Here\’s to the crazy ones…

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Ars Technica\’s John Siracusa is having flashbacks…  He is reviewing and commenting on his 10 years of Apple Mac OS X reviews…

The latter half of the 1990s was a dark time for the company then known as Apple Computer, Inc. Windows 95 had dashed any remaining hopes of mass-market desktop dominance for Apple. The big profits of the earlier part of the decade had given way to some huge annual losses. The future of the entire company was in doubt.

Like injured animals, corporations are adept at hiding the true magnitude of their injuries. As grim as things appeared from the outside, few Apple enthusiasts knew at the time just how close the company came to fiscal ruin. But the software picture was always crystal-clear—clear, and terrifying.

I highly recommend taking a look, and seeing where he has gone wrong, and hit it on the nail…

John is a fountain of useful information on the Mac OS X internals, and he\’s got some great ideas…

Twitter is still down… And it\’s my problem..

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Well, I\’m communicating with the author of the Twitoaster package, to see if we can isolate what is causing the failure of the package…  (It\’s probably something related to my wordpress configuration…)
Twitoaster, automatically posts the wordpress posts to Twitter, but it also allows the Retweets, and Tweetbacks, to show up in the posts on the blog…
In the meantime, Facebook integration is still working…Or you could just monitor the RSS feeds..
– Benjamin

Are you Frying an Egg, or cooling your laptop?

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

As a general guideline, these temperatures are really the maximum I would consider safe for a laptop…

  • 0-104F (40C) = Cold.
  • 122F – 158F [50-70C] = Typical-ish use, still safe.
  • 159F – 185F [70-85C] = Heavy use, consider moving to flat surface, elevating, or cooling it.
  • 185F+ [85]+ = Hot! Go take a break.

If you laptop (or desktop) is running hotter than that, then double check to see if there is dust buildup in the cooling system.  Is there anything around the air inlet\’s that would be blocking them?  Shag carpet?  Fluffy lap blanket? etc…
Long answer: the highest temperature the internals can handle depends on the manufacturer and model. Unless you feel like opening the laptop up, your best bet is to do the following:

  • Find the CPU model by looking at the System Information screen or via System Information.
  • Google for the datasheet. For instance, if it\’s a P8700, you would google for {P8700 datasheet}.
  • Download and open the datasheet. Look for a section named something like \”Maximum Ratings\”; this section will have either a maximum storage temperature or a maximum running temperature.

Alternately, you can try finding it in this list, but it\’s a bit out of date.

Trailer #2 for Kick-ass

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Here\’s the story, the Kick-Ass trailers are getting better and better….
The Latest one, is inlined below…
I want to believe it\’s going to be fantastic….  I just read the comic series, and boy, if it covers it as faithfully as it appears…  It\’s going to rock….
Or crash and burn….  After all, it\’s a comic adaption…  Other than the new Batman movies, what was the most faithful adaption?  Watchman?  Didn\’t that burn pretty heavily?

Disaster Recovery for File Vault

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

This assumes that the hard drive is physically intact. Put the drive into a 2.5″ enclosure and hook it up to another Mac.

  • First, attempt to open the Disk Image, by going to the new drive’s USERS folder, and double clicking on the File Vault users disk image (it should be named the same as the users SHORTNAME).  This should then cause the system to prompt for the password.  Once the password is entered, it should mount as a disk image.
  • If that doesn’t work, try this use an Admin account (call it user2) to mount user1’s FileVault using the following command in Terminal :
    sudo hdiutil attach /Volumes/UpInFlames/Users/user1/user1.sparsebundle
    where UpInFlames is the volume name of your MacBook drive. You’ll need the password of the user2 as well as the password on the sparsebundle.

Then you should be able to access the data as normal.
via File Vault Information • The Matrix Data Bank.

Start screen sharing remotely in Terminal

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Assume you want to do some work on a remote Mac via 10.5's Screen Sharing, but you forgot to enable Screen Sharing before you left the remote Mac. Since the screen sharing system uses launchd to monitor its state, enabling and disabling is as simple as adding a file in the/Libary/Preferences folder.
Of course, this does mean that you will need to have remote Login access to the remote Mac…
$ cd /Library/Preferences
$ echo -n enabled > com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd
To disable screen sharing:
$ cd /Library/Preferences
$ rm com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

Why should I shoot my Stack? Isn\’t that bad?

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Just remember, if you find something on your system, and you don\’t know what it is….  Don\’t immediately panic, try to understand the situation first.
I just read a startling account, of someone thinking that StackShot, was direct evidence of their Macintosh OS X system being rooted by some evil HACKER.
Stackshot is a built-in diagnostic tool, and is expected to be built-in to the Mac OS X system.  From the MAN page:

The stackshot daemon is used to capture stack traces for each thread on the system; this includes both user space and kernel stacks. The resulting view of the system is internally consistent. Stack pages that are paged out are not captured–this caveat does not apply to kernel space stacks, which are wired. The stack snapshot is triggered upon pressing a special key chord; this is currently Control-Option-Command-Shift-Period.

So there is no reason to believe that this tool is a problem.  Not at all.