Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: macintosh

  • Replacing a Hard Drive

    Replacing a Hard Drive

    Once in a blue moon I play with hardware. My home laptop has been dropped more times than I care to admit, and it’s finally started to make bad noises. And be slow. As in, I can run one app at a time slow. So I buckled down and put the comic book money into a new hard drive.

    I picked Other World Computing’s Extreme Pro 6G SSD. At 450G.

    The content on my laptop has been around since I was in college and bought my first laptop. Literally. I have every paper I’ve written since high school on here, plus music I wrote, plus videos. It’s a lot. My old HD was 300G and I was always low on space. I also make copious backups to Time Machine. The last four times I got a new computer, I did a Mac transfer. This content, hell, this user account, has been around.

    You bet your ass I kept it again.

    Installing the new HD was easy. Unscrew the back, disconnect the battery, remove the old HD, get the mount screws out, put them and the sticker on the new HD, reconnect everything. screw it’s all back together. Next, though, is the hard part.

    I took my old HD and put it in an external drive case. OWC offers a deal where you get the case and a USB connector for cheap, plus all the tools. Perfect. While I have Time Machine, an over air restore would be 24+ hours. A USB restore, provided the HD doesn’t break, would be about 4. Instead of installing the OS and copying things over, I did a restore from Source.

    Once I got the old HDD in an enclosure, I attached it to your Mac via USB. Then I rebooted the Mac, which took me to OS X Recovery. From there, I clicked on Open Disk Utility and picked the new drive from the left hand pane. There I chose to Erase it and format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

    Once done, I clicked on the Restore tab. I picked the external HD (the old one) as my ‘Source’ and the new one as my ‘Destination.’ Illogically, this is a drag and drop step. Sorry about the photo:

    Terrible photo of what it looks like

    When the data transfer was completed, it was as simple as a restart.

    If you’re skittish, you can put the new HD in the enclosure and copy it that way, booting off USB when you’re done to test it. I’m a little more daring.

  • It’s Not Beer It’s Homebrew

    It’s Not Beer It’s Homebrew

    If you’re a rookie getting your hands around all this webdev stuff, and you’re on a Mac, you may have already come to a rude awakening when you find out that, for reasons unknown to man, Mac decided we didn’t need wget.

    Beer bottlesThat’s how I was introduced to Homebrew.

    I love wget, because it’s a super simple and fast way to download something. wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip is the fastest way for me to download a zip, and I use it regularly. So one day, when deving code, I realized I needed a plugin. I went to wget it and got a horrible message.

    -bash: wget: command not found

    After searching around, I was about to download, compile, and install wget when a comment on StackExchange said “Try Homebrew.”

    Everyone’s dersive comments aside about how ‘real’ programers don’t install packages (seriously people), I said to myself “Ipstenovich,” I said. Yes, I call myself that sometimes. “You use yum to install packages on your server because it’s easier and safer. Why wouldn’t you use the same thing here?” Over to http://brew.sh/ I went and stared at the installer command like a fish.

    ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

    The call ‘ruby -e’ means “run Ruby and tell it to call this URL externally…” And then it clearly was calling github for an installer. It’s tough to decide to trust a new program but after some serious banging around, I trust the Homebrew.

    Homebrew Logo

    Once installed, which doesn’t take long at all, I ran the check brew doctor which told me a couple things:

    1. I’d installed SVN and Git on my own (truth) so I needed to change my .profile (with directions how)
    2. I had a half-baked attempt at installing ImageMagick that needed cleaning (with suggestions how)
    3. I had MacPorts still in my /opt/ folder, that needed removing (with directions how)
    4. I needed to install xcode command line tools (with directions how)
    5. xQuartz was out of date
    6. I hadn’t updated my brew list in a bajillion years

    Most people won’t have that last one. I did once have an older install of Homebrew that I’d never really cleaned up. However the other ones took me about an hour to clean up properly, because I was watching Fargo (the movie) at the time. Once installed and set up, I was able to install wget and upgrade it. Ditto OpenSSL (because Heartbleed, you know). It’s great.

    Homebrew is pre-1.0 which means there can and will be issues. Don’t panic, for most of what anyone needs, this is perfect. It’s also good at upgrading when you need to:

    Output of Homebrew, upgrading a few items at once

    The little beer mug is awesome.

    One of the nice things about Homebrew is that it doesn’t use (nor advocate the use of) sudo. This is really good for security and makes me feel much safer.

    Go forth, rookies, and install Homebrew! It will make your development much happier!

  • InBox Insanity

    InBox Insanity

    I get a lot of emails. I’m usually receiving and sending every hour or so. Most of the time they’re email alerts, sometimes conversations. While I’m a massive unsubsciber of email lists, I filter a lot of my emails into folders, where I’ll leave them unread until I have time, and then I delete them. Oh yes, I’m a member of Inbox Zero.

    Cat Face CloseupI started doing the Zero because I wanted to cut down on the stress in my digital life. An unread notification sits there, like a malignant ‘Deal with me!’ eye. And the thing is I do, I will, I always at least read the email. I don’t always reply, but I will read it. But what I don’t need is a five year old kicking my seat asking if we’re there yet.

    I’m not patient. I eat my bagels undercooked because if the dang thing isn’t done in the time it takes me to start the toaster, get my cream cheese, make a coffee, and go to the bathroom, then it’s getting eaten as is. I would never be a good chef because I don’t care if every slice and dice is the same, I care about eating. If it’s time to go and you’re dawdling, I hate you. I get annoyed when people can’t budget their time well and thus are always late. It’s a thing, it’s mine, and it’s what it is.

    Conversely, when it’s not food, or when its not a specific time event (like “I’ll meet you there between 4 and 5”) then I don’t stress about it. And when it’s email or Twitter, I’m seemingly negligent about serious replies because I may take a long time, and reply to other people frivilously, but in reality I’m thinking about the right reply. I have a couple emails in my drafts at any one point in time because I’m thinking.

    It’s funny, I know, that I get upset when people nag me about replying. But I understand that people need processing time, and while I’m terribly impatient when I wait for an email reply from someone (seriously, ask my wife, I’m really annoying), I try as hard as I can NOT to bother them about it! I may send them a little “Hi” note after a week or so, depending on the issue, but I’m usually asking someone for a special favor in the first place, and I try to respect their boundaries.

    Whew. Lots of me me me here!

    Also I like using desktop applications. I like email apps, and Twitter apps, over in their own thing that I can totally close out and ignore if I need to write or whatever. I’m not tempted to open twitter.com in my browser because I never do it. It’s good for me and my sanity, because I don’t get those ‘gotta clicks.’ The only ones I have in my browser are my RSS reader, Facebook, and Google Plus, none of which annoy me with alerts in my browser (well, not once I forcibly turned off all alerts).

    But email and Twitter, being a desktop tool on my Mac, need some settings changes too. Twitter has two places:

    Example of Twitter Settings

    On the first settings page, General, I set my menu bar icon to disabled, so nothing to pester me up there. On the Notifications page, I turn of nearly everything. The exceptions are mentions (which I keep as menu, just in case I change my mind… it’s been a month, I suspect not) and messages. Messages are important. Very few people DM me on Twitter, and when they do, it’s probably important or private, so it needs serious attention.

    Nothing else does.

    Email is weirder. How do you turn off the dock? Surprisingly easy. Go into your System Preferences and click on Notifications (first row, last column). In there, I always turn on “Do Not Disturb” settings from 9pm to 7am. If I’m up and coding at that hour, I’m in a zone and leave me alone. Otherwise I’ve left the laptop open, and either way I’m probably not in a mood to talk to people. The last thing I want is more alerts.

    Next scroll down to your email app (mine is Postbox) and turn off everything. Uncheck the boxes and set the style to ‘None’ and walk away:

    Notifications for PostBox

    Boom. No more red number.

    Don’t worry, I’m still checking mail.

  • Command Line Mac Trash Tricks

    Command Line Mac Trash Tricks

    RM TrashWarning! I’m going to talk about the ‘rm’ command which is a super-deadly command in the linux world. No matter what, never ever ever consider running it unless you’re certain you know what it does!

    I review a lot of plugins, which means I download them all to my laptop, review all the code, possibly install them, and then delete. This means, on any given week, I have 5000 items in my trash. And this is without unzipping! (Yes, we get a lot of plugins, and TextWrangler lets me review most of them in their zips.)

    When I forget to empty my trash every day, I end up waiting hours for the GUI empty to run unless I use rm -rf from inside the ~/.Trash/ folder. The real command is this:

    $ rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

    I like this because it’s crazy fast compared to the GUI, and

    But sometimes I actually just want to commandline my trash. I’ll be banging on things in Terminal and a very simple ’empty trash’ command would be nice, right? OSX Trash lets me type trash -l to see what’s in my trash, and trash -e to run the normal empty command. It’s better than a lot of other scripts, because if I type trash filename and there’s already a file with that name in the trash, it behaves like Mac Norm. That is, it’ll rename my second file ‘filename date’ and I won’t have file conflicts!

    The only thing it’s missing is a ‘trash -p’ command, which would let me run the force rm and just dump it all. Yes, I know rm works, but if you’ve ever typed it in the wrong window, you know why it’s a terrifying command. Still, back to the age old rm commands, what happens when you have that annoying locked file error? Like me, you probably kvetch about quitting everything to delete.

    More command line magic!

    $ cd ~/.Trash
$ chflags -R nouchg *
$ rm -rf *

    Finally, to make this full circle, I made a dead simple alias to prevent me from fat fingering the rm too much:

    alias trashdump='rm -rf ~/.Trash/*'

    Fast, efficient, and potentially deadly, but less than manually typing it in all the time. Deleted 2000 files in seconds, versus minutes.

  • Mountain Lion and SVN

    Mountain Lion and SVN

    Caveat: You need root access on your Mac to do this!

    Ages and ages ago, when I first was using MAMP and all that fun stuff, Apple didn’t include a version of SVN. I had installed, and promptly forgotten about, my 1.4.4 install sitting out there. Now, I know I upgraded it to 1.6.something at some point, but I only found out that was wiped out when I went to svn up some code on my site and it all died. My version of SVN was too old.

    svn --version was coming back as 1.4.4 and I knew that was wrong. I complained on Twitter, and Eric Hitter pointed out that Xcode has SVN (and Git) so I went and installed that. It didn’t work, I was still stuck on 1.4.4.

    After checking that, indeed, svn was located at /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/svn, and that ran the right version, I deleted 1.4.4 manually by removing the following folders:

    /opt/subversion
/usr/local/bin/svn*
/Library/Receipts/Subversion*

    Then I made a fast alias ln -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/svn svn over in /usr/local/bin/ to redirect my scripts, and finally I followed the directions from Panic to fix Coda, and changed the Subversion tool path setting in the Files pane of Coda’s Preferences to /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/svn. I also changed git to /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/git and made a fast link for that too, since I can.

    Have a happy weekend!

  • Alfred.app

    Alfred.app

    My friend Trepmal loves Alfred.app. Since she touts it, I decided I should try it.

    What I Had To Do

    Generally I use Spotlight to search for things. I type in ‘Transmit’ and hit enter and there it is. To make myself use the alt-spacebar of Alfred, I knew I had to hide that from my menu bar. Thankfully, that’s pretty easy. Run these two commands in Terminal.app and the magnifying glass is gone:

    $ sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
    $ killall SystemUIServer

    Now I start to move the mouse up there, see it go, and know to alt-spacebar it.

    What I Like

    It’s fast and it’s versatile!

    What I Don’t Like

    One of my (few) issues with it is Growl. I just don’t like Growl. There’s something about how it pops up that bangs away at my ADHD/OCD nature and makes it harder to pay attention to anything. Instead, I like apps that change color in my doc, or on my menu bar (think how the Twitter icon goes blue when you have something to pat attention to). That catches my eye in a non-demanding way, which is what I need most of the time. When I need pop-up replies, or audio/visual alerts, each app (Skype or my IRC app) has settings I can refine to give me just what I need.

    Sadly, some of Alfred.app’s code needs Growl to pop up and alert me of things. I wanted a whois extension, so I could type in ‘whois xxx.xx.xxx.xxx’ and get back ‘That’s foo in blah.’ All the extensions I found use Growl. Trepmal asked me what I’d rather use, and I said “I really don’t know.” And I don’t. A terminal window would probably be fine, but the problem is Growl really does fit the bill here. It pops up, you click and it goes away, and it’s not another app running.

    Still, everything else about it I really like. Once I solved my (silly) problem with not showing contacts, which was entirely my fault, I’ve been having a blast.

    http://twitter.com/Ipstenu/status/179683776497061888

    Right now, I’m using it instead of spotlight. I’ve started using the basic calculator, and I picked up the Power Pack for more goodies.

    Suggestions for how best to use it? Lay it on me!