The moment you download OS X Lion, you'd better have a copy of OS X Snow Leopard, because by default the new Apple OS can only be installed on a previous installed Operating System (upgrade). So if you need to reinstall your Mac in the future, you need to install OS X Snow Leopard first, and then upgrade to OS X Lion. Also, there's no way of ordering an OS X Lion copy on DVD..... Well, that sucks.
Fortunately, there's a way of creating the installation DVD by extracting the actual disk image from the downloaded OS X Lion installation package.
The Leica M9 has no means of determining foreign or old lenses. The newer Leica lenses have a 6-bit (visual) coding mechanism for determining the lens. Problem is that this is only for (relatively new) Leica lenses. There is the possibility to manually select the lens in the menu of the M9, but that's only limited to the Leica brand lenses. No option for Carl Zeiss lenses.
For certain characteristics, and in-camera processing of the RAW image it's handy to manually select a Leica lens even though you've attached a Zeiss lens. This can be automated by coding the lenses yourself (or have Zeiss do it for €100 a lens).
All this is nice, but it still generates photos with faulty EXIF information, because you shot the photo with a CZ C-Sonnar 1.5/50mm and not with a Leica 1.4/50mm Summilux ASPH....
The iTunesHelper application is used to automatically detect iPod's/iPad's and iPhones, when you connect these to your Mac. The application launches iTunes, and (if configured) synchronizes stuff. Very handy, but it can be quite annoying.
E.g. I have an iMac (main 'PC' around the house), and a MacBook. All the synchronization stuff is done on my iMac, and I don't sync anything on my MacBook. But when I attach my iPhone to my MacBook for Internet access (tethering), it launches iTunes and wants to synchronize with an empty iTunes. Something I definitelly don't want.
This feature can be turned off by removing the iTunesHelper application entry from the Login Items in your account settings, but turning it back on is something completely different. I accidentally removed it from my iMac, which wasn't supposed to happen....
No idea if this is a new feature introduced with a newer version of Dropbox, but it is possible to download nzb and torrent files through the Mobile Safari app.
What you need is the following (for a complete downloading system):
- A Dropbox account (the 2GB version is free!!!!)
- A torrent application with the possibility of using a so-called watch-folder (e.g. Vuze)
- An usenet application with a watch-folder capability (e.g. SabNZBd+)
- An iPhone with the Dropbox app.
First you need to setup Dropbox. This is the easiest part. Just create two folders called 'NZB' and 'Torrent'. These folders will contain the downloaded torrent and nzb files.
After that you need to configure the Vuze and/or NZB download application to use a watch-folder.
I use these apps on my Mac Mini server. So it's operational 24/7.
For testing and development purposes I run a Cisco Secure ACS 5.x in a virtual machine at home. In this environment I also run an Apple Directory Service. I'll be using this setup to test several 802.1x and RADIUS authentication schemes.
To get things going I needed to connect to the ACS to my LDAP Directory. The Apple Directory Service is a bit different from the regular LDAP implementations. They seem to add the 'apple' reference in a lot of attribute values. Thankfully the ACS has a very versatile configuration interface.
Apple references in attribute valuesNormally, the group definition would be 'group' instead of 'apple-group'. So the configuration of the ACS should reflect these variations to the standard.
Earlier this week I got the announcement (I opened an Adobe application) that there was an update for the Adobe Reader app. Security-conscious as I am, I fired up the update process.
Each time, this process stopped at the (near??) end of the installation with the following error:
The operation couldn’t be completed. (com.adobe.ARM error 1807.)
The error also suggested looking at the log file. Examination of this file showed nothing out of the ordinary. At least not that made sense to me.
There were some lines in the log that made me try to do a work-around (in bold);
During the clean-up of my personal data on my Mac's, I found several PGP encrypted containers, and encrypted files. To see what was stored in them, I needed to install PGP (again).
After installing the software I dug up my keyrings and everything worked fine, until I tried to encrypt an e-mail. In the old days you had a button for encrypting the body of an e-mail message, but today things have changed. PGP is using some sort of (local) proxy to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify e-mail messages. BUT there's also the possibility to do this with text on the clipboard, or text you selected with your mouse/keyboard.
This is where I ran into some missing functionality; Normally the PGP actions are visible under the 'right-mouse' click -> Services, but no PGP actions available. Further investigation showed that no PGP actions were available on (plain) text in editors. PGP actions on entire files were no problem.
Today we ran into a feature of the Machine Authentication Restrictions (MAR) option in the Cisco Secure ACS Radius server. It seems that when you're using the ACS for 802.1x authentication, you have the option of demanding that the authenticating users can only be authenticated when the computer is already authenticated. This way, you make sure that no user can access the network without a legitimate PC.
PhotoLinkerI tend to geotag most of my photos. This way I have location information with the photo for future reference. It's also a neat feature that you might exploit when creating photo albums with e.g. iPhoto. The GPS coordinates in the images creates the option to create maps in iPhoto albums.
I use geotagging in two different ways. I use the jf Geocoding plugin in Lightroom and the PhotoLinker application. Both have their (dis)advantages. Something I won't go into in this post.
;)