Pants in Motion » Macs

Windows vs OS X

paul — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:03 +0000

Believe it or not, both of these dialogue windows address the same issue.

Which scares the shit out of the typical user more?

How to hide your Boot Camp partition in Snow Leopard

paul — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:52:21 +0000

So you installed Boot Camp and now you see an annoying read-only Windows drive on your nice clean OS X desktop?

Don’t bother with any of the kludgy workarounds you found on Google (‘put a dot at the start of the drive name’, ‘install MacFuse and do weird crap’). Do it the right way. Tell OS X not to mount the partition in the first place. How?

Like this:

Open the Terminal. If you don’t know how, ask a grownup to help you.¹
Type ‘diskutil info /Volumes/diskname‘ (in my case, the partition was called BOOTCAMP, so I typed ‘diskutil info /Volumes/BOOTCAMP’
Copy the Volume UUID. It’ll be a long string of hexadecimal; on my particular Mac it’s ‘ECE08F90-9FCD-4334-8B7D-DA9B959B9380′.
Now type ‘sudo vifs’ – this is the Snow Leopard-approved way to edit the file systems table. This is vi – again, if you don’t know how to use vi, ask a grownup.
Append the following text: ‘UUID=yourUUID none ntfs r,noauto’
See my example below.

And that’s it. Save the file, reboot and you’re done. Even if you try to mount this partition manually via Disk Utility, it will fail. If you want to undo the change, obviously just run vifs again and remove this line.

Hope that helps.

1. By ‘ask a grownup’, I of course mean ‘use Google’.

Reasons why June will rock

paul — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:01:10 +0000

1. It’s the end of the financial year, and that means tax return time!

2. E3. I’m expecting to discover the release date of Gran Turismo 5, the game that tipped me over the edge to buy a PS3 over an Xbox 360.

3. WWDC. With luck, we’ll be told the release date of the new OS X operating system, Snow Leopard, and a new iPhone will be launched.

4. Ghostbusters on Blu-ray!

More reasons as they come to me.

Spending more money

paul — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:10:54 +0000

Hurray! I just realised that my larger external hard drive enclosure takes a SATA drive, so I can use the existing 500Gb drive to replace the 250Gb drive in my iMac, then install a new 1.5Tb external drive for backup.

Why do I need more space? Simple – I just installed the entire Logic Studio set, and lost about 50Gb of hard drive space on the internal drive.

Hrmm. I should probably try to find a larger IDE hard drive for the other external drive. 300Gb just isn’t very much space anymore. That or a SATA-IDE adapter. Or… maybe put that 1.5Tb drive into the Time Capsule and use it for all the backups? No.. too dangerous to put all the backups on the one drive..

No logic

paul — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:28:33 +0000

I just found out today that the $250 upgrade to Logic Studio that I was planning on buying no longer exists. I’d have to buy the entire set again for $650, with no discount for previously spending $1500 on Logic Pro 7.

Strangely, because I upgraded from Logic Express 7 to Logic Pro 7, I can get a $400 upgrade.

How does this make any sense? Why am I rewarded for spending less money? I must call Apple Australia about this and hassle them. I’m not above trying to save $150!

Making me go 'Hrmm'

paul — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:57:39 +0000

Don’t mention Firewire, Apple.

Oh, Jesus

paul — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:28:01 +0000

Horrific. Apple has been eating Microsoft’s lunch in the public mindspace for what seems like years now, with the ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ ads doing a lot to push the Apple brand back into the mainstream. They portrayed the PC as confused and out of touch.

So, Microsoft release a couple of aimless, confusing ads with Jerry Seinfeld and are met with a resounding chorus of ‘Huh?’ from the geek crowd.

And what do they do next? They scrap the campaign and pretend it was all part of some master plan.

Good work, Microsoft. Nice way to not come across as confused and out of touch!

Fumbling towards.. something

paul — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 01:28:48 +0000

Today I made my final payment on my Macbook Pro. Hurray for stuff!

Of course, I won’t be buying a thing until late October when LittleBigPlanet comes out, due to the expense of the Vibiemme. Well, I guess I can afford a tamper, right..?

…apparently I can!

Time Capsule

paul — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:39:59 +0000

I ordered a 500Gb Time Capsule on the weekend and installed it a couple of days ago. A Time Capsule is an Apple product that combines an 802.11n router and print server with a large hard drive suitable for network storage or (for Macs running Leopard) automatic backup.

The backup runs about as well as I’d expect over a wireless network considering that it’s not just copying files, it’s also doing comparisons (I see about 2-4Mb/second), and the 802.11n wireless speed is obviously a lot faster than the old 802.11g Airport Express that I was using (I’m running a 5Ghz n-only network with a 63-character WPA2 key).

The best thing about the upgrade, though, is that after reconfiguring my network so that my rubbish Netcomm ADSL router is running in bridge mode (meaning that the Time Capsule does my PPPoE login and does all the NAT for the network), the Back to my Mac feature that I was so looking forward to in Leopard started working!

There goes my productivity…

Stupid error of the month

paul — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:35:13 +0000

Seriously, Apple.

What.

The.

FUCK.