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.

Running noipupdater.sh as service on MacOS

This entry is the corresponding one to the adaption of the noipupdate.sh Script, where the necessary changes for MacOS bash are filed.

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.

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.

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:

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.

PIL trouble - how to make it work again

For some odd reasons (I guess it is due to some updates of Xcode or other updates within MacOS) calling certain PIL functions on a MacPort Python 2.6 installation on MacOS 10.6 ended up in the error code:

ImportError: The _imaging C module is not installed

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:

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".

Teaching my Mac the correct encoding for LaTeX files from Windows

Opening my Windows tex files in TeXShop resulted in unreadable umlauts and special characters due to the different file encoding (I normally used ISO Latin 2 on Windows). Of course, if you take the "Open File" dialog, you can choose the encoding at the bottom in a drop-down menu, but this takes some time and it is simply much easier to double-click...

You can, however, set the standard encoding to be used in the "Settings" dialog under "Source" in the field "encoding" (I defaulted to ISO Latin 2).

Synchronising more than one Google Calendar with an iPod touch/iPhone and iCal

Here the short short version of how-to sync more than one Google calendar with your iPhone/iPod Touch using iCal.

KDE 3.5 on MacOS 10.6 mainly for Kile

Kile is a very nice and comfortable LaTeX editor (yes, and it runs under MacOS 10.6 - hint hint hint for avocadohead). It is installed quite comfortably using MacPorts.

Matplotlib, NumPy and SciPy for Python 2.6 on MacOS 10.6 - the hard way

Prerequisites: have Macports and Python 2.6 installed on MacOS 10.6 (for 10.5 users, please note the side note at the bottom of this post) as explained e.g. in this blog post.

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)