phaq

Out of a sudden iTunes struck me with this error: The iPhone “…” could not be synced because the sync session failed to start

I did web research, but did not really find a proper solution to this.
Well, there were a few which either did some funny things on Windows (I run a Mac ….), or recommended to restore the iPhone from a previous backup, removing just one app, installing just one new app through the iTunes store, and, well, some other curious and strange things.

After all, I thought to give the restore thing a try, however that changed nothing. Same message came up. So I disabled WLAN sync as to not interfere with the iPhone being hooked up by the cable already — again to no avail.

So I decided to look into the iTunes internals. There I found a primising folder within the Application Library folder called SyncServices. It was not that big, around 6 megs. But inside there where clear traces of synchronisation stuff.

My solution to the above error was then to quit iTunes, remove the SyncServices folders completely. And voila, iTunes would just start syncing my iPhone as if nothing bad had ever happened.

So here’s another piece of code I hacked up tonight.
Since I’m roaming around with my MacBook every now and then, the need arised, that I would need to switch my TimeMachine destination volumes based on location.

So while in the office, I’d like to backup to my external USB drive there.
Being at my home office, i’d like to backup to my NAS, while on the road, I’d love to habe my external mobile drive to kick in (and yes, I know about the “mobile backup feature” of OS X Lion, but that’s not the point …)
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After making a backup from a hard disk ta a disk image using plain old ‘dd’, I was just looking into mounting it using the Linux loopback device.

If you ‘dd’ a single partition into an image file, then this is very straight forward. But if your image file contains multiple partition partitions including the partition table itself, then you need to take additional steps.
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It’s not hard to install Icinga on FreeBSD, at least if you’re satisfied with default options.
Should you however require Icinga with IDOUtils and MySQL support, then you need to take additional steps.

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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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