smart

If something has a “smart” in its name, you know that it’s talking to someone else, and the topic of conversation is probably you.

Howdy

Welcome to Maffi’s own personal blog. I post about stuff I see and do. Probably something about engineering and stuff. And of course: this is my WordPress-Playground. This site might look totally different the next time you visit it.

Live long and prosper!

How to sync Omnifocus-Clients via webDAV and GMX

I recently thought about switching from my local sync via Bonjour over to webDAV, to be able to sync with my OmniFocus on my home-desk even, if there are problems with local network. I did a quick search and found out that my e-Mail-Provider GMX was offering a webdav-service. So here ist how to set up you Omni-Focus both on iPhone and Desktop to do the switch.
1. Sync Omni-Focus for iPhone
2. Sync Omni-Focus on your desktop
3. Open up your Finder and hit CMD + K and connect to your GMX-Server at the adress: https://mediacenter.gmx.net and hit connect. My machine was asking for some permissions to use information from my keychain to get my login-details for my GMX-Account.
4. You can now create a new folder in which you can store your Omni-Focus-Sync-Database. In my case I created a foder named ofodb
5. Go to your omni-Focus preferences and switch to the Sync-Tab and choose volume.
6. Choose your syncfolder and accept it.
7. Hit sync. Omni-Focus should upload your library after that.
8. Switch to your iPhone and open up preferences there.
9. Go to sync and type in the mediacenter-adresss given above. Make sure you also specify the correct folder there.
10. Omni-Focus will prompt for your login-Details of your GMX-Account – Type them in. (If not, try to leave the folder and just put in this adress: https://mediacenter.gmx.net
11. Sync with your GMX-webDAVserver!

I’ve not tested this feature very much, but there might be some problems with the subfolder ofodb. I’ll try to put my Omnifocus-Database in the root-directory.

Edit
——–
After some testing it looks like this feature is a bit unreliable when it comes to different network connections. I was unable to sync my iPhone while I was connected via WiFi. Syncing went back to normal, when I disabled WiFi, I could sync via an Edge-Connection.

OS X Mail can’t make notes

Recently I had problems with my notes, which are synced via iTunes into my iPhone and Mail. I couldn’t make any new notes as well as no syncing too. What was wrong?

Recently I was doing a cleaning of my fonts folder and obviously deactivated one font to much. Reactivating the font MarkerFelt and everything was back to normal!

Alternative: Go to Mail Preferences and look for the tab Font & Color and chose a different font for your notes. (which is what I did, as I didn’t like the marker-font anyway.)

Help Photoshop won’t start up.

When I came back from vacation Photoshop would not start up wie the error “An unexpected and unrecoverable problem has occured. Photoshop will now exit.” Yikes! Unrecoverable that’s bad.
The problem was peculiar since I had left without any signs of problems. Finder was sometimes asking me for the permission to delete files that were on my deskop and other places. Onyx and repairing file permissions brought no bettering, so I took a look at my Library-Folder. During a profile-migration I had granted another user access to my home-folder and exactly that was causing the problems.
I revoked permissions for the second user and everything was getting back to normal.

Merge two folders

HELP!
I need to merge the content of several large folders on my mac.
Filemanagement with Windows and Mac OS X differs, when it comes to folder replacement.
Under Windows if you have two folders with the same name, the windows explorer will warn you, that files within that folder will be replaced with the ones you just dragged in. As the result, you will have a folder containing all the files form you source-folder accompanied by the ones in your target-folder, that were not present in the source-folder.

WATCH OUT!
Under OS X, if you drag a source-folder on a folder containing an equally named target-folder, you will replace your target-folder with the source-folder. Data that was not present in the source-folder will be lost! Merging data is not trivial under OS X.
The Kingsize-Solution to leave newer Data untouched is the rsync comand. This is the way you want to choose, if you are unsure, if you updated files within both folders.

Example
We have a TEST Folder within the Source Folder, we want to merge with the TEST Folder inside DROPIN. We use the folowing comand from within the terminal.

rsync -au SOURCE/ DROPIN

-a stands for the archive option; -u leaves newer files in the destination folder untouched.

For those of you who want to save some typing and use drag an drop:

rsync -au "dragged sourcefolder icon" "dragged targetfolder icon with the last forwardslash removed"

Another option is the ditto comand, which copies the files and adds the ones that were not present before as well as overwrites the ones that were present in both folders.

ditto SOURCE DROPIN

See the internet for the many more options these comands have or use the option -h. Especially rsync has options to configure what exact files you want replaced, like timestamp, filesize or type.

Of course you should try this out for yourself, to prevent unwanted data loss!

GO SANE

Today I’m going to introduce a way how to connect a image capture device, which is not natively supported by OS X, to your mac.

The Problem: I wanted to connect a rather old scanner – a HP Scanjet 3300C to my Macbook Pro. However HP doesnot deliver any current drivers to connect it to my mac.

The solution is an open source interface called sane which delivers connectivity to many many image capturing devices and also enables Linux to capture images from your digital camera or scanner. Basically the sane interface sits between your operating system and your connected hardware as a driver. The sane frontend connects sane and your operating system. The backend connects between sane and your hardware. This is a very convenient solution to save development time and money as you only have to establish a connection to sane once.

In my case I needed the appropriate files for OS X and installed 1. the libusb package followed by 2. the sane-backends package. And finally 3. I installed the TWAIN-SANE-Interface.
There is also an option, to install a preference pane in your system configuration, where you can select your image capturing device and do more configuration tasks.
There is also a a backend available for the HP 3300c, but for me the above steps were sufficient.

In Photoshop you will find a new device under the import section called sane. The features you will find here can not compare to the Windows 98 Driver, however you can select the disired resolution and use your hardware. Otherwise I would have needed to invest in a new scanner, which I did not want to.

There is a wide variety of image devices available. Maybe yours is among them.

Go Sane and have a nice scan!