Long have I searched for the magic bullet solution to my bookmark synchronization woes.  I’ve wanted a simple plugin that would synchronize my bookmarks between multiple installations of Firefox and Safari, thus making it simple to access said bookmarks from any computer, or between the two commonly used browsers on my Mac.  I’ve looked at many options, but always the solution only allows me to sync one browser or the other, leaving me looking for some secondary sync tool to get between Firefox and Safari on my Mac itself, not via network or a proper sync.

I’d almost given up on finding a solution, then, a few months ago I started using Delicious. It was cool because there were plugins for Safari, Firefox, and IE, and of course, it’s by default a web based bookmarking system. Its cool, I like it, but I just didn’t use it much. The plugins integrate it into the browser by giving you ANOTHER bookmarks menu, not by integrating with the browsers’ bookmark system.

Before ever using Safari or Delicious, my Firefox bookmark sync tool of choice was Foxmarks. It provided a web interface for remote access to my bookmarks, plus a nice sync interface for all my Firefox installations. I was randomly poking around today and discovered that Foxmarks now works with Safari and IE! I was excited and wasted no time installing Foxmarks for Safari. So far, it works great!

For the most part, it works just as you’d expect, bookmarks sync between all my Safari(Mac only, for now, I think) and Firefox(Mac, Linux, and Windows) installations without hassle. I’ve yet to try out the Internet Explorer functionality, but I’m guessing it works pretty well. I just don’t use IE enough to care.

One caveat to be aware of: both Firefox and Safari use some browser specific URL syntax to access internal functionality for recent bookmarks, etc. That stuff will only work on the browser where it was created, Safari on Safari, Firefox on Firefox, etc. For me, that’s a non issue, I rarely use those features. I have tested and confirmed that javascript bookmarklets (like for Tinyurl and Cornify) do seem to work after syncing. Those are about the only reason I use on the bookmark menubar.

Since getting a Mac Book Pro for work, I’ve become quite the fan of OS X. As a unix/software guy, I really enjoy having the power of a BSD/Unix system readily available, without having to install some hack like cygwin. (I’m not knocking cygwin, it’s a really nice Windows add-on, but I prefer not to run Windows, in general.) I also like the OS X user interface, and lately, that it runs the very cool boxee media center software. So, I wanted to build a boxee box. My options were AppleTV, Mac Mini, or Hackintosh. The Mac Mini was more money than I wanted to spend for an untested solution. The AppleTV would probably be a good solution, especially now that it’s getting more testing from the boxee community, but I wasn’t sure about it. Finally, I thought that a Hackintosh would be a cool project, give me not just boxee but a full OS X system, and I could buy the parts for $235 from newegg. That’s a cheap computer, and especially a cheap Mac.

I went with an Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard. It’s a mini-ITX board with built in dual Atom 330 processors, the kind of CPU’s used in the new and inexpensive NetBook computers. It’s a very low power solution, but with the dual processors most of the research I did suggested it should do 720p HD content. It has a S/PDIF header for digital audio out, but requires an extra cable and I have yet to test it. VGA out is less preferable than DVI, but again, this is cheap, and my Samsung 46″ LCD has VGA-input, so it certainly works. Also, it’s limited to a single 2GB DIMM, so max out that RAM early.

I bought the following from newegg:

• D945GCLF2 motherboard – $80
• Any old PATA (SATA should work, too) DVD Burner – $25
• 2GB Kingston 240-pin DDR2 667 SDRAM – $21
• APEX MI-100 Black/Silver Mini-ITX Case w/ 250w PSU – $56
• 80GB Western Digital SATA Hard Drive – $37
• Shipping/Handling + rush processing – $15

Total cost: $234
Full disclosure: I later bought a cheap USB bluetooth dongle ($25) and Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (full retail, ouch) as that was the best wireless control solution, but any USB keyboard and mouse combo should work fine for normal usage.

INSTALL GUIDE FOR RETAIL OS X on D945GCLF2

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I’ve been a bit obsessive this week as I’ve been trying to research and find a new camera that I would really like. The last one died last weekend… so we were facing the trip home for Christmas with no camera! Before Beaumin was born, not having a camera for a few weeks would have been a non-issue, but now, we take multiple pictures a day!

I talked with several friends who are way more “camera geeky” than I am… I’m pretty ignorant of photography for the most part, but I wouldn’t mind learning a bit more. So I only had a few basic criteria:

• Pretty decent low-light (indoor) photos
• Use AA batteries (I really like having easy access to spares in a pinch)
• Some advanced features so I can learn more if I get motivated

Not required but very nice to have items were:

• Big optical zoom (because its really nice)
• Viewfinder (because sometimes glare just makes LCDs useless)
• Semi-fast flash recharge

It was soon obvious that I was looking for an “Advanced Point and Shoot” for which a few of the top players were Nikon’s P80 and Canon’s SX10 IS. I have some friends who are die-hard Nikon fans and others who are die-hard Canon fans, so this was tricky.

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A while back I posted a simple solution for restricting website access in a situation where HTTP basic authentication couldn’t be used.

Not much more to the story, but I did make a few tweaks to my sample code. The mod_rewrite rule and javascript have been a tiny bit improved, so now after a successful login, it will try to redirect you to where you intended to go. (Previously, it always sent the user to /) 

Also, in the comments I made it MUCH clearer that this is NOT intended to be a secure solution, just a simple way to keep Google and random people out of things. Anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML/Javascript/Cookies (or less than basic) could read the source and figure out how to create the “secure” cookie, and BAM they’re in like Flynn.

I’m solidly impressed with the WPMU Plugin Commander. One thing that seemed odd to me about WPMU was that I either enable users to have plugin control, or NO ONE (not even the site admin) has the ability to enabled/disable plugins (without a lot of hacking).

This plugin provides a control panel where I can globally enable/disable plugins, set plugins to be auto-enabled for new blogs, and give users the ability to enable/disable only selected plugins.

The perfect scenario is, I want to auto-anable Akismet for my users, so they get spam filtering on comments. Also, I want them to have the ability to try out other various plugins, but don’t want them able to turn off Aksimet.

I’ll echo the sentiments of others I read when discovering Plugin Commander, “this functionality should be in WPMU core!”

I was literally sitting down to write a plugin that did this, when I stumbled across Viper007’s Regenerate Thumbnail plugin.

I could still write my own version, but eh, what’s the point. Seems to work great!

A long time ago I used ksh with vi key bindings, and life was good.

Then I moved on to bash, but for some reason, I never investigated using vi key bindings. I simply lived with the defaults (which, for the record, are emacs-like key bindings).

So, just the other day I said to myself, “Self, I want to use vi key bindings in bash. I want to again experience the joy of traversing and editing my command line in COMMAND MODE. I want the speed and the power of my precious vi (well, I use vim) at my finger tips. And I NO LONGER want to waste time holding arrow keys or to think about using emacs-like commands.”

So, I fired up google.com; low and behold I stumbled onto this little post about using vi key bindings in bash and zsh. So sweet!

In a nutshell, the bash command to enable vi mode is:

set -o vi

This can be set in your .bashrc file, and if it doesn’t pickup when you start a new terminal session, add something like this to your .profile or .bash_profile:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi

With vi mode enabled, you’ll start your bash session in insert mode, so things should behave as normal. But, to turn on the power, just hit the ESC key to enter COMMAND MODE. Now all your vi commands are availble. Move to end of line with “$”, beginning of line with “^”, delete a word with “dw”, etc.

Enjoy!

A while back I wrote about advertising Linux services via Avahi/Bonjour. Since then I’ve made a few changes to my setup.

First, I nixed netatalk for direct AFP support. My primary reason for using it was to gain a more Mac-like network filesystem which would make Time Machine happier. Well, Time Machine uses a sparse bundle disk image on it’s target; after learning about that, using AFP seemed a bit unnecessary. Also, Samba CIFS/SMB seemed to perform better. I don’t have solid benchmarks for this, but simple file copies seemed to be consistenly faster with Samba. One of the biggest annoyances about netatalk was all the extra hidden files and folders it created. I run a hybrid network, I have more Mac machines, but also Windows, plus I browse file systems on the command line quite often; and those excess files pushed me over the edge.

Second, I nixed Time Machine. Just when I thought everything was working perfectly, it completely blew up and could no longer access its data store. Not good for a backup solution. I plan to write about my new home backup solution sometime, but it’s basically rsync with a few key points.

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I’ve been spending some time getting my son’s blog setup. In doing so, I discovered that as of Wordpress 2.5, there is built-in [ gallery ] functionality.  Though it isn’t full featured, it’s pretty nice, and perfectly integrated with Wordpress, since, well, it IS Wordpress.

Currently the process to put photos into a gallery is:

1. Choose photos in iPhoto
2. Export chosen files to disk
3. Create new Wordpress post
4. Add media via Wordpress uploader

This isn’t too bad, especially for a geek who’s used to lots of arcane workarounds to accomplish simple goals. But… for my wife or others who don’t want the hassle, this is basically annoying.

So I have this idea to create an iPhoto export plugin which will upload directly into Wordpress!

Roadblocks to completion:

1. Time and Commitment (typical)
2. Objective-C (don’t know it)
3. Cocoa (don’t know it)
4. X-Code (don’t know it)
5. Non-Javascript/Java development on Mac OS X (new to me)

So… this is going to be a slightly ambitions undertaking… but I’m excited about it! I’ll be learning a bunch of new stuff. It’ll take more time than I’d like, but I expect it to be a rewarding process. At some point, I’ll be able to create a “project” home for this bad boy, and make it available to all!

If anyone has pointers on OS X development, I’m all ears.

I’m working on some updates to my personal blog which have more or less taken photos down for a while.

Hopefully, all will be well again soon.