The need

No good comes without little drawbacks. When I swapped ODD with HDD, I noticed that it was quite a bit noisier than SSD and even compared to similar MBP with HDD in original bay (probably because ODD bay has a slot that lets noise out easily). So, now I tend to eject the secondary disk when I don’t need it, so my Mac can spin it down. All nice and dandy, but reattaching it when needed was a bit tedious.

The Script

set partList to {"Meedia", "BOOTCAMP"}
choose from list partList with prompt "Choose partitions" with multiple selections allowed
if result is not equal to false then
	repeat with part in result
		do shell script "diskutil mount " & part
		display dialog "Volume " & part & " mounted"
	end repeat
end if

This script asks for which of the partitions to mount and then iterates with diskutil through the selection.

Download

You can copy-paste the above script to AppleScript Editor and adjust it to your needs, or you can download this as a ready to use application.

MountPartitions.zip

Related posts:

1. TextMate 2 New Window (via AppleScript)
2. MacFUSION workaround

Turns out that there were several different complications that messed things up for me, but in the end, I have a working Windows 7 installation on the secondary disk. Read on to find out how I accomplished it.

What didn’t work

You can skip to Success Story if you are not curious.

USB-booting installer

Boot Camp Assistant warning that I need optical drive

First I tried to fake Boot Camp Assistant to create bootable USB stick, but that did not boot for some reason. Also, booting from USB-DVD did not work.

Then I used Virtual Box to fully install Windows on physical partition and that did not show up in the boot menu either.

With all of these options I also combined rEFIt to no avail.

EFI, rEFIt and File Vault 2

Intel Macs have been using EFI instead of BIOS for booting up the system since the beginning. If Boot Camp dual-booting is not enough for you, there is the rEFIt alternative boot manager that gives you more power over boot options. But it turns out that although rEFIt installs without any complaints, it fails to load from File Vault 2 encrypted partition, which is understandable as I haven’t yet provided my passkey.

So, running out of options, I decided to decrypt my partition, which I’d have had to do anyway sometime to be able to resize the encrypted partition over the previous Boot Camp partition (Disk Utility is not able to resize encrypted partitions).

I still had rEFIt installed and I retried some of previous failed attempts, including booting from USB, but still no effect.

Finally I noticed that I had actually two boot loaders – Mac’s own Option-key triggered menu and then the rEFIt that was installed on the primary Mac OS X partition. While most of the time Mac menu didn’t show me anything besides primary partition and Recovery HD, rEFIt showed me Windows partition (sometimes two of them pointing to the same partition), but was not able to boot from them (giving different errors from EFI failures to Windows complaining that winload.exe is missing or corrupt).

In the end I removed rEFIt altogether.

The Success Story

OK, enough of the failures. What ended up working was a variant of the Virtual Machine method, that used Virtual Box to make the partition bootable and then copy over the installation files to that partition. Unfortunately I can not find the original post that lead me to the idea, but it was probably somewhere in this thread.

Note: At this point I had tried multitude of setups already and I can’t be sure that all of the steps below are necessary nor that all of the required steps are listed. If you find some errors, please comment on them.

Create partition

Create a partition in some way. You can use Boot Camp Assistant to shrink existing HFS+ partition and create a FAT32 partition or you can do it yourself via Disk Utility or diskutil command line tool. I had my partition left over from one of the tries with Boot Camp Assistant and USB DVD-drive.

Using Boot Camp for this step has the side effect that it gives you the option to download latest Boot Camp drivers for windows (just have a USB stick ready to store them).

Let Boot Camp Assistant download latest support software

Set up Virtual Box guest

I used Oracle’s excellent (and free) Virtual Box virtualization tool. To get Virtual Box to use your physical Boot Camp partition, you have to make a raw disk image that is bound to your physical disk. In my case it was the disk1 and I partition number 3 (disk1s3 as seen from Disk Utility’s Info). To create the image, change directory to some good enough place to hold the file and enter (NB! adapt to your needs):

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk1 -filename bootcamp.vmdk -partitions 3

Next, give yourself access to the physical disk and the just created image files:

sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk1s3
sudo chown $USER bootcamp*.vmdk

Last thing is to actually set up Virtual Box Guest OS. There is nothing special there, except that you specify your bootcamp.vmdk as the startup disk, instead of creating new one.

Installing Windows

Install Windows to the Virtual Box guest as usual. I shut down the Virtual Box client at the “Setting up Windows for first use” step, but according to some posts (links to which I again have misplaced), you could stop even at the first reboot, though it didn’t seem to work in my case.

Now you should have a partition that is visible to the Mac Boot menu, but not a working Windows installation.

Next step is to restart the install, only this time on the real hardware. To accomplish this, mount the Boot Camp partition, delete everything and copy over all files from the installer ISO. NB! You probably need to have some kind of NTFS driver, either NTFS-3G (see my blog on how to get NTFS-3g working in Lion) or some commercial driver like the Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X I have installed.

After you copy over the files, reboot your Mac and hold down Option-key to access the Windows partition. Now install windows as you would if you had with optical disk attached.

Conclusion

Now that I have finally managed to jump through all those hoops to get Windows installed, I can only wish that Virtualization advances enough that I could play those old Call of Duty games without even rebooting into Windows. Until then, I hope to preserve my newly installed Windows.

Related posts:

1. Ruby (on Rails) toolchest for Windows users

OptiBay

If you ever run out of disk space on your laptop you might have wondered if you could replace your Optical Disc Drive which you rarely use anymore with another HDD. Turns out that of course you can and there are plenty of manufacturers out there who sell kits to do that. One of the most famous in Mac community is the MCE Technologies OptiBay pictured right.

But I live in Estonia and of course I wanted it NOW, so I went out for a little adventure to see if I can fit one of those el cheapo Akasa N.Stor HDD to ODD cases found in local PC store.

For the imatient: yes I can.

The Slim SuperDrive

I went out and bought myself the aforementioned Akasa ODD bay case, but failed to notice that it had markings for both 12.5 and 9.5 mm HDD-s. What this means is, of course, the case itself is 12.5 mm thick, which is 3 mm too much to fit in place of the SuperDrive. So if you can find a 9.5 mm case, your in luck. I had to be a bit more creative, but more on that later.

Akasa N.Stor 12.5 mm bay

Akasa N.Stor unpackaged

What’s in the belly

First things first – unscrew your MacBook and take of the bottom. Note, that the bottom is held in place from the center by two clips and at first it seems that you missed some screws. Just gently pull on the bottom cover to release the clips one by one.

To access the ODD, first remove Wireless chip screws (RED arrows) and then either (a) release the antenna wires (GREEN arrows) or the connection ribbon (BLUE arrow).

Now behold all of the glory inside your MacBook. More precisely pay attention to the Wireless chip that blocks access to ODD. You have to unscrew it (RED arrows) and then you have the option which of the wires to unplug. Either (a) release the antenna wires (GREEN arrows) or the connection ribbon (BLUE arrow). I opted for the antenna, because it seemed a bit less prone to break. (Though later on I learned that the ribbon reattaches a bit easier than the antenna wires, so pick your poison).

Take out SuperDrive

Now you can access the SuperDrive.

Take out SuperDrive

First unscrew the 3 screws (marked RED) that hold it in place and then gently pull on the ribbon cable that connects it to the motherboard (marked BLUE) and remove the drive.

If you ever plan to replace the ODD into your MacBook (maybe when you’re selling it off), your are going to need those screws, so better screw them back in now, before they don’t get lost.

UPDATE: After I received my excellent SuperDrive external closure, I found out that I should’ve unscrewed one additional fixing from the SuperDrive. In the above picture, it is the rightmost RED screw holder is itself attached to the SuperDrive with 2 screws. That won’t fit in the external closure, so instead of taping it inside the closure as I did, you could screw it back in the laptop for future use.

The Creative Part

Now we come to the part where I found out that the Akasa N.Stor was 3 mm too thick for the bay. Fortunately, after I dismantled the N.Stor case (BTW, one screw was behind a sticker), it turned out that the additional 3 mm were added with protruding stands that could easily chopped off (or so I hoped).

In the process of chopping off 3 mm of plastic from the N. Store

In the picture the RED arrows point to some of the stands that need to be chopped off. That part was easy – a sharp pocket knife and a steady hand.

The more tricky part was to thin up the inner rectangle. But I found that small wire-cutters followed up by knife and then a file did the job pretty well.

Hacked N.Store compared to SuperDrive

To avoid dust getting into the computer I washed the case thoroughly and then dried it off.

Stuff it in

Fitting the disk with the remains of the N.Store was easy enough but the problem was that the SuperDrive had screw-holes that the N.Store didn’t. So how would I secure the disk in place?

Cabling foam

I found in my drawer some pieces of foam that was wrapped around a VGA cable. That looked like something I could use.

The N.Stor did have a plastic piece that was supposed to hold the HDD in place, but it did not seem to do it’s job that good, so I decided to stuff the HDD too from two sides and then fix the whole thing from two adjoining sides so that it was gently pressed against ODD bay walls.

Stuff foam around the HDD and the casing

The frame that held Wireless chip proved to be in the ideal position, so I reattached that first and then stuffed foam between that and the N.Stor case. Another roll of foam was put between the case and the DVD slot.

The Result

Final result

The last piece was the insulator shield from the N.Store that completed the design. Reattach the back cover and you are done. Viola!

I was a bit nervous when booting the Mac up, but everything worked nicely and now I have a bidrive MacBook Pro with SSD and HDD totalling 750 GB storage – should enough for some time.

At the end it cost me 16 € compared to $90 for the OptiBay (35 € even in the aftermarket here). OK, the OptiBay comes with a free USB case for the SuperDrive which I don’t have, but it turns out that I can get one of those for another 10 €, totalling in 26 € for me. And a bit of exitement from accomplishing something myself.

Related posts:

1. Installing Windows 7 on MacBook Pro without SuperDrive

1. Ruby Installer

Of course the first and foremost brick in the foundation is RubyInstaller.org which is the easiest way to get Ruby working on Windows machine.

Just head over to the site and download the latest installer release (which at the time of writing is Ruby 1.9.3-p125) and run it.

After agreeing to the license terms, RubyInstaller prompts you with some options. I think it a good idea to put Ruby on the path and also associate .rb and .rbw files with Ruby:

Go ahead and finish the install.

DevKit

Some Ruby gems need to compile native code and in order to do so, they need some additional development tools which are missing in default Windows. Fortunately RubyInstaller has packaged them in a handy extension you can download from their download page under the “Development Kit” header.

Just unpack into some folder of your choosing, e.g. C:\DevKit (BTW, the package itself doesn’t contain a parent folder, so point it to an empty or non-existant folder) and navigate your command prompt to that folder. Based on the DevKit manual, the following is needed to install it:

ruby dk.rb init

This will generate a config.yml file which you could use to configure multiple rubies, but for now we leave it as is. To install DevKit, just enter:

ruby dk.rb install

Gem conf

By default Ruby Gem command installs documentation for every gem. I have found that Googling is much more convenient and faster than browsing local documentation and as generating docs from code often takes more time than installing the gem in the first place, I have come to disable the documentation from the start. To do so, open Notepad (we’ll come to install a better editor later on) and input:

gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc

Save the file under your Documents and Settings directory with a filename .gitrc (yes, with a leading dot – that means hidden file in UNIX). E.g for me:

C:\Documents and Settings\Laas\.gemrc

2. GIT

I won’t even come to the argument whether version control is needed. It’s a must. Period.

For me (and a lot of folks out there) currently GIT is the best version control system – you can start using it without much effort and without even thinking about where to store the repository in the long run – it will all come in it’s own time.

For Windows users the easiest way to get GIT up and running is using msysGit. Head over to their Downloads page and download latest release (which at the time of writing is Git-1.7.9-preview20120201.exe).

Installing msysGit asks you a few questions. First come the install options and you could choose to check ‘Git GUI here’ (and maybe ‘Git Bash Here’, but we’ll change the terminal emulator later on so that won’t be as helpful):

Next two settings are of importance. First one chooses how Git is integrated to PATH and I think the golden middle is best:

And the last one changes how Git treats Windows line endings. Working with multi-platform programs (and Ruby on Rails is a good candidate for that) can be problematic, when developers don’t consider that Unix and Windows use different line endings (LF and CRLF respectfully). Git can automatically convert between the two and that is the default selection in msysGit. Change this only if you know you need to. Even if your editor already uses Unix endings, the first option won’t hurt.

Now you should have a working Git installation.

3. Console 2

Windows Command prompt is a pain to use. It has multiple shortcomings when it comes to developing and while some are harder to overcome (e.g copy-paste because Windows uses Ctrl-C to copy, which at the same time is used to terminate a running command), others are more easy. There are several alternatives to the default cmd.exe, but I have found that the best is Console 2.

It is actually a wrapper to cmd.exe but it adds Tab support, easier copy-paste and whats best for Rails developer – flexible windows width, so that you can fit all those routes in the window.

Just head over to their site and download latest version and unpack it (I chose to put it under ‘Program Files’, but the location does not matter). For easier access, make a shortcut on your desktop.

Configure

For even better experience, we configure Console to use Git Bash we installed in the previous step. Open Console and navigate to Edit > Settings > Tabs. There the Shell division has two options. First one points to the executable that is run as the command interpreter. Default empty value means ‘cmd.exe’, but we change it to Git bash. First use the file navigator option to find Git bash (in the ‘bin’ folder under Git installation directory) and then add two options to that line:

C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe --login -i

Next, if you keep all your projects in one folder, set the startup directory to point to that folder.

All together you should see something like this:

If you now restart Console, you should see a bit different  look (which you like, I hope).

4. Editor

As pormised, we now come to pick a good programmers editor. There are a lot of choices out there and I won’t come to claim any of them to be THE single best. Also, as many of the best editors are actually paid software, I won’t advertise any of them, but will only make a short list of them and point out a few things to notice.

Many of Rails developers are Mac users and many of them use TextMate as their editor, thus a lot of TextMate bundles exist to make developers life easier. It might be a good idea to start with one of those that support TextMate bundles.

Give a try of many of them to find your poison:

• Notepad++ – free and powerful editor
• jEdit – also free, but Java-based and cross-platform
• E Texteditor - paid app, but has the benefit of using TextMate bundles.
• Sublime Text 2 – paid app (currently in beta), also supports TextMate bundles, it’s cross-platform
• Komodo Edit – free IDE, cross-platform
• RubyMine – paid Ruby IDE, cross-platform

Configure

Which ever editor you choose, most definitely you need to configure it to your needs. At the bare minimum, you have to choose whether you use tabs or spaces and how many of them for indenting code lines.

To give you a head start, it seems to be convention in Ruby world to use 2 spaces instead of tabs – this is a good balance between readability and width for most Ruby projects and also makes it easy to share and edit Ruby code online (where tabs are not so easy to enter) or via email etc.

5. Rails

Last thing before firing off development would be to install Rails itself along with its dependencies. Open console and type the following commands.

gem install bundler

This installs fantastic Bundler gem to manage your apps gems for you.

gem install rails

And this installs Rails itself.

Now, off you go. Start developing Rails applications. Shue!

Related posts:

1. Installing Windows 7 on MacBook Pro without SuperDrive
2. Ruby lambda
3. Ruby Rack servers benchmark

But the problem is that TextMate 2 alpha currently does not have
“New file” option in the Dock menu. I really miss this, because of my workflow – I use spaces to manage projects and programs I have open concurrently and I don’t want to mix the TextMate windows between spaces. So opening new TM2 window in current space is a must.

But surely the developers are preoccupied with more important features and thus I decided to throw in my 2 cents and cobbled together an AppleScript that one can use to open new window in current space.

TMNewWindow

Place this script in your Applications folder and wait until Spotlight has indexed it. Then push whatever shortcut you have for Spotlight (or Alfred, if you are like me) and enter few first chars. I have found that tmn is enough to trigger this application.

Hitting enter will fire this app and a sec later new TextMate window should be opened in current space. Definitely faster than switching to TM2, hitting ⌘N and then moving the window to correct space.

Related posts:

1. BetterTouchTool and Safari

iPhoto Trash

iPhoto uses its own trashcan to store deleted photos for easy retrieval. You can view the contents of trash by clicking its icon in the left pane in the Recent section.

Empty iPhoto Trash

To free your disk space of these deleted photos you have to simply empty the trashcan. To do so, just push Empty Trash button in the upper right corner if you are inside the Trash.

Or at any time select “Empty iPhoto Trash” from the iPhoto menu as seen below.

Now it prompts you with the usual confirmation:

And when you agree, it will move the photos to the Mac OS X system Trash.

Empty Trash

After the iPhoto Trash has been emptied, the files are now in system Trash and to finally free disk space, this also must be emptied. This is done as usual, by right-clicking (Ctrl-clicking) the Trashcan and selecting “Empty Trash“. Again, it will prompt you with confirmation, but this time it includes all the files in the Trash so be sure to be sure.

Safety net

As you see, freeing disk space from deleted photos can be a long walk, but after all, photos might just be our most valuable files on our computers as they are impossible to recreate.

Always make (several) backups of your photos to be sure not to loose them.

Related posts:

1. iTunes, iPhoto and Migration Assistant

In our office we have a Linux box, a set of speakers and a few laptops sporting Mac and Windows. Tonight I set out with a goal to turn that Linux box into an AirPlay speaker so that each of us can play music from their laptop without having to reconnect the cables every time.

Airfoil

First off I stubled upon RougeAmoeba’s Airfoil, which is a $25 sofware piece that, enables half a dozen device classes to be hooked up as remote speakers to a Mac or Windows (yes, that too). And, better yet, instead of only enabling iTunes to play, it can reroute all sound to that remote speaker. Though, it’s Linux speaker software is free download, it still seems to require paid Airfoil to route audio, because bare iTunes couldn’t care less of the wannabe Linux speaker that should have appeared to the WiFi. As the price would have been multiplied by the number of laptops, it was unfortunately out of question.

Shairport

With a bit of googling around, I next found Shairport, which (if I got it correctly) is based on data found in a hacked and reverse engineered AirPort Express. ShairPort turns a random PC into a fake AirPlay speaker set. The software itself got installed relatively quickly after going through the short docs (perhaps because I had most of the dependencies like avahi etc already in place because of the Airfoil).

Also, for Airfoil, I had already opened firewall to Zeroconf/Bonjour and ports TCP:5000-5005 and UDP:6000-6005  which seemed to apply to Shairport too.

After starting up the daemon, all of our iTunes magically discovered the new remote speakers and allowed us to play music there with a simple mouse click. Even from Windows. And from iPhone. And, if wanted, all at the same time. Voila!

This is definitely much easier than messing with the wires all the time.

No related posts.

Please read all about the SOPA blackout in the Wikipedia article. I have signed a petition against SOPA and I am fully concerned about what this could mean to Internet.

Wikipedia is main source of information for me and when googling around I hit Wikipedia dozens of times a day. I would not even like to think about what it would be like if Wikipedia would be blocked, because of linking to webpages that, among other things, contained some alleged pirated materials.

Now what?

Having said all this and having already put in my 2 cents, I now have work to do and this blackout is hindering my progress, even if for just one day. Fortunately Wikipedia has not removed itself from Internet. It only has drawn a black blanket over it’s contents. So, after viewing this black page and dedicating a few (milli)seconds to think about the consequences of SOPA, tech-savvy people can still reach the articles and make use of them.

NOTE: This post is not about avoiding Wikipedia blackout. This post is about getting work done, after you have signed some anti-SOPA petition or written a letter of concern to the US Senate or your own Ministry of Foreign Affairs if you live outside US.

Desopafy

There are several ways to still access Wikipedia today. Wikipedia itself has pointed out that mobile Wikipedia is still accessible and as the blackout is JavaScript-based, disabling JavaScript, will avoid the blackout too. But being JavaScript based, the blackout can also be reversed with JS. My initial code was a bit crude, so I googled around and found a more thorough version (thanks timraymond and kballenegger). Add this link to your bookmarks (or drag it to your bookmark bar):

Desopafy_Wikipedia

This bookmarklet will hide the blackout and show the Wikipedia article. But please, do at least think of what this blackout means, before you remove it.

No related posts.

The GIMP Resynthesizer plugin makes it easy to intelligently remove unwanted objects from photos. There seems to be a 2.0 version of this plugin available at the developer’s github page (bootchk/resynthesizer), but I haven’t tried that yet.

How this plugin works has been covered number of times before, (e.g this “Content-Aware Fill” clip or this resynthesizer tutorial), so I won’t go into details of this here.

Only difference for me was that I used the Enchance > Smart remove selection... filter rather than Map > Resynthesize... and the result is displayed below.

No related posts.

Still, unlike Gmail, Mail.app by default shows only incoming conversation and omits sent messages, unless one presses the “Show related messages” button.

Fortunately there is a preference option to turn this on constantly.

Go to menu “Mail > Preferences > View” and check “Include related messages” box.

I wonder why this option is turned off by default?

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