Tim Sodhi’s Weblog

For the longest time I resisted RSS feeds, dismissing them as too cumbersome to keep track of, and rather too concise for my needs. Over time though, with the plethora of sites I keep track of, not to mention the trackers and feeds for breaking news on CNN, BBC, I decided to make the shift to RSS. I toyed with subscribing to individual feeds in Firefox, but soon gave up on that idea. With around eleven feeds, I couldn’t keep a history of older feed stories, as well as, mark them as read/unread. I looked to Apple Mail, but apart from a marginal improvement from Firefox (in terms of history), I didn’t see a benefit.

Enter Google Reader. It does it all, aggregate feeds into one feed, and allows for a history as well as marking the same (starring in Google terms). I can access my feeds and read/unread status from any computer/device. Wonderful, but only restricted to the actual GReader site. That was until I found Socialite (formerly Eventbox).

Socialite supports Google Reader in it’s entirety, allowing one to subscribe to a feed from the client, unsubscribe, mark as read/unread, star/unstar, etc. With Growl support, this is by far the best Google Reader RSS feed client for the Mac. What’s more, this client integrates support for various social networking APIs such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. A definite MUST try.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to relegate my main machine (Gigabyte 965P – DS4) to a file server. I decided to go the no-hassles route and installed Windows 7. After painstakingly converting all my drives back to NTFS, I found to my chagrin, the great amount of lag when opening a network share via Samba (SMB) on my Macs. The Finder would scan the remote directory for what seemed like minutes before it showed me the contents of the folders.

That in addition to the messed up permissions on the server machine made it nearly impossible to sync files to and from the iMac/Mac Mini/MacBook Pro. Each time I’d initiate a transfer/sync session, the permissions on the Windows server would cause the sync client to erroneously recognize the entire data set as new, and cause a full copy between machines. Not too serious, but it does get old when the entire network is choked up due to 100GB of data crossing over each night.

And this is when I decided to head back to Mac for my server needs. It is an old adage that if you don’t flex your muscles enough, you lose them. Apparently, the same goes for Hackintosh skills! For the life of me, I couldn’t remember which set of KEXTs I used in my /E/E folder, so I decided to go back to the easier Leopard route. I installed iPC, only to notice the slower network speeds of 32MBps (Gigabit Ethernet). I could get up to 60-70MBps on Snow Leopard – so indeed, I decided to reconvert all my drives to HFS and then start the process of installing Snow Leopard.

I had to refer back to my blog and to the relevant websites to pick up pointers. Luckily I had my DSDT handy and after a couple of trial and errors, I finally had Snow Kitty back up on my Hack. I used Chameleon RC4, and with no need for manual UUID injection, things just worked the way they should. I added a number of flags to my com.apple.boot.plist – mainly to cause a timeout at the boot selection screen, as well as to hide some extra drives that showed up. I also have a new set of KEXTs I am using. These are:-

fakesmc.kext (new one)
LegacyAppleYukon2.kext
LegacyHDA.kext
NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
OpenHaltRestart.kext

It has been a few weeks since then. I am running a 32Bit Kernel and Extensions, and I couldn’t be happier. Chronosync keeps all my Macs up-to-date and runs scheduled backups of all my home movies and iPhoto data.

Indeed, it has been forever since my last update. How better to cap this year, than with a post about what I have been up to, the latter quarter of 2009. Things have been going rather smoothly over the past three months. I finally have fully converted to the Mac side. Our home is now rigged with Macs doling out, and playing back media and resources.

The biggest change so far? The Hackintosh that I worked so diligently upon, is now relegated to a Media/File server. Running 10.6.2, I have rigged my Hackintosh with around 8TB of storage, and run it in a cooled closet 24/7. It is forever on the up, doling out Series/Movies to my other machines.

Speaking of which, I am a proud owner of a brand new spanking iMac. 21.5″ 3.33GHz machine with discrete graphics, 4GB RAM as well as a 1TB HDD, this is one beautiful machine. It has become my main rig, my go-to machine for the day to day surfing. As pleased and satisfied as I am with this week 41 monster, it almost didn’t come to be. But that story is for another day.

In addition to the aforementioned machine, I now also own a Mac Mini which serves as our Media Center. The specs are – 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD of pure win. I installed Plex (an offshoot of XBMC) on this machine, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how seamlessly I can combine all my media to be accessible through one interface. And what a beautiful interface. Till date, I was a traditionalist, preferring to keep my series/movies in proper folders and clicking to view the same using Quicktime or MPlayer OSX Extended. But through Plex, I have it all under control using just the Apple Aluminium Remote. And the interface! Wow, it scrobbles all my series information and downloads Episode Information from various sites, as well as Fanart, Music etc.

I debated long and hard before making the switch to official Apple hardware. Hacks and community support, notwithstanding, it is more of a headache to keep a Hackintosh in perfect working condition. I just couldn’t take second guessing an update, or having my entire installation messed up, because I decided to take the claim of “Vanilla Installation” too seriously. I can’t count the number of hours I have wasted on my Hackintosh, and with an iMac and Mac Mini, as well as a MacBook Pro under my belt, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief and get back to working.

The battle was hard-fought and indeed, I tried to stick by Panic.com’s Unison for as long as I could, but eventually I had to give in, and I proclaim the prominence and sing the virtues of a new Newsgroup Binary Client for every platform – SABnzbd.

If you download Binaries from the NNTP, be it newest Linux distros or what have you, on a regular basis, there is rather a limited field of OSX clients worthy of mention. I rigidly stood by Unison for the longest time. However, it seems that the developers at Panic have lost all interest in updating this App. It has a number of issues on Snow Leopard, and the fact that it doesn’t do any PAR correction or UnRAR operations, makes it a half-client. On Windows, one is set – Newzleecher will do that and more. For the longest time, I searched high and low for a replacement for Newzleecher on OSX. I thought Unison was it, that is, till I came upon SABnzbd.

It does it all, and then some more. I couldn’t begin to enumerate the features of this App, which runs as a server. This means, I can connect to it from my iPhone, or in essence, from anywhere in the world (via Dynamic DNS). I can configure an RSS feed from a multitude of sites, and tell the App to monitor it for anything that shows up, and conforms to a list of keywords I have configured. It will then, automatically download, unpar, unrar AND delete the RAR and PAR files. Oh sweet! I have just started to scratch the surface of what this App is capable of. More to come! Check this App out – best of all, it is Open Source and therefore – FREE!

I must admit I am one of the later adopters of the sensation rocking the world – DropBox. Until recently, I was convinced that I really didn’t need FileSync over and above what my trusty External HDD provides. I work extensively on my MacBook Pro at work, and back home I have my trusty Hackintosh (as well as a number of other Windows machines). Keeping my main machines (MacBook Pro and Hacki) in sync was a chore, that I promised myself, I would undertake religiously each night. Backup the important documents from my MacBook Pro at the end of the work day and restore/sync with my Hacki when I am home. And repeat ad nauseum. Prime idea, only I am not that diligent and nearly not as much of an industrious fellow.

After hearing all the buzz around OSX forums, I decided to give DropBox a try, and my, was I surprised! Amazingly seamless and scalable, this app is fast, lean, and does everything right! It maintains a local Folder on my Mac, which my applications can read from/write to, and backs up all the files therein to the central DropBox server. Any changes are immediately caught, and archived to the DropBox server in the background, as well as downloaded to any other computer linked with that account instantaneously. The possibilities are endless.

At first I used it to replace the Documents folder on my system, and started saving all my files to the DropBox. Easy enough – it sync’d all my files to all my machines. Next up, my scanned documents, and indeed, that was a snap. I then decided to sync my Adium Logs to the DropBox, which just involved creating a SymLink from my DropBox Chat Log folder to the Adium folder.

ln -s /Volumes/Documents/Home/Dropbox/Catalogs/Chat\ Logs/ /Volumes/Documents/Home/Library/Application\ Support/Adium\ 2.0/Users/Default/Logs

Could not be easier. For a while I was content with this, but the heart yearns for more. I decided to take up the next challenge, and as it turned out, this was the more challenging of the lot. Syncing my NewsFire RSS reader preferences, feeds, and read count.

One might assume that it would be as simple as creating a folder in the DropBox folder and Symlink’ing it to the NewsFire folder (or any App folder) in Application Support. But as it turns out, it of course isn’t as straightforward. For the successful syncing of apps across machines with DropBox we will need to replicate three folders/plists in the DropBox folder. These are

1. Application PLIST (org.xlife.NewsFire.plist) originally in ~/Library/Preferences/
2. Application Folder (NewsFire) originally in ~/Library/Application Support/
3. Cache Folder (org.xlife.NewsFire) originally in ~/Library/Caches/

Copy/Move these three to the DropBox folder. Most of the help I found on the web dealing with this type of sync’ing stops at creating symlinks and doesn’t mention the Caches folder. Caches is very important as this will store the current state of the application. For instance, the number of read RSS entries in a news reader. I have read 11 latest at home, but in the meantime 13 new have arrived and if I didn’t have the caches folder, I would see 24 when I log in at work. Easy when there are a handful, but can get impossible if there are 100-500 new entries. Just an example.

Back to topic, now create Symlinks like so.

ln -s /Volumes/Documents/Home/Dropbox/PLISTS/org.xlife.NewsFire.plist /Volumes/Documents/Home/Library/Preferences/org.xlife.NewsFire.plist

ln -s /Volumes/Documents/Home/Dropbox/AppSupp/NewsFire /Volumes/Documents/Home/Library/Application\ Support/NewsFire

ln -s /Volumes/Documents/Home/Dropbox/Caches/org.xlife.NewsFire /Volumes/Documents/Home/Library/Caches/org.xlife.NewsFire

And Bob’s your uncle. A word of warning- this WILL fail if you don’t set the newly created Symlink to the PLIST as a Locked item. Just right click on the PLIST in Finder, and click the box that says Locked Item. This will prevent the App from overwriting the Symlink. It’s that simple.