Auto mount/unmount your Mac volumes when required
Earlier this month you might recall the solution I gave you for keeping unused volumes unmounted on your mac. The next part of the equation, automatically mounting those volumes when needed to run my backup scheme, took me a little longer to sort out. In fact I wasn’t able to write a solution on my own, try as I might, so I finally went searching for one.
I needed a script of some sort that would mount my unmounted volumes when it was time for ChronoSync to run and then unmount my volumes when ChronoSync was finished. After several IRC queries, forum posts here and there and countless Google searches I finally stumbled upon this post at Mac OS X Hints. This solution was the answer I needed and it works perfectly. I won’t recap the whole thing here, but I will give you the bits that were most important to me.
Copy the following script into Script Editor.app (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app), changing the diskname and appname to suite your needs:
property diskname : "MyDisk"
property appname : "ChronoSync"
on idle
tell application "System Events"
set x to the name of every process
if appname is not in x then
if (exists the disk diskname) then
do shell script "disktool -l | egrep -i "Mountpoint = '/Volumes/" & diskname & "" | cut -d\' -f2 | xargs -n1 disktool -p"
end if
else
do shell script "disktool -l | egrep -i "Mountpoint = '', fsType = 'hfs', volName = '" & diskname & "" | cut -d\' -f2 | xargs -n1 disktool -m"
end if
end tell
end idle
Next you need to save it as a bundled app and select “Stay Open“, give it a useful name and save it where you will be able to find it. In my case I chose /Library/Scripts/ChronoSync/:
Then you have to make it run in the background. To do this, find your newly created app, right click on it, “Show Package Contents“, find the Info.plist and open that in your favorite plain text editor. Above the key that says CFBundleAllowMixedLocalizations you want to add the following:
<key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
<string>1</string>
Get out of the package and find your app again and double click on it. It should launch in the background but not show in the dock. You can see that it’s running by opening Activity Monitor.app (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app):
Now to truly make this process automated, you need this app to be on when your computer is on, so it needs to launch when you login. So open your Accounts preference pane in System Preferences.app (/Applications/System Preferences.app), select the Login Items tab, select the 
button and add your newly created app:
And that’s it! Next time your backup program fires up to do it’s regularly scheduled backups, your disk mounting app will mount your volume, wait for your backup app to finish and then quietly tuck your volume back up for the night.
Other references
- A Script to mount/unmount a volume on app launch
- An AppleScript to mount, run, unmount a disk image
- MountPart
AppTrap; the unistaller that makes sense
One thing that’s become increasingly important to me over the years is uninstallers. If an app doesn’t come with one I am reluctant to install it. It became painfully clear recently just how much crap application leave behind when you are done with them and banish them to the trash.
In the last few years a number of apps have cropped up that not only remove the app, but all of it’s associated plist files and folders and what ever peripherals the app has added to your system. I have been using AppZapper for no better reason than in was there, packaged with some Delicious Generation bundle of the time (probably Macheist), but it always struck me as odd that I would have to open an app to move another app to the trash. I presume it’s just to show off their artwork and screen flashy effect more than any practical reason. But to me it just seems like one step too many.
In my hunt for something smarter, I came across AppTrap. This just makes sense to me. It sits in waiting, in your preference pain and if you happen to drop an app in the trash, it pops up and asks if you to get rid of the other crud that goes with it. How smart is that?
I Give Apples New Safari 4 Beta a Spin
Apple announced today the launch of their Safari 4 beta program that claims to lead the way with innovation. I had to test this claim so I immediately downloaded it and gave it a spin. Here are my findings:
- On initial launch you are presented with the “Top Sites” window in which it appears that Safari scours your history for the most frequently visited sites in your recent cache and then throws up their thumbnails in a Core Animation like black gallery for you to pick from. Selecting the edit button allows you to remove items and make others sticky. I presume you can also add others that might actually be more indicative of your “Top Sites”. Again, in true Apple form, Apple seems to be hinging the success of a product on visual wow factor, but admittedly I could see myself making use of this.
- My next reaction was when I created a new tab and found that, a la Google Chrome, the tabs are on top. Why? While I will most certainly get used to it, what is the actual reason for this? I can’t find and difference in their functionality apart from the fact that you can only drag them about from their corner. Aside from that you can still drag them, move them from window to window, create a new window with each tab… there is one option I hadn’t noticed in previous version, “Add bookmark for these X tabs”. Is that new?
- Coverflow in Safari… there have been a few plugins to address this in the past. I guess they are history now. Do I need Cover Flow in Safari? I don’t need it iTunes or Finder so I probably won’t use it here either. But that said, it must be a popular enough technology if they keep throwing it in to their software.
- History search. Now that I like! I have always found searching the the history in the bookmarks folder to be painful and unproductive. This history search is insanely fast and (in Cover Flow form) even shows you screen shots of the sites that match your search terms.
- It claims to be faster, using the Nitro Engine. It could be but browsers and web technology today is getting so fast I would be hard pressed to notice the difference. It does seem to be faster overall but am I reacting to the guts of a finely tuned OS X Cocoa application or the page load? One note I will make about making browsers faster (and Safari 3 is already guilty of this), they cache things… unnaturally so which can make web development a nightmare. Safari 3 already caches it’s javascript and images in ways that cause web developers to have to reset their browsers all too often just to get an accurate response on their new projects. And faster also means pre-load, again which Safari 3 is bad for. Safari 3 will scour your main CSS file in search of things to load (like background images), whether or not that thing is actually needed or even being used. I hope Safari 4 handles this a little better.
- The newish developer tools are nice (if your weren’t already playing with them in webkit), but I don’t know… it’s still not FireBug. You still can’t select code in the element window! How good is debuggin if I can’t edit what’s there or even copy and past it to a text editor? Seriously? As far as developer tools, these will give a glimpse into how your page is working, but they’re not much good for anything else.
- The full page zoom could be useful (hopefully not for a few years for me yet), but wow does it ever slow things down. Zoom in once and try page scrolling… not so fast now.
- I love, love, love the new address bar! If I am going to interface with browser in any way, it’s through the address bar so this improvement is quite welcome. Basically when you start typing in the address bar you are presented with much the same information your were before, but it’s clearly defined in two categories; history and bookmarks. In both cases it presents you with the site title followed by the URL which makes it very easy to get your bearings.
- The search field is now really slick too. It’s along the lines of Inquisitor, offering you suggestions and previous search queries. Very nice!
- CSS Animation, CSS Effects, CSS 3 Web Fonts… just more things to tease us web developers with. Stuff we won’t be able to use in the real world until all other browsers catch up. We can always dream though…
Overall, I think this is two things combined; a promising look at where web browsers should be and a sobering reminder of how much waiting for other browsers to get there will suck.
Stacks plus ExtraContent; it's a new Stacks Library item
So did you here the news? Possibly the most exciting thing to happen to themes, plugins and RapidWeaver all at one time! Back a couple of months ago we introduced you to ExtraContent, the new way of getting more out of the available RapidWeaver content areas. And a little while ago, YourHead Software introduced Stacks, a new way of building your page layouts in RapidWeaver. Then recently YourHead Software announced the the API that goes along with Stacks so that developer can build custom stacks to add to your Stacks Library. Are you with me here?
So what do you get when you put it all together? A custom stack made for ExtraContent enabled themes! Now you can access your ExtraContent areas of your ExtraContent enabled themes from the comfort of the Stacks interface. Utilize the layout power and elegance of Stacks to build exceptional ExtraContent layouts without having to so much look at a snippet or piece of code.
Here is the best part, the ExtraContent Stacks plugin is free. All you need is Stacks, and ExtraContent enabled theme and this custom ExtraContent stack and you have a world of possibilities in your hands.
Learn more about the ExtraContent Stacks plugin here, watch the tutorial here, download the ExtraContent Stacks plugin here and get YourHead Softwares Stacks for RapidWeaver.
YourHead launches Stacks 1.0
Fellow RapidWeaver developer, Isaiah of YourHead Software announced today that Stacks, a fluid layout plugin for RapidWeaver, is now official, hitting the big version 1.0. Those of you familiar with YourHead’s previous heavy hitting page layout tool, Blocks, will immediately recognize what this RapidWeaver plugin is all about, but the two are as different as night and day.
Don’t get me wrong, Blocks is a brilliant feat of plugin engineering and is the life blood of literally throngs of RapidWeaver users unable to do such layouts on their own. But it’s not a plugin that ever fit my web design sensibilities. The web is fluid, ever changing, growing, shrinking… for me, Blocks was too rigid.
Enter Stacks; a completely fluid, flexible, drag’n'drop all about layout tool for RapidWeaver that can generate oodles stacked up, blocked up, split up, embedded here and there kind of page layouts that only a pocket full of hand coded snippets could achieve perviously. Just like Blocks, Stacks allows to drop in text, HTML, images and whatnot, but then it allows to stacks onto stacks and those onto more stacks. You can make columns, columns in columns, columns where one column is an image, one is some code, one is some text, etc… drag that under some more columns… before you know it, you’ve got your very own 960 Grid System built into a RapidWeaver plugin.
If you are looking for the ultimate in flexible page layout with RapidWeaver, go check out Stacks. There are some great movies demonstrating the raw power of it and there is also and Stacks API if you’re interested in creating a custom Stacks library or two.
Life As a Theme Developer
Have you ever wondered what a day in the life of a professional RapidWeaver theme developer is like? Wonder no more because I am about to tell you.
02-18-09 07:22 – started writing this which will end up being a blog post on seyDoggy.com
02-18-09 07:23 – opening up Mailplane.app to have a gander at what support has crawled in overnight.
02-18-09 07:28 – popping in the the Realmac Software forum to respond to a thread I was notified about… nothing for me to add.
02-18-09 07:40 – helped potting training daughter go to the potty.
02-18-09 07:52 – responded to an email from the seyDesign Member Group.
02-18-09 07:53 – reacted to a Twitter follow request… followed.
02-18-09 07:56 – Twittering.
02-18-09 08:02 – responding to another Realmac Software forum thread.
02-18-09 08:04 – sifting through a bunch of press releases that I subscribe to.
02-18-09 08:18 – responded to a comment on seyDoggy.com blog.
02-18-09 08:19 – moving over to the support email account now. Checking the spam box since Google seems to deem all of my real support requests as Spam.
02-18-09 08:21 – yup, 7 messages caught in the spam box.
02-18-09 08:22 – opening up Parallels to confirm one users report of an IE bug with one of my themes.
02-18-09 08:24 – realizing that their complaint has more to do with screen size than anything else. It’s not a bug, me thinks. Keep testing.
02-18-09 08:28 – just got a wrong number on the support line. “seyDoggy who? I’m trying to call my sister.”
02-18-09 08:38 – yup, IE6 issue was just the end users window size. I like that kind of support.
02-18-09 08:50 – support taking longer then I hoped. Need some tunes.
02-18-09 08:59 – support is done.
02-18-09 09:00 – opening my calendar (a Fluid.app SSB of Google Calendar) to see what’s on the plate. My calendar is my mental mapping tool.
02-18-09 09:19 – more forum posting.
02-18-09 09:20 – back to calendar, deciding how long it’s been since I invoiced this one client before deciding to do more work for them. Have to be extra cautious in todays economy, not to get into too deep with any one client.
02-18-09 09:21 – going to do some site updates (in TextMate) for said client.
02-18-09 10:27 – just answered someones questions about M Cubed Softwares Code Collector Pro.
02-18-09 10:48 – syncing client changes via Panics Transmit.
02-18-09 10:57 – hmm… forgot to update the sitemap… and all the french <title> tags… ugh
02-18-09 11:06 – sitemap updated, french <title> tags updated, re-syncing.
02-18-09 11:26 – fresh coffee, looking at my calendar… what next…
02-18-09 11:28 – checking my @bugs tags in TaskPaper to see if there are any pressing bugs I should tackle… one in seyDoggy bloop! but it’s going to have to wait until I have the time for some extensive rewriting. It’s only an issue with one plugin so it’s not really a bug as much as it’s a compatibility issue. Moving on…
02-18-09 11:33 – continuing with Med Designs Bubblegum.rwtheme update. Adding some really cool new features to it. Checking my todo list within the theme to pick up where I left off on Monday.
02-18-09 11:54 – force quitting RapidWeaver after I jammed it up with a tricky Theme.plist move.
02-18-09 12:22 – commit current set of changes to the rwtheme package go make lunch.
02-18-09 12:54 – exercise… it’s important to get away from the office chair for a bit so you don’t develop deep vein thrombosis, but getting and walking about is boring. So I exercise; 50 pushups, 25 crunches, 20 lying-on-my-back-leg-lift-thingies, 20 of the same, but lying on my side, and then again, but on my tummy. Not only is it good for preventing DVT, but it helps my core compensate for slouching at my desk for hours at a time.
02-18-09 13:17 – back to Bubblegum.rwtheme update.
02-18-09 16:04 – committed a whole whack of changes to the Bubblegum.rwtheme. Time to wonder about the house for a stretch and maybe splash some cold water on my face.
02-18-09 16:08 – scheduled in two custom jobs, one for Friday and one for Monday… sigh.
02-18-09 16:23 – feeling refreshed. Time to get back at it. But it’s time for 10 minutes of fun; time to read a chapter of jQuery in Action.
02-18-09 16:45 – Well it’s time to call it a day and go embrace the inner chef in me. I hope you’ve enjoyed peering into a day in the life of a professional RapidWeaver theme developer.
Keeping unused hard disks unmounted
The question
How do you prevent Mac OS X Leopard from auto mounting disks, drives and volumes when the computer boots up or a user logs in? (skip to the solution)
The preamble
I have spent days (literally) searching for the answer to this one; I have a Mac Pro running Leopard with (count them) 4 internal hard drives. One is my system disk and the other 3 are backup disks. Two are weekly mirrors of my system while the third is a daily snap shot of my user account. We won’t even get into the external disks I have. Yes I am THAT anal about my data.
So what is the trouble here? When you have this many disks containing duplicate data, Spotlight, QuickSilver, Launchbar, Google QSB, etc… they all want to serve up information found on each disk. That would include duplicate information that you most likely don’t want to inadvertently open and/or edit. But further to this, why spin up a disk, potential shortening it’s life span and wasting precious energy, when it only gets used on occasion?
One way around this is to diligently eject each volume every time you boot up your system. But that is both a pain in the butt and no where near as geeky as it should be. So do a quick search on Google for a solution to “unmount disk on login” or “prevent volumes from mounting at the boot up in Mac OS X Leopard” and you get a great deal of outdated info, inefficient Apple Scripts, overly complex bash commands, apps that wrap bash in an executable app that you launch at login when the moon is at… you get the idea.
So I set forth to put together the best of the best and simplest of the simple and post it here, for my own reference, exactly what I did to prevent my back up volumes from mounting on boot up.
My Solution (proceed at your own risk)
First off, what you are going to find with most solutions out there is the need for a file called fstab in the systems hidden “/etc” folder. The trouble is that later versions of OS X (10.4.x and later) don’t have this file. However, there IS a redundant file called fstab.hd. WE ARE NOT USING THIS FILE. Instead we will create our own fstab file. So with that out of the way, let’s get started:
The short of it
- Start by making a backup of your system. If you bugger up your system you’ll have something to recover from.
- Open terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
- Do one on the following:
- In Terminal, type the following (with your volume name) and return
*:diskutil info /volumes/DiskName
- Or, you can use Apples Disk Utility app (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app), select the disk in question and choose “info” from the toolbar.
- In Terminal, type the following (with your volume name) and return
- Find the Volume UUID (Universal Unique Identifier). Copy the UUID to your clipboard
**. - In Terminal enter and return
***:sudo pico /etc/fstab - Enter your password and return.
- You’ll enter a window that looks like this:
- Enter the following (with your UUID) and return
****:UUID=87635CC4-B2EF-3114-B854-F64347A39630 none hfs rw,noauto 0 0 - Repeat step for each device you with to hide, each on a new line.
- Exit pico (⌃X) and save (Y).
- Press return when prompted with:
File Name to Write: /etc/fstab
- All that’s left to do is is cross your fingers and reboot your Mac.
The long of it
*substitute “DiskName” for the name of the volume you wish to hide. If your volume name contains a space, like “Macintosh HD” you need to escape the space with a backslash so it looks like “Macintosh\ HD”**We use the “Volume UUID” as the disk identifier since it is not prone to change like “Device Identifier” (i.e. “disk0s2″) which can change with each and every start up.***This will create/edit your “/etc/fstab” file with pico, a simple text editor.****The string you are entering is the device id followed by the mount point, the filesystem, the mount options, the dump and fsck booleans. In this case:- the device is my UUID (UUID=87635CC4-B2EF-3114-B854-F64347A39630)
- the mount point is “none” (because we won’t be mounting it)
- the file system is “hfs” (since it’s formatted for Mac)
- the mount options are “rw” (read-write) and “noauto” (volume will not auto mount)
- the dump option (backup utility) and fsck option (filesystem check utility) booleans are both set to 0 (false, off, nil, nada) since we don’t plan to mount the volume and therefor don’t need to backup or check them
For more on fstab column structures, visit tuxfiles fstab help.
The wrap-up
For whatever reason, Apple decided to nix fstab from it’s own Unix core. Perhaps for security or perhaps they just deemed it unnecessary. If you look in the other file I mentioned, “/etc/fstab.hd” (in terminal, enter and return: sudo pico /etc/fstab.hd), you’ll see the message:
IGNORE THIS FILE. This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in future releases. Do not depend on this file or its contents.
However, I see no harm in extending the life expectancy of my disks and saving energy at the same time. All while doing away with the annoyance of long indexing times and being inundated with duplicate search results. If you have anything to add, please feel free to leave a comment.
Other references
Is social media really free?
I met today with a local Kitchener-Waterloo Graphic Designer, Umberto Micheli of Plus Branding to exchange ideas and experiences and stories about being self employed as a designer in today’s tough economy. It doesn’t seem to matter what sector you are referring to, the bottom line always looks the same; you have to spend money if you stand a chance of coming out the other end smelling like roses.
Of course our perspectives differed a little. I take online presence and social media for granted and Umberto knows the ins-n-outs or drop mailers and print advertising. The later comes at a real cost, like cold hard cash kind of cost while the former is free… or is it?
It got me thinking when I got home, what’s the real cost of social media and online marketing? What is the mental tax and real cost of labour involved. I bet when it really comes down to it, dollar for dollar, the physical path become a lot cheaper then the metaphysical path.
Real World vs Online
Consider this; a graphic artist may put anywhere from 2 to 6 hours into a flyer, that flyer gets printed for a couple hundred dollars, that flyer gets handed out home to home for a couple hundred more. Regardless of internet connectivity or technical know-how, the information on that flyer has now reached thousands of homes guaranteed, and may very well remain there anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Heck if your flyer is a Pizza or Chinese food menu, that flyer might remain stuck on the fridge for years to come. Total cost for such longevity? Anywhere from $500 to $5000.
Now let’s look at the flip side, social media and the “free” online presence. You want to maximize your impact, so you invest your “free” time in a blog, Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and maybe a pinch of Tumblr if you’re really in the game. But what kind of investment are we talking about here? Do you want your blog to be really noticed? Then you have to post to it more than once a week. What’s that take? A post like this might take a couple of hours once you’ve collected your thoughts, images, proof read (cough) and publish.
How about Twitter then? To be honest, if you’re not a moderately attractive woman with a few geeky words to say about tech gear, your chances of building up an instant following are slim to none. I have been on Twitter for nearly two years and only have 300+ followers. I’ve amassed nearly 6,500 posts on Twitter. That’s about to 9.25 posts a day. Even if each post only took me 1.5 minutes, you’re looking at nearly 15 minutes spent each and every single day for almost two years posting to Twitter… that’s about 91 hours per year, or tens of thousands of dollars worth of man hours spent on 300 people, a fraction of which actually care enough to pay attention. My advice, get into Twitter for the love of community, not for a leg up in the market.
The rest
So where does that leave FaceBook, LinkedIn and Tumblr then? Well, take the above paragraph and divide the followers by two, then increase the effort by two and you have a $ per eyeball ratio that is four times as costly as Twitter (or 25% as effective depending on your perspective).
The Best Approach
Is there a best approach? Different markets will have different needs. Certain demographics will embrace one approach more than the other so it depends on what your target market is. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense for me to market my downloadable RapidWeaver themes in a flyer sent to a few thousand local area homes, but that’s not to say I couldn’t benefit from the exposure. But Plus Branding, on the other hand could benefit immensely from both an online presence and a distributed print approach. But it’s finding the balance that is key.
Rebuilding after all of these years!
Rebuilding after all of these years. Seriously, it’s been years since I have done a clean install… since Mac OS X 10.2 to be exact. I have been pulling all the crud I have collected over the years along with me like barnacles on the bottom of of the ship of life. And like the real thing, those barnacles have been slowing me down.
This became painfully obvious recently when I made a new user account to make some tutorial movies. The new account was fast and responsive in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. If this wasn’t evidence enough, I was having a nagging problem with TaskPaper from Hogbay Software where for no obvious reason, it would quite with every launch. Between Jesse and Apple they were able to nail it down to a webcam component that was not proper GC code but was pretending to be. The point is, I have no idea where I ever picked up that component or when even. It was time to nuke and rebuild.
The reason I haven’t in so many years is because I have come to rely on so many hacks over the years, things that Mac OS X wasn’t either capable of or didn’t do well enough. It was a scary thought to try and get by on a stock system or try and replicate those hacks again. For the last little while I’ve been trying to change my habits, trying to use less 3rd party hackery and find native solutions or terminal commands that accomplish the same thing.
For instance, years ago I used to use USB Overdrive to ramp up my mouse tracking and and assign special functions to various mouse button combinations. When support for it waned I turned to SteerMouse which did almost exactly the same thing. But now-a-days I barely use the mouse and when I do all I really need is a speed boost which is easily achieved in the terminal:
If you have a mouse:
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling some_numberIf you have a trackpad:
defaults write -g com.apple.trackpad.scaling some_numberThe some_number at the end of each of the above lines must be replaced by, well, an actual number indicating the speed you’d like to use—the higher the number, the faster the tracking will be. As a starting point, the default value for maximum mouse speed is 3.0, and maximum trackpad speed is 1.5. So you might try a starting value of 5.0 for your turbo-charged mouse, and 2.5 or 3.0 for a turbo-charged trackpad.
The easiest way to make your changes take effect is to log out and then log in again (Apple menu: Log Out user name ).
I guess my point is this (wearing my nutMac/productivity hat), if you are going to spend any time as a developer of any sort, keep your system customizations to a minimum, install only those apps you honestly think you’ll need or use, find native solutions to mods you can’t live without, document those mods carefully and alway be prepared to do a clean install from time to time. The less cluttered your system is the better chance you have using a migration assistant so you don’t have to do it all manually like I did.
That’s where I am at now. I have spent nearly two whole days manually moving preferences and folders for the apps I need so that I can be sure not to take all the other crap with me again. Now that I have done my clean install I should have no trouble keeping it clean every six months now.
nutMac meets seyDoggy
It’s one of the oldest pieces of web real estate I own that still saw some moderate action about once a month or more. But the time has come to close up nutMac and move on. I was writing some more web development tips there then I was Mac productivity tips and either way, I honestly think that stuff is better suited anyhow. So with a little WordPress magic, we pulled in this blog from blogger and pulled in the nutMac blog from WordPress, mashed them together and voila! Nothing lost, everything gained.
Now everything we want to write about web design/development, Mac, app review, RapidWeaver development, productivity tips, IE hacking… it’s all here now, in one place, not two. Sounds good to me.