Phillo's site > Mac all day usage

I’ve already found, as soon I purchased it, that the standard 250 GB disk of my MacBook Pro is not a very good performing unit, so I’ve already replaced it with a 7200 rpm Western Digital hard disk I’ve available from a previous notebook. Performance increase was good (in the 10-15% range, according to XBench), but there were some drawback, the 7200 rpm disk used more battery and makes more heat.

So I’ve done a further upgrade and replaced it with a new OCZ Velocity 3 Solid State Disk, in a 120 GB capacity.

The previous 7200 rpm disk, evaluated with the XBench program, had a performance index of 60.31, with  uncached read of 48 MB/Sec and 22.28 MB/Sec, sequential and random.

The new SSD disk has a new index of 197.52, with read rates of 225.79 and 599.97, performance was dramatically better.

Said that I’ve to say that the SSD usage of Lion OXS is not quite effective and it requires some tweak to work without issues, all requiring to use Terminal and sudo to issue command as root.

Here is the list of what I’ve done, to perform them launch terminal and copy the commands I’ve outlined here:

    sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

This avoid a problem related to Lion freezing when it resumes from hibernation.

    sudo pmset -a sms 0

This tells Lion not to use the sudden motion sensor to stop the disk from spinning if the Mac is dropped or does a sudden movement. Not having moving parts having this feature it’s useless with a SSD disk.

 

 

The latest addiction I have made to my setup at home is the Apple TV.

It’s a very nice engineered piece of hardware (for example the fact that do now have a power adapter and that the power cable goes directly from the power plug to the Apple TV is a very small thing but at the same time it’s very nice thing not to have another adapter connected) but, I have to say so, it’s basically useless without jailbreaking it (at least here in Italy where the Netflix offer is not available and so the only movie you can purchase are from Apple).

I was a little disappointed in the beginning because it does not have a full 1080p output like the WD TV it replaces in my setup but, after thinking about it, I’ve decided that it’s good enough, because my library of full 1080 HD video is quite short (just one movie!).

Jaibreaking it (a last generation Apple TV with the latest iOS from Apple) was quite difficult, because I did not find a way to put it in DFU mode that was predictable enough to describe here. The best suggestion I can give you is to use the Seas0nPass tool and try to reboot and put the Apple TV in DFU mode using in sequence the following remote control combination:

• Down Arrow – Menu
• Play – Menu

sooner or later Seas0nPass will see your Apple TV going in DFU mode and will perform its magic. The other suggestion is that, when you need to start Seas0nPass, you can alt-click (or option-click) on the button to avoid downloading the same ipsw file again and again from Apple if, annoyed because the DFU mode does not happens, you close Seas0nPass.

DFU mode works, you need to try and re-try, the timing between rebooting the AppleTV (Menu-Down Arrow on the remote) and pressing the Play-Menu combo on the remote and the timing to keep pressed the Play-Menu is critical and the window available is very, very narrow, so pressing the buttons with just a little delay can invalidate the procedure.

Once AppleTV was jailbreaked I’ve installed XBMC on it and the XBMC remote on the iPhone and so now I’ve a complete multimedia center connected to my network fully managed via iPhone.

In short:

• AppleTV: a very nice piece of hardware but (for me) almost useless without jailbreaking it
• AppleTV Jailbreaked: a very useful piece of hardware that, using XBMC, it’s one of the best media center combination available on the market

 

After purchasing the WD MyWorld edition I’ve tried different ways to stream my music library on my network.

The first solution I’ve found was to use PlugPlayer to play music using the iPhone but the solution worked great but had a big problem: it required to connect the iPhone to my stereo to listen it, so if you play music you cannot, at the same time… well… make a call!

So I moved to another solution, I purchased an Airport Express device, connected it via WiFi to work as a remote speaker and connected it to my main stereo (a Marantz amplifier connected to a pair of Indiana Line speaker). This way you can stream music from your Mac to the main stereo.

Last piece of the puzzle was to install the Apple Remote application on the iPhone so that I can control the iTunes running on the Mac via the iPhone.

Now I’ve what I consider a very well engineered and polished solution: the Mac runs iTunes connecting to the WD music library, stream music on the AirPort Express to play it on the main stereo with a very good quality (thanks to Indiana Line speakers, that are very, very good and not too expensive) and I can control everything from every room of the house using my iPhone.

I’ve changed the option of my Mac OSX to boot in full 64 bit mode every time it boots and, after that, the NTFS-3G failed to load with an error telling me it’s not able to load MacFuse. This happens because the version of MacFuse include on NTFS-3G do not work on a 64 bit environment and also allowing MacFuse to update to a beta version load the latest official beta (2.1.5) that still do not works on 64 bit.

Only solution I’ve found so far (beside upgrading to the full Tuxera product) was to install a non official build of MacFuse, version 2.1.7.

You can download it here: http://www.phillo.it/MacFUSE-2.1.7.dmg.

Update: Also if the proposed solution worked for smaller files it failed every time with files larger than 200-300 MB. I’ve experimented some more and I’ve not found a suitable solution beside restarting Max OSX in 32 bit mode (booting it keeping the 3 and 2 buttons of the keyboard pressed during the boot process) to copy larger files. The problem seems in the 64 bit part and not on MacFUSE because the I’ve not downgraded MacFUSE from version 2.1.7.

I’ve added a Western Digital MyBook World edition to my home network. I was in “cheap” mode and so purchased the simple 1 TB, single disk, model, so without any kind of Raid.

Installation was flawless and very simple and, in just a few touch, I was able to connect my Mac to it, set it up to perform Time Machine on it (limiting the user quota for backup to just 250 GB). As a simple file server it works very well and without problem.

The fun started when I copied my MP3 collection on it and then shared it via the two options available for media sharing, iTunes and the standard Media Server available with the included TonkyServer.

The iTunes share can be seen from iTunes on the Mac but the overall experience is not so good, you cannot search for files or create playlists. Much more interesting it’s the media server option, that exposed data using the UPnP™/DLNA® standard, first of all because sharing is made also considering the various mp3 tag that are included in the files (so allowing browsing for artists, genres, albums and so on) but, above all, because I’ve found two very useful programs that allow me to browse the media server collection (both audio, videos and photos!) via my iPhone.

The first one is called AirPlayer (http://itunes.apple.com/it/app/airplayer/id369713694?mt=8. The first time you open it it scans the networks, find your media server and allow you to browse your media, listen or play them.

The second one is called PlugPlayer (http://itunes.apple.com/app/plugplayer/id293235450?mt=8) and works like AirPlayer buth it should also allow you to control other media players on the network, not only the iPhone.

None of this two is clearly superior to the other, AirPlayer has the strong point that manages all kind of video formats and so can be used to look also to video files (both keep in mind that you have high resolution files the video playback will suffer due to the performance of wifi network, unless you have a very good connection), but has a poorer user experience compared to PlugPlayer. PlugPlayer is definitively nicer to look at but wasn’t able to play any of the videos I’ve shared. A very strong point for PlugPlayer it’s the capability to manage Media Renderer device, unluckily I do not have one available and so I cannot test this feature.

Next step will be to purchase a BlueTooth receiver to connect to my stereo and see if one of this two tool can also send the music from by WD NAS storage to the stereo, so that I can listen to Christmas Music using my iPhone to control everything.

Post Christmas Update: After some testing I’ve decided to use PlugPlayer as my main player control. It has some feature missing from AirPlayer (basically it works with the back/forward buttons of my player remote) and because of its capability to control remote devices that should work with the next addition to my media rig, the WD TV Live I’ll use to replace my current WD TV. PlugPlayer misses the video capability of AirPlayer and to it’s basically useful just for music, but music it’s what I need, so as a guide line if you need a music player choose PlugPlayer, if you need a video player choose AirPlayer.

If you have Google Chrome installed on your Mac you can browse the full human body in 3D using this command to start Chrome:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome –enable-webgl http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/body.html

If you need a RDP client for Mac OSX do not search open source or other alternatives, the only one I’ve found that works well it’s the one distributed by Microsoft itself.

If you need it you can download from Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=68346e0d-44d3-4065-99bb-b664b27ee1f0&displayLang=en

While in Windows I was quite used to run Paint.NET (a very useful and free photo editing tool, available at http://www.getpaint.net/) the same quality in a simple Open Source tool is not available for Mac OSX.

I’ve tested GIMP but I do not like it and, above all, the time required to start every time because it need the X server to run is too much for occasional usage, I’ve also tested Seashore but I do not like it, so I’ve decided to purchase a commercial software, and the winner is:

It was quite some time I’ve seen a program polished and finished as that, a truly work of love from a group of passionate and competent developers.

I really do not have anything to say, Pixelmator it’s the best program I’ve found for Mac to edit photo, because it’s fast, it works, it’s seamlessy integrated in every aspect of the Mac OSX operating system and it values much, much more than the very affordable price required to buy it (thanks also to the very favorable euro/dollar exchange rate). Highly recommended, without any doubt.

A very useful link of open source Mac OSX programs:

http://www.opensourcemac.org/

The better tools I’ve used of the proposed ones are:

The Unarchiver: a replacement for the standard uncompression tool of Max OSX with support for more formats like Rar and 7z

Perian: a very useful addon of different codecs to extend the media player capabilities of your Mac

Burn: a much more powerful and easy to use software to burn CDs and DVDs

I do not understand why I cannot easily connect my standard Mac Os X email client to Outlook Web Access like I do using the Email client of my iPhone.

I’ve tried every combination of sites and configuration but it seems there is no way do to so, the connection to a Outlook Server is required to access a mail server and cannot work using just the standard OWA access. Unluckily the mail server of my company it’s not exposed on the Internet, while OWA is.

The only solution I’ve found was to use the Enturage client from the older version of Microsoft Office, that works without problems and allow me to access my work email from my Mac from a rich client that also caches the email messages on disk and not only via Outlook Web Access.

The same problem applies to the latest Outlook included in the latest office for Mac.

In both case it’s something I do not understand, the code for accessing email via OWA was available (Apple has included it on the iPhone client and Microsoft had it available from the Entourage code base) and I see that having OWA exposed to Internet and not the mail server is a pretty common scenario in the enterprise world, but nor Microsoft nor Apple chooses to include this basic functionality inside their flagship email clients.

For Outlook I’ve also found (later) that it cannot access neither the Exchange server of my company because it requires Exchange Server 2007 and we did not upgrade from 2003, so I’m forced to use Entourage to read my office email also when connected to the office network. Luckily the Entourage mail client (also if quite old with a not so nice look&feel) it’s quite powerful and allow me do to all the thing I need to do via email.

I share my notebook with my girlfriend and so we had some common Windows application running on VMWare Fusion and I would like to have a single VMWare virtual machine with Windows 7 to avoid wasting space. This was not so easy as I expected…

Once the VM has been created I moved the Virtual Machines to the Shared folder so that we could use the same VM, but access denied errors happened as soon I changed the user and tried to run the VM. To change this I was forced to run a chmod command to change all the permission in all files in the folder, because the same operation using the finder was not possible.

To do so run the terminal and do a

sudo chmod -R 777 Virtual\ Machines.localized

This way everything runs also with the other accounts.

I’m starting to hate the finder!!!

The connection from Mac to my office VPN was something that required some time to work. Here it is how I manage to connect.

First step was to connect to my VPN site (the office one) using Firefox, because connecting to it via Safari or Chrome did not work, with that configuration the Java applet that my office requires to start to verify the system pre-requisites did not start and so I cannot get to the page to authenticate. Using Firefox the Java applet works and so I can get the login page.

From there the connection worked.

Before using Firefox I tried to manually install the SNX client with mixed success.

First download the latest release of SNX client from https://supportcenter.checkpoint.com/supportcenter/portal?eventSubmit_doGoviewsolutiondetails=&solutionid=sk41808#2, it’s one of the latest download link on the page

After that install it on the Max OSX. It requires to install it by executing a .sh file that creates the required files, including the update of SNX tool that it’s used to create the VPN connection.

Once the SNX client has been installed from the terminal you need to create a file named .snxrc in your home directory that contains all the informations required to connect, like the following (change the address of vpn server and the username according to your configuration):

server v<em>pnserver.domain.com</em>
username <em>youruserid</em>
reauth yes
debug yes 5

Now run the SNX command and it should ask for your password, insert it, it should connect to the VPN.

snx
Check Point's Mac SNX
build 800005012
Please enter your password:

SNX - connected.

Session parameters:
===================
Office Mode IP      : 192.168.1.173
DNS Server          : 172.16.0.190
Secondary DNS Server: 172.16.0.191
Timeout             : 12 hours

The first time I tried the second option it worked but was not able to find an IP address on the remote network, this can be verified giving the ifconfig and verify the result:

This configuration do not work because it do not assign an IP address to the checkpoint VPN interface:

ifconfig en7
en7: flags=8862<BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1350
ether 54:55:43:44:52:00 
Check Point Virtual Network Adapter

After having made a lot of tests with different ifconfig option I resorted to a very sample solution: I changed the DHCP configuration to give me an address not in the same network of the IP assigned by the office (so using a different subnet) and everything worked fine.

I do not know what will happen if I connect from some hotel where I cannot change the DHCP configuration, I hope that the connection via Firefox works well.

UPDATE: after some further testing I’ve found that the SNX client described above do not work if you’ve updated your Mac to always boot in 64 bit mode (or, as far I know, if you have a new MacBook where the 64 bit option is enabled by default).

The error is:

Unable to open ‘/dev/vna0′: No such file or directory
Unable to open ‘/dev/vna0′: No such file or directory
Unable to open ‘/dev/vna0′: No such file or directory

While we wait for Checkpoint to release a new update supporting the new 64 bit option (if it will be ever released) the only way I’ve found to use it is to boot OSX in 32 bit mode. To do so boot OSX while keeping pressed the 3 and 2 button of your keyboard. After doing so the Checkpoint client works. Quite boring because you’ve to perform a reboot.

One of the first thing I’ve done once my new MacBook Pro arrived at home was to connect my external disk drive (usually connected to a WD TV HD media player) to see how some of the video worked and to copy some mp3 files on my Mac.

Everything worked fine until… I tried to rename a folder and the rename command was not available. Nor was the copy command or every kind of command that writes on the disk. After some digging on Google I found that NTFS usage is something not included with every Mac.

So I arrived to a tool, http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/, that it’s easily installed on Mac OS X and easily allow a NTFS disk to be mounted on the Mac in a writable mode.

The ntfs-3g tool install quite easily and it’s reasonably fast for a a free edition. A commercial version that enables some more advanced caching option it’s available but I’ve not tested it, the read and write performance of the free edition is enough for my needs (occasionally read or write media files in the 350MB-2GB range), I believe that if you need a disk with faster performance for heavier usage (like, for example, working with multimedia files and not just copy them) then the commercial edition could be justified but maybe it’s better to format your external disk with the native OS X file format.

Only very small side issue I’ve found is that if I delete the files from the external disk using the Mac I need to run the Maintenance tool or the Disk Repair on the external NTFS disk to proper recover the space used by the files I’ve deleted, a simple empty trash operation it’s not enough.