels. But there are some reasonably priced monitors. One of them is the Asus PA246Q ProArt monitor. It’s factory calibrated and even ships with a printout of the calibration result from the factory. You can set the monitor to sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998 color space directly on the front controls of the monitor. It’s also has fairly high resolution with 24″ size 1920×1200 pixels.After using my Spyder Color calibrator there wasn’t that much of a difference between the built-in calibration and the Spyder created one, but calibrating the monitor is always a good thing to do.The monitor is thick, so you need ample of desk space to accommodate it, but the monitor stand is sturdy and there is a lot of adjustments available including height. Very handy.When comparing the Asus PA246Q monitor to the monitor on my Macbook Pro mid 2010, you really see the difference in image quality. I wouldn’t edit images using Lightroom or Photoshop on the Macbook anymore. You get spoiled fast when seeing the difference you get from a good monitor.There is a built-in USB hub and connectors for HDMI, D-Sub, DisplayPort and DVI-D. It also includes all the cables, except for the mini-DisplayPort cable for my Mac, which is a nice touch. There is an audio-in port but the build in amplifier has way to low gain to be usable. It’s essentially useless. But for me that’s not a problem. I bought the monitor for it’s image quality.When buying a monitor, one thing to look out for are dead pixels. A dead pixel in the middle of the screen can really be annoying when doing editing. Different manufacturer has a minimum of dead pixels the monitor has to have for a replacement. Mine has one dead pixel fairly low on the screen, so I can live with that.There’s a built in 7-1 card reader, but considering that the monitor is aimed for the professional market, the absence of CF-card capability seems a bit stupid.Would I recommend this monitor? Yes, even though there are some problems, the price and image quality makes up for the faults.Here’s the manufactures description:

The Most User-friendly P-IPS ProArt Series Professional Monitor

P-IPS panel with 98% Adobe RGB coverage and 178° wide viewing angleQuickFit Function instantly boost design efficiency by providing real-size document, photo, and grid on screenBuilt-in USB hubs and 7-in-1 card reader for instant connection

Panel Size: Wide Screen 24.1″(61.13cm) 16:10

Color Saturation : 98%(Adobe RGB), 100%(sRGB), 102%(NTSC)

Panel Type : P-IPS

Resolution : 1920×1200

Display Colors : 1073.7M (10bit)

Good

Factory color calibrated.

Great image quality

Able to display 98% of the Adobe RGB color space.

Bad

Built-in audio interface has too low gain, making it practically useless.

No CF card support in card reader.

Retina display on Mac

Jacken — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:09:14 +0000

Retina display on Mac

After working with the iPad and iPhone and then sitting down at my computer working with InDesign, you quickly realize that the resolution of computer screens need to improve. I have a factory calibrated 1920×1200 pixel 24″ monitor and to see how the fonts are going to look, you need to zoom in. With twice the resolution that would not be a problem. Let’s face it, the iPhone 4/4s have higher resolution than the first couple of generations of laser printers. It’s unfortunate that Apple hasn’t put more effort into making OS X resolution independent. Doubling the resolution is a quick fix, but in the long run they have to step up to the plate and implement resolution independence.

Blogging with Byword and Marked with WordPress

Jacken — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:55:26 +0000

Byword and Marked

I just got Byword and Marked from the Mac App Store because I’m totally addicted to writing in Markdown. I didn’t like the predefined fonts, but found a great typeface called Droid Sans that you can download here.

Byword

This is a really simple and nice text editor that handles Markdown like a charm. I really like the way it dims down the markup, making the text easier to read.

Marked

This is a nifty little application for previewing the live HTML output from your Markdown text. Great for catching mistakes.

Images

I’m using a WordPress blog and I have found that it’s easiest just to upload the images using the WordPress Dashboard and then copy the link. There are shortcuts for most of the Markdown commands, so all I have to do is to press alt-command-i and paste the link to the image. Thanks to Marked I know that the images will look ok. This looks like a great way of writing blog posts.

iPad/iPhone

I store all my blog posts in a directory in Dropbox, so If I want to I can edit the post with my favorite iPad/iPhone Markdown editor Writing Kit. For me that’s an enormous bonus. Bored on the subway? Write on your blog posts.

Finishing

So when you are finished writing, you just need to export HTML to clipboard and paste it into WordPress.

My favorite commands in .bash_profile on Mac OS X

Jacken — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:30:58 +0000

Here’s some additions to my .bash_profile for making life easier. I especially like that completion now ignores case. Makes navigating the file system so much faster. Givem a spin.

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups export HISTSIZE=10000 shopt -s histappend set completion-ignore-case on

ReplayGain itunes, iPod and iPhone or tired of songs with different sound volume

Jacken — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:10:13 +0000

elgrandee

Why whould I need this?

All albums and songs are mixed differently. So in iTunes some albums sounds very loud whilst other is rather low. This has increased in something called the Loudness War. Producers of albums soon realized that if you mix an album really hot, it will sound louder then the other songs on crappy stereo equipment. So essentially you have a lot of music in your iPod/iPhone with albums recorded at totally different volume. That’s why you have to constantly change the volume knob to correct for this. Here Apple comes to the rescue with it’s Automatic Volume Settings. Unfortunately the algorithm Apple chose to use to determine the volume of the song is made to be quick, but not particularly accurate. This mean that the songs does come out all over the place volume vise.But there is an good solution to this problem, and it?s name is ReplayGain.

This is program that analyzes the music psycho acoustically and then makes an assessment on witch level the song/album should be. Unfortunately Apple haven’t embraced this techique even though it’s totally open. Shame on you Apple.

ReplayGain application

But there’s a sollution. An application called iVolume that goes though all your songs in iTunes and makes sure they have the same level. This mean that you can be certain in that you won?t have ear blead when a song of Sting ends and Mötorhead comes on.

The software is super easy to use, just start it and iTunes, make sure you have ?Sound Check? enabled in preferences in iTunes. After that you just push a button.

One downside only, the price is $29.95 witch I think is a bit high. But for me It was a must, it transforms the pleasure of listening to music.

GPS tagging on the cheap

Jacken — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:58:49 +0000

I just love gadgets. That’s why it’s nice to find that I bought a Garmin eTrex a long time ago. Haven’t used it in years, but then when Apple released the latest version of iLife 09 with the map function in iPhoto I realized that it is very cool to have all the images geo tagged. So I found a program called GPSPhotoLinker, a program that downloads GPS data and pictures and by the date/time on the pictures manages to add longitude and latitude information in the picture info. When you import pictures with this information iPhoto can use that to show it on maps and make it searchable. And when you upload pictures to Flickr, it also uses the location information place your picture on a map. Very cool.

The software is free to download here. If you have an old GPS receiver like me, you need a serial cable (I made my own because of the very high prices for ready made cables), just check eBay. You also need a USB to serial converter, like the “Keyspan High Speed USB Serial Adapter.

To start tagging, just power on your GPS receiver when you start (I just put it in my shirt pocket) and then photo away). Set the clock in your camera (check the GPS clock, it’s VERY exact ) because this is information that is used to sync position information.

Download all your pictures in a folder, connect the GPS, start GPSPhotoLinker and download data from the GPS, and then select the folder with pictures you took. Press “batch” and your done!

iPhoto 09 map showing my short walk today

Map with my pictures in flickr

FRA får inte läsa mina brev. Hur gör man för att skydda sig? Kryptera din epost

Jacken — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:25:47 +0000

Efter de stora protesterna fick våra kära politiker skriva om delar av FRA lagen. Nu verkar det som SÄPO ska få tillgång till information, vilket säkert betyder att vanliga polisen kan få se vad du skriver och pratar om inom några år.

Så vad gör man för att slippa detta? Du gör det på samma sätt som de som FRA försöker hitta, dvs krypterar all din kommunikation.

Det finns en gratis programvara för att kryptera epost som heter The GNU Privacy Guard.

Men hur gör man då för att använda GPG när man skickar epost?

Det beror på om man har Macintosh eller Windows, men jag ska visa hur man går tillväga på båda dessa plattformer.

Macintosh installation

Från http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/ laddar du ned följande program
GNU Privacy Guard (se till att du väljer för din maskin och version av systemet)
GPG Keychain Access, ett program för att hantera nycklar (nycklar förklaras längre ner)

Sedan ska vi ladda ned PGP för Apple Mail härifrån

Börja med att installera GNU Privacy Guard. Installera sedan GPG Keychain Access.

För att installera PGP för Apple Mail måste vi flytta filen GPGMail.mailbundle till hemmamapp/Bibliotek/Mail/Bundles

Starta om Apple Mail.

Så hur fungerar då PGP?

Varje användare av PGP har två nycklar. En privat (hemlig) nyckel och en publik nyckel. Den publika nyckeln kan du lägga på nätet, skicka över internet eller trycka på en T-shirt. Spelar ingen roll. Om en annan har din publika nyckel, kan de kryptera epost meddelanden med hjälp av den. När något är krypterat med hjälp av din publika nyckel, finns bara en nyckel som kan öppna den, och det är din privata nyckel. Du börjar förstå att det är din privata nyckel du ska göra backup på nu va?

Först laddar du upp din publika nyckel till en nyckelserver som gör att andra kan hämta din publika nyckel

Här har någon sökt och hittat din nyckel och laddat ner den på hans maskin. Han kan nu använda din publika nyckel för att skapa krypterade meddelanden som bara du kan läsa. Oftast när epost program krypterar, brukar de även använda ens egen publika nyckel så bara ni två kan läsa. Det går att skicka till flera deltagare om du har krypteringsnyckel till alla mottagarna.

Hur får folk tag i andras publika nycklar då?

Det bästa är att ladda upp dem till en nyckelserver där din publika nyckel kopplas ihop med din epostadress och namn. Man kan söka dessa nyckelservrar för att hitta personerna man vill skicka krypterad post till. Man laddar ner mottagarens publika nyckel och installerar på din maskin, och vips! så kan du nu skicka krypterat till dem.

Så låt oss prova att hämta en nyckel genom att starta GPG Keychain Access programmet. Det ser ut som nedan.

Först måste du skapa din privata och publika nyckel, så välj “Generate…” under Key-menyn och följ anvisningarna. Nu skapas din privata och publika nyckel.

Välj “Send to keyserver” på din publika nyckel. Då kan folk leta reda på din kryptonyckel och skicka krypterat till dig.

För att lägga till andras publika nycklar som du vill kunna skicka till välj “Search for Key…” under Key-menyn

Skriv in epostadressen på personen du söker.

Nu ska den personen finnas i din lista. Så låt oss prova att skicka ett krypterat meddelande med Apple Mail:

Om du installerat enligt ovan ska du nu ha möjligheten att välja PHP: Signed och Encrypted.

Signed är när man skickar texten i klartext, men blir signerad, och en kryptosträng läggs till. Om någon försöker ändra i epostmeddelandet innan du får det, får du en varning. Men det vi vill göra är att kryptera, så välj att kryssa i Encrypted.

Nu skickas ditt meddelande krypterat till mottagaren och bara du och han kan läsa den.

GLÖM INTE BORT ATT GÖRA BACKUP PÅ DIN PRIVATA NYCKEL. UTAN DEN KAN DU INTE ÖPPNA KRYPTERADE MAIL.

MAMP WordPress and Error establishing a database connection

Jacken — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:59:59 +0000

I’ve installed MAMP on my Mac to do some changes to my blog. I tried to set the WordPress wp-config.php file to connect to localhost:8889, but got an error that It could not connect to the database. After replacing localhost:8889 to 127.0.0.1:8889 it works. My quick guess is that permissions for the root user is set to allow connections 127.0.0.1, but not localhost. Anyway, it works now.

My wp-config.php file looks like this:

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress'); /** MySQL database username */

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’);

/** MySQL database password */

define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘root’);

/** MySQL hostname */

define(‘DB_HOST’, ’127.0.0.1:8889′);