Semiconducted » UX Interaction Design

Set up Time Machine on windows NTFS shared drive

dhammy0110 — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:11:24 +0000

This technique allows you to use the built in Macintosh Time Machine app to backup a Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard machine to a Windows 7 network shared drive wirelessly. Through trial and a lot of error I was able to get the following setup to work well, but your mileage may vary. Two key details not mentioned on some other guides are the inclusion of a .plist file in the image and possibly using a static IP address for the shared drive host. I set a static IP for the Win 7 share machine mainly to avoid IP conflicts that would occasionally occur with laptops and VM machines, so I have not isolated this as a sole factor in helping NTFS drives to be mounted by Time Machine. This should also work with Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), but you are required to use the MAC hardware address detailed below.

1. Open System Profiler to get some info about your computer:
    a. Go to:
        Apple menu > About This Mac > More Info… ()
    b. Note the following:
        1. Computer’s name – located in the upper left corner of the dialog (E.G. MyMac)
        2. MAC address (Network > Ethernet > MAC Address)
– it looks something like 00:aa:11:bb:22:cc
        3. Hardware UUID (Hardware Overview: > Hardware UUID:)
            – it’s a long string of numbers and hyphens, ignore the hyphens

2. Open Disk Utility
a. Select New Image to create a sparsebundle image on your local system.
b. Save the file with your computer’s name, an underscore, and then the MAC address without the colons. E.G. MyMac_00aa11bb22cc. In Snow Leopard it might no longer be necessary to include the ethernet MAC address in the filename, but I included it for good luck and it worked.

Use the following settings when creating the image, adjusting size as needed. Note that I did not include the MAC address in the name field but did include it in the filename.

3. Create a new text document that contains the following text:

com.apple.backupd.HostUUID
—-insert your UUID here, no hyphens—-

4. Mount your newly created sparsebundle and save this file into the root of it using the filename:
“com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist”

5. Unmount the sparsebundle image and copy the file to your network share drive. You’ll probably need to keep it in the root directory to allow Time Machine to easily find it.

Bear with me, we’re almost there.

6. Now we need to do a small hack to enable Time Machine to see network drives:
   a. Open the Terminal Application
   b. Enter the following at the prompt:
       defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

7. Open Time Machine, select your network share drive and select the shared drive where your image is stored.

Interactive public art meets childhood toy

dhammy0110 — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:02:46 +0000

File 2009’s SMSslingshot under “fun stuff that gets people interacting with each other”. Interesting project, although for texting, I would have gone with a QWERTY keyboard over an old school triple-click key pad. Or better yet, use the familiar phone in your pocket to “load” the sligshot. This reminds me of a hybrid of Graffiti Research Lab’s projection work and Jury Hahn’s Megaphone project that came out of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP) in 2007. Either way, it’s fun stuff that gets people to be creative in a social setting.

SMS Slingshot

Graffiti Research Lab LASER Tag

Sync your files across multiple computers seamlessly

dhammy0110 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:59:34 +0000

For many years I have emailed files to myself, copied them to thumb drives, and cobbled together my own FTP syncing scripts. All very complicated and error prone. Enter 3rd-party syncing services – easy as pie to use, magically work in the background, and they come in pretty colors. There are a ton out there, but here are a couple of the better options.

Dropbox:
Free for 2GB of storage space.

Beautiful interface, easy to use, cross platform, including an iPhone app and mobile site.
The iphone app is handy for viewing PDFs, but currently only offline syncs the list of documents, not the actual content.
Sharing is easy, but limited to options. In my case, I want access to other people’s folders ONLY on the website. I don’t want every change they make to automatically sync to me all the time, eating up resources.

Live Mesh:
Free for 5GB of storage space

As of this review, still in beta. It provides the ability to sync ANY existing folder you wish, provided it is not a system folder (anything within the Library folder on Mac OSX).
The Live Mesh web interface allows for a lot of flexibility in what you sync to which device. At the time of my review, the mobile app was not yet available.

For either the above software solutions, you can sync items or folders outside the main sync folders using symbolic links. I use it to sync my Omnigrafffle stencils and templates across computers.

Ultimately I’ve continued to use Dropbox and have been extremely happy with it. If you use this referral code, we both get an extra 250MB storage.

Push email is a harbinger of the productivity apocalypse of 2012

dhammy0110 — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:08:27 +0000

OK, so maybe it isn’t REALLY the end of the world. But the following article echoes the sentiment that the number and speed of modern communication channels reduce focus and enable procrastination.

Researchers at Loughborough University found that it took an average of 64 seconds for a person to recover their train of thought after interruption by email: those who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week in this way. “There is no doubt that people use it as an avoidance tactic,” says Yoram Kalman, a post-doctoral researcher in online communication at the Open University of Israel. “The modern office worker works for an average of three minutes before an interruption occurs.”

According to the psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, the stress of trying to process information as rapidly as it arrives is reducing us to quivering wrecks of indecision and demoralisation. As email becomes easier and quicker to use, we are finding it increasingly difficult to sift the relevant information.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/01/email-facebook

Complete iPhone 3GS voice control command set

dhammy0110 — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:52:10 +0000

As of this date of this posting, here is the full list of the iPhone 3GS Voice Control commands available. Hopefully as this is adopted, they will roll out more – like finding a contact’s info or initiating an email by speaking the name.

Start Voice Control:
Press and hold the Home button or your headset middle button until the Voice Control screen appears and you hear a beep.

Cancel Voice Control:
Tap the cancel button on the screen or say “cancel” to close Voice Control.

Call someone in your contacts:
* call + [name of the person or phone number]
* dial + [name of the person or phone number]

If the person has more than one phone number, add:
   * home
   * mobile
   * work
   * other

Make a correction:
   * no
   * nope
   * not that
   * not that one
   * wrong

Music playback:
   * play
   * play music
   * play + album + [name]
   * play + artist + [name]
   * play + playlist + [name]
   * pause
   * pause music
   * next song
   * previous song
   * shuffle

Music Info:
   * what’s playing
   * what song is this
   * who is this song by
   * who sings this song

Use Genius to play similar songs:
   * Genius
   * play more like this
   * play more songs like this

For best results:
Speak clearly, naturally (like you are making a phone call), pausing slightly so each word is distinct. Use only iPhone commands and full names or numbers.