You can’t always blame data loss on hardware failure. A clumsy user can be just as harmful. PhotoRec is a nifty little command-line based tool that can recover accidentally deleted files.
To use PhotoRec effectively you need to understand how the filesystem handles files. When you delete a file, it isn’t actually zapped into oblivion. Rather the file system just marks it as deleted, and makes the space the file occupies available to other files.
This means that until another app uses that recently freed-up space, the original file is still there, and can be retrieved by a file recovery tool. For this very reason, it’s very important that you immediately stop using the computer as soon as you realize that you have accidentally deleted files in order to minimize the interactions with the hard disk.
Note: PhotoRec is cross-platform compatible. For this tutorial, we will use a Linux (Ubuntu) system for illustration.
We’re all incredibly reliant on our internet connections these days, but sometimes those connections aren’t so reliable. Whether it’s due to an ISP failure, a router being down, someone tripping over a cord somewhere, or whatever other occurrence, it can be frustrating to wait for a downed internet connection to come alive again. We’ve all known users who simply hit the “refresh” button on a web browser repeatedly to see when things revive, but there is a better way. Users who are comfortable with the command line can use a better solution, which utilizes the ping tool to detect an active internet connection and the text-to-speech say command to verbally announce when things are live again. Be sure to have the volume turned up on the Mac to use this.
It should be noted that with only slight modification you could use this same technique to monitor a specific site that is down, and notify you when it comes back up. The article and reader comments also show how to receive other types of notifications, in case you are in a situation where you can’t hear a voice alert, or it would be unappreciated by others nearby.
NOTE:Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery was formerly known as Redo Backup. This article has been updated to show the new name.
If you are replacing an older hard drive with a newer one, possibly with more capacity, you may wonder if there is a way to do it without having to reinstall everything. The answer is often “yes”. There are many ways to do it — some are free and some cost money — but one great solution that happen to be free is to use Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery, possibly followed by GPartEd Live. In fact, even if you aren’t planning on replacing a drive, it’s probably a good idea to back up your drives using Redo Rescue periodically, just in case a drive unexpectedly fails. If that happens you can restore from your last backup and you are back in business.
The nice thing about both Redo Rescue and GPartEd Live is that they have nice graphical users interfaces. Redo Rescue is very easy and intuitive, while GPartEd live is a only bit less so. For example, to move a partition within a drive you may need to use a click and drag operation, but that’s not explained on the screen. So, your favorite search engine may be your friend.
Here are some articles that explain how to use Redo Rescue:
If you are moving your system to a larger hard drive, a simple restore will only utilize as much of the drive as was used on the original drive size. What you can do is use GPartEd Live, another free tool, to grow your primary partition to occupy the remaining unused space. Before you can do that, you may need to move the existing swap partition to the end of the allocated space. What you need to do depends to some degree on the operating system in use on the drive you are moving, so you may need to do some searching to get instructions that apply to your particular situation.
Here are a couple of links about GPartEd that may help Linux users:
Perhaps you have noticed that they don’t make monitor power switches the way they used to – in the past they were a large button prominently featured on the front of the monitor, but on newer models they tend to be small and harder to locate, and sometimes difficult to press. But since LED monitors draw very little power in sleep state, many people simply go into the Energy Saver settings, and set the Display Sleep value to something relatively low. But for some users, that’s an imperfect solution, because if you set it too low it might cut out on you whenever you take a brief pause from whatever you’re doing. On the other hand, if you set it too high, it might display an image when you don’t really want it to.
Another solution for OS X users is to use Hot Corners, one of which will put the display to sleep instantly. But some users hate Hot Corners, because it is much too easy to inadvertently activate one. Fortunately, for those users there is another solution, and it is found in a program called Sleep Display. While the description of Sleep Display might lead you to believe that the last supported version of OS X was Snow Leopard, we can attest to the fact that it works in Lion (though you need to press a key, such as the shift key, to wake up the display – moving the mouse won’t always do it), and there’s probably no reason it wouldn’t work Mavericks. All you do is click on the apps’s icon and the display goes to sleep. In case you wonder how it works, it’s probably just an updated version of this.
The only thing we didn’t like about Sleep Display is that it had a generic application icon, but since changing icons in OS X is easy we just created a new one in a graphics program and used the free lite version of Img2icns to convert it to proper OS X icons. Unfortunately, we can’t share it with you because it includes an image of a copyrighted cartoon cat sleeping on a pillow (which we placed in front of the image of a monitor screen, so the sleeping cat blocks the view of the display, just as a real cat might do), and even though the image we started with can be easily located using a Google image search, we don’t have the deep pockets of Google and we’d rather not get sued. It’s kind of sad that even a mashed-up icon might be lawyer bait these days, but such are the times we live in.
In case you have the opposite problem, and your display goes to sleep even when you don’t want it to, just go into the Energy Saver settings and set the Display Sleep value to Never (or a high value, such as 3 hours, if that works for you). That will stop OS X from putting the display to sleep after a short fixed delay, so it will never put the display to sleep when you don’t want it to, but you can still put it to sleep instantly any time you like using the Sleep Display app.
And just to avoid confusion, we are talking about putting the display to sleep here, not the entire computer. That feature is sometimes called “hibernation” and while that’s also an option for some users, there are others that need to leave the computer on 24/7 even if they don’t want the display on constantly. It’s this latter group that this article is aimed toward.
BONUS HINT: If you bought a new monitor on Black Friday and it has a bright pixel, a.k.a. a stuck pixel, you might be able to fix it without returning it to the store. We are not saying this is a good idea, but if you are very careful not to use too much force, it’s sometimes possible to fix the pixel yourself, and if not then you can probably still return it:
The only thing we would say different from the advice given is that you should never put any hard object directly against the display, since you might scratch it or worse. In our case, when the software method failed to produce results (always try that first!), we used a rounded pencil eraser and placed a (non-perfumed el cheapo) facial tissue over the screen so the eraser could not touch the screen directly, and tapped lightly in the area of the bright pixel a few times, and it cleared the pixel (we also had a software fix running over the pixel area at the time, specifically this one). The trick is to use a light touch, so that you do not make things worse! If somebody in the next room says “What’s that tapping noise?” then you are doing it much too hard! And you certainly don’t want to mess up the display so badly that the store won’t exchange it.
[notice]The use of services such as Tunlr, that provide access to geographically-blocked websites and services you might not normally be able to access, may be illegal in some jurisdictions. We are not lawyers, so cannot comment further on this. You are responsible for knowing your local laws.[/notice]
Tunlr is a service that describes itself as follows:
Do you want to stream video or audio from U.S.-based on-demand Internet streaming media providers but can’t get in on the fun because you’re living outside the U.S.? Fear not, you have come to the right place. Tunlr lets you stream content from sites like Netflix, Hulu, MTV, CBS, ABC, Pandora and more to your Mac or PC. Want to watch Netflix or HuluPlus on your iPad, AppleTV or XBox 360 even though you’re not in the U.S.? Tunlr lets you do this.
If you are in the U.S., Tunlr may allow you to access certain sites in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe. It does not yet allow access to sites in Canada (pity). Again, we are specifically not saying that it is legal to to this, since were are not lawyers and cannot give legal advice.
You utilize Tunlr by setting your computer’s or router’s DNS addresses to Tunlr, but Tunlr does not want you to do this except when you are actually accessing content. As their FAQ explains:
Why you shouldn’t set your DNS permanently to Tunlr
For speed, stability, privacy and security reasons we do not recommend to permanently set your computer’s or router’s DNS addresses to Tunlr. Setting the DNS permanently to Tunlr also puts a heavy strain on Tunlr’s network infrastructure. In order to render the permanent use of our DNS resolvers less attractive, we’re artificially delaying responses to DNS queries. What this means is that your Internet surfing experience will be a lot slower than if you’d just use your Internet service provider’s DNS resolver. However, your ability to download/stream audio or video content is not affected by this delay. To sum it up: do not use our DNS resolver for day to day web surfing.
The FAQ shows “links for more ideas about how to temporarily use our DNS resolver” and they do show some suggestions for OS X, but at this writing none of those links show the easiest way. When you use the method described below, you will be able to simply click on the Apple logo in the top menu bar and select Tunlr as your DNS, or switch from Tunlr back to your usual DNS, like this:
Selecting Tunlr DNS from the Apple dropdown menu
Note that when you switch DNS servers in OS X your network connection will be momentarily interrupted, so you probably don’t want to do this while you have downloads or uploads in progress.
So, how do you set this up? It’s relatively simple. Go To System Preferences (which is another selection in the Apple menu shown above), and when it comes up, in the Internet & Wireless section click on Network. You should then see a screen similar to this:
System Preferences | Network settings
This image is from a system with only a wired ethernet connection – you may see additional connections. But in the left-hand menu you want to select the connection you’ll be using while using Tunlr, which is probably your wired (en0) connection unless you use wireless exclusively.
Before you go any further, click the Advanced button in the lower right corner, then on the next screen click the Proxies tab at the top:
Advanced Network settings, Proxy tab
What you want to see is what’s currently in the “Bypass proxy settings for these Hosts & Domains” text box. If there is anything in that box, copy it and save it somewhere – you can open a TextEdit window and paste it in there temporarily if necessary. Next, at the top, click on the Location dropdown and it should give you the option to Edit Locations, so select that:
Adding a new location
Next you should see a popup window showing your existing locations:
Popup to add new locations
Click the + in the popup and it should let you enter a new location, so enter Tunlr:
Adding new Tunlr location
Click Done and the new location will be added. At this point it is not configured so you will likely be thrown offline, and you’ll see something like this:
New Tunlr location created but not yet configured
Next click the Advanced button and go to the DNS tab, then click on the + and add the two Tunlr DNS addresses (69.197.169.9 and 192.95.16.109) as shown here:
Network settings, DNS tab with Tunlr proxies entered
After adding the two Tunlr proxies, click OK and then click Advanced again and go to the Proxies tab. What you want to do here is paste in any proxy information you copied from your original network connection back into the “Bypass proxy settings for these Hosts & Domains” text box. So, copy that from TextEdit or wherever you saved it and paste it in here — it should look exactly as it did for the original connection:
Advanced Network settings, Proxy tab
Click OK and you should be taken back to the main Network settings window. Now it should show the two Tunlr DNS addresses:
Network settings, Tunlr location with Tunlr DNS addresses configured
The last thing to do is click Apply, which should enable the Tunlr location and start using the Tunlr DNS:
Network settings, Tunlr location configured and connected
Note that the dot next to your network connection should have changed from yellow to green. Now open your web browser and go to the Tunlr status page (you can just click on that link). You are looking for the section near the bottom of the page headed Tunlr activation check, which should tell you whether or not Tunlr is activated.
Note that even if it says that you need to restart your device or computer after you change the DNS address, that is NOT true when you use this method. Instead, when you want to access geographically-locked content that Tunlr knows about, you simply go to the Apple menu and select the Tunlr location, and when you are done accessing that content you go back the the same menu and select the Automatic location (or whatever your default location is called). Just keep in mind that any time you change locations, any in-progress communications (downloads or uploads) will be interrupted, and depending on the software and/or protocols used, you may need to restart those connections.
Mosh(mobile shell) is Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.
Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It’s more robust and responsive, especially over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links.
Mosh is free software, available for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Android.
Look, we’re not suggesting that anyone copy the look and feel of another operating system – that might be frowned upon in some circles. But that said, there are some people who are finding that true Macs are priced just a little out of their reach, so they either try to build a “Hackintosh” or they put Linux on a computer and then try to make it look and work as much like a Mac as possible. For the latter crowd, we offer this article, but suggest you consider carefully which tweaks you actually make, particularly if you ever plan on using your system in any kind of public setting. Could you get sued for displaying an Apple logo on a non-Apple product? We don’t know, and we don’t want to find out!
Mac OS X transformation pack is ready for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy/Linux Mint 16. This transformation pack has been completed with collaboration of haniahmed (One Gnome Shell theme) and mbossg (One Gtk theme + two icon sets) both guys did really fine job. Mac themes for Linux are almost stopped but we kept this project on our list from 12.04, and now we release Mac transformation for every new Ubuntu release. Many people look over the internet for pre-configured Mac look like Macbuntu 13.10/Mac4lin, Mac Ubuntu theme and so on, but it is good idea to transform it by yourself because if you want to change to old/other look you can do that easily. This method of transformation doesn’t use any excessive memory/CPU/and other resources.
This time NoobsLab is offering four Mac GTK themes, two Gnome Shell and one Cinnamon theme. Cinnamon theme isn’t very close to Mac but it can give Mac feel to panel. This time we included three icon packs which are somewhat different from each other.
We don’t think we’d go through all this trouble just to change the look and feel, even though we do hate Unity in Ubuntu. It might be easier to just start with a Linux distribution that already has a great interface, such as Linux Mint.
So you have switched to another operating system, but still miss some of your favourite programs on Windows? Here are 7 app to help your run Windows program on your current platform!
Two additional ways that we know of that are not mentioned in the article: Parallels, which is basically a virtual machine that integrates into the OS X or iOS platforms, so that you can run just about any Windows program, although you will need to have an actual copy of Windows to install, and the Parallels software itself is not free. But there is a free alternative: VirtualBox, which runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD (and, we’ve even heard reports of people running Android in VirtualBox). Here again you would need to have an actual copy of Windows (or your other preferred operating system) to install, but the VirtualBox software itself is freely available as Open Source Software (see their web site for details).
Suppose you have a collection of files which are replicated on two different servers. The two replicas are then modified independently, and you want whatever changes made in one replica to be propagated to the other, so that both replicas remain in sync.
There are several file mirroring tools on Linux, such as rsync or duplicati. However, these tools are meant for “uni-directional” file sync (i.e., pushing or pulling incremental updates in one direction), and so two-way sync would require running such tools twice, one for each direction.
Unison is an open-source file synchronization tool that natively supports bi-directional file synchronization. Unison is available on multiple platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and MacOS X. In Linux, Unison is available as a command-line tool as well as a GUI program with GTK+ interface.
In this tutorial, I will describe how to synchronize files between two servers with Unison command-line utility.
When developing websites and web applications, you will often have a local environment set up for testing in your browser. But what if you want to test it on another machine or device on your local network?
Chances are, the hostname of your computer won’t work as a valid virtual host on a mobile device (and some computers). Additionally, you might have multiple projects on the go that all need unique virtual host names to operate properly.
This problem used to be solved by the “hosts” file (in /etc/hosts on Linux/Mac and C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts on Windows), but there’s a better way! You can use IP reflection services or wildcard DNS records to let you use nearly any virtual host name you want.
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