So I just got my NAS setup and its working good. However, I was hoping to come across something fun to do with the iPhone.
Maybe listen to music I have remotely or upload / view pics to the thing from the device.
If anyone comes across this post with some ideas leave a comment.
After running through some issues / problems with the base configuration / features of the D-Link DNS-321, I ended up working to install the fun_plug hack to gain access to the linux core of the device.
I won’t walk through the whole process… they do that at the fun_plug wiki page.
I used that page to start and dig in. All references I link to can be found there. But to sum up what I did…
fun_plug: I had issues with getting the files to run on reboot. MAKE SURE your browser / system is not tampering with the files after you download them. e.g. fun_plug file should not be renamed to fun_plug.sh… fun_plug.tgz should not be unzipped and named fun_plug.tar… that stops the process from installing during the reboot.
AFP Give yourself some time. Took me a few hours to fully sit down and configure AFP.. that was the big time sink since it’s so hands-on. (Given I’m not used to configuring this type of stuff.)
I did have trouble getting my Snow Leopard driven MacBook to be able to write to the drive over AFP. A CNID error that made me mount the AFP share read only. Look for the comment about starting /ffp/sbin/cnid_metad at the AFP install page.
I finally got a true NAS (Network Access Storage) device. A consumer level DNS-321 device. A nice sale at Tiger direct brought this in at under $100.
A while ago I bought a Wireless-N router (Linksys E3000) with USB support to host a hard drive, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted in the end. I didn’t want to put too much burden on the router so I held off.
Since the DNS-321 is supposed to support that all out of the box, I figured it would be easy… NOT THE CASE.
The setup instructions were written for Windows users, and I use a Mac. There was even a Windows setup disk utility I could have used.
Not a bit issue though, the web admin interface was fine with me.
SMB / Mac / resource forks. The quickest way to access your NAS files is to use the Network Share… eg over Samba share (SMB.)
I hate that Mac still does not play nice with SMB network shares, it leaves those phantom ._filename.ext files that are counter parts to the original file (e.g. filename.ext would have ._filename.ext extras.) Not every file gets this, just files that Mac appends extra info to (e.g. spotlight data I believe.)
Also, you can’t tell they are there when viewing the drive in Mac. HOWEVER, you do see them when other systems look at the files. For example, I setup UPnP share for music files (e.g. DNLA) and when I browsed music in my DNLA device, I saw all the ._ files ahead of the real files (since it’s all alphabetical.)
I ended up being able to solve that by using FTP to upload the files instead. Of course, I tried using NFS first instead of SMB (not sure if that would have even resolved the resource fork issue.), but I could not get my Mac to connect to the NFS for whatever reason, even after a couple days of reading up google-found forum docs. Other people could, I could not. Still not sure if it was an issue with the NFS server in the DNS-321 or not, but one thing was for sure… D-Link was not a help at all.
Final straw before I started trying to hack the thing with the fonz fun_plug (aka ffp… touching on this later)… iTunes server did not serve my video files to iTunes clients.
Everything I read said it should, and after seeing an example of a configuration file here http://krook.net/archives/169 I decided it may be just a small tweak of the server configuration to resolve the issue.
… Long story short … I didn’t plan on hacking the DNS-321 at all, but I found it necessary. I want to tweak the iTunes server config and also setup AFP file access (to replace the SMB access and reduce the requirement for FTP.)
I’ll link to the article walking through the process next, but for now, I figured I’d share the problems I ran into first.
Google Chrome nailed it in my opinion with the address bar. It’s a typical address bar, but if you type something there that is not an URL, it guesses that you want to search it. Perfect! I find myself frustrated with Firefox, Safari and other browsers when I get errors after typing my search in the address bar.
In Firefox at least, it’s easy to get the search bar to work that way. I found this page offers a great walk through. It’s a quick 1 or 2 min tweak, and it uses Google as the fall back search.
After yo apply the tweak, you can totally remove the search bar from the Firefox interface in the top right.
When I develop sites I start on my local machine, and edit my /etc/hosts file to point to my local system. E.g. website.dev is the dev domain I might use to work on website.com locally. (This would be opposed to pointing all sites to localhost/folder/someotherfolder/website_dev or something. I just find it eaiser.)
It works great, but for WordPress sites the SiteURL and Home settings are in the database, so they need to be updated EVERY time you change domains (e.g. when I push code and database changes I was writing under website.dev to stage.website.com or something.)
A quick few lines you could add to your theme (or probably in a plugin too) to update the siteurl and home settings would be as follows.
// at top of functions php
update_option('siteurl', 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
update_option('home', 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
Placing that at the very top of your themes functions.php file would allow you deploy your site under a couple domains without going through the process of logging in or anything.
My goals
Update my router, and get a network attached hard drive setup allowing me to backup my MacBook Pro over the network via Time Machine (possibly over the internet, but that might be a long-shot?) I’ll write about the backup process later, but here’s some references to get a network setup supporting full G speeds and also support B/G (all running DD-WRT.)
How I decided on the Linksys e3000
I finally upgraded to a wireless n network. After looking at a few high performance dual band routers (Negear WNDR3700, Linksys e3000, and the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station) I decided on the Linksys e3000.
The Airport Extreme wasn’t as customizable as I wanted. And the main deciding factor between the Netgear and the Linsys was just brand loyalty really. All were close in price.
After I bought the Linsys I almost took it back for an Airport. I wanted to Time Machine from my MacBook Pro over the WiFi via an USB attached hard drive. But the Linksys e3000 didn’t offer the support for that type of hard drive sharing.
I instead decided to install DD-WRT onto the router, after all I’ve done that before with my trusty Linksys WRT54G and it was great. The only holdup… DD-WRT didn’t officially support the router yet (as of July 25 2010.) It was however supported in the forums, and I decided to try installing that.
Step 1: Setup the Linksys e3000 with DD-WRT firmware
Here’s the link to the thread on the DD-WRT forum I read through after some Googling. Note: page 14 has the version of the firmware I installed in the end.)
I wanted DD-WRT because I was used to it and didn’t want to be limited in any way with the Linksys factory firmware. As I mentioned, a USB hard drive attached to the router was not very useful for my needs using that factory firmware.
I configured the router with WPA2 WiFi security and the basic settings I would want in a day-to-day router setup.
Step 2: Setup my old WRT54G as the G and N WiFi hotspot
I had older B and G devices in the house, and I wanted to separate the traffic from those off the wireless of the newer e3000 router. I guess it helps with speed (keeping the N speed up to true N speeds) and I felt it may also help avoid a bit of wear and tear on the newer router, I don’t know but I did.
I already had DD-WRT installed on it, here’s the walk-through I used to setup the old router to use the internet through the new router through ethernet and keep the DNS settings the same as if there was one router.
A while back I wrote this post describing my efforts in looking for a way to rate iTunes shortcuts anytime with a quick shortcut on Mac. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I found the steps to enable this site wide was a bit different, thus this post was created.
First, use Automator to create the Services needed. Services will be available no matter what app is in the foreground.
tell application "iTunes"
set the rating of current track to 20
end tell
That finishes up the Automator work. Just be sure you used “Save As” and not “Save”, you don’t want to overwrite your services, but create 5 different services.
Now, go to System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts. Select “Services” on the left window, and in the right window you should see (at the bottom) the 5 services you created.
You can click in the white space to the right of the services (not intuitive really, but there is a little spot on the right you can double click to edit the short cuts for all the items in that list.)
Once you add a shortcut there you should be able to use the short cut from anywhere!
Be warned, I found it very tricky to find a short cut that worked for me in all apps, since some apps or services (mainly iTunes) had shortcuts similar to them. (Snapshot utility for example is Cmd-shift-4, which may be a shortcut you wanted to use.)
I found that the Cmd-Option-Shift worked for me best.
UPDATE: Add Growl Notifications to show that the song was indeed rated!
This is a screen shot from Automator showing the Service for Rate as 1 Star
Well, this is an easy and quick addition to the Automator services. I constently found myself switching to iTunes to see if the song was rated… kind of defeted the purpose of adding the shortcuts!
I realized (in somewhat of a “duh” moment) that I could just use Growl to add a little note for each of the ratings. I already had Growl installed (it’s a standard install for any Mac of mine.) And best of all Growl is very Automator friendly, so it just took a few seconds to add a pop-up Growl notification for each Rate as ? Service!
Oh man, went to the store and ended up dropping way too much on a mouse. Well worth it, but $80 was not my intention that day.
I recently got a new MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and I needed a good notebook mouse. I had a 5 year old bluetooth Kensington mouse, but it was not responding very smoothly. It would kill my batteries and didn’t work well enough. So I almost bought a Logitech mouse but waked by this thing.
I didn’t even realize Razer made a notebook mouse. It’s bluetooth, and even though originally wanted to avoid bluetooth (due to battery life and having had bad luck with another bluetooth mouse) but this one had an interesting feature. I could optionally use it as a corded mouse.
Sweet right? I love the Razer brand but their old Pro|Click mouse for the mac just is not well supported anymore. Annoying, but whatever. I didn’t want to drag a desktop mouse with a long cord around with my laptop anyway.
So far it’s going good. I love having back the programmable buttons. One trick I found was in using Macros to assign keyboard buttons, I could avoid the conflict with the OS when in games. Expose would override any in-game buttons, and being so customizable, I no longer need to wait for Valve or Apple to fix the problem.
Oh, and even though it’s nowhere on the outside of the box, it does work as a corded mouse with no batteries. I’ve yet to see how long the mouse works in wireless mode though since I just purchased it.
(Say that title 5 times fast.)
I am very picky about the hardware I use. I’m on the computer a lot of the day developing websites, and I won’t settle for a keyboard / mouse setup that is not comfortable and responsive.
(95% of the reason I switched to Mac was due to the keyboard on the late Powerbooks and original Macbook Pros)
I tried the Copperhead by Razer for my PC, and loved it so much that I ended up getting the mouse Razer markets towards the Mac. Meet the Pro|Click
The software for the mouse is nice. The best thing about the Razer mouses is the ability to change the sensitivity on-the-fly. You set up a button on the mouse and when you hould it and scroll your mouse becomes more or less sensitive.
Perfect for switching between graphic editiong, coding or general web browsing.
Mothers Day is coming up here, could she use a new computer?
Netbooks (net not note) are smaller notebooks. The screens are usually 10 inch or less. The don’t pack the punch that a larger laptop does. So this won’t replace the computer that handles all the family videos.
However, they also are very mobile and can be found for as little as around $350. They are great when traveling, perfect for email and light office use, and could be perfect for poking around the internet on the couch.
Here’s a link to an example. It’s at TigerDirect. Like many places they offer a lot of Netbooks, so look around.
The only thing I’d reccommend would be to find one with a VGA port, so if you want to you can hook it up to a larger screen when at home.