If you like Quickview in Leopard (and I do) then you may want to checkout this

Or should I say there is a hole in my firewall……

I just discovered that the firewall in Mac OS X 10,5 (aka Leopard) is by default set to allow all incoming connections. I noticed this yesterday and it was confirmed by this article on the BBC website.

I can’t check if this works or not, as I haven’t received my copy of Leopard yet but it would appear the screen sharing function in iChat is available externally.

Check out this hint

Do you have problems with your Mac browser not tabbing in to drop down boxs on forms? It's very annoying to say the least.

Hydey asked me about it last night and so I thought I'd research it - sure enough I came across the solution after some digging around on Google.

If you open System Preferences and click Keyboard & Mouse. Goto the Keyboard shortcuts tab and at the bottom of the screen select the All Controls selection box. Close down System Preferences and you're done.

Enjoy!

If you ever want a backup solution that will automatically backup all your word documents for example, no matter where they are located on your Mac/PC - then check out Mozy!

You can get a 2GB account for free, this allows you to backup from 2 computers. If you need to connect more computers or you want unlimited space, then it's $4.95 per month. You can also earn more space by referring people, so sign up by clicking here https://mozy.com/?code=UGC5ZB

I've always known Finder was just another application running on OS X but had wondered why it didn't have a quit/exit menu item. You may need to restart Finder, due to a problem, or you may just want the memory for some other process.

Here's how to do it:

1. Open terminal
2. Type defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool yes
3. Hit return and then close Terminal
4. Goto the Force Quit menu and relaunch Finder
5. Now you have a Quit Finder menu item - just like other apps.

Enjoy!

I was explaining to a couple of friends how I backup our music & other data and thought I'd write it up for others to benefit from.

My first requirement is that the backup be done automatically. The problem with backing up data manually is that it relies on you to perform the backups. If you're anything like me you won't remember to do this and when your system crashes you'll have lost all of your data since your backup.

My second requirement was that the solution had to maintain file permissions, so that upon restore the security of the files would be maintained.

My final requirement was that the solution had to be able to run even when I was on the road. I travel a lot and can be away for a week or two at a time. This is when I need a backup solution, as my laptop is most likely to be damaged or nicked when I'm away.

So after looking around at what was available I decided upon rsync. This utility is built in to OS X (as well as other *nix systems - you can also get a Windows version if you want), so it requires little or no setup.

So what did I do?

Well, I first of all listed out all the directories on my laptop that I wanted backed up. It's important to make sure you keep this list updated, so you don't backup unwanted information or miss vital data.

Using this list I created a bash script which passed my directories to backup to the rsync command. My backup involved me backing up my data from my laptop to the mac at home. The command looks like this:

rsync -avz -e ssh /Users/chris /MyData chris@myserver.com:/Backup/chris.

I'll explain the break down of the command:

-a this tells rsync to use archive mode, e.g. it keeps all file permissions intact - check out man rsync for more info.
-v this makes the output verbose - I have this emailed to me, so I can check what was backed up.
-z this compresses the file data
-e ssh this tells rsync that my target location should be accessed over ssh. This enables me to use my public IP address so that I can backup my data securely whilst on the road.
/Users/chris and /MyData are my directories I want backed up. You can list out as many directories as you like here.
chris@myserver.com:/Backup/chris is my target, where I want the data stored. I use certificate based authentication to prevent password prompts. If you're going to do this, keep your certificate in a safe place and limit what the user can do.

Once the shell script is in place, you can insert a cron job to perform the backup automatically for you. I have mine set to run every night at 2am. Check out man cron and crontab for more info.

This backup solution means I can have all my machines backing up to the home machine, over a secure connection, maintaining file permissions and done automatically.

Hopefully this will help you to get started, leave a comment if you have any questions.

People seem to be asking for binary versions of the Handbrake CLI - HBTest. I tried building this a number of times on my Intel box but it wouldn’t compile, so I ended up building it on a PowerPC platform.

But it works quite happily on both of them. I have no idea why it wouldn’t build correctly on the Intel machine, it just kept erroring on the libavcodec. Who cares anyway, the build works on both platforms, enjoy!

You can download it from here.