Author Archives: Martino

About Martino

Dutch. Married. Dad. Living in Italy. Apple fan. Owner of ZenaConsult

OSX: Screen Sharing over the internet

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Here’s a quick write-up describing how to connect to your Mac at home from your Mac at work (or any other Mac…).

Prerequisites

1) User access with administrator’s rights on your remote OS X computer.

2) An Secure Shell (SSH) client on your local computer. On Windows, Puttyis a common and free version. Linux and MAC OS X, by default, come with SSH.

3) A VNC viewer client on your local computer.  In our case, we’ll using Screen Sharing. You won’t find it in the finder; it’s hidden here:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen\ Sharing.app

4) Network access to the SSH service on your remote machine.  This requires

a)  You know your remote machine’s hostname or IP address.
b)  Being behind the firewall, having VPN access, or being accessible to the public Internet (i.e. no firewall).

How to Remotely Turn On (and off) OS X Screen Sharing

This procedure keeps security in mind.  The idea is to turn on screen sharing while you need it, and then turn it off when you’re done.

1)  SSH into your remote OS X machine with an administrator’s log in and password.

2) Enable Remote Desktop (a.k.a. Screen Sharing, a.k.a. VNC) with this command:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes -clientopts -setvncpw -vncpw password -restart -agent -privs -all

3) Login using a VNC client. You can use Screen Sharing or Chicken of the VNC (see tip below).
Your password is “password” (see the -vncpw flag in the above command;  you can — and should — change this).

4) When you are done, turn of screen sharing using your SSH session:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -deactivate -configure -access -off


Problems connecting with your VNC client, like Chicken of the VNC?

Set your remote display settings to greyscale (to speed up things) or ‘Let server decide). Anything lower than ‘thousands’ won’t work.

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing controlObserveQuality 2

 

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Recursively batch rename files in Linux

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If you’re using Kerio Mail Server (Kerio Connect) under Linux and you’ve moved around (using rsync or such) some mail folders, sometimes you’ll need to recreate the folder index, otherwise some email might not show up in your email program (Outlook, Mail.app, Webmail).
The only thing you’ll need to do is to rename the index.fld files inside each (!) folder into index.bad.

Yeah, nasty. So: fire up your Vi editor and put this little script inside your store folder:

badindex.sh
#!/bin/bash
find . -name "index.fld" -exec sh -c 'mv -v "$0" "${0%.fld}.bad"' {} \;

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Link your public Dropbox folder to your site

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I’ve always got some stuf in my public Dropbox folder I want to share with friends but I don’t want to send out emails with the link to those files.
I thought it would be easier to have link a folder on my webserver to this public Dropbox folder. This is how I did it:

– get your public dropbox folder name; should be something like this:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/xxxxxxx/
– replace the xxxxxxx with what you see in your dropbox
– create a folder on your webserver, like /dl
– create a .htaccess on your folder with this info:
Redirect 301 /dl http://dl.dropbox.com/u/xxxxxxx

That’s it! It’s a ‘file not found’ redirect towards your Dropbox.

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Unboxing the WD 2.0 TB USB disk – WDBAAU0020HBK

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Got a couple of external 2.0 TB disks from WD; prices € 65 at amazon. Amazing deal.

But, I wanted to know what’s inside of these boxes. So, I took my trusty putty-knife (the one I use to operate on Mac mini’s) and I opened it up. And this is what’s inside:

Disk: Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EACS 2.0TB with 16MB cache
(update: or you might find a WD20EARS 2.0TB with 64MB cache!)

Model: WD20EACS-11BHUB0

Date: 17/12/2010

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Spedireweb.it: NON funziona!

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-UPDATE-

Lascia perdere SpedireWeb; dopo un sacco di problemi (spedizione perse, niente rimborsi, ecc) sono passato a TNT-Click.it che funziona davvero bene.

Visita il sito tnt-click e spedisci con lo sconto

Oggi ho fatto la mia prima prova con www.spedireweb.it; ho compilato i moduli, ho pagato € 6,98 tramite paypal e ho ricevuto subito via mail la bolla da stampare e da applicare sul pacco. Alle fine usano TNT Express per il ritoro e la spedizione: niente male per questo prezzo!

Domani il pacco viene ritirato e dovrebbe arrivare alla destinazione entro 3 giorni. Vediamo!

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Aumento tariffe Paccocelere di Poste Italiane

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Eccomi qui a fare l’ennesimo post per annunciare l’aumento delle tariffe postali del “pacco celere” che è operativo dal 24 agosto scorso e che, ovviamente, è avvenuto in sordina, senza nessun avviso per gli utenti.

Per chi vende online o per chi partecipa a swap, baratti, scambi e simili (come me) è l’ennesimo salasso ingiustificato, ingiustificato perché essenzialmente la qualità dei servizi postali nazionali peggiora invece di migliorare, malgrado gli aumenti costanti e abbondanti!
Stessa cosa per chi ama comprare online (come me ancora una volta) che si vedrà addebitate spese di spedizione ancora più care.

Per calcolare l’aumento basta aggiungere il costo dell’IVA al 20% ai prezzi del paccocelere, quindi la postacelere 1 passa da 10 a 12,00 euro, mentre il pacco celere 3 passa da 9,50 a 11,40 euro (quasi quasi conviene di più il primo tanto per 60 centesimi di differenza…) e il pacco celere 1 (da 0 a 3kg.) passa da 13,00 a 15,60 euro!

Però una buona notizia c’è, sono venuta a conoscenza di un nuovo servizio privato, per spedire in Italia, che ha costi un po’ inferiori, devo solo provarlo e poi preparo una bella recensione a “blog unificati”… Si chiama www.spedireweb.it.

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How to install language support for Ubuntu

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How to install language support for Ubutnu:

If you want to add additional locales on your Ubuntu installation, check this out!  Go to the locales folder:

$ cd /usr/share/locales

In that directory is a script to add a new locale or language pack.  If you want to find out which language pack to install you can look at the /etc/locale.alias file.  To install, for examples,  Italian language support on Ubuntu, just run this command:

$ ./install-language-pack it_IT

Followed by:

$ dpkg-reconfigure locales

That’s it! Repeat these steps for any other locale you need.

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