Rajani's weblog

This is awesome. Now you can call any iphone4 or ipod touch from Mac over Wi-Fi.

My problem was that the CD (likely the case for DVD disks as well) was physically stuck because of a clear plastic label placed over the playlist side of the CD. I didn’t notice it when I inserted it, which increased the thickness of the CD beyond the tolerance of some aspect of the MacBook’s eject mechanism. I fiddled around with it for quite a while, trying all the various solutions on the Internets, but none worked.

The slot has a felt dust remover that makes it hard to see what’s happening inside. Finally I noticed a metal spring that acts as a kind of door in the middle of the slot. The spring moves up and down when you select eject, which allows the disk to pass.

I suppressed the spring from the top toward the bottom using the very tip of a fine-bladed knife and hit the eject button. A very thin-tipped flat screwdriver would probably work as well, but the business card trick did not hold it down. The drive tried to eject the disk repeatedly and finally I saw the tip of the disk emerge.

Over the last year, many other people have shared additional approaches on this thread, so read further if my method doesn’t work for you.

If this happens to you, be patient, keep trying, and you’ll get it out without wrecking the drive or spending a lot of money to have someone else remove it.

Filed under: Terminal Tips

Terminal Tips: Enable "path view" in Finder

by Cory Bohon (RSS feed) on Dec 5th 2008 at 11:00AM

When you open a Finder window and start browsing to a folder, do you lose track of the path to that folder? If you do, the Terminal command below will enable path view in the Finder -- this means that you will see the directory path to the current folder you are browsing in the title bar, instead of only seeing the name of the current directory.

To make directory paths visible atop Finder windows, open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/) and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Once you run the above command, you will also need to restart the Finder, so you can either type "killall Finder" and hit return, or use the Force Quit option under the Apple menu to relaunch it. The Finder will restart, and you will start seeing the paths to directories in the title bar.

Update: As some have pointed out in the comments below, this Terminal command will only work with Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5).

via tuaw.com

Mac OS X does a good job of working with a wide variety of disk formats. It can, for example, read and write USB hard drives formatted using FAT32 which is also compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows. Any FAT32 formatted hard drive is useable right out of the box by either Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. The problem is that FAT32 is drives using have relatively slow disk access. And, the maximum file size is 4GB. The 4GB maximum file size becomes a problem if you want to, for example, copy a large file like a VMware or VirtualBox virtual machine hard disk file from a Mac to a PC running Windows. Transferring large video files from a Mac to a PC is another common problem. Microsoft's NTFS partition format is fast and does not have a 4GB maximum file size limit. However, while Mac OS X can read NTFS drive partitions, it cannot write to it. I've gotten around this issue by moving files over the network and other means. But, moving files using an external USB drive is a much simpler and faster means... If Mac OS X could writer to NTFS.

Fortunately, there is a simple and free solution for this issue called...

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X

...which coupled with...

MacFUSE 2.0.3.2

...lets your Mac write to an NTFS formatted hard drive as well as read it (OS X can read NTFS partitions natively).

You need to install MacFUSE before installing NTFS-3G. MacFUSE provides a base for add-on file handlers like NTFS-3G to extend OS X's ability to deal with additional file systems such as NTFS.

Unpacking NTFS-3G reveals both an installation file and an uninstallation utility. The uninstaller can be handy if you later decide that NTFS-3G is not working for you or unnecessary. There's no instruction to reboot the Mac after installing MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. But, the superstitious Windows user in me decided restart my Mac anyway.

I attached an expendable (in case NTFS-3G/MacFUSE was buggy) external NTFS formatted USB hard drive to my Mac and copied two large, but not gigantic, files: A 589.5MB Xubuntu ISO file and a 2.85GB VirtualBox virtual drive for an Xubuntu Guest OS. After the file copying finished, I detached the USB drive from the Mac and plugged it into a PC running Windows Vista. After copying the virtual drive file over to the PC, I fired up VirtualBox under Vista and brought up the transported Xubuntu Guest OS on the PC (VirtualBox required a bit of tweaking and fussing).

The entire installation and test process was painless. The file transport worked fine (write to NTFS partition from a Mac). And, I'm very happy that I can easily copy large files using an NTFS formatted USB drive that Microsoft Windows can work with.

The NTFS-3G December 22, 2008 blog entry notes a couple of known issues for filenames with international characters and the Startup Disk preference pane (neither affected me). So, be sure to read that blog entry before installing NTFS-3G.