Most Hard Drives when you buy them are built to run on Windows Machines and not Macs. To make them work on Mac, you need to format the drive first.
There are 4 main formats, each with their own pros and cons. This guide gives you a quick run down of each format and how to format a drive on a Mac and PC.
There’s a lack of good file copy utilities on Mac like there is for Windows (eg. Teracopy/Ultracopy). If I need to copy a bunch of files where I’m likely to come across errors copying, I’ll use rsync!
This guide covers how to copy files on a Mac using an external drive or any connected network drive. It’ll skip any errors and log all the failed copies to a file for you to check through. It’s especially handy for copying files while skipping errors, corrupted files and getting past some permissions errors.
This is a beginner to intermediate guide and doesn’t cover some of the more advanced features of rsync.
If your computer got stolen, how much data would you lose? Wedding photos, baby photos, important documents, photos of your recently deceased grandparents?
It’s vitally important that you have a backup solution ready for when disaster strikes, and one backup isn’t enough.
The basic principle of 3-2-1 Backup, is you have 3 copies of your data, stored on 2 different types of media and 1 of them is off site.
A good example of this is having one backup on an external hard drive at your house (local backup) and an online backup (offsite backup).
If your computer got stolen, how much data would you lose? Wedding photos, baby photos, important documents, photos of your recently deceased grandparents?
It’s vitally important that you have a backup solution ready for when disaster strikes, and one backup isn’t enough.
The basic principle of 3-2-1 Backup, is you have 3 copies of your data, stored on 2 different types of media and 1 of them is off site.
A good example of this is having one backup on an external hard drive at your house and an online backup.
Read more to find out about how to setup both a local and a cloud backup on a Mac!
So, my FreeNAS Server started randomly spewing my log file with this:
Dec 24 16:16:10 zoe kernel: arp: 43:05:43:05:00:00 is multicast
Dec 24 16:16:10 zoe kernel: arp: 43:05:43:05:00:00 is multicast
Dec 24 16:16:10 zoe kernel: arp: 43:05:43:05:00:00 is multicast
It was going at a rate of about 1 a second (in bursts of 5 every 10 seconds or so).
I fired up Wireshark to work out what it was, turns out it was my OpenMesh Wifi Access points sending these packets out.
Read more to see how I fixed it 🙂
My school got loaned a 3D Printer to borrow for a few weeks, now we’ve got a minecraft club. I figured I could combine the two!
The cool thing with being able to export Minecraft to a 3D Printer is that children can do it really easily without having to learn a 3D Design program.
I’ve done a bit with 3D Printing before, I bought myself a PrintrBot Plus when the Kickstarter for it was on, however I could never get my prints to work very well. I ended up giving the printer to some friends and decided that 3D Printing wasn’t for me. That was until my school got loaned an UP Mini 3D Printer. I did a test print and it just worked. Glorious.
The version of Minecraft we’re using at school here is called MinecraftEdu. It’s built for schools and gives you greater control over students (and cheaper licences).
Continue reading →
A few years ago I bought a barcode reader for use in a school Library. It was a Cino 780BT, Bluetooth, nice base station, glorious battery. It was a really nice unit.
One slight issue: The trigger switch on them sucks. The first one we warrantied and got a replacement, the second one developed the same fault after a year or so of use too. The first time it happened the switch had come loose from the board, so I resoldered it back on (it’s a SMD switch, so there wasn’t much holding it on).
I contacted the company, they wanted me to send it back to them to fix (and charge me for it), the switch would be $20 + labour to fit it. I figured since it was out of warranty I’d give it a shot and see if I could replace it.
I couldn’t find a decent switch to fit (I tried to repurpose a switch from a mouse, but I couldn’t get it to fit right), so I used a switch from my Mechanical Keyboard sampler kit (it has 4 different types of switches to try out to see which one you like).
So: Little bit of soldering and some hot glue later, I have a working barcode reader again!
Read More to see some in progress pictures!
UPDATES! 21/6/14: Use a different interface that does just WAN traffic and made the cron thing actually work. Scroll down for the green bits (padavans firmware only though).
I’ve spent the last few days fiddling around with network traffic monitoring on my modem so I can track downloads for each different computer on my network. This article is a how to guide and a set of notes about getting it working.
If you want to follow this guide, you will need an Asus RT-N56U or one of the similar models. You can also mostly follow this guide using any OpenWRT routers (but you will need to adjust as you go to suit your router). I initially set it up using the stock firmware on the RT-N56U, however I ran into issues where it was reporting the wrong amount of traffic. After I installed the Padavan’s Firmware, I still had the same problem (I later solved it by disabling hardware NAT below). In theory this technique should work with the stock firmware and I’ll detail it below as well as how to get Padavan’s Firmware up and running too.
The final result of this is to be able to see a screen like this:
I recently got myself a MacBook Pro 15″ Retina and noticed that in Mavericks they have removed the option to have separate timers for display sleep and computer sleep. You can turn off sleep mode when you’re running on AC power, but not when you’re running on the battery.
The problem with this is that I want the display to turn off to save battery power, but I want all my background processes (eg. Adium/Colloquy) to continue running and for it to stay connected to wifi, but when the display goes blank, it goes straight to sleep and disconnects everything!
The fix for this is to manually set the options via pmset in the terminal. To do this, you’ll need to do the following:
1. Open Terminal (it’s in the Utilities folder under Applications)
2. Enter the command: sudo pmset -b sleep 0
3. Enter the command: sudo pmset -b standby 0
You will need to enter your password after running these commands (if it asks for it).
For more information about what this command does, check here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html
Hope this helps someone 🙂
Ducky
I’ve done this as both a Mac and PC guide, the PC way of doing it is actually a little easier (but I use a paid program for it).
I’m on a 100mbit connection with a 720p iSight camera on my MacBook, so it uses about 500KiB/s of uploads (+ whatever the person I’m talking to is sending me back) which turns out to be something like 2gb an hour. This being said, Skype runs just fine on 50-100KiB/s.
When you turn on the speed cap thing, give it a minute or so and Skype will automatically adjust the video quality to suit the bandwidth available to it, so set your limit, then chill for a bit and see if you’re getting the quality you want
Mac
You’ll need a program called Entonnoir (it’s a free one).
Download it, and pop it in your Applications folder.
In Skype, go to Preferences and check the port number under the advanced tab.
Now, in Entonnoir, hit the + button, set the port number to the same as the one in your Skype Prefs and set your limits.
PC
I use a program called NetLimiter. It is glorious and I use it a lot for scheduling downloads (like game downloads through Origin/Steam where there’s no scheduling function built in) to run during off-peak download times.
Simply open up NetLimiter, tick the button next to Skype and enter a limit in.
If you know of a free equivalent for NetLimiter, post it in the comments!
