#osx


Use a Single Mouse and Keyboard Between Multiple Computers


For those that have a lap­top and a work-station or desk­top PC/Mac, we are often faced with the ques­tion of how to fit and work on both on our tiny lit­tle desks (but that’s prob­a­bly just me). Any­ways, if you haven’t heard of Syn­ergy+:

Syn­ergy lets you eas­ily share a sin­gle mouse and key­board between mul­ti­ple com­put­ers with dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems, each with its own dis­play, with­out spe­cial hard­ware. It’s intended for users with mul­ti­ple com­put­ers on their desk since each sys­tem uses its own monitor(s).

Con­tinue reading →

How Not to Use Default Gateway on VPN (PPTP) in Mac OSX

Well, after search­ing for hours and hours, I have finally found a solu­tion to a small but trou­ble­some prob­lem. The prob­lem (if you call it that) occurs when I tried con­nect­ing to my work’s VPN. Rather than not using my work’s gate­way when con­nected, OSX does this by default. Hence, you can see and hit your inter­nal IPs but not resolve the rest of the internet.

In Win­dows XP, this may be dis­abled via the following:

  1. Open Net­work Connections
  2. Under Vir­tual Pri­vate Net­work, open the Prop­er­ties of your connection
  3. Click and open Prop­er­ties for “Inter­net Pro­to­cal (TCP/IP)”
  4. Click on Advanced
  5. Dis­able “Use default gate­way on remote network”
  6. Hit OK, OK, and then you’re done

Although it’s easy in Win­dows XP, I couldn’t fig­ure it out for OSX. I searched and search to finally get this arti­cle from macosx­hints, Avoid Cre­at­ing PPTP Default Routes. The hints at the very bot­tom of the com­ments helped some­what, but didn’t get me to view my inter­nal IPs—which was the reverse of the orig­i­nal prob­lem. Luck­ily, with a lit­tle bit more search, I landed on this arti­cle page by Chris­t­ian Stocker on Chang­ing default routes on OSX on VPN. Though it was the same as the pre­vi­ous page from macosx­hints, I saw this short and sweet reply which hap­pen to have fixed everything:

lon­nie @ 22.08.2006 19:22 CEST
Inter­net Con­nect 1.4.2 has

Con­nect Menu -> Options…

|X| Send all traf­fic over VPN connection

Uncheck­ing should do the same.

I hope this arti­cle could be of help, and save those who are look­ing for the same solu­tion san­ity and time.

So What’s New In May?

Hey, hey, hey. May 1st has come and gone and those who have promised them­selves to Reboot were either suc­cess­ful, or behind. One of the sites I’m curi­ously await­ing to check out is Bryan Veloso’s new ren­di­tion of Aval­on­Star.

So what the heck am I doing this early in the morn­ing? I can’t damn sleep, and have been try­ing to fig­ure out how to orga­nize my shiznit a bit bet­ter. I have too much stuff going on (as usual), and need to com­plete tasks I have set in my to-do list. But it seems that that list just keeps get­ting big­ger and wider (in terms of those URL-bookmarks).

Any­ways, just wanted to catch-up with this writing-thingy-majig. Maybe some­one out there can help orga­nize things with some cool advise and/or refer­ral gift =)

Speak­ing of which, here’s some cool things that have inter­ested me in the past cou­ple of days:

  • Mac­Book Pro — yeah, I’m a “switch-hitter” now
  • Text­Mate Basic Tuto­ri­als — this will prob­a­bly change my devel­op­ment work­flow for work and on-the-side
  • Com­pil­ing new “points of inspi­ra­tion” from the Reboot-ed sites, new and old
  • … and the list goes on—but it seems that I should be catch­ing some Zs now as I hear some people’s alarm clock going off; at least I think I’m hear­ing it

From my mind to yours, keep learning.

Mac OSX Read and Write to NTFS Drive

Just in case you guys are try­ing to use one exter­nal drive for both Win­dows and Mac envi­ron­ments (as in my sit­u­a­tion), here’s some­thing that will save you all the grief and hours of sit­ting in front of your Macs

  1. Down­load the lat­est Mac­FUSE Core DMG file and restart
  2. Down­load the lat­est NTFS-3g + Mac­FUSE Tools (and Unin­staller if you want) from Fill­ing the Gap NTFS-3g page via NTFS-3G for OS X Revived Blog
  3. Plug-and-play with your exter­nal. It should show up mounted auto­mat­i­cally. If not, do a quick restart.

Hope that helps.

PS. The steps above is more updated that what was posted over at this MacOSX­Hints arti­cle.

Update 2007-04-28
Grab Win­Clone if you’d like to backup/restore your Boot­Camp par­ti­tion. Great if you’d like to try out Par­al­lels using that WinXP NTFS partition.

Update 2008-08-13
Step #2 above has been updated, which links to the lat­est NTFS-3G for OS X development.

An Intel-ligent Apple

Seems that Apple is going to drop & stop (shut ‘em down open up…) using IBM’s Pow­erPC proces­sors for Intel chips. I Never thought I will see the day were I might actu­ally like an Apple prod­uct (other than my iPod Photo). With this scheme, you can dual-boot with either Mac OS or WinXP—pretty sweet if you ask me.

How­ever, I’ll pro­lly be just using the Mac OS when I’m away from my com­puter. Pro­lly just put on the Screen­saver from the mac. It kicks ass ver­sus the default Mys­tify screen­saver on WinXP. Man oh man… other than the screen­saver and mac’s cool nav­i­ga­tion effects, that’s all I can stand from it.

Oh well, if you’d like to get more tid­bits, click here.

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