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.

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.

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.

More memory makes the Mac run as hell...

Since I often work with virtual machines on my MacBook and always ran out of memory, I decided to give myself a present and got 8 GB of memory for roughly 50 EUR.

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:

The Lion roars tonight - MacOS 10.7 installation slightly different

Ok, so after the hipe around Lion, my nerdy heart talked me into getting a copy of it and install it.

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.

Fritz!Box 7050 as repeater with sipgate VoIP

This blog post is way off-topic but a reminder for myself how to create a functional setup.

Using the ADF of the Brother MFC-7420, MFC-7820N and MFC-7360N via the Scan-To keys in Ubuntu

In a previous post I talked about enabling the scan-to functionality under Ubuntu Linux, but the script presented there was only able to scan one page. Here now the solution for using the ADF (automatic document feeder) for scanning a larger amount of pages and getting a nice pdf out of it.