Marshall's Weblog » Mac

Using *NIX top on OS X

Marshall — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 23:44:42 +0000

When I use top, I generally use it to find runaway processes. The default behavior on Linux is to order the processes by the amount of CPU usage that they are taking. On OS X, this is not the case. If you want to order processes by CPU on Darwin’s top, you will need to run a command that looks like this:

top -ocpu -O+rsize

Plop an alias in your .bash_profile file and never think about it again.

Strange Math…

Marshall — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 03:01:02 +0000

Apple Inc. + Google + Yahoo + Cingular = iPhone!

I know I will be buying one in June when they come out.

Civil Netizen

Marshall — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 02:42:13 +0000

A while back I had an idea for a web app whereby users would upload files to a server and the app would spit out a download key. Third party’s could then download the files only if they had the proper key. Today, I came across Civil Netizen, a free service which allows you to upload 4 GB worth of files via a desktop app and see who has downloaded the files and when. You can upload groups of files as packages and send a pickup slip to people in an email or an IM.

MythMusic, Mac OS X, and iTunes

Marshall — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:02:26 +0000

Tonight I set out to sync my iTunes library up with MythTV. I have been wanting to create some playlists on the Myth box, but I find the playlist “editor” (if you can even call it that) for MythMusic just a bit kluggy. I found the script that is embedded in this post which will take an iTunes xml database file and create corresponding playlists in the MythTV database, but in order to try it out, I needed to update the Music folder on the Myth box with the music on my Powerbook. Enter this nice tip. I simply mounted the Myth box on the Powerbook, tweaked a few parameters in the rsync command and off it went.

Update…
I had to modify the original script for Myth 0.20. You can find my updated script here. (Right click and choose Save As…)

Bejeweled Free for Mac

Marshall — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 03:48:47 +0000

I spent a good 30 minutes looking for a free version of the game Bejeweled for the Mac which I had before my hard drive crashed. I finally found it on the FreeMacware site and it is called JewelToy.

Finally, a Feed Reader I Can Live With

Marshall — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 03:02:32 +0000

I was really dissapointed when I tried out the new version of Vienna today. My first thoughts were YAFR. (Thats “Yet Another Feed Reader” for those who are not hip to the new acronyn I just created). I decided to toy around a bit and found the new “Unified” layout. This is the EXACT feature I have been wishing for in a RSS feed reader. It provides the ability to view all posts for a feed, or in Vienna’s case, a collection of feeds, on a single page. No more clicking around to each individual feed to get your news, which I always thought was counter intuitive to the whole purpose of RSS. Really, I didn’t care if I could have all of my feeds in a single application, if I had to navigate all around to read everyting anyways. In my opinion, most feed readers are just simplified web browsers, and I do not need another web browser.

With the addition of the “Unified” layout, Vienna becomes more like my prefered route of reading my feeds, Planet. Oh, and Vienna is Open Source as well!

Hurray for Vienna!!!

Also, recently released, a Mac version of the Google Video Player. I do not use google videos that often, but it might be worth a download for some people.

Free iDisk Replacement

Marshall — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 01:47:33 +0000

If you have a Mac and don’t subscribe to .Mac, yet still would like some easy online storage, check out Box.Net. Along with these directions on how to connect to it on a Mac, you will have 1 GB of free online storage, perfect for backing up those important files.

Back in Action

Marshall — Wed, 03 May 2006 03:17:22 +0000

After hours of toiling around over my Powerbook, I finally decided that I would attempt to replace the drive myself, rather then send it in to Apple and be charged for shipping, labor, and a new drive.

I picked up an 80GB Hitachi Travelstar from the local Best Buy and proceded to disassemble my laptop. These directions at IFixIt.com, were pretty self explainatory. They were so good that I decided to to disassemble and reassemble the whole thing TWICE!

Ok, ok, so I forgot to plug the new hard drive back into the motherboard, which i realized after I attempted various of my previous efforts to format my old drive.

This post is fortunately being typed from a brand new installation of Tiger, so all went well in the end. I installed a few of my favorite applications: TextWrangler, Cyberduck, Firefox, Transmission, the iScroll2 trackpad driver (for scrolling with the trackpad). One thing that I forgot to copy off of my old drive was my Address Book contacts, which made me mad.

Powerbook Powerfucked

Marshall — Tue, 02 May 2006 04:09:45 +0000

Well…. I am temporarilly without my Powerbook. You see, I was opening up Automator to try to create a New File action, similar to any other respectable operating system, so that I could ctrl-click on a Finder window and create a New File. As soon as I clicked on the New Automator Action from the menu, the hard drive started thrashing. I figured it was loading up Automator, but after about a minute of waiting, I tried to click onto the Dock to kill it. It was then that I discovered that the Dock wasnt responding, and neither was anything else but the mouse. The hard drive had stopped, so I figured I would just power it off and reboot…

Rebooting, turns out, would not be such a simple process. After letting it try to boot for about 10 minutes, I hit the power button again to restart the damn thing. I did this 5 or 6 times and nothing past the gray boot screen would display. So I found the keystroke for booting into verbose mode (hold command + V before you press power) and found out my disk was fucked. The boot process was spewing a bunch of “file system is readonly” messages. I tried booting into the Tiger DVD a few times and attempting to use Disk Utility to repair the drive. It would repair it, but then attempt a second Verification pass and would hang. Again, my impatientness got the best of me and I quit it a few times without determining if it would actually finish.

All I wanted to do was copy my Digital Pictures so that they did not get lost, really, there isnt too much on my laptop that I would miss besides those pictures. Finally, after almost throwing down $80 on DiskWarrior, and attempting a Gentoo LiveCD to repair the drive, I went back to this page to see if there were any boot options that I may have missed. I found Single User Mode, and said, WTF, what could I lose at this point. Single User Mode boots up to a bash prompt and lets me at least see my files on the file system. I was then able to mount my external Firewire drive and copy my files onto it so that I can wipe the drive clean and start from scratch. Happy Day! (Actually, this is still going on right now)

What is most ironic about this whole situation is that I wanted to backup my files and reinstall the OS from scratch anyways. Last night I had an inkling to backup my home directory, but chose to ignore the voices in my head to do so. Out of sheer luck, this came back to bite me in the ass.

So what did we learn today??? Always keep backups. And never use Automator.

Update: Well, the drive is, at least, partially dead. It will not repair itself, it will not allow me to modify the partition table, nothin’. I am heading out to Best Buy after work today to pick up a new hard drive and attempt some surgery on the Powerbook later tonight

Updated Firefox Extensions

Marshall — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 23:58:09 +0000

I updated my Favorite Firefox Extensions post with Fission, a plugin which overlays the location bar with a progress bar, a la Safari, and SwiftTabs, a tab switcher. It’s a simple little addition, but once I saw it in action in Safari, I instantly needed it in Firefox. I find myself again switching aimlessly around between Safari, Firefox, and Camino. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses but I think that Firefox’s plugin architecture and Find as You Type will eventually overpower the other two.