prog | Entries tagged with macs

This is how I finally got Time Machine to work over WiFi:

I plugged my big-ass[1] third-party hard drive into the USB port of the Airport Extreme base station that I had purchased the day before.

I let my desktop Mac, connected to the house LAN via Ethernet, discover the base station automatically (it shows up under the "Shared" section in any Finder window's left sidebar). Via the Finder, I connected to the airport and mounted the drive.

I told the desktop Mac's Time Machine System Preferences to use this mounted drive as its disk, and let 'er rip. Hours later, I had a working, browsable Time Machine history on that machine. Hooray!

I set up my laptop beside the base station, connected to it directly with an Ethernet cable, and turned off the laptop's Airport access in order to ensure that it would use only Ethernet for the time being.

I repeated steps two and three with the laptop, mounting the backup drive via the network and letting the laptop spend a few hours making its initial backup. And then it worked too. Hooray!

I turned the laptop's Airport back on and unplugged it from Ethernet, so it's back to how it usually is. Time Machine continues to work as nicely as you please, both in making its hourly incremental backups, and in browsing them through the Time Machine application.

Previously, I had the hard drive plugged directly into my desktop Mac's USB, and tried to have the laptop back up to it via network-mounting it from there, but it didn't work properly - Time Machine would make all of its scheduled backups, but the Time Machine application would not recognize them, acting as if no backups had ever been made.

Admittedly, I changed several variables at once going from there to my current, working setup. Most obviously, there is the presence of the new Airport base station, and the fact that the backup drive is now plugged into it rather the desktop Mac. But also, I didn't know that my laptop's ethernet port worked - I thought it was broken! So I didn't try to make my initial backup that way; instead, I connected the hard drive to the laptop via USB, performed the backup, and then reconnected the hard drive to the desktop Mac, doing subsequent backups via the network. I suspect this may have confused matters. (I discovered the working state of the laptop's ethernet last night, as a desperate move. Wow.)

Therefore, I can't prove that my previous setup wouldn't have worked if I had tried to connect my laptop to the network differently. However, I don't regret purchasing the Airport, because the house now has a very nice new router. It gives us not just 802.11n WiFi (several times faster than anything we've had before) but also gigabit ethernet (ibid) and a separate wireless internet node for guests, with a trivial password and no LAN access. Plus,

classicaljunkie's old router is junky and prone to freeze up if you looked at it funny, so just as well that it get replaced.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that calling one and a half measly terabytes "big-ass" will seem laughable in a dozen years' time. I well recall how I purchased a two-gigabyte hard drive in 1997 and how infinitely huge it seemed then, and on and on back through time. This setup is for today, and lo, the ass, it is big.

Thanks for all the feedback re: cut tags on (non-LJ) blogs! I've instituted them on Gameshelf and am cautiously optimistic that the site's bounce rate has decreased as a result. It's still pretty crappy even so, but there's other fixes I've got in mind for that.

Bounce rate, in Google Analytics-ese, represents the percentage of people who stay on a site for five seconds or less - in other words, they load the site, say "meh", and move along. Some bounce is inevitable: there are regular readers who don't use RSS and visit the site between updates, and there are folks who breeze in from search engines and decide that we're not what they were looking for. Based on research, I'd like to get our bounce rate down to 50 percent. It's been hovering around 80-85 percent, which suggests that we're losing a lot of potential audience that should be more interested in us, but the site looks so boring that they have no reason to stay...

In other news, for the last week I've been trying to set up Time Machine in our home so that both my laptop - which speaks to the internet only via WiFi - and my Ethernet-using desktop Mac can both benefit. (The Intellish laptop is my main work machine, and the desktop, a rusty ol G5, performs various labors appropriate to a sessile machine: print server, Torrent torrenter, etc.)

First, I purchased a 1.5TB external hard drive last weekend, connected it to the G5 via USB, and net-mounted it on the laptop. The G5 took to it immediately, and after some groveling, I got a setup where the laptop was also backing up to it - but the Time Machine browser failed to ever show any history for the laptop. It acted as if no backups had ever been made, even though they were all there and accounted for on the backup disk, with new patches getting added every hour.

I couldn't find a solution to this on the web, though I quickly got the impression that was I was trying to do was quite unorthodox, and might work better if I acquired an Apple Airport Extreme router, and plugged the drive into that. So yesterday I visited my friendly local Apple store and had a conversation about this with one of the experts there. Was told that what I had in mind wasn't an officially supported solution, but the fellow had set up something similar in his house, and if I didn't mind getting my hands dirty it should work fine. OK, sold.

So am how having both machines perform their initial backups over the network, to the hard drive that is now plugged in downstairs, under the television, piled in with all the game consoles and DVRs and the new Airport router. They've been going at it for close to 12 hours now, and have miles to go, but that's expected; there's a lot of data. (Yes, I excluded the enormous Final Cut Scratch directories and such from the backup process. There's still a lot of data.) We'll see how well this works.

Side question: if any locals have a FireWire cable they'd be willing to lend me, it may help reduce the laptop's backup time from a few days to a few hours. (Its Ethernet port is busted, alas.)

Picked up one of these dongles at Best Buy yesterday. Less than half the price of a new controller, and it lets me use any wireless 360 controller (of which I own two) with Limburger. This should make debugging much faster. Thank you for the pointer,

lediva!

(LImburger is the name of the stank Windows XP side of my creamy white MacBook, which is otherwise named Brie. Yes, there must always be at least some vestigial amount of Mac Pride goin' on.)

Extra props to VMWare: This was the first time I tried installing new driver-dependent hardware onto XP through a VM, and it didn't even blink. That's very nice.

Extra props to Best Buy: I initially located a blister pack containing the adapter and a new controller together, so I picked it up and walked to the first blueshirt I found, asking if they sold this without the controller. She didn't know but proceeded to escort me from one of her cowrokers to the next, all of whom doubted that they had any but suggested the next person to ask. We eventually came to a fellow who said "What, this?" and handed the right thing to me. "You have succeeded where all others have failed," I told him.

I think the moment you know I'm really starting to use a new mac is the moment I install Noise on it.

OMG I just can't stop listening to this lady making call after call about all of her medical insurance haggling, though, in a voice that rings like a bell. She's totally doing this for our sake, making a little laugh to the room every time she hangs up. Argh. And she's sitting at the booth that I didn't sit at because I wanted to keep it open for people who needed it. I hate people.

Dear jmac: You're breaking my heart, being forced to hang out in a cafe writing for your little TV funhouse show while the rest of us actually have to work. I'm sure you'll find the strength to carry on somehow.

Been in a Gameshelf-heavy mode, with a lot to do before Tuesday's shoot. Yesterday

taskboy3000 came over to help me refresh my knowledge of Acquire, and we played MULE together so that I could get a feel for how it plays with another human (instead of against three computer players).

classicaljunkie helped us play an online version of Acquire that I'll be talking about more on the show.

This morning I went through the Acquire footage from last month, pleased to discover that it contains a story that can act as a natural focus for a monologue. I've got to write that monologue now, as well as one for MULE. And I've got to decide today how we're going to approach the MULE review so we can shoot it correctly tomorrow.

Feeling antsy about all of this, after spending so long focused on Voilty. I'll be on the other side of it by Wednesday, though.

I have not been ignoring the arrival of spring! I've been walkin around a lot, both by myself and with friends. The Gameshelf stuff's all on deadline, though, so I can't spend hours at it. Cranking open all my apartment's bay windows and sitting in the cross-breeze to type is an acceptable substitute.

Typing this on the new MacBook. Whee! It's taking a while coz it's yet another slightly different keyboard layout to get used to. No complaints.

It's very nearly six years to the day from when I last purchased a laptop, the iBook that you've probably seen me with, if you've seen me at all. (The one with the Jim's Big Ego sticker on.) What a trooper that old computer's been. It was my main machine for only a year and half or so, at first; I loaned it to my parents when Harvard gave me a shiny G4 lappie to use. But I had to give that up when I quit in 2005, so I took the iBook back, stuffing it full of RAM and a fresh battery. I used it all last year, writing many business documents. (I prefer to do these sitting on my couch, or in a cafe.) And now I'll probably hand it back to my parents when they visit next month.

Last night I signed, scanned and emailed a sweet work contract with a new client. This is the... fifth? client I have had in my on-and-off writing-and-programming freelance career but oddly enough it is first time I thought of them as a client. I am multiclassed, and I just leveled up in something.

Just now I ordered a refurbished MacBook, going ahead and spending the price of a new lowest-end to get a refurb middle model. And then dropping another $30 for next-day shipping.

Coz, y'know: write-off.

(OK, I'll only claim it at 50% business-use, but still.)

Edit Oh, bullshit: overnight shipping means that it'll ship overnight once they get it out the door. Which will take a week. Rrr, I wouldn't have spent the money had I known that. Maybe I can call on Monday and get em to switch me to standard ground.

Edit Whoah, I just got an email saying that it was shipped, several days in advance of the time window from the first email. I'll take it.

Had two dreams that seemed to be different faceplates on the same core anxiety:

1. I spent all my money on a beautiful new Intel Mac - but I forgot that it was a laptop that I wanted, and ended up with a perfectly redundant desktop machne!

2. I rented a Zipcar and had a jolly and rewarding drive - and realized, back home and 15 minutes after my time was up, that I had returned it to the wrong spot!

http://theminiblog.co.uk/archives/2006/11/16/how-to-cleaning-the-apple-keyboard/

I'm totally doing this this weekend. After three years, my keyboard is really quite disgusting. I'm embarrassed to let other people use it.

So I have this old Mac Classic II that I trashpicked during the summer. It's been sitting on or around the monolith in the living room since then, and since the living room has gotten less cluttered its presence is now more obvious. It's quite handsome, but I would like to have it do something more than merely sit there.

I would like to clean up its guts so that it stops making a horrid whining noise when activated - I am hoping it's a gunky fan and not a about-to-fail hard drive - and then make some sort of permanent low-key digital art installation out of it. That is, have it run a program of some sort that is amusing to look at, and is perhaps even interactive, something for guests to fiddle with.

I would rather not make it into an aquarium. That's too 1997 for me. I suppose I could do it anyway and be doubly retro, but nah.

Any ideas? Assume that I am unwilling to write any code. I suppose in theory I could install MacPerl on it, but, shudder. Am I hoping too much to hope that someone somewhere has not only already created such a program, but has made it publicly available?

DUDE I totally just trashpicked a working Mac Classic II. It's on the living room monolith making cool hardware-based outer-space noises even as I type. I am yanked back to my days at Andy England's shop and the strange things people would bring in.

THE MAN SAID I CAN UPGRADE TO A POWERMAC WITH A... PENSHUM? AND... DC-ROAM?? HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST

Actually most people were just disappointed when I broke the bad news to them that they couldn't turn a Mac Plus into a Pentium or (in one clever guy's case) turn a monitor into a TV while spending less money than you would on a new TV. All these people were hoping they'd figured out a way to beat the system and weren't especially surprised to find out that it wouldn't work. The only exception was one woman who had picked up an Apple ][ at a yard sale and got really angry with me when shrugged at it. Oh well.

Hm, there was also the guy who got offended when I offered $10 for his complete Lisa system, which he had paid about 1000 times (literally) as much for when it was new. If I were buying it for myself I would have paid more, of course, but from the store's POV it didn't have much resale value. Andy ended up buying it for himself for $100, I think.

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

Entries tagged with macs

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