DLNA on OSX, done right

Posted on By rolfje 60 Comments on DLNA on OSX, done right

Sony PS3 LogoMy wife bought me a playstation 3 last year, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of gaming on it, finishing Tomb Raider underworld, and now making decent progress in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction.

DLNA logo

I was a bit sceptical about the DLNA capabilities of the PS3, because I read a lot of bad news on this fairly new  “Interoperability Guidelines” concept. It sounded like a lot of trouble to go through to simply watch the photos and home videos on a TV. For weeks, I was not able to find a single site telling me how to install a DLNA server on my Mac, or where to find a decent one.

Altgough they’re hard to find, there are a few OSX DLNA servers out there. One of them is actually very good. Here’s what I found:

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Apple, Software

Remote Desktop Connection updated

Posted on By rolfje 1 Comment on Remote Desktop Connection updated

Remote Desktop Connection icon

“Remote Desktop Connection.app” allows you to see the desktop of a remote Windows machine on your mac. This application will not update itself automatically, unless you have it installed as part of the Microsoft Office for Mac suite. If you’ve downloaded the 1.0.3 version you probably did not notice that “Remote Desktop Connection.app” was updated somewhere last year by microsoft.

You can find the latest version of Remote Desktop Connection on the Microsoft Mactopia site. Version 2 is an improvement over 1.0.3 (which I had). Notable differences are:

  • Nicer configuration screens, makes configuring your resolution and shares easier.
  • Now a Universal Binary, which should improve performance on Intel Macs. I have not noticed improvement, but that’s probably because the network is the bottleneck.
  • Supports the new RDC 6.0 protocol used by Vista.
  • Can do authentication of the remote machine (if it’s a Vista machine).
  • Your Mac printer can be exposed to the Windows machine so you can print documents on your local printer.

I played with it for a while, and apart form the new looks I can not say it’s very different from the 1.0.x version. It could load my old RDC 1.0.3 configuration files. If you need to connect to a Windows desktop from your Mac, this does the job just fine.

Apple, Microsoft, Software

Buddha had a stroke

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Buddha had a stroke

Dr. Jill Bolte TaylorHere’s Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a brain scientist, studying schyzofrenia, and the micro-circuitry in the human brain which causes these (and other) mental illenesses. On the morning of September 10, 1996 she had a stroke. Amongst all other things that went though her head, she realized that this was a tremendous oportunity because she got to study this phenomena first hand. Luckaly, she fully recovered, wrote a book about it, and did a very impressive presentation about it at the 2008 TED conference, called “a powerful stroke of insight”.

Having watched this presentation, I realized that Zen monks already figured this out a long time ago, without knowing that they were talking about left or right brain halves. Here’s a short recap of what your left and right brain halves do:

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Uncategorized

Choose: AFP or SMB

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Choose: AFP or SMB

Choose AFP or SMB, not both.

I recently upgraded the operating system on my trusty Mac Mini G4 home fileserver from Tiger to Leopard. In addition to the out-of-the-box backup, I no longer have to use SharePoints to manage my network shares. In Leopard, I can just right-click them and arrange the sharing.

In doing so, I decided to switch on both SMB and AFP sharing for all shares. The idea was that my Macs all would use AFP automatically, and all Windows machines would see the SMB mounts. After a few hours, iTunes began acting up on me, because it decided to switch between the SMB and AFP protocol (or so it seemed). Finder also seems to have some trouble listing network shares if the exact same name on the same server is shared with two different protocols.

Because there are people on my network with Windows machines, I decided to switch off the AFP protocol and only go with SMB. I haven’t had problems since.

If you’re sharing drives like I’m doing, go for SMB. It may not be the technically superior solution, but it will “just work”. You can easily switch to AFP when the world is freed of Windows machines. 😉

Uncategorized

We are Free! Free, I tell you!

Posted on By rolfje 2 Comments on We are Free! Free, I tell you!

iTunes iconRegular readers know that I’ve been ranting about the way  the music and movie industry are selling us crippled content, which actually feels like punishing you for honestly buying your digital content. Coincidentally, a month after that rant, Steve wrote a mail to the music industry in which he stated that DRM clearly was not working, and we needed to approach things differently.

A few months later, Apple and EMI actually started a new service in iTunes called iTunes plus, selling 256kbps DRM-free AAC files. If you’ve seen the latest Macworld 2009 Keynote Address by Philip (Phil) Schiller, you will have noticed that Apple hasn’t been sitting still. At the end of this quarter, all songs in the iTunes store will be available as DRM-free iTunes plus version. And there’s an easy button in iTunes which let’s you upgrade all your DRM-ed music automatically (payed, ofcourse). The link is in the iTunes Quick Links box, top right. I tried it, works fine.

Upgrade to iTunes Plus

Finally, your music will travel with you and play anywhere, just like those trusty CD’s did. Even better: with your iPhone you’re now able to buy music anywhere you are, because Apple has added 3G to the iTunes store on the iPhone.

Uncategorized

“Instruments” – Application monitor

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on “Instruments” – Application monitor

InstrumentsDid you know that your installation of Leopard comes with a built-in performance monitor? It’s called “Instruments” and you can attach it to any process currently running. In the screenshot you see here I attached it to an instance of Eclipse while running some unittests.

Instruments has some nice templates for you to choose from, and you can monitor CPU activity per thread, disk I/O, User Interface activity, Object allocations, and leaks. Just so you know, it might come in handy.

Apple, Software

How to add drivers to SQuirreLSQL.app

Posted on By rolfje 11 Comments on How to add drivers to SQuirreLSQL.app

SQuireL SQL on OSX with Oracle driversIf you’re a SQuirreL SQL fan like me, and you use a Mac, you probably also want to know how to add a driver to the OSX version of the application. Most people just point to an external jar file, but you can also add drivers to the application bundle.  There’s not much to it, but it took me some time to discover that I actually had to edit the plist file in the bundle after adding the driver.

As you can see on the left, my SQuireLSQL.app now comes with the Oracle OCI and Thin driver built in, and because they are part of the application bundle, I can’t wreck my installation by misplacing jarfiles or reconfiguring classpaths. Nice.

If you want to drivers to your SQuireLSQL.app yourself, here’s what you need to do:

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Apple, Software