Jacken's Blog » mac

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

Geotag your DSLR images using your iPhone GPS and a Mac

Jacken — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:44:52 +0000

Geotag images using an iPhone

One of the nice things about modern camera phones and even some regular cameras uses GPS to tag photos and embed the coordinates in the pictures EXIF data. But wouldn’t it be great if you could do that with your fancy DSLR camera photos as well? Programs like iPhoto, Aperture and the upcoming Adobe Lightroom 4 can show you your pictures on a map. Many online photo sites like Flickr also uses the GPS data in the pictures to display them on a map.

Use your iPhone to geotag pictures

There’s an easy way of adding the GPS coordinates to your RAW or jpg images using your iPhone as a GPS logger. To get it to work correctly, make sure that the clock on your digital camera is the same as your iPhone. This will help when adding the coordinates later. There are some free alternative apps for iPhone like Gps Stone GPX, but I’m using an app called MotionX-GPS for logging when I walk around taking pictures. All you have to do is to start the app and create a new track. Turn off the display and put it in your pocket. Just have the app running while you photograph. After you are finished, use the share function in MotionX-GPS to send the track data by email to your Mac. You get some statistics in the email, but also two included files. One .kmz file for Google Earth, but it’s the .gpx file your interested in. Just save the file to your hard disk. Download your images to your computer. I usually use Image Capture, a very underrated program, and download the images to a folder on the desktop. Start up GPSPhotoLinker, a free program for Macintosh. Import your .gpx track data and photos and use the automatic batch function in the program to save the GPS data into the image. Now you are ready to import your images to your favorite image handling program like iPhoto, Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. So now when you upload pictures to Flickr, the GPS location is embedded in the image.

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.

iPad, useless expensive toy?

Jacken — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 01:13:54 +0000

After buying my 32G 3G iPad I was a bit worried that it would become yet another victim of my impulsiveness. The first day with it, I was convinced that I’d get bored within the week and having it ending up on my mountain of cool but never used electronics. But during the weeks I’ve used it, it’s becoming indispensable. Checking out Twitter with Twitter for iPad. Reading news on FlipBoard (which has the most beautiful design of all news readers), answering mails, making plans with OmniFocus for iPad, chatting with IM+ and using the calendar (naturally synced to Google Calendar) for booking appointments. It’s now an essential part of my daily life. I’m also starting to hate the noise of my Macbook. With the iPad, it’s really quiet.

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

DNS problems with Snow Leopard 10.6

Jacken — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:49:28 +0000

I’ve had some bizarre problems with my DNS today. I checked /etc/resolv.conf but everything looked ok. Checked the settings dialog for my network and at first glance, that one seemed ok as well.

But normally there should be a dimmed version of the DHCP assigned values there.

Just select the empty one and press the minus sign. Sneaky little bug there!

Save your settings and you should be good to go.

Getting Perian 1.1.4 to work Snow Leopard 10.6 to work

Jacken — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:33:40 +0000

There’s a problem with getting Perian to work in Snow Leopard. But there’s a quick fix outlined here, but If the PreferencePane is installed to only the current user, you need to paste the following into the terminal:

cd cd Library/PreferencePanes/Perian.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Components cp Perian.zip ~/Downloads cp CoreAudio/A52Codec.zip ~/Downloads cp QuickTime/AC3MovieImport.zip ~/Downloads cd ~/Downloads unzip AC3MovieImport.zip unzip A52Codec.zip unzip Perian.zip sudo mv Perian.component/ /Library/QuickTime/ sudo mv AC3MovieImport.component/ /Library/QuickTime/ sudo mv A52Codec.component/ /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/

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′);

Firefox plugin for PDF

Jacken — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:59:05 +0000

Yes! Finally a plugin for displaying PDF in Firefox 3 for mac. It uses PDFKit.

Get PDF plugin for Firefox here