Letztes Jahr war es echt knuffig, wie die Kleinen sich verkleidet und sich große Mühe mit Ihren Kostümen und auch der Schminke gegeben haben. Einige sind sogar mit Laternen durch das Dunkel und den Nebel gewandert. Da bin ich mal gespannt, wie es dieses Jahr wird.

Für alle, die es bunt mögen und auf die ausgehöhlten Kürbisköpfe stehen, stelle ich mein Wallpaper in der Auflösung 1920 x 1200 zum Download bereit und leite die herbstliche die Stimmung ein.

Happy Halloween 2011!

Falls du es selbst ausprobieren willst, kannst du hier die vollständige Projekt-Datei herunterladen:
http://hotfile.com/dl/111175375/552713a/Fluid.c4d.html

Hilfe! Ein Käfer?

Leider habe ich einen kleinen “Bug” oder sagen wir lieber “Schönheitsfehler” entdeckt: Kürzlich habe ich mein OS aktualisiert und somit sind viele neue Dateien vorhanden, die gesichert werden wollen. Das Backup ist mittendrin stehengeblieben und hat einfach nicht weitergemacht.

Wie funktioniert Time Machine?

Bevor ich mit der Lösung fortfahre will ich einmal kurz und knapp das Prinzip von Time Machine Backups erklären.

Time Machine muss zuerst ein volles Backup anfertigen, danach werden nur die Daten gesichert die neu sind oder sich verändert haben. Das bringt einen erheblichen Geschwindigkeitsvorteil und spart auch gleichzeitig jede Menge Plattenplatz.

Der erste Schritt ist das “Vorbereiten” in dem alle Daten zunächst ermittelt werden, die neu gesichert werden sollen. Je mehr Dateien, desto länger dauert dieser Vorgang. Danach beginnt die Datensicherung und letztendlich der Aufräumvorgang.

Warum bleibt das Backup stehen?

Sparen ist gut, aber zu viel Geiz eben nicht – und zwar mit Energie. In den Energiespar-Einstellungen ist festgelegt, dass die Festplatten frühstmöglich in den Ruhezustand gehen sollen.

In meinem Fall handelt es sich um eine externe Festplatte. Weil es eben relativ viele Daten sind, die gesichert werden hat die “Vorbereitung” länger gebraucht und die externe Platte einfach abgeschaltet. Geht man nun in die Engerie-Optionen und stellt das kurzfristig ab, so läuft die Datensicherung wieder an einem Stück durch.

Noch ein Extra-Tip

Mit dem Consolen-Log Programm in den Application Utilities kann man ebenfalls gute Analysen durchführen und nach Fehlern suchen. Mit der Eingabe von “backupd” sieht man alle Ausgaben von Time Machine.

Das klappt auch bei sämtlichen anderen Programme, die Ihre Machenschaften in Logdateien protokollieren.

Unfortunately not everybody owns a big enough USB stick, yet – although they went quite expensive. I got mine 16 GB USB stick for less than 20 Euro!

Burning takes too much time in my humble opinion nowadays and especially with rewriteable media.

Depending on the amount of the megabyte or even the gigabyte you want to burn you have to decide what media you should take.

On videohelp.com is a very nice summary of the media types and their appropriate writing and reading speeds. Take a look at that save as much time and media as you can.

Credits: Icon by webdesign-guru.co.uk

Espacially, when you want to install something large which normally requires an expensive dual layer DVD or even when no DVD drive is available at all, it makes sense to use a USB device. On a Mac, this can be a standard USB stick or an iPod having the appropriate capacity.

Also using a USB device is really fast und produces less noise.

Ok, here is my short step-by-step guide for you how to make it work:

Note: Doing that will erase ALL data on your media!

Step 1: Open the Disk Utility from the Application / Utilities folder and select your destination USB device. Then go to the “Partition” tab and change the scheme from “Current” to “1 Partition”.

Step 2: Click the options to select the partition mode. To make it bootable on a Mac “GUID Partition Table” is required. Check this radio button and confirm with “ok”.

Step 3: “Apply” the settings and confirm to “Partition”.

Step 4: Finally, we need to select that image file to be placed on the USB device. This can be a DMG or ISO file. You can use the Disk Utility tool, to create such images from your DVDs. You can start the process by clicking on “Restore”.

Note: Do NOT copy discs or any other media you are not allowed to!

Drop me a comment, if that guide helped you out.

Many disc accesses are usually done with a Virtual Machine, so I put a blank Parallels Windows XP virtual machine image to the stick, hoping the speed would be fantastic.

But, the hope still remains a hope. The speed is just OK, and absolutely not faster than directly starting from a harddisk. The USB probing sais 480Mb/sec which is a maximum of 6 MB per second, but the average speed I could measure in fact is 5.2 MB per second.

That is absolutely too slow and the conclusion for me is, that flash memory is only really fast if it will provided over the S-ATA port.

1. First of all monitor the fans and temperatures using tools like SpeedFan and make sure everything keeps in a normal range. Disable the screensaver and do something memory and CPU expensive like SETI. When the computer crashes and the last view shows values out of range, then replace the fans by better ones and in case of CPU overheating, remove and renew the heatsink paste. Maybe it got too dry and lost its thermal conductivity.
2. 

   Test the memory bars each by each. Take all out except for one and run a memory tester booting from CD or a USB stick.

   Remove the power chord when doing that! If you still leave it in, the power adapter gives some voltage to the mainboard and a short circuit will happen fore sure.

   When the test is completed and no errors are shown, that bar is ok. Turn off, replace by the next one and so on. Do not use a corrupted bar anymore.

   • If no error occured at all, put all bars in and run the test again. When now an error is displayed, the slot may be dirty or corrupted!
3. 

   Do a full harddrive surface scan. This is neccessary because Windows uses a pagefile to supply virtual memory. If the sectors are bad at this area, data is written, but not read correctly and placed into the RAM without any further validation. With a surface scan Windows will mark that bad sectors not to use them again. Go to the workplace, rightclick your main drive (mostly C:) and select Extras then Check drive and Surface scan. This may take a very long time depending on your harddrive speed and storage amount.

My unique color

The amount of available colors is really huge, so it is possible that everybody can have his own color. Colors are mostly compound with the RGB color model. They are mixed out of three values, where R is red, G is green and B is blue. The shading is zero for none and 255 for full power. If you think in lights and mix all colors together you reach white equals RGB(255,255,255). Black would result in RGB(0,0,0).

When you are dealing with HTML, then hexadecimal codes are used to describe the colors. So white would be FF (255) and black 00 (0).

Combining all color shades together there are 255*255*255 = 16,581,375 single colors! Ok, there are more people living on planet earth than just 16 million. Coulourism had the idea to combine your name and birthday to find your unique color.

My unique color is a nice Purple (#9208A1).

So what is your color? Post it as a comment.

The greatest feature I like is to make screenshots of Safari. You can specify a screen resolution and it is rendered with the Safari engine and stored as an image.

This is nice to have all your links pictures or thumbnails. Unfortunately you can only either add a URL or take the active one from Safari.

LittleSnapperBatch

But I want to have all open tabs as websnapshots. And to solve that I wrote my first Mac Application called LittleSnapperBatch.zip using the powerful AppleScript. I hope you find it useful, too.

Toastbook

Walking to the subway station I saw a an advert with a weird looking notebook on a big poster, but the design is very familar to me, so I decided to take a closer look.

It is a MacBookPro with a unusal thick screen and toasts falling into it. Next to it the hashkey “Toastbook”. This picture manipulation is not very professional, because the laptop’s frame looks quite unrealistic and the visible screen content is not designed by somebody having or using a Mac.

The promotion of trade and industry start2grow.de wants to help young start-up companies in the IT segment.

And now, “tada” (yes, this word was chosen by intention, and if you know why, then you are a real nerd, compliment!) one of the big sponsors surprisingly is Microsoft trying to pinch Apple.

A very good helper is the PathFinder application, because it can count all directory size contents even recursively and you can sort by size or any other properties. So you will find large files very quick. But this can take much time and needs a lot of attention not to remove files, which should not be removed.

When surfing I found a free application called GrandPerspective which scans a folder or drive you have specified for sizes and then displays a graphical block view.

Grand Perspective

You can point with the mouse over the blocks and you see details like file size, file name and which directory it is. Files and directories are grouped by colors, so that you see at the first glance what belongs together. With the context menu you even can reveal the directory in the finder, so that you can delete the files or directories from every level. A rescan function is also included, so that you can compare the before and after version. Scanning is really fast, so that you even could scan the root of any mass storage device.

Speedport’s original firmware has some bad properties. After login it resizes the browsers window, the interface is ugly and some items seem to be misplaced in my opinion. But, all in one it is ok.

Due to I am having T-Home, I am forced to use the Speedport router because of the built in Modem. I just wanted to use my TimeCapsule only, but that did not work, because I do not get any internet connection then.

In former times I already a had FritzBox and was impressed how far it succeeded with useful options. It was even possible in those days to connect a USB capable printer and to print wireless via WLAN. But now, AVM has implemented state of the art features which are really useful for home users or small networks. It provides now USB-support for harddrives and memory sticks and even sharing them with FTP and SMB, VPN tunneling, call answer machine, fax sending/receiving and many more.

Refering to that article mentioned above, I began some research and found some solutions how to get the AVM firmware to the Speedport.

It is not working by just uploading it the normal way! You need to somewhat compile your own thing out of both firmwares. See my steps, and it will work really easy.

Here is my installation guide for Mac users, but with some fantasy you may adapt it for your own purpose:

Disclaimer! YOU ARE DOING ALL THAT AT YOUR OWN RISK! YOUR HARDWARE MAY GET DAMAGED. Read carefully and make sure to understand before doing anything.

First of all, get the Debian businesscard edition (36 MB). The compiling scripts do require some apt libraries which are not available on OS X by default. The stable CD/DVD of Debian 5 crashed during my installation within Parallels Desktop 4.

Begin to create a virtual machine with Parallels by running the assistant. Set the just downloaded Debian 5 ISO file as the CD/DVD drive. Parallels will automatically detect everything what is needed. When the machine starts for the first time and asks you for the installation method, I recommend you to go to the options and select the graphical unattended one. The installation will download everything what is required.

When done, log in as a normal user, because no root access is required. Use the browser icon from the menu bar to download the master script doing all the nasty work for you. For the ease of use, I have created a short URL to type less. You can use the samehttp://kURL.de/opupiin your address bar. If you get a hint, that you have no internet, have a look at the top right corner of your menubar left next to the clock and calendar. There should be a tiny icon and if you click it, you can select a cable network connection. Then reload the script and you should see it’s source text. Store it with menu file, save as. Change the download folder to Desktop!

Open a root terminal window via the menu bar applications, then tools. Go the Desktop directory where the downloaded shell script is located by typingcd DesktopPay attention to the letter case on unix systems! Start the script by typing sh ./download_speed-to-fritz.shThis will do some downloads and may take some time. Now, we change to the new files and run the first script, which will install some needed libraries to continue.cd trunk/speed-to-fritzsh ./install-start

Follow the instructions and read carefully. If everything is done it will start the module configurator which has a nice interface where you can use the cursor keys to change options. Then it downloads the needed firmwares and will re-image them. When you are prompted to reset the router, turn it off! Wait 10 seconds and power it on again. Then the firmware will be installed. Do not interrupt until it is complete!

Then you can access the router over same IP as before or just with http://fritz.boxAll the settings are still kept.

If you made a mistake, you can re-run the last script and restore to the original firmware or just customize other things.

Now I am so happy beeing able to receive faxes and missed calls running on my answering machine by mail to my iPhone!

And guess, what they sanctimoniously promise you: Those bunnies are just waiting only for you! So register with your credit card and go to meet her.

Below the persuasive photo you see her age, just over 18 and still below 30. That’s a match and the username is below, so there is no reason not to contact her directly.

Did you really find any of those shills?

Reload. Reload. Reload. Reload. Reload.

Meet these girls from your area

What?!

They got you fooled, because of course these girls are fakes. Reload the ad containing site several times, until your browser releases cache or something else, and then have a look at the details.

The pictures are the same, the girls are same. Really? Not really! The blonde 24 year old Bleustar77 renamed to Gemini0669 and is now 20 years old. My brain says: Stop, she is now 4 years younger. Damn! How is she doing that?!

But next, lets have a look at the usernames and the pictures, again. We have already noticed, they have changed. Clever, so far.

Anne14388 is one advert two times! Two different looking girls and two different ages, but both do have the same username?

Please, dear Adultfriendfinder network, stop fooling us with bad coded random generators and sniffing our geo locations by IP-Adresses!

MacOSaiX

So often I have seen picture mosaics and I wanted to do one by myself, because I find them so amazing and fantastic.

A picture mosaic is one picture which is made of other pictures as like a screenshot is made with pixels.

Searching a short while lead me to the freeware tool MacOSaiX which does exactly that thing. In the screenshot I used a photo from a friend’s marriage. I have a collection of 500 pictures of this event and all of them are included to build this single one. If you zoom in you really can see every single photo clearly!

The program has many options and the export function lets you define really high resolution for professional poster printings.

Using gravatar to display icons

An avatar is somewhat like a symbolic identification of your online presence like companies having their own logos in the real life.

In forums it is normal to have your very own user profile with a nick name altering to the real name. You may attach a photo or some other graphics which will be shown on every of your posts. Because those tiny little icons are easier to recognize than any texts, it helps you quickly to identify a poster without first reading the username.

Even the comments in a blog do containt the icon and the name of the poster below. Why not having icons there, too?

The website gravatar.com provides a great and simple solution for this issue called “globally recognized avatars“. You just sign up with your email address. Then you add a picture to it. It also offers you the possibility to rate your avatar, so that you have different versions for the same account, like adult and non-adult.

To display those pictures, you can use gravatar.com‘s free API. You can use the HTML’s image source tag to the gravatar.com and give just three arguments. The first one is a MD5 hash of the email address, the second one is the rating and the thirst and last one is the image size.

Some blog systems like WordPress are using this. It works so well, because to register a forum or to leave a comment, you will need a valid email address. And exactly this is used to identify your icon picture.

To add some security against spammers, the MD5 hashkey of the email address instead of the plain text is used.

It is very impressive if you want some animation or nice workflow. That is really cool to make a show of how cool a Mac is.

Just download the small and tiny freeware application Screenie.

It works so simple, that you just click on start and the backround starts to animate. You can stop it anytime the same way.

Here is a short video tutorial I made:

Music: Silent Groove by DJ N-4ceR.

Skitch

Skitch is a wonderful freeware tool from Plasq helping you creating screenshots with annotations or simple image manipulations like rotation or scaling.

As you can see in the picture, I made a snapshot of my DJ homepage and did some simple things like text and shapes.

You can resize just by dragging or make snapshots even from your connected webcam. You have plenty of customizable settings and a history to see what images you have created.

Another cool thing is a time delayed screenshot as you can do with the Grab tool from the Application Utilities.

Skitch enables you to upload the visible picture to your own FTP server or many other preconfigured image hosters like Flickr or Plasq itself, where you can share it with the world or your friends.

On the bottom of the window is a puller where you can just drag and drop it on to the desktop, a folder or any other dragable application. The file is then named as specified in the textfield and created on your destination with the selected image file format.

There are many other features which would explode this article. Just have look at Plasq‘s valueable demo video. I am sure, after watching you will download, install and love it. Maybe that is the reason why they took a heart as logo.

The solution is really simple with the Quicktime player. Just pause at the wanted position, size the window as you like and then drag the picture to a document or the desktop.

Grab a picture from video

Voila! When dragging to the desktop the file is named “Movie Clipping 1″ and stored with loseless compression as a png image. If you do some more, they will be numbered.

Credits: Picture taken from Pumping iron.