Additionally it raises the keyboard a bit which I find more nice to write on. It’s very simple, robust and easy to store. It comes with a small hull so you can even store it within the tight second skin covers for your precious MacBooks.

It easily adopts to all different sizes of Laptops and even Netbooks can be put on top of it.

Find a more detailed review at the-gadeteer.com

I often struggled to run two different versions of Mozilla Firefox in parallel. Of course you can install an application basically in any folder on you machine and it will probably run. But applications tend to store certain app data in your “~/Library/Application Support” folder and the likes. Firefox will store it’s profile data there and some lock information when it’s running. So when you try to start a second instance of Firefox it will usually complain that another instance of Firefox is already running.

But there is a workaround using Firefox Profile support. Basically you’ll call Firefox with a certain profile because you can run multiple instances of Firefox with different profiles at the same time. Unfortunately there is no easy way to add start parameters to an Application under MacOS. But here’s the trick:

I’ve installed the latest Firefox in the default location under /Applications and let it run unmodified. I have an Firefox 3.6.x installation in my personal applications folder under ~/Applications. This one I modified to start with a certain profile. In order to achieve this, I initially called the Firefox manually invoking the Profile Manager:

~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Create a profile and name it “FF3″ and tick the box “Don’t ask at startup”. Now you need to tell Firefox.app to use this profile for start. In order to do this you need to modify a .plist file in the application package. That contains the start up command for Firefox. Unfortunately you can’t just add a parameter here. You need to create a shell-script that’ll call Firefox with the appropriate command. Then you’ll nominate this shell script as start command in the plist file.

So create a file named “start-firefox.sh” in ~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/ with the following content:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
/Users/fzurell/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P "FF3"

Make the shell script executable for the user: chmod u+x ~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/start-firefox.sh

Then edit the file ~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/Info.plist

Find the key for “CFBundleExecutable”, the next line contains a string element pointing to “firefox-bin”. Replace it with your newly created shell script as seen in the screenshot and save the file.

Basically that’s all. When you now double-click the Firefox.app in your personal Application folder, it should start Firefox with the FF3 profile.

If it doesn’t your Finder cache might not yet been updated. Move the Firefox.app from the ~/Applications folder to your Desktop for a moment. Double click the Firefox.app as if you want to open it. Nothing will happen (as the shell script is pointing to ~/Applications/Firefox.app). Now move it back to ~/Applications folder. It should work now.

So why seems everybody disappointed with the iPhone 4S then? I guess because Apple forgot about an important feature – the distinguishness of their products. People want to show off that they have the latest and greatest gadget, that they can afford the new iPhone although their other iPhone is just half a year old.
All this glamour can’t be achieved with the new iPhone 4S because nobody will easily recognize it from it’s predecessor.
Poor hipsters and early adopters. This time there is only little reward for staying in line in front of the Apple Store half the night. They’ll only get a new device in the old case that nobody will recognize.

I found a fairly easy way to do the upgrade. OCZ provides a Linux based update tool that downloads the actual firmware on demand from their website. So you need a computer that can run Linux, has internet connectivity and the drive accessible via a controller that allows the update.

Of course you can’t update the firmware of the drive you’ve booted from. So I just took a Ubuntu Linux Live CD and booted my MacBookPro (press C during boot) from the CD. From Linux I downloaded the firmware update pack from the OCZ website and ran in it a terminal.

This worked like charm. Hard disk was recognized, appropriate firmware update downloaded and disk updated. Done. No need to put your hard drive in another computer that runs the support OS or any other fiddling.

TextExpander (commercial):

This little program safes me a thousand key strokes every month. You can define small strings that get expanded to much larger strings when you type them.

For instance I have a abbreviation defined as “psjava” that instantly gets expanded to “ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep java” once I type it somewhere.

TextExpander comes with a price tag of about ~ $35 USD.

ClipboardHistory (commercial):

The Clipboard History does what the name implies. It keeps history of what you put in your clipboard and can restore it later. So you can copy multiple items to the Clipboard and paste it one by one.

The nice thing about ClipboardHistory I found is, that it stores plain text, RTF and even pictures. But you have to choice to paste it as just plain text. This is very handy if you have to cite from HTML formatted emails and the like.

ClipboardHistory is available for about 3,99 € in the Mac App Store.

There is a free alternative called JumpCut that I used before. That stores only plain text in the history. So Clipboard History is a bit more flexible here. And also offers a search windows for you history. So worth the few bucks if you ask me.

ControlPlane (free):

ControlPlane is a nice tool that helps me changing certain settings when I switch work environments. I use my Laptop at Home and in the Office. There are different network environments and stuff I would need to adjust every time I move. ControlPlane can recognize these environment changes and can execute certain actions on change.

For me it switches to a different network location profile to adopt the proxy settings and starts and stops certain programs.

ControlPlane seems to be the successor of Marco Polo which is discontinued.

SoundSource (free):

SoundSource is a nifty little menu bar item that let’s you pick input and output audio devices. You can specify to use the headset microphone but the build in speakers etc.

LittleSnitch (commercial):

This little Snitch is a tool for control freaks. It acts like a reversed firewall. It captures traffic from applications on your computer to the network. So you can explicitly allow or deny applications to talk to hosts on the network. It also gives you a monitor on which applications talks to which hosts etc.

LaunchBar (commercial):

This is my control center for applications. LaunchBar gives you sort of a command line interface for launching applications and other stuff. Just hit the trigger key (Ctrl + Space) and start typing some letters of the application you want to start. Once there is a match in the LaunchBar hit Enter and you’re done.

No searching and clicking with a mouse for application launch. LaunchBar supposedly also can maintain clipboard history. But I don’t use this feature at the moment.

iStat Menus 3 (commercial):

Unix-Freaks always love those little meters and gauges displaying all sort of system metrics. Of course there is a Mac way to have this. The most popular is possibly iStats Menus. This stays in the menu bar and can display CPU load, Memory usage, Network throughput etc. at a glance and more detailed measures with a simple click.

DropBox (free, premium available):

DropBox offers you 2GB of cloud storage + synchronization for free. Think of it as an folder on your disk that is constantly synced with a cloud service. So you can keep this folder in sync on several Computers (not limited to Macs).

I use this to store stuff I need on multiple computers like Password Database, TextExpander repo etc.

Make sure you read and understand their small print. Basically they’ll own your data if you use the service. So don’t put stuff their that you don’t like to be shared (copyright protected material, unencrypted personal stuff etc.)

Evernote (free, premium available):

Evernote is a note keeping application. That itself isn’t something spectacular. What makes Evernote unique is, that it’ll sync your notes with their cloud service. This way you can access your notes from multiple devices. Additionally Evernote does OCR on pictures you store in notes. This way you can for instance take pictures of business cards and search for the text on it. That is pretty neat.

Xmarks (free):

I’m using different Browsers on different Platforms. But I want to have my Bookmarks available  in all those browsers. The most versatile tool seems Xmarks to me. It has a plugins for most popular browsers and thus keeps my bookmarks in sync. Be careful with their additional offering called “LastPass”. That one can sync your stored password with their cloud service. But they have been hacked several times on the past…

1Password (commercial):

Of course one can’t remember passwords for all the online services and website that are in use. So either you use the same password everywhere (bad idea) or you use different passwords and try to memorize them somehow. I use 1Password to help me with that. It stores all the passwords in a strongly encrypted database file and hooks in to my browsers to easily fill in on demand. You can sync the password file via DropBox to your other computers and even to 1Password on the iPhone. So you always have your passwords at hand.

The good thing is that you passwords are encrypted in a file that you own. Not in a cloud service where you hope the provider encrypts them properly.

OmniFocus (commercial):

GTD is a big hype and there meanwhile tens or even hundreds of tools out there to help you getting your tasks and lists organize. OmniFocus was one of the first tools around and is very versatile and capable. Some people complain about the rather technical UI compared to fancier alternatives like “Things” or “The Hit List“. But apart from it’s powerful features OmniFocus has one big advantage. It can sync it’s database with the iPhone version via any WebDAV folder. So I don’t need to pay for an additional cloud service but instead can use my own web server to sync the database between iPhone and MacBook.

Main reason (apart from being a fan boy and pain seeker) is the full disc encryption (FDE) that is now build in. It replaces the basically useless FileVault that was in place before Lion.

In principle the FDE works fine once you enabled it. It can be turned on later and run’s in the background without drawing noticeable performance.

But last week, out of curiosity, I started the disk utility to check if my volume is still healthy. DiskUtility stated that my partition needs a repair. As Lion now’s got a recovery partition with a basic operating system and tools I thought this is an easy task. I’m such an optimist…

Booting into the recovery OS is easy. Just press Command + R during boot. Then started the DiskUtility from the there. Of course my main partition is still encrypted at this point, but the DiskUtility has got an “unlock” button.

Just my password for the disc encryption doesn’t seem to work. My initial thought was the special characters in my password. I noticed that the keyboard layout was set to english. One could pick German from the little flag in the upper right corner. But it will instantly snap back to US English. First bug…

So I booted up in the normal OS again to change my FDE password to something more simple. Bootet again into the Recovery OS and tried to unlock the partition. No luck either. I also noticed that the password hint field is empty although I explicitly typed in something initially.

Out of curiosity I tried to change the password from the DiskUtility of the Recovery OS. It accepted the password (the new one) I typed in as well as the new password without complains. Let alone I still couldn’t unlock the FDE partition with any of those passwords.

So I decided to start the main OS in single use mode (press Command + S during boot) to do a manual repair (/sbin/fsck -fy). Guess which password could open the encrypted partition? Right, non of my new password could decrypt the partition. Instead my original password still worked. At least the manual repair did work without any problems.

Conclusion: FDE seems to work (OK I didn’t actually checked the bytes on the disk if they are really encrypted). But the tools to deal with FDE seems fundamentally broken in 10.7.1

But for peace sake I’ll show you how to display this secret information on your shiny MacOS X as well.

The trick is to create a custom format for the full data listing in the System Preferences. Just add the place holder for the Week to the format definition and it will show up in your menu bar clock and even in iCal.

Please find an excellent instruction on that on Marius van Witzenburgs Blog post

I couldn’t figure out what was the root cause of this behavior. But at least I found a workaround now. There is a free tool to change the schedule of the TimeMachine backups called TimeMachineEditor. This uses an alternate scheduling mechanism to trigger regular backups. I set the schedule to be 1h and it works just fine now.

Leider ist Majo gestern doch etwas überraschend an seiner Krebserkrankung gestorben. Überraschend daher, weil er noch vor wenigen Tagen nach längerer Pause selbst einen Blog-Eintrag verfasst hatte in dem er einigermassen optimistisch in die Zukunft blickte.

Mit Majo tritt ein Urgestein der deutschen Blogger- und Mac-Szene ab. Ich würde ihn in einem Satz mit dem Schockwellenreiter nennen (der gottlob noch lebt). Dank diverser Devotionalien wird Majo zum Glück noch lange einen Platz in meiner Erinnerung einnehmen und ich hoffe es geht euch ebenso.

How to setup encrypted Time Machine Backups from Falko Zurell on Vimeo.