The easy way to open a shell in the directory displayed by Finder on a Mac: Go2shell

Since I use the Terminal intensely but got annoyed of always doing cd in the directory I wanted to be in, I looked for a solution.
By googleing I found a nice app called Go2Shell, which you can find here.
Installation works nicely. After installation, drag the app into Finder's menu bar. Important, on MacOS 10.9 you need to hold down the cmd-key in order to drop the app into the menu bar. If you click on the symbol a terminal opens in the directory displayed by Finder. Nice and easy to work with. Kudos to the programmers.

WD myCloud as NAS for Apple's TimeMachine

Since I got annoyed of Time Machine complaining about not being able to backup my stuff, because I am too lazy to always plug in the external hard drive keeping the TM backups, I got myself a 2 TB WD myCloud NAS.

First thing I did was assigning a fixed IP address to the NAS (as I always do for any network device shared by multiple devices within the network, e.g. network printers, or a NAS) in order to minimize problems with changing IP addresses.

Backing up one Mac via Time Machine works like a charme, when set up as the WD myCloud manual says.

BTW: just for security reasons: make sure you have switched off the external access via internet in the myCloud setup screen!

Update (2014, Jan. 2nd): ensure to update the myCloud OS to the acutal Version (Jan 15). They seem to have fixed a performance problem with TimeMachine.

Xubuntu 14.04 and removing desktop icons for partitions.

I had to install Xubuntu 14.04 on a rather old Lenovo Notebook for a friend of mine. Xubuntu, because of its lightweight Desktop management which rendered the notebook usable again.

MacPorts and tiff2pdf

One of my favorite commands in the Unix-World is tiff2pdf since it produces nice pdfs with a very small file size especially from black/white tiff images from a scanner. To get this command on a Mac, install MacPorts as can be found on this page: http://www.macports.org/. After successful install, you can install the tiff2pdf command by installing the package tiff. Open a terminal and cast the command

sudo port install tiff

After that, you can use the command tiff2pdf from the terminal.