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Key applications on Mac such as iMessage, FaceTime and even Facebook integration with Notifications depend on your Mac's Serial Number. If the System Information is showing #Serial Number, you will not be able to sign in.

To solve, search for Blank Board Serializer.

Worn Out

It is scary, you're coming to an end baby.

Do not worry, I'll replace with a nuclear energy.

Customize Time Machine Intervals

Why? You don't want Time Machine to backup your data too frequently that it fills up your backup disk quickly. Unless you are someone who works in a production area or your files moved and altered very frequently in one day.

What happen when your backup disk is full? This is what happened to my mom. It automatically removes the oldest files until the latest backup made it's way safely to the backup disk. You don't want that. The worst thing is, it doesn't ask for your permission. Or make it this way. It doesn't ask a question that can be understand by a non geek user.

When you restore a large files to the current time, Time Machines will do hourly backup in the next hour. This will fill up your backup disk fast. What happen if the large file that you just restore isn't the file that you want? Some people will go back in time and restore another one. And they forget to remove the earlier files.

Time Machine users should know how this thing works before they start using it. Unless they have a super huge disk or unlimited storage, they should aware of their backup disk usage. So if needed, you can customize your backup interval using TimeMachineEditor.

Fusion Can Explode

WARNING: Do not ever put your MacBook in the bag while sleeping IF you have VMWare Fusion running. It'll burn or may explode! Because I did zipped it in my bag for say 30 minutes and the heat just scares shit out of me.

I Love Shortcuts!

All Caps - CTRL+SHIFT+A
Annotation - ALT+CTRL+M
Auto Format - ALT+CTRL+K
Auto Text - F3 or ALT+CTRL+V
Bold - CTRL+B or CTRL+SHIFT+B
Bookmark - CTRL+SHIFT+F5
Copy - CTRL+C or CTRL+INSERT
Copy Format - CTRL+SHIFT+C
Copy Text - SHIFT+F2
Create Auto Text - ALT+F3
Date Field - ALT+SHIFT+D
Delete Back Word - CTRL+BACKSPACE
Delete Word - CTRL+DELETE
Dictionary - ALT+SHIFT+F7
Do Field Click - ALT+SHIFT+F9
Doc Maximize - CTRL+F10
Doc Move - CTRL+F7
Doc Restore - CTRL+F5
Doc Size - CTRL+F8
Grow Font - CTRL+SHIFT+.
Grow Font One Point - CTRL+]
Hanging Indent - CTRL+T
Header Footer Link - ALT+SHIFT+R
Help - F1
Hidden - CTRL+SHIFT+H
Hyperlink - CTRL+K
Indent - CTRL+M
Italic - CTRL+I or CTRL+SHIFT+I
Justify Para - CTRL+J
Left Para - CTRL+L
Line Up Extend - SHIFT+UP
List Num Field - ALT+CTRL+L
Outline - ALT+CTRL+O
Outline Collapse - ALT+SHIFT+- or ALT+SHIFT+NUM -
Outline Demote - ALT+SHIFT+RIGHT
Outline Expand - ALT+SHIFT+=
Outline Expand - ALT+SHIFT+NUM +
Outline Move Down - ALT+SHIFT+DOWN
Outline Move Up - ALT+SHIFT+UP
Outline Promote - ALT+SHIFT+LEFT
Outline Show First Line - ALT+SHIFT+L
Lock Fields - CTRL+3 or CTRL+F11
Web Go Back - ALT+LEFT
Web Go Forward - ALT+RIGHT
Word Left - CTRL+LEFT
Word Left Extend - CTRL+SHIFT+LEFT
Word Right - CTRL+RIGHT

SSH through SOCKS proxy

compile connect source and put to any bin

add to ssh config file:

Host *

ProxyCommand connect -S socks.proxy.la %h %p

1. establish wifi connection (comp + iphone)
2. run socks (3proxy) from mobileterminal
3. surf anything from mobile safari to establish EDGE
4. set browser's socks proxy with iphone IP address & port 1080
5. if firefox, additional step: set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true

iPhoneModem app is annoying

Clippy! I miss thou!!

I thought it was a restriction or expired evaluation time but its NOT!
They have replaced the way to show copy & paste button to by holding
[123] even for copying an sms, you need to hold them. Thank God Clippy
is back!

Sent from my iPhone

backup-sms.sh

I always have the feeling that huge sms.db will slow down SMS application startup. So I created a script to be run in Terminal and I wish I can do an application for this.

#!/bin/sh

# backup-sms.sh

# 

#

# Created by amanyus on 2/2/09.

# Copyright 2009 __MyCompanyName__. All rights reserved.

DATE=`date +%y%m%d`

echo "${DATE}"

if test -f /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db.$DATE

then echo "Today's backup already exists."; exit; fi

if ! test -f /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db.$DATE

then cp -npv /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db.$DATE; fi

ls -lrt /var/mobile/Library/SMS/

if test -f /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db.$DATE

then echo "Today's backup successful"; fi

Update: Something fishy here. Applications installed by Cydia do not appear on the springboard...

Aperture: A tiny thing that saves a lot of time.

Just for expressing an excitement. A new thing I just discovered and love about Aperture.

I have a lot of pictures and my last trip to Langkawi produced more than 1700 shots - and my mother wants them ALL! So as I started to export hundreds of pictures, I went through one by one to reject bad photos - even the exporting is still running (right now). Suddenly I came to a photo that attracts me. After a simple edit, I decided to upload it to Flickr and this is the good part. I don't have to wait for the earlier exporting process to complete before exporting a new picture. It really saves my time.

What a good software design in customer point of view!

Installing NTFS-3G on your Mac OS X will render your Windows drives invisible from your "Startup Disk" preference pane. [1] They suggested disabling or uninstalling to bring the disappeared drive back. But I accidentally see a Windows partition in my VMWare Virtual Machine Library.

Convert plist binary to xml, back and forth.

plutil -convert xml1 some_file.plist

plutil -convert binary1 some_other_file.plist

To check, use file something.plist

Leopard Re Installation: Part 2

I reformat using the same filesystem my external hard drive uses. Then set UID to 1000 in the System Preferences > Accounts > Advanced Options (right click on username). After that chown whole home directory.

Leopard Re Installation: Backup & Restore Issue

I wanted to replace my OS X Server because of lack of Internet Sharing feature. So I do both Time Machine backup and manual backup before making a fresh OS X installation. These are the issue that I faced.

Restoring using Time Machine right after Leopard Installation is not as I expected. There will be folders like 'System (from old mac)', 'Applications (from old mac)'. For me, this is not neat.

Your OSX filesystem must have the same format as your Time Machine backup filesystem. I'm using HFS Journaled with Case Sensitive, but my external hard disk is using HFS Journaled NOT with Case Sensitive. I have to reformat either my OS X partition, or my external hard disk.

Restoring files from Time Machine is strict because of UID. My user uses 501 as UID but my last Server system was using 1000 as UID. So restoring could get complicated.

Right now I'm going to change my UID and reboot and see what will happen.

Phone Number Fix on iPhone (localization)

Problem is iPhone doesn't recognize callers. Although they exist in the address book, iPhone only show their number with extra country code prefix.

Replace PhoneNumberTemplates.plist
in the /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/AppSupport.framework

*Best to just backup/rename than to remove.

Custom Ringtones on iPhone

Convert audio file to use AAC codec and change the extension to m4r. Must not exceed 40 seconds.

Fix Youtube on iPhone

Unzip unlock.zip
to /private/var/root/Library/Lockdown and remove pair_records folder.

*Best to just backup/rename than to remove.

Unresponsive Dock and Finder

I can't access Dock just now. No respond. And I'm unable to go through Finder too, so I can't get a touch on Terminal. I forced quit some applications, but there's only TextEdit which I left because there's work which wasn't saved yet. Then how do I rescue this without force quitting the TextEdit which I'm not even sure if it is the cause of all this? But I'm pretty sure that it was about the hung Dock. I really wanted to avoid logging out or reboot.

But user fast switch is enabled. I logged in as administrator and used terminal to kill other's Dock process.

PS=`ps aux | awk '{if($1="amanyus") print}' | grep -i dock`; kill $PS

PS is temporary shell variable to hold a value. This value is coming from a ps command after few filtering with awk and grep. Awk only print lines that match the first column with user amanyus, which result in all amanyus' processes. Next with grep, only match insensitive case dock rather that all processes under user amanyus because we only want to find Dock process and put in the PS variable. Up to this point, PS variable will hold the process number of amanyus' Dock. After the semicolon, the process will be killed.

Silly is you just can simply use ps aux | grep amanyus | grep Dock and kill the Dock's process without bothering with awk command =p

p/s: Hey, I forgot about spotlight at the first time to search Terminal, but not sure if it would work.