Dynamic DNS: adapting noipupdater.sh for MacOS

I often use my MacOS 10.8 laptop as a test server. In order to do this and to have other people easily accessing test services, I use a free Dynamic DNS entry from noip.com.

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.

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.

Configuring JabRef on different computers for using a shared database including pdf files

Since I host my literature data base and the associated pdf files on a shared directory, I wanted to make JabRef use the same database and link the pdf files correctly on different machines (MacOS, Linux, Windows). Took me a litte bit of trial-and-error, but here's the recipe:

Sipgate and a softphone for iPhone/iPod touch

Since I rely on different types of DTMF transfer protokols using sipgate (either inband for my telefone system at home for remote control, or info for the sipgate answering machine) I looked for a free and reliable softphone for my iPod touch and found Media5-fone. Works out of the box, has even a setup for sipgate and all DTMF modes work perfectly out of the box.

Reverting back - "Snow Lion"

Well, I normally consider myself not being a total computer noob, but reverting back from Lion to Snow Leopard somehow went entirely wrong:

PhonerLite, VoIP softphone for Windows

Since I was really unhappy with X-lite, which was offered by sipgate as standard softphone, I tried to hunt down a free, compact VoIP client for Windows.

Packages I recommend installing on a fresh Ubuntu system

The following list is more a reminder for myself when setting up a new system.

VoIP for MacOS 10.6: XMeeting and sipgate

Free SIP VoIP-clients on MacOS 10.6 are a species of software quite complicated to hunt down. Since I have a sipgate-account and wanted to use it on my Mac as well, I found Xmeeting. Unfortunately, configuration of it is not necessarily straight forward and definitely not Mac-like "just works". Here are some hints how to configure XMeeting correctly:

Useful software add-ons for MacOS 10.6

This list is by far not complete and unordered, but more a mere reminder to myself and for interested people and will be updated (thanks to a friend who had always a tip handy, as soon as I ran into problems during changing from the Windows to the MacOS world - see his Mac Blog - I also stick to many of his suggestions, which I will not always repeat here)

Samba 3.4, Webmin 1.510 and some trouble

For some odd reason, my webmin is not able to correctly create users in the samba module unsing smbpasswd.

Firefox 3.6.3 and the error console

After an update of Firefox I got a really annoying behaviour: the error console just popped up randomly showing css format errors and other stuff. Disabling the reporting of those errors didn't help, until I found in a thread somewhere on the internet (sorry, forgot to bookmark the link) that mouse gestures extensions might cause that. Indeed, disabling exactly this extension (in my case "All-in-one Gestures") immediately led to a hassle free Firefox.

To be honest, this problem actually showed up on a Windows machine

Update:
With the following version 3.6.4 the problem vanished.

Thunderbird 3 on MacOS 10.6

I haven't figured out yet, why this happens, but here are the symptoms:

Updating from Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 to 3.0 yields in a perfectly usable Thunderbird 3 including all emails and setting, but each time I want to close Thunderbird, it does not respond any more and has to be killed.

Installing ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on a Mac Book Pro 5,5

First (can't say it often enough): BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA. While you can use e.g. the free version of Superduper! to keep a bootable clone copy of your system on an external harddrive partition, you have TimeMachine as a very convenient program to keep your data backuped, so there is NO EXCUSE for you to not have backups, just in case you accidentally crash your system.

Installing rEFIt and opensuse 11.1

This post is actually just a copy of the post found here for the sake of completeness.