Colin Charles Agenda

I tried running Inkscape and it wouldn’t start. It seems that OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) doesn’t ship X11 any longer, and you have to use XQuartz.

You’re then forced to log out & log back in. Once that is complete, Inkscape and others work again. This problem doesn’t exist with The GIMP any longer as that is now native. Here’s hoping Inkscape moves with the times too.

On OS X Mountain Lion, df now has lots of extra inode information. This is the new default according to the man page (turning on -i). The workaround to get the old df output is simple – just use -P. So df is now aliased as: df -Ph

byte@lovegood~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51% 62130995 59797234   51%   /

byte@lovegood~$ df -Ph
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51%    /

Much friendlier.

Yesterday I unboxed my new MacBook Air 13″ (full-spec) laptop. I used a USB3 disk to backup via Time Machine the old laptop (which maxed out at USB2), and then did a restore using USB3 last night and today it seems that the laptop is ready to use. This is my first experience with OS X 10.8.2 as well – I was previously on 10.7.5. What did I have to change?

1. I had to re-login to Dropbox, but at least it didn’t have to perform a full sync (there was some data exchanged, but it wasn’t the entire Dropbox folder).
2. I had to re-login to Google Drive. This required a full sync as the old folder was not recognised as an original.
3. I had to make sure settings for iCloud were sane again (as there was a popup).
4. I was asked to re-download MsgFiler and login to the App Store.
5. I had to change the caps lock key to become a control key manually again.
6. The Mail.app version changed and it has to reimport/reindex messages again (this takes some 1 hour 15 minutes on my machine with 33GB of mail).
7. The F4 key for some absurdity goes to an application called Launchpad (that makes it look like an iOS device). I used to have Dashboard on F4 and I much prefer that. It seems the only way without a third party app like Functionflip is to press Fn+F4 to get my Dashboard. I think this is rather silly of Apple – changing muscle memory is difficult.
8. My scroll continued to work from the old settings (I’m no fan of a natural scroll).
9. Time Machine allows you to “inherit backup history”, thus using the same drive that brought you over to be the new backup drive.
10. There now exists a Notification Centre. A little odd thinking that iOS styled notifications have made it here. Do I still need Growl which constantly reminds me that there is a (paid) update waiting?
11. Seems the screensaver and the lock after it has been enabled needs to be re-enabled.
12. CrashPlan would not work as you need Java SE 6 so you’d have to install it – seems odd that Apple decided to drop this rather significant piece of software. Then again, considering who drives ownership, and the recent security scares…
13. sudo tmutil disablelocal – the local backups were enabled again, and I only want Time Machine to have backups to an external disk.
14. I couldn’t print as there needed to be new printer drivers. Many apps had to be updated in the App Store. Gasp.
15. Turn off most notifications with Notification Centre. I really don’t want to be “beeped” when mail comes in.

Initial impressions of the laptop? The machine is fast. It has a lot to do with the SSD disk, as well as the 4-core i7 processor. Out of the box, the battery capacity is meant to be 6700 mAh, though I’m getting 6669 mAh. Battery life is one of the strongest reasons why I picked up a 13″ over a 11″ – I just didn’t want to have to deal with flaky batteries a few years down the road… 7 hours brought down to say 5 is manageable, but 5 hours brought down to say 3 is annoying.

Another reason is resolution. Using a 15″ MacBook Pro to a 13″ MacBook Air has no change in resolution for me either – its all 1440×900. It seems 512MB of virtual RAM is reserved for the Intel graphics card (so I guess this Air won’t suffer the same fate as the first ever MacBook Air which was dog slow in terms of graphics).

Its good to note that the Thunderbolt port is also MiniDisplay compatible – all my old cables work. The only catch is that it is no longer on the left side of the laptop but the right side.

Time Machine decided to misbehave. I’m still running OS X 10.7.5. 

mount_hfs & syslogd were consuming close to 100% CPU time (on this machine with 2 cores), so it was clearly grinding the system to a halt. I couldn’t kill the mount_hfs process (kill -9), but I could kill syslogd though it would repeatedly restart.

Problem was only solved via power cycling. There was advice from Macworld titled: One fix for a runaway syslogd process, but nothing from that was useful.

Root cause seems to be another external disk going wonky. Yes, I’ve seen 2 disks die being Time Machine backups in a span of what, 3.5 years? Worrying trend. 


root 30064 88.0 0.0 2434804 776 ?? R 10:40am 2:45.62 /sbin/mount_hfs -u 99 -g 99 -m 755 -o nodev -o noowners -o nosuid -o owners /dev/disk1s2 /Volumes/Expansion Drive


I just purchased The Humble eBook Bundle. I primarily use a Mac OSX based laptop (my MacBook Pro), and secondarily use Linux in various flavours (a Lenovo ThinkPad runs Ubuntu, various boxes run a combination of that and Fedora & CentOS, and virtual machines are growing).

It seems not only with regards to Orbitz showing better, more expensive, hotels to Mac users, even when it comes to the Humble Bundle, Mac and Linux users pay more. Are we just conditioned to pay more than Microsoft Windows users?

I’m glad to support DRM-free e-books & great content. Who knows, I might discover something new.

Over a year ago, I wrote about Messenger apps, disrupting text messages (SMS). During that time, Apple launched another service called iMessage (standard with iOS 5 and greater). Send unlimited text messages via WiFi or 3G, and pick up where you left off across devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch).

I was desperately looking for a BBM desktop client. I’ve since stopped using BBM much due to the fact that most of my friends on the service have ditched the BlackBerry in favour of Android and iOS devices. So now we only keep in touch via WhatsApp. And more recently, KakaoTalk. Makes me wonder which came first — WhatsApp or KakaoTalk.

But not to digress, Apple has done a one-up. They’re providing iMessage support in Mountain Lion. And this is a killer feature because now you can chat on your iPhone, move to an iPad if you’re lying on your couch, and go straight to continue messaging on your MacBook Air when you’re on your desk. You also have group chat with iMessage. This is an extreme productivity booster when you need to keep in touch with groups (i.e. don’t only chat on the go, but chat at your desk too).

The only limitation of iMessage? All users need to have an iOS device. I’d hope Apple would open it all up so other people can built against the iMessages API, but thats probably a pipe dream. This limitation is basically similar to the once popular BBM.

With two major platforms, Android (Google Talk) and iOS (iMessage), you’ll go where your friends are.