Archive for the ‘mac’ Category

The importance of backups

Friday, February 29th, 2008

My hard drive on my macbook failed a few weeks ago. I’ve resurrected the original hard drive (not the failed one) till I get around to buying a new one. Luckily I had backed up my photos the night before (yay for rsync!), so I didn’t lose anything really important.

I’m seriously considering getting a Time Capsule, since I need a wireless router anyway, and automatic wireless backups would be awesome.

Deleting locked files from a USB drive in OS X

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

I ran into the following dialog when trying to “Empty Trash” in OS X (10.4)


dialog showing locked files

The problem was caused by a couple of hundred locked files on the USB drive, which OS X happily sent to the trash but would not let me delete. Normally you can just restore a file from the Trash to a normal file, and then alter the properties (File -> Get Info in the Finder). But since the files were on a USB drive I couldn’t see them in the Trash.
So the files were effectively stuck, and I couldn’t empty the Trash without hitting “continue” a couple of hundred times (and the locked files would still be there, so that would happen every time).

After a quick google, and a look at man chflags, I found a solution. Open terminal, and run the following commands (replacing DRIVE with the volume name of your USB drive)

NOTE: run the following command at your own risk!


find /Volumes/DRIVE/.Trashes -type f -exec chflags nouchg {} \; -print

After than, “Empty Trash” worked as normal.

Totoro finally arrives!

Sunday, July 9th, 2006

My MacBook finally arrived last weekend. It’s small and white, so I’ve named it ととろ (Totoro) :-)

A few quick notes:

  • the packaging is excellent, the box is incredibly thin
  • it looks a lot like my old ibook from the outside, just a bit thinner and wider
  • the screen is great, a big improvement over the ibook
  • the keyboard seems good

Obligatory unpacking photos follow…

MacBook box - it's a slim little fellow!

Unpacking the MacBook

Unpacking complete

I had to wait 4 weeks for the white 2.0GHz MacBook stock to arrive. I was considering paying the extra $200 for the black because I was sick of waiting. They look nice, like the old pismo powerbook, but also a lot like a normal pc laptop, and it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the extra just for the color (although something less prone to scratching might be nice).

Now I have to install the 120G drive in it and get everything transferred across!