phaq

Apple introduced a new feature called “mobile backups” with OS X Lion.
The idea behind that: Use a temporary part of the local hard drive to store backups until the backup drive is connected again.

True, this is a good feature for most. But if you can spare some backups, because you – let’s say – store your files to a dropbox folder, which is synchronized to a cloud service, then you may not need the mobile backup feature of OS X.
In fact, you may notice running out of disk space, that you could use otherwise.
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Years ago I wrote a small script to restore local default route after connecting the RAS VPN on Windows.

Now, I made up a similar script to do the same on OS X.
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It’s only days since I wrote about a custom script action upon inserting a DVD in OS X, allowing me have either run the DVD Player or MakeMKV to rip the DVDs.

Now I was digging around if I could do some automation on the GUI part, which indeed turned out to work … at least to a certain degree.
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I’m currently ripping my complete DVD collection off to MKV (Matroska) format, so I can stream them across my home network.

So I sought a way to have my OS X give me the choice to either start DVD Player or MakeMKV upon inserting a DVD.
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Are you using an external hard drive for TimeMachine backup?
Are you using it to store other data as well?
Didn’t you divide your hard drive it into a data and TimeMachine partition? (Hell No …!)
Now you’re running out of free disk space and need more room? (Hell Yes …!)

Solution #1: Buy another (bigger) hard drive.

Solution #2: Remove some old TimeMachine backups to recover some space.
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Why for God’s sake would anyone even think about shutting speakers while the screen saver runs?
Don’t these thingies provide an internal mute switch to stay quiet?

Well, yes, most of the time, they do. Though in my case, I run that nice and decent System47 LCARS-style screen saver. And while it provides indeed a mute switch, it yet refuses to honor that flag and will always revert to non-muted operations. This drives me crazy, at least during the night time.

So here’s my solution to shut it quiet — really handy when I’m not along and forgot to turn volume down …
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Some time ago, I set up a multi-boot environment on my Mac, where I could use my BootCamp-Partition for both booting Windows natively on the Mac as well as virtualized from within VirtualBox.

Now, I wanted to create a clone of the RAW partition to do some testing.
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So OS X “Lion” is out now for over 36 hours. It’s time for a review of the minor troubles and glitches I had with it so far.
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Mac OS X (since 10.5) sports a python environment in it’s default install, which includes a very simple HTTP server.
This may come in handy if you want to serve some files quickly over HTTP, without the need to fireup the full-blown Apache available through ‘Web Sharing Service’.
Don’t believe me? Read on to see how you’ll be up in running in just a few seconds.
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Here’s a follow-up to my previous posts on sharing Windows 7 in BootCamp and VirtualBox and launching a VirtualBox VM directly through an icon shortcut.

Concerning this topic I was asked if it’s possible to have the BootCamp partition only umounted upon startup of the Windows VM.
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