Bill Morefield My thoughts, discoveries, and occasional rambiings.

January 22, 2014

Cisco ASDM gives “Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar” Error

Filed under: Cisco — Tags: , — Bill Morefield @ 4:45 pm

Java pushed out a new update recently that implemented a change that had been warned about for a while. by default it now no longer allows running apps that are unsigned, self-signed, or without permission attributes.

This includes Cisco ASDM manager. The quick fix (other than Cisco adding the missing permission attributes file) is to add the web address where ASDM is accessed as an exception. You can do do this in Java Settings control panel. This is reached under Window by the Java option under Control Panel.

There select the Security tab and click the Edit Site List… button next to the Exception Site List. Here add the URL to the firewalls that you access with ASDM. After doing this, ASDM will connect and work again normally.

Interestingly enough given Java’s sudden concern about my security, it still asks to install the Ask Toolbar every update….

More info on the change at http://www.java.com/en/download/help/java_blocked.xml

January 6, 2014

Goodbye AppStorm

Filed under: article — Tags: — Bill Morefield @ 12:02 pm

Saw today that AppStorm is shutting down. I hate to see that. I admittedly am biased as  I wrote for the Mac and Windows sides of the sites  through late last year. I always felt the site had good reviews and found a number of useful tools and apps through the last few years. More worrying is another quality site goes down as losing money while the “Ten Surprising Ways Your PC Can Hurt Your Cat” sites keep going.

November 29, 2013

Encoding CSR on Exchange 2010

Filed under: web — Tags: , , — Bill Morefield @ 11:46 am

Mostly writing this for my own benefit as I have to do this a couple times a year and always have to look it up. By default if you request a new or renewed certificate signing request on Exchange 2010, it comes out as a binary file that almost no certificate authority accepts. They want a base 64 encoded file instead.

It’s easy to convert the binary file to base 64 though using the certutil utility using the encode option.

certutil -encode C:\renewal.req C:\renewal.csr

This command encodes the binary file renewal.req into a base 64 encoded file renewal.csr that will work with any certificate authority.

October 22, 2013

Fixing a Lightroom Catalog

Filed under: photos — Tags: , — Bill Morefield @ 9:30 am

The biggest risk of any type of database file is corruption. Sometimes you can fix it, but too often the only way to recover from a corrupted file is to restore a backup from before the problem showed up and rebuild or recreate anything lost. For full database servers there are ways to minimize these problems, but for personal catalogs not so much. Major corruption let’s you know, often with a corrupt file message when starting the program. When the corruption is subtle you may not know it until it’s too late to easily recover.

I do a lot of photography and organize my work using Adobe Lightroom. At heart the Lightroom catalog is a specialized database storing information about the photos and the data you’ve attached to them. I found myself seeing an odd error whenever I would take an image into Photoshop for editing, the edited photo would not show in Lightroom as it should. After searching the Internet and talking with Adobe support, I confirmed the catalog was the problem.

I now faced the prospect of either creating a new catalog, importing my photos, and then rebuilding lost data or rolling back to a several month old backup and redoing every import and edit since then. The later might not have been a bad option except I’d done quite a few of both the previous few weeks. Either way I’d have to hope I didn’t miss anything. Neither felt like a particularly good option.

I began to look for ways to possibly pull the data I couldn’t normally save, such as pick/reject flags, from one catalog to another. I knew there was an SDK to create plugins and tools to work with Lightroom and I began to think of something to export everything I cared about into something like an XML or CSV file and then import it again.

I had no luck finding an existing app or plugin to do this, but during my search I learned that the catalog file in fact is a database. It’s a fairly common database format known as SQLite. This led me to the hope that I could extract the data I wanted using database queries. All those years writing web apps looked to be about to pay off in getting my data from the corrupted catalog.

I found two articles on the web at http://gerhardstrasse.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/recover-from-a-corrupt-adobe-lightroom-catalog-file/ and http://www.simplyness.com/more-photography-tips/recover-corrupted-unrepairable-lightroom-3-catalog-with-sqlite.html. Neither of these articles worked perfectly for me, but did get me in the right direction.

Without diving too deep into the technical details, SQL databases are a fairly common database structure and SQL is the language used natively to create and manipulate those databases. The process described involved converting the database into a text file that contains a series of SQL commands that could then be used to create the database.

First I downloaded the command line tool to deal with SQLite databases from https://www.sqlite.org/download.html.  I downloaded and unzipped the shell binary for Mac OS resulting in a program that could be run from the command line to manage a SQLite database. I move the sqlite3 binary to my home folder along with a copy of my catalog file leaving the original safely put away in case this didn’t work. I then used the following to dump out the contents of the database into a text file containing the SQL commands needed to create that database:

echo .dump | ./sqlite3 ~/Lightroom-3-Catalog.lrcat > ~/Lightroom-catalog.sql

The vertical bar (|) breaks this command into two parts. The first part takes the characters .dump and sends it as the input to the second part. The effect is the same as typing those commands after the second part of the line runs. The rest of the command executes the sqlite3 binary I downloaded giving it my catalog file as the database (and yes I’ve been using this catalog since Lightroom 3). The .dump command tells SQLite to display the text commands it would take to create the database. At the end the greater than sign then tells my computer to send that text to a file named Lightroom-catalog.sql instead of displaying them on the screen.

So I now had a huge text file instead of a unreadable catalog file. Some articles I read noted common errors seen in the SQL commands, but my scan of the data found nothing out of order. So now that I had a text file I wanted to create a new database using this command:

cat Lightroom-catalog.sql | ./sqlite3 ~/Lightroom-Catalog-Repaired.lrcat

This command is again split into two parts. The cat command takes the contents of the Lightroom-catalog.sql file we just created and normally sends them to the screen. As before though the vertical bar instead sends them as input to the command that follows the pipe. This command creates a new database with the name. In effect the entire contents of the 600+ MB text file is automatically typed in.

I moved the new catalog file back to my Lightroom folder and opened it. Behold everything was there and all looked good. Only problem I ran into was that when I next imported photos into Lightroom it saw the parent of the folder holding these new files as different than the original folder in spite of being the same. It made no sense to me, but was easily fixed by clicking on each subfolder and using the locate folder to get everything synced up.

It’s been a bit over a month now and all is still working well. Hope that helps anyone else running into this problem.

August 13, 2013

Managing Time Machine Backups to Windows Server Continued

Filed under: osx — Tags: , — Bill Morefield @ 10:13 am

Back in June I posted my experience getting Time Machine backups to work with a Windows Server as my main storage. It worked well, but had three problems. First I’d often get an error as it tried to connect to my server when I was away from my home network. I also had to manually mount the drive before the backups would run. Third, I sometimes found issues if I put the computer to sleep in the middle of a backup and woke it up off the home network.

To fix these issues I came up with a few scripts to address those. This first pair are designed to run when I come to my home network and consists of an Apple Script and a shell script.

I’d started these over a year ago, but never perfected them and lived with the limitations. I’d worked on them off an on, but didn’t complete them until I had to recreate my backup system around the time of that last post. The code for starting and stopping Time Machine came from http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/11177/quicksilver-accessible-script-for-disabling-and-enabling-time-machine and the other code came from places now lost.

First the Apple Script to start Time Machine backups:

   1:  tell application "System Preferences" to activate
   2:  tell application "System Events"
   3:      tell process "System Preferences"
   4:              click menu item "Time Machine" of menu "View" of menu bar 1
   5:              tell button "ON" of window 1 to click
   6:      end tell
   7:  end tell
   8:  tell application "System Preferences" to quit
   9:   
  10:  tell Application "Finder"
  11:  Mount volume "cifs://<SERVER>/<SHARE>"
  12:  end tell

Lines 1 – 8 simply start Time Machine by in effect going into preferences and turning it on. Lines 10 – 12 then use mount the server share containing the disk image.

Next I need to mount the disk image. This is trickier than it might seem in my case as I had encrypted the image. I didn’t want to have to type the password each time since I’d already saved it in my Keychain. So I combined a script to pull the password for the disk image named MacBook-Backup.sparsebundle. This would need to change to the name of your disk image if running the script. I then pipe the output of that command to the mount command to mount the disk image. This in effects types in the password read from the Keychain to the prompt when I mount the drive. The path (here /Volumes/TimeMachine/MacBook-Backup.sparsebundle) would need to be changed if you use this script.

security find-generic-password -w -D "disk image password" -l "MacBook-Backup.sparsebundle" | hdiutil attach /Volumes/TimeMachine/MacBook-Backup.sparsebundle

Finally a script to turn off Time Machine.

   1:  tell application "System Preferences" to activate
   2:  tell application "System Events"
   3:      tell process "System Preferences"
   4:              click menu item "Time Machine" of menu "View" of menu bar 1
   5:              tell button "OFF" of window 1 to click
   6:      end tell
   7:  end tell
   8:  tell application "System Preferences" to quit

There are several ways to use these. I initially ran them manually when needed. For automation the best method I found was to use Keyboard Maestro’s ability to run scripts when a wireless network was either connected to or disconnected from. I ran the first two scripts when I connected to my home wireless network and the last when I disconnected from it. I used that process for about a week and a half and found it worked very well.

Since then though I’ve moved from the Windows Home Server to a new Synology NAS. This new NAS supports native Time Machine backups using AFS so I no longer need the disk image process I detailed here. It worked for me well over a year with only one problem and the scripts worked for about a month so I’d feel comfortable going back to them if the need arises.

July 29, 2013

Running 3.1 Miles (Or My First 5K)

Filed under: health — Tags: , , — Bill Morefield @ 9:23 am

I used to have a motto that it was pointless to run unless being chased. Thankfully I’ve rarely found myself in a position where I needed to run for safety and therefore rarely ran unless caught in the rain.

I’ve already noted the weight and exercise changes I’ve made over the last couple of years, but running is a pretty new experience. I spent most of the spring training for a backpacking trip planned for June out west. That meant lots of long hikes in hilly terrain worried about distance and not time. I did several hikes of as much as ten miles, but rarely worried about a pace greater than a steady walk.

The backpacking trip didn’t quite go as planned and now will take place in early November. Shortly before that fell apart though I had decided I needed something to work toward once I came back. I was looking at coming back in mid June with the main goal I’d held for my spring gone.

Why I decided to try running I do not know, but somehow it felt like a change of pace. Shorter distances in faster time which sort of flipped what I’d been doing. I figured given the condition I was in I could train about six weeks and have a decent result so I looked for something around the end of July and found it in the Bele Chere 5K in Asheville, NC.

Then shortly afterward June happened. The trip fell apart on me at the last minute. And shortly after I got back from it my father had an accident at work breaking his hip. Several weeks of hospital and rehab for him followed and my training time was the victim. I trained, but not as many days as I’d hoped. I got what I could in, but my goal went to simply finishing. I felt I could walk ten miles without a break still, I worried about being the last person to finish just over three.

Bele Chere was a festival held in downtown Asheville at the end of July that everyone in the city seems to either love or hate. No, the locals I know mostly either hated or ignored it. I use the past tense as it appears this year’s was the last one. I heard more love than most years this time perhaps for that reason. Interestingly I’ve been in the city the last three years during the festival, but this was my only time actually going to it.

I get downtown early. It’s early morning in Asheville and I’m walking around Pack Square park warming up mostly by just walking. My test 5K shortly before the race had been run when I was really tired and a bit under the weather, but my time had been terrible. My goal as I walk around the park next to the start and finish areas is to finish at a pace of twelve minutes per mile or a bit over 37 minutes for the race.

It’s been a cloudy morning and drizzly. The night before had scattered some rain around the city. The calls are for us to start to gather around the start/finish line. I settl toward the back of the middle of the pack figuring it’s about the right spot for me on my pace. Shortly after getting there a noticeable flash occurs in the sky. A lot of cameras have been in use, but this ain’t that. The thunder a bit later confirms this. I take a moment to enjoy the irony that coming over the speakers is AC/DC’s Thunderstruck before wondering how they handle thunderstorms.

Lightning flashes a couple more times in the ten minutes or so before the start. Only the last is close enough to be concerning, but it’s not repeated. What does follow though is a downpour of rain a couple of minutes before the 7:30 A.M. start time.

There are almost 1,200 people there at the race start. I work through the largely empty streets of downtown. I’d had the luck and foresight to wear a cap, but even before I cross the start line it, along with my pants and shirt, are soaked to the skin. It’s a cool morning for July, but the movement means I never feel chilled.

The rain last probably the first five minutes of the race. Water runs down the street and there are puddles everywhere the asphalt dips even slightly. My socks get soaked along the way and I’ve no idea if the splash that did it came from me or another running hitting a puddle.

At the same time the race feels like it takes forever, and seems over in minutes. I cross the finish line 37:03 after the starting gun putting me 941 out of 1,177 people listed on the results site this evening. My official time from start line to finish lines of 36:32 matches my own tracking pretty closely for a pace of 11:56 per mile.

I’m not happy with the time, but already see how to improve. More training of course would have helped, I had to walk an uphill section around the two mile mark that likely cost me at least a minute off my time and I lost probably another minute dealing with my shoe laces. I’d not tired them well and had to stop and retie both along the way.

So the question then is will I do it again? Probably so. I’m looking to train better now that life has gotten a bit less crazy and would like to hit something around thirty minutes for a time. When I don’t know, but I’ll probably start looking at area races toward end of August or into September. Be interesting to see what progress I can make in between.

July 9, 2013

My Simple, But Not Easy Weight Loss Plan

Filed under: health — Tags: , — Bill Morefield @ 9:12 am

When you lose over 100 pounds of weight people notice. Especially over the last few months as I’ve moved to pretty close to a normal, healthy weight. Up until a couple months ago when asked I pretty much gave the rather boring answer of “I ate less and exercised more.” That’s really true, but misses a lot of the details. Everyone know that you have to eat less and exercise more to lose weight, but most people, including myself many times, fail to do it.

So what did I do differently this time? A few months ago I wrote a bit about the process, but now let me describe a bit of the daily things I did that worked for me. These I think are the things that I did to lose weight and feel that I’ll keep it off going forward. I’m a lot of things, but not a doctor, trainer, or nutritionist or any other professional at this so take this advice as just what worked for me. I’m not trying to sell you anything, but some of the links to products below might be affiliate links, but they’re the things I’ve used myself.

Exercise feels lousy when you first start, but eventually you do start to actually enjoy it and feel better afterward. Even now though when I’d consider myself in the best shape of my life, I still often feel that nagging laziness when it comes time to work out. At some point just telling yourself to do it and doing so really is everything. I’d developed an enjoyment of hiking early in my weight loss process, partly tying into an interest in outdoor photography, and did a lot of that over the last couple of years. Late last fall I started training for my backpacking trip this summer that didn’t quite work out as planned and will now take place in the fall, but the process meant three to six mile hike much of the winter and spring. Together these meant I spent much more time outdoors and active. After getting past the initial “I hate exercise” adjustment I did also found it burned off stress nicely. I’ve had a few rather stressful periods in the last year and I found that going for a hike or getting onto the elliptical during the dreary weather days when getting outside didn’t seem a great plan worked wonders for my stress and at the same time helped me lose weight and feel better. Gradually exercise stopped always feeling like a chore or work. So I found a way to make exercise, while not always enjoyable, at least not something to dread. I always enjoyed getting outdoors for a hike, but when not I was at least able to remember that while the first few minutes on an elliptical were rough, I’d feel better at the end.

And that’s the first element, just deciding to do it and sticking to it. It’s not easy to make time, but in the end I valued it enough to do so. You don’t get more time, just allocate what you have differently. I found that audio books and podcasts worked well for me while exercising giving my mind something to focus on when on the elliptical other than somewhat dull routine. A nice pair of headphones for some of the less wild and more boring trails in the area also let me take those same things with me on hikes.

The second element really comes down to awareness. I started paying attention to how much I ate and what I ate. I paid attention to how much activity I did and what type of activity I did. When I decided to make a good final push last fall and get beyond the slow weight loss I’d seen to that point, I started tracking things. Doing this can be a nuisance, and it’s easy to get bogged down to a level where you want to give up in frustration.

I began tracking everything I ate and it’s nutritional value. For packaged foods this is simply on the label. Many larger or chain restaurants provide nutritional info on their web sites. And sometimes you just have to guess based on that you had a salad with Italian dressing and grilled fish. Doing this made me think a bit more about what I ate before I ate. It’s one thing to overindulge on cookies, but another to then look at what you ate and see the effect they had on your diet. Seeing I’d had a hamburger at lunch made me a little more likely to pick something healthier at dinner. So I became more aware of what I ate. Reading the nutritional info for restaurants was very eye opening. I was especially surprised how often the healthier looking or sounding option at a restaurant wasn’t any less caloric or more nutritious than the hamburger.

There are web sites that can do this or simply paper and pen, but I mostly used apps on my iPhone to track my food. I started with using Lose It! on my iPhone, but ended up using the app from Fitbit since it tied into the activity tracker I’ll mention in a moment. I still use Lose It! for the ability to build custom recipes for meals that I create when cooking at home and it ties into Fitbit so anything I enter in Lose It! shows in Fitbit.

For tracking my activity I started with a now discontinued Fitbit. It worked pretty well, but after a couple months I sold it on eBay and bought the newer Fitbit One Wireless Activity Plus Sleep Tracker. I loved this thing so much that when I lost mine on my trip to Arizona in early June I ordered a replacement the same day. The small size is nice in that it’s pretty discreet while being worn, but it is easily lost, especially as the case become more lose over time. I lost mine while clipped to my belt as I worked to get myself and too much luggage from the rental car center to the airport in Phoenix before returning home. I now wear it clipped in a pocket most of the time so if it does fall out it’s not lost, something I wish I’d started a bit sooner. This device tracks steps taken and floors climbed during the day. I can also monitor how well I sleep. It’s not perfect, but does give a decent determination of how many calories I burn and how active I am during the day. I found that knowing how many steps I took helped me realize what led to me being less active (see winter weekends) and adapt for them.

In December I also added in a heart rate monitor for exercise. The Fitbit does well with walking based activities such as walking, running, and hiking, but doesn’t work as well with stationary activities like weight lifting, the elliptical, and cycling. For those I found the heart rate monitor gave me a more accurate number. I ended up using a Wahoo Fitness Blue HR Heart Rate Strap for iPod/iPhone that connects to my phone using Bluetooth. I’ve tried a number of apps, but settled on the Digifit iCardio to use while indoors on the elliptical or any other inside workout. I found it less useful for outdoor exercise as the GPS seems unreliable. For tracking outdoors I use RunKeeper which tracks and maps my hikes. I also like MotionX GPS, but find it more useful for hiking than as exercise tracking. I’ve mostly use RunKeeper for anything outdoors.

None of these are perfect. That’s not a problem. I really don’t worry about getting every calorie to the exact amount or exercise to the exact calorie matters. The key is that these tools made me more aware of what I did and that seemed to be enough for me. There were days I went for a walk in the evening just to get a few more steps onto the counter before bed. There were many days I’d have a salad for lunch so I could feel better about the hamburger I’d be eating for dinner at a cookout. I tracked as close as I could and tried to keep a steady deficit between what I ate and what I burned.

June 30, 2013

A Last Word on Google Reader

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Bill Morefield @ 2:00 pm

I’d originally planned this to be published a few days ago and to be much more comprehensive on what I chose to replace Google Reader and how I’d arrived at that decision. Simply put, life, and a failed hard drive, got in the way. So instead here’s the shorter version.

I’ve used Google Reader for a long time, first to sync, and then as my main reader, then again to sync. And I was not happy to see it go away, and so soon after the announcement, but expected that several alternatives would appear to try to fill the void. They have. More than twenty are listed on ReplaceReader, a site listing all the alternatives. Some existed before the announcement, but have either arrived or been reinvigorated afterward.

Google Reader won because it was frankly better than the alternatives when it came out. There were other services that synced news, but frankly they didn’t work as well. I know because my primary method at the time was a series of batch files that copied my sync state to and from a USB thumb drive.

From the start I planned to wait until about mid June to really begin testing alternatives. I’d play with a few before then, but I expected a couple of months would be needed for the new candidates to arrive. An early month vacation that wasn’t quite as restful as expected had me starting a bit earlier, but I really didn’t make my final choice until earlier this week.

I’m currently using NewsBlur. It was the first alternative I tried and the one I kept coming back to. Overall it feels the most polished web version at this point and the native iOS apps work well. In addition it feels the most stable and reliable as it was around before the shutdown announcement. The intelligent features for news feeds I’m still playing with, but look promising so far.

The other service I’m keeping an eye on is Feed Wrangler. It still feels just a bit too rough for me to use daily, but it might be the one that I’ll be using six months from now. The flexibility of the smart streams could be a wonderful way to manage the heavier traffic sites I follow while highlighting what I want to read.

Overall none of the programs really seem to completely replicate Google Reader. There are a lot of new programs coming out, many in just the last few days, and this is changing quickly. I expect many of them won’t be around a year from now. What I’d look for now is what works best for you and make sure you have a way to export your data so there’s a way out if your chosen service closes down in the future.

June 19, 2013

Time Machine Backups to a Windows Server in Mountain Lion

Filed under: apple,osx — Tags: , , — Bill Morefield @ 9:54 am

Since I moved to a MacBook as my laptop a couple of years ago, I’ve had one continuing problem with backups.  In my mixed Windows/mac environment I’ve used an HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server as my file storage solution for both systems and mostly that’s worked well.

At first Time Machine backups from Snow Leopard to this server worked fine as the HP server included software that allowed it to function as a native Time Machine destination.  That stopped working with the changes that Apple made to Time Machine in Lion.  HP being HP, they never updated their tools to work with Lion.  Once I upgraded to Lion I found no good alternative so I changed to the use of an external USB drive to store my backups.  I never really liked this solution since it required me to remember to plug in the drive on a regular basis. It also ran slowly at times and I didn’t like that it put part of my backups in a different place than the rest of them.

I finally found a solution that is not perfect, but is as close I’ve gotten.  Recently I had to redo this when the disk that held the backups had some issues because of a bad hard drive on my server and thought it worth documenting. It’s been more than a year since I set this up so I can’t provide the links to the blog post that got me thinking this direction so unfortunately I can’t credit them.  Still this is how to create a pretty good TimeMachine backup destination for a Lion or Mountain Lion Mac to a Windows Server.  In fact it should work with any storage that is network accessible and doesn’t natively support updated Apple’s AFP protocol.

This works by creating an Apple disk image on a server share.  This is the same concept used by VMWare and Parallels to create disk images for virtual machines.  Here though we’ll set up a disk image that we can later mount from our Apple that works as a destination for our backups.

  1. Start the Apple Disk Utility.  Easiest way is to bring up Spotlight and start typing in Disk Utility.
  2. Make sure that you do not have a drive selected and click New Image…
  3. I had problems creating the disk image directly on the external storage. When I tried creating the image on the remote storage it would never mount correctly. Instead I created the disk image on a local drive and then moved it to the server share.  This would normally be a problem since we want our disk image to be large enough for our backups and therefore want it at least as large as our hard disk.  To work around this, and save storage space until it’s needed, we’ll create a sparse bundle disk image.  This type of disk only allocates space when it’s needed.  It will run slower than a preallocated image, but I’ve found the difference isn’t noticeable.
  4. Now give the image a name.  I used MacBook-Backup for mine.  You will need this name later, so make sure it’s easy to type.
  5. Next skip ahead in the dialog and change the Image Format to sparse bundle disk image. This lets us create a disk image that will grow over time so we do not need to allocate all the space at once. It also let’s me allocate a 1 TB backup disk and still create it on the 500 GB SSD in my MacBook.
  6. You’ll want to size the image based on how much you have to backup and how long you want to be able to go back to retrieve data. Since I’d been using a 1 TB USB drive I decided to create the image the same size and found that’s worked well for me. Under the Size dropdown select Custom… to enter any size that you’d like.
  7. For format the default Mac OS Extended (Journaled) works fine so leave it.
  8. Encryption is optional.  For an actual portable disk like the USB drive I’d consider encryption a necessity.  With a network stored file the question is how much you trust the other people who may have access to your server.  If you want to be safe, 128 bit encryption works well.  I’m using it on my backup.
  9. You can create the image anywhere on your computer.  I gave it the name MacBook-Backup.sparsebundle to make it clear what it was.  Again since it’s a sparse bundle it will only initially use a small amount of disk space regardless of the size of the disk image.
  10. Once Disk Utility finishes creating the image, unmount it, and move it to your remote storage.  In my case I created a new share on my server and gave my account read/write access to that share.  I then moved the file into the share.

With the image file now on my storage, I next had to tell my Mac where this file was and to use it as the Time  Machine destination.  If you try to do this through the GUI as normal you’ll see that only external drives and AFP supporting devices (generally either a Time Capsule, Airport Base Station, or NAS with the necessary support) show.  Instead we need to use the tmutil command to tell Lion where this image file is

To do this I found the easiest approach to first mount the image to your computer.  To do this connect to your external storage where you placed the file.  In my case this was a cifs share and I mounted it using the Go -> Connect to Server… option in Finder.  Once I did this it and I entered my login credentials I could see the disk image.  To mount the image double click on it.  If you created an encrypted image you will be asked for the password.  You can choose to store the password in your keychain so you will not need to enter it each time.  Once the image is mounted, you will see it in Finder under Devices much as you would an external drive.  The name will be the image name you entered in step 4 above.

If you want to move any existing Time Machine backup you can do so.  Apple provides instructions to do this at https://support.apple.com/kb/HT5096.  In this case the disk image functions just as an external drive would.  It takes time, but allows you to keep your existing backup data.

Next start Terminal.  At the prompt enter the following command to tell Apple where our Time Machine destination will reside:

sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/Mounted Image

Change Mounted Image to the name of the device in Finder after you mounted it.  In my case since I gave it the name MacBook Backup in step 4, my command is:

sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/MacBook-Backup

Try running a backup now by going to the TimeMachine icon and select Backup Now.  Depending on how much data you have on your Mac and the speed of your network it might take a while.  If you have a lot to backup the first time doing so with a network cable instead of wireless can speed it up significantly.  If you have an existing backup it may be faster to transfer it to the new image which will allow the backup to pick up from there.

After a few days this is working well.  I’m now getting regular backups instead of only when I remember to plug in the USB drive and have the time to let the backup run.  I’ve found the backups over my wireless to be much faster than over the USB 2 in my MacBook.  I also feel more confident my backup is up to date and will cover if something happens to my laptop or hard drive.

It’s not perfect though.  Since this is for all purposes an external drive it functions much as connecting a physical drive and not as a network destination.  To kick off the backup, you must manually attach to the server and mount the drive. I’ve also found that when networks other than my home, I get errors about not being able to connect to the storage when the Mac attempts to start the backup. I’ve generally just ignored these since there seems to be no problem other than the error message.

June 13, 2013

Thoughts on iOS 7

Filed under: ios,iPhone — Tags: — Bill Morefield @ 6:05 pm

Earlier this week Apple demonstrated the new version of iOS 7. I watched part of the keynote live and the rest while travelling later in the week. So what I’m putting here is based just on that along with what I’ve seen and read publically and not actually using the beta myself. I do have a test device for that, but won’t be doing that until home later this week. Also since I’ve been on vacation and not following the news out of WWDC in depth I might have missed something and will update/correct this as needed. These are what stood out when watching the keynote and reading a few online items off that.

What I liked

The overall look. I’m odd in that I like Windows 8 overall. And iOS 7 really reminds me of Windows 8. It’s not a clone or copy, but it’s inspired by the same design principles that inspired that system. And I like it. The icons aren’t all perfect, but this is a beta and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them polished a bit before the final release. I do think the overall look answers the concerns about the outdated look to the interface, but of course actually using it will do much to see how well it works.

The control center is a great feature and one that excites me from an ease of use view. The toggles for things like Wi-Fi and flight mode are great when travelling. My recent vacation reminded me how long it takes to hop into settings and turn on airplane mode when getting ready to get onto a plane or when going somewhere with little or no cell reception that drains the battery so fast you can almost watch it count down. I do hope that those quick access links at the bottom can be customized, but I doubt it given’s Apple’s past track record.

Better multitasking is finally here too. This was the one of my two biggest hopes that were addressed. Don’t underestimate the ability to start and app and not have to wait for it to update. Compare bringing up a mail app to say bringing up a news reader where it takes a minute to update before you’re done. Background runs are a great feature, and I expect Apple’s implementation will mitigate battery concerns.

Activation lock is a big deal. Working for a company that deals with nearly 1,000 iPads anything to reduce theft makes a big impact. And personally I like the idea that if I lose my iPhone or it’s stolen then it might not be useful to the finder and means I’m more likely to get it back.

Notification Sync. No more clearing the same notification from multiple devices.

I can finally put as many icons in a folder as I want. No more adding numbers to the end of a folder name or jailbreaking for this purpose.

What I’m Not As Excited About

I think that a lot of these features seem interesting, but not there yet or just won’t work for me. I love the idea of a browser integrating secure passwords into the browser, but I’m not sure I feel a lot of trust to iCloud for it at this point. And for me the iCloud, and therefore Apple only, nature of this solution makes it a non-starter for me. I’ll stick with RoboForm, though if I was a developer of a password app I’d be looking into iCloud integration if that’s possible.

AirDrop looks nice, but the rather limited selection of devices it will work on I think means it will be of limited use until older devices cycle out of common use. I know a lot of people still running iPhone 4’s.

The radio service really doesn’t show me anything that would move me from a program I was currently using. I think Pandora might be in the most trouble since it seems the closest to what Apple produced. I’ll play with it, but don’t see it moving me from Slacker. Again the Apple device only likely makes it a non starter for me.

What Disappoints Me

Still doesn’t look like any good inter-application communication. I still have to hope every developer integrates use for the systems I want. My photo site of choice is 500px and I’d love if they could write a 500px share target and then I could send a photo to it from any app. I’ve hoped for this for a while and really though that it might show up this year. I still think we’ll see this feature, but really wonder how much longer Apple can put this off?

Last Thought

There are always software products that look in trouble after the new version appears. This year thought I think the biggest might be the jailbreak community. Each jailbreak version seems to take longer than the last and I’ve noticed each time I’ve missed the jailbreak a little less. A lot of the things I’ve turned to jailbreak apps for now look built in. I’m not sure at this point I’ll be that worried about jail breaking when 7 comes out which will be a first.

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