Archive: October 10th, 2003

Words fail me:

"SunnComm Technologies, a developer of CD antipiracy technology, said Thursday that it will likely sue a Princeton student who early this week showed how to evade the company’s copy protection by pushing a computer’s Shift key."

This is going to be yet another entry of pure OS X geekery so if that’s not your cup of nerd tea then look away now.

First off, here’s a great tip from Tim Bray:

“If you boot a Mac while holding down the “T” key, it turns into a passive FireWire drive, and another Mac that you plug it into sees a big fast disk drive.”

He’s right, y’know.

I had a 7GB iMovie project sitting on my iBook ever since someone brought a DV camera to a Salter Cane gig and I downloaded the results there and then. I had been meaning to transfer it to my iMac for some time but I knew it would take ages over a wireless or ethernet network. With FireWire it took about ten minutes. I just used the FireWire cable that came with iSight to hook up the two machines.

Now for even more geek happiness…

Remember I was talking about the cool calendar files that are hidden away in OS X:

“Now LazyWeb, how about fixing me a cron job that runs that command and emails me the output every morning?”

Well, both Jeff Croft and Dave Phelan wrote to me to tell me how to edit my crontab to add just such a cron job. Unfortunately, I neglected to mention that I didn’t have Sendmail up and running on my machine.

I figured it would be a horrendously complicated process to get Sendmail going but thanks to this page of instructions from O’Reilly, it was a very simple matter indeed.

Sendmail is running. My crontab is updated. I’ve also added the great command line tool iTerm to my dock.

I’m starting to feel like a proper geek.