Posts Tagged by OSX

OSX, iPhone, iTunes – finer grained syncing

28-Jun-2011 Posted by Sonia Hamilton under
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iTunes’ syncing of movies and podcasts is a big lame – there’s not enough fine grained control. For example, you can’t say “sync only this category of movies”, or “sync 30 minutes of podcast X, and 4 episodes of podcast Y, and only remove episodes of podcast Z after they’ve been listened to twice“. And at the moment I don’t have the time to migrate to Android and/or write my own podcast sync tools on Linux, so I’m stuck with iTunes/OSX. (I used to have some scripts for doing this for an ancient device, but device is dead and scripts are suffering from bit-rot).

One work around I’ve found is to categorise as much media as possible as either “Music” or “Music Videos”. You can then work with playlists and “smart” (sic) playlists to get a bit more control.

Serial Port Access on OSX to Cisco devices

26-Feb-2010 Posted by Sonia Hamilton under , , ,
1 Comment

How to connect to a Cisco device (or other serial devices) using OSX and a USB to Serial converter (eg ATEN). Googling, everyone says to use zterm, but I couldn’t get it to work (and zterm looks and feels like a toy).

This probably isn’t the “Mac way” of doing things, but </whatever>…

Install PL2303 USB to Serial Driver for Mac OS X, restart :-(

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port upgrade outdated
sudo port install minicom

Work out tty of USB-Serial converter:

ls /dev/tty* > pre

Plug in USB-Serial converter.

ls /dev/tty* > pst
% diff pre pst
3a4
> /dev/tty.PL2303-00002006

Link up to make life easier:

cd /dev
sudo ln -s tty.PL2303-00002006 ttyusb

Setup minicom, and use colour:

sudo minicom -s -c on

Setup defaults to:

  • /dev/ttyusb (ctrl-A, O, Serial Port Setup)
  • 8N1
  • 9600
  • no hardware or software flow control
  • init string empty (so garbage doesn’t appear on screen when you connect) – ctrl-A, O, Init string
  • save settings as default (ctrl-A, O, Save setup as dfl)

Always use colour:

  • add export MINICOM=”-c on” to shell rc file (~/.bashrc, .~/zshrc, etc)

Connect (sudo minicom), hit enter a few times, and you should be on the device.

macports: git-upload-pack: command not found

19-Nov-2009 Posted by Sonia Hamilton under ,
4 Comments

When doing a git clone from a repo hosted on a Mac OSX machine (installed using macports), I get this error on the client (Linux, cygwin, whatever):

git-upload-pack: command not found

Solution is to do this on the OSX machine:

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/git* .

Obviously some $PATH funkiness is going on somewhere on the Mac, and I should find a better fix. My personal $PATH on the Mac is OK:

$ echo $PATH
/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin

Mac OSX Startup

15-May-2007 Posted by Sonia Hamilton under
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Some notes on the startup sequence for Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger), and troubleshooting the startup process. These will be corrected/expanded as I learn more about the process…

Links

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