mac

Waking up a NAS from Mac OS X at boot time using Wake-on-LAN (WOL)

Posted on by Jan

Please see this post for a more recent version which works in OS X 10.11 El Capitan and newer.

Do you own a Wake-on-LAN (WOL) capable NAS (network attached storage) unit? Is your computer a Mac? Want to save on your energy bill?

The consumer NAS units you can buy these days are actually small Linux computers with a software RAID and a bunch of S-ATA hard drives inside. Depending on the make and model, some NAS units consume a considerable amount of energy even in standby mode. For instance, my QNAP NAS still consumes around 25W after all disks spun down. However, once I shut my NAS down, it only consumes 1W in deep sleep mode. It just keeps its network adapter barely alive so it’s able to “hear” a Wake-on-LAN signal.

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How to merge/combine/join multiple .mp4 videos on the Mac

Posted on by Jan

I have a whole bunch of photography tutorials I converted from Flash video format (.flv) to .mp4 so I can watch them on my iPad. Since those tutorials are broken down into a myriad of .mp4 episodes it makes it much harder to watch them in the right order. I needed to find a way to merge several episodes into large movies. This is where Squared 5’s MPEG StreamClip for Mac comes in handy. While this free video conversion tool allows you to convert alls sorts of video formats to .mp4, it also allows you to merge multiple .mp4 videos. Here’s how to do it. Continue reading →

How to convert .flv Flash video to .mp4 on the Mac

Posted on by Jan

I have a bunch of photography tutorials in the Flash video .flv format which I want to watch on my iPad. As you may be aware, everything with the name Flash in it doesn’t play too well on Apple’s iOS devices. VLC Media Player for iOS is able to play the .flv format but Apple doesn’t allow 3rd party software devs to use the built-in H.264 hardware acceleration for video playback. As as result, .flv videos usually don’t play very well on iOS devices. Besides, I prefer to manage my video collection in iTunes instead of dragging every clip onto an app icon.

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ASUS P6T & OS X 10.6.5 update – still no support for SSD TRIM command

Posted on by Jan

I just updated my ASUS P6T Hackintosh to the latest Mac OS X 10.6.5 developer build and it looks like there aren’t going to be any changes regarding the support for the SSD TRIM command for the official release of Mac OS X 10.6.5.

  Model:	INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GN
  Revision:	2CV102HD
  Serial Number:	CVPO942200DA080BGN
  Native Command Queuing:	Yes
  Queue Depth:	32
  Removable Media:	No
  Detachable Drive:	No
  BSD Name:	disk0
  Medium Type:	Solid State
  TRIM Support:	No <--

My 2nd generation Intel SSD supports the TRIM command in Windows 7 even though Mac OS System Profiler thinks it doesn’t. By the way, aside from the AppleHDA-kext replacement the update process from 10.6.4 to 10.6.5 went smoothly as usual on my ASUS P6T rig.

How to connect a Holux M-241 in 64-bit Snow Leopard over USB

Posted on by Jan

I took me quite some time to figure this out (again). Actually, the solution was already provided in one of my posts from 2008 but I had completely forgotten about it. I recently downloaded the new 64-bit USBtoUART SiLabs driver (the package contains a 32-bit driver too) to hook up my Holux M-241 GPS logger to a USB port on my Mac. Every time I tried to connect the GPS client software BT747 to the Holux data logger I received the following exception: Continue reading →

Mac doesn’t auto-sleep anymore, hard disks too

Posted on by Jan

Lately, my Mac was having two weird problems.
First, it didn’t go to sleep after the amount of time set in Energy Manager anymore. In fact, it only went to sleep if either I pressed the sleep button on the case or selected the sleep menu entry in the top left Apple-icon menu.

The second problem was that unused hard disks didn’t go to sleep anymore. If I manually ejected an unused hard disk it only went to sleep for a short time. After about 30 seconds I could hear the disk spin up again. Well, obviously something I installed on the Mac was preventing it from going to sleep properly.

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How-to: NFS mount a Dreambox from a Mac

Posted on by Jan

Gosh, it ain’t that easy to mount a remote NFS share from a Mac. At least not if the NFS server is a Dreambox DM800 sat/cable tuner.

Connecting to a NFS share using Mac OS X is usually pretty easy: open Finder, hit Command-K and enter the remote NFS share address:

My Dreambox is running at 192.168.1.35 but you have to provide your own address or hostname. In my case, the Dreambox also resolves with the hostname dm800.local. If you’re unable to connect using Finder and you’re sure there’s an NFS server running in your Dreambox you will have to do some tricks with Terminal to make it work.

Use the showmount command to see the exported NFS shares:

showmount -e 192.168.1.35
Exports list on 192.168.1.35:
/media/hdd                    Everyone

If you see a NFS share using showmount, let’s try to connect to it from the command line:

sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.35:/media/hdd /Volumes

You may get an output like this:

mount_nfs: bad MNT RPC: RPC: Timed out
mount_nfs: can't access /media/hdd/: Permission denied

or

mount_nfs: /Volumes: Operation not permitted

If this is the case, you will have to apply two changes to your Dreambox’s NFS server configuration in order to be able to connect using Finder. Continue reading →

Nikon D80 RAW .NEF GPS geotagging workflow on the Mac

Posted on by Jan

I already wrote a few articles about how to use my preferred GPS logging device, the Holux M-241, on the Mac. In this article I’m focusing on the linking process between the GPS data and the photos. This process is called a geotagging workflow. Most of the time I’m taking pictures in RAW mode so the workflow is optimized for this type of images. I’m using a Nikon D80 but the workflow should work with almost any other (Nikon) digital camera like the Nikon D200 or Nikon D300 too. Continue reading →