WD myCloud and slow backups again - the WD myCloud Mac App and the restsdk-serverd

I thought I had solved the slow backup problem with my WD myCloud, but of course (being technology) it became slow again. This time I found the restsdk-server process on my WD myCloud eating up almost all free memory of the WDmyCloud drive, which almost halted any file transfer. Solution was killing the daemon.

WD myCloud and TimeMachine - (finally) a fast backup

Fiddling around with many settings and being quite annoyed by the incredibly slow backups with MacOS 10.11 (often one day was not enough to do an incremental backup) on my WD myCloud, I finally found the solution accidentally. Thanks and kudos to StackExchange where I found the solution. Backup without emergency brake on. I post the necessary commands here just for sake of this blog being my external memory.

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.

Adding the home directory's bin subfolder to the MacOS terminal

This is a pure reminder to myself to remember this the next time I stumble upon this issue (source is: google it :-) )

Teaching the Webserver of MacOS 10.8 to use Imagemagick

The problem: MacOS 10.8 Mountain Lion screws up quite a bit of the built-in web server functionality. Since I wanted to have a fully functional web server for testing purposes I wanted to use the built-in system and didn't want to install an additional MAMP server (you can find one for free in the xampp project). Additionally, the cgi script used relied on imagemagick for thumbnails so the apache server should work with that.

TeXShop and BibTeX for lazy guys - automatic call of bibtex

If you want to write a larger scientific document, like a diploma or doctoral thesis, you surely will use bibtex for creating your bibliography (and especially for the German guys: don't just copy and paste... but really use a good bibliography).

Help for helpless copy cases - terminal for the Mac User

A friend of mine had big trouble in copying data from his harddrive to an external one. For whatever reason, Finder stopped with strange error warnings that a folder could not be created because it was already there - and there was no way to click "try again".