Macintosh Command of the Day Sept 28, 2011

I have no idea why I did not do this sooner!

On my Macs I always had that md5sum the command doesn’t exist, and I hate that the output of the md5 command that does exist is not the same as the GNU tools. Sure it’s BSD (And I’ll always love my BSD), but I think compatibility to the GNU tools buys more for BSD and OS X than incompatibility.

Add this to your ~/.bashrc (and source it or restart your terminal)

alias md5sum='md5 -r '

Now your md5sum <filename> works the same as on the 1,000,000,000 Linux boxes out there.

Also in my .bashrc on my Macbook Air is

alias ll='ls -Falh'
alias lg='ls -Falh|grep -i '
declare -x EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim"
declare -x JAVA_HOME="/usr/"

-Jon

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1. Launch the “Keychain Access” application located in /Applications/Utilities.
2. Choose “Show Status in Menu Bar” from the View menu.
3. Now you have a lock in the menu bar. Use this menu to “Lock Screen” when you leave your computer

Thanks to Mac Daily News for this howto, from here -

http://macdailynews.com/2003/03/13/lock_your_mac_os_x_screen_from_the_menu_bar_by_adding_lock_icon/

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My kids have dove into the game Minecraft and one of the first things they wanted was their own servers that they could customize and create lots of world.

We’re now running 5 servers on my Linux box. I don’t notice a performance drop in using it for anything, and each one is set to use 1GB of RAM, fortunately I have 8 GB…

This should be a quick howto that will work on Linux and Macintosh as long as you have screen and java.

I run the Minecraft servers under screen, so I can disconnect and reconnect to them, and they’ll keep running if my connection stops.

Quick setup :

(I use -R instead of -S to start and name the screen, since it will resume the same screen if it’s already running)

mkdir minecraft

cd minecraft

Edit a server.properties file, here’s a sample one :

Go to http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp and copy the link that says “minecraft_server.jar” (it will update based on version, so copy it each time)

wget -O minecraft_server.jar http://www.minecraft.net/download/minecraft_server.jar?v=1307312614783

(that link will change with each version)

Now start your server

screen -R minecraft

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

Now type CTRL+a d

This will disconnect you from your  screen.

To reconnect run

screen -R minecraft

Now connect to your computer from minecraft, you may need to connect by IP address and port.

Running multiple servers on the same host is as easy as changing the port and setting up another directory, and the screen instances.

This is just a simple setup assuming you have a Mac or a Linux box already running.

I hope to cover using a Dynamic DNS service like DynDNS.com , opening the ports in your router so your friends can connect from outside.

It may also help to find out your public IP address, you can go to http://jonzobrist.com/ip.php

I wonder if you could run a minecraft server with only 512MB RAM, would be perfect for the free tier of Amazon AWS..

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If you purchased a new Macbook Pro with a Core i5 or Core i7 (The 15″ or 17″ ones for now) you probably expected the nice battery life they talk about on their site, when I bought this one it said 8-10 hours, but currently it says 8-9 hours for the 15″. Imagine my surprise when I routinely get 3 hours of battery life. Doing a quick Google search finds lots of people with the same complaints. If you dig into this a bit you will learn that these Macbook Pros have two graphics cards, one from NVIDIA that is fast, but power hungry, and one from Intel, that is slow but saves your battery.

The nice thing about this is your computer automatically handles which card to use, giving you the performance you need, and saving battery when it can.

In theory, this is great. In reality it’s a total joke, an EPIC FAIL on Apple’s part. You see, they switch based on which applications are running, guessing they need the graphics based on the libraries they load, it seems. This would be great if it was things like World of Warcraft or Photoshop, but Skype? Evernote? Give me a break!

You can go to power settings and disable automatic switching, however this sets it to ALWAYS use the Nvidia chipset, and gives you permanent short battery life.

In comes donation-ware graphics management tool gfxCardStatus written by Cody Kreiger.

1. Download the zip file
2. Unzip and move gfxCardStatus to Applications folder
3. Run gfxCardStatus, you will see an icon on your menu bar with either an ‘n’ or ‘i’ to indicate when you’re running in Nvidia or Intel graphics mode. Intel will give good battery life (5-6 hours for my core i5 15″), and Nvidia will give 1990′s battery life (3-4 hours on the same core i5 15″).
4. Click the icon, change to Intel only. Enjoy better battery life!
5. Set calendar appointment for 1-2 weeks in the future to go back to Cody’s site and donate a dollar or two for his work.

I plan to leave this on Intel only and see how both my battery life and performance is. I don’t play any games on my laptop, so I expect I won’t notice the difference.

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Mac OS X natively supports VNC with its ‘Screen Sharing’ app, to launch it, simply type vnc:// in Safari, and it will automatically launch and connect.

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I got a new MacBook pro, one of the core i5 ones, and transferred all of my data with time machine restore, which is absolutely awesome, btw. But my ethernet interface never worked! Being the IT guy I need my ethernet interface to work, so I searched online for someone else who had the same problem. Unfortunately, everything I found was simple fixes for simple problems. So I made an appointment with the mac genius hoping they could solve my problem, and they did.

They went to my hard drive->Library->Preferences and deleted the folder there called “SystemConfiguration”
Then rebooted, and viola, a working ethernet interface.

So, what must have happened to break mine, is when I restored my mac with time machine, it confused the network interfaces somewhere. The interface showed up, but always said ‘cable unplugged’. I had tried everything; deleting the interface in the network section of system preferences, configuring the interface with ifconfig in Terminal, creating multiple interfaces, rebooting, different cables, different networks, and different locations. The time machine had restored my network config folder and prevented OS X from correctly seeing the right interface.

The Mac genius said it can also help if you’re having problems staying connected to a wifi network.

Hope this helps!

Update 6/7/2010:

Here is a good article on troubleshooting your Mac OS X wireless networking at osxdaily.com

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