Monthly Archives: November 2012

Do more with your old MacBook

Have you got an old MacBook that Apple doesn’t support any more? Can’t install the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X on it because the CPU is too old? You’re probably seeing a warning from Chrome that Google has discontinued support for Mac OS X 10.5.3 or whatever is on that ancient beast? It’s the same with Firefox.

Flash isn’t updated either and when you go to Youtube to watch a video Chrome shows you an ugly warning that it’s outdated. Frustrating isn’t it?

What’s more, you’re probably leaving yourself open to exploits by nasties on the Internet. Problems and bugs are found in Flash all the time. Browsers and operating systems are the same too but if that software isn’t actively updated then you’re out of luck. I discovered Opera browser is still built for these old machines and it’s fast but Flash was still a problem and I needed a better solution.

As unlikely as it may seem on an Apple computer, it’s Linux that came to the rescue!

I didn’t think I could put Linux on the MacBook as there was no Bootcamp to dual boot the machine. Thanks to Zé I found the MacBook help pages for Ubuntu which pointed me towards rEFIt, a “boot menu and maintenance toolkit for EFI-based machines like the Intel Macs.” Even on an old MacBook 4,1 I could install Linux!

Installing rEFIt was simple enough, just run the package installer when I mounted the .dmg file. However the boot menu didn’t appear, even after several reboots until I pressed down ALT while rebooting.

Partitioning was a problem. I used the command line diskutil tool as suggested here but ran into problems because it couldn’t do a live resize. It would report that it ran out of space or there were too many deep links. Luckily the Ubuntu install CD comes with Gparted and after booting into the live CD I ran that and freed up 40GB of space for my new Linux install. A couple of reboots later to verify everything was working and then on to Linux!

Thankfully I didn’t run into the problems a recent Ars reviewer of Ubuntu Linux 12.10 came across. Linux installs are getting simpler and simpler. I told it to install alongside Mac OS X and let it set up partitions.

The WIFI adaptor in the Macbook requires a proprietary driver and after hooking the laptop up to an ethernet cable I started updating packages. While doing that I looked in the System settings and discovered that Ubuntu had installed the right driver without my prompting! I’m not sure when that happened but WIFI has been rock solid since.

Time to install Opera, the restricted packages (mp3 and dvd playback, etc), Java for Minecraft and finally Minecraft. Getting a Minecraft icon for Unity was a pain and I can’t find the script I used now but some quick Google-fu will find it.

Linux on the MacBook is nice and fast, even with Unity on there. I may replace that with a lighter window manager if it becomes a problem but it’s much improved on older releases. If you have an old MacBook and you don’t need some proprietary software that isn’t available for Linux then you should definitely put Linux on there. You’ll have the security of using updated software and a nice new desktop and apps to play around with!

Android: auto brightness and mute your phone

I have two great (and free) Android apps for you today:

Yet Another Auto Brightness is a useful app that will reduce the brightness of your phone display. Here’s the XDA thead about it.

Easy Mute will pause or mute music and podcasts on your phone just by placing your hand over the device. It uses the proximity sensor and you can tell it to only activate if the phone is lying flat.

It works great and it remembers it’s state when the phone is moved. This confused me at first but to replicate, cover the front of the camera to pause and then lift the phone. It will still be paused when you lift your hand off the front. After putting the phone down wave your hand over the front again and it will resume (or just unlock and hit play, the old fashioned way). (via)

Bash: compare two directories

In Unix based systems like Linux and Mac OS X there are a number of ways of comparing two directories. The simplest way is to use diff:

diff –brief -rb directory_1 directory_2

This command compares each file and reports if they differ. You can find the meanings of the options in man diff.

Diff is fine if you’re on a fast drive, if there aren’t many files or the files aren’t big. The command compares the contents of each file so it can take quite some time on a slow external drive.

If you just want to know which files are in one directory and not in the other directory it’s overkill. This little bit of Bash scripting does that however:

diff <(cd dir1 && find | sort) <(cd dir2 && find | sort)

It still uses diff, but compares the file listing of each directory instead of the files. It’s much faster and perfect for figuring out what files are out of place on my 2 relatively slow USB drives. (source)

Edit in 2021: I should have done this a long time ago. I put it in a function. Paste this into your .bashrc or .zshrc etc and reload the configuration by logging out and in or using source:

function dirdiff () { diff <(cd $1 && gfind | sort) <(cd $2 && gfind | sort) | colordiff | less -R; }

Now use dirdiff dir1 dir2 to compare two directories quickly.

My Favourite Android timer app: Chef’s Kitchen Timer

Timing things is something you might not think much about but when you have to make the dinner and various dishes take different times to cook then juggling the time in your head can be a pain.

That’s where a smartphone timer app comes in handy.

For the longest time my wife and I used Kitchen Timer and it works great but it has one drawback. The screen has to be unlocked to reset the alarm. There’s nothing more annoying than a loud beeping noise and you’re waiting for the screen to unlock and hit the off button.

I’ve looked for alternatives in the past but couldn’t find any until last week when I found Chef’s Kitchen Timer. It’s an app that does much the same but also shows the timer controls on the lockscreen. The UI is radically different and I never bother changing the timer names but it works a treat.

C64: Wanted Dead or Alive

Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” as played on a real Commodore 64. The song was digitized on an Amiga, downsampled to 4 bit audio and copied onto a 3.5″ inch disk that the Commodore 1581 drive could read from. The song data was streamed in realtime from the drive to the tiny 64Kb of memory in the computer and fed to the SID chip for our aural delight. I presume the screen has been blanked to save processing power, or the data for the sample gets dumped into screen memory.

This did require an Amiga with the Perfect Sound digitizer. I hooked up the CD player to the digitizer and then using a custom routine on the Amiga, my brother would convert the data to a 4 bit sample. Then we used a null modem? cable and Novaterm with a cartridge port adapter to transfer the data to a 1581 floppy. Quite a bit of work went into this.

20 years ago I recorded my own voice onto a cassette saying the word “Ozone” (the name of my demogroup) and I figured out how to sample my voice using the Commodore cassette deck hooked up to the C64. I can’t remember now what memory register it used, I’ll have to search my disk images or examine a C64 memory map one of these days. The quality was terrible but if you knew what was being said you could make it out. It had to be kept short because I’d ran out of memory! I think I used it in the last part of my demo “Awareness of Reality”. (via)

Do you remember the show where …

Years ago, I would guess almost 20 years ago, there was a late night show on TV that has stuck in my brain ever since.

This show had a Twilight Zone vibe about it. It was set in a diner/restaurant where time stood still. I’m pretty sure there were multiple episodes but I only remember one.

In the opening scene a waitress is wiping down a table when a shot rings out outside. A man staggers in clutching his chest. He’s been shot and has only moments to live. Time has stopped in the diner so he tells his story and resolves the troubles in his life.

By the end of the show he knows he has to leave, the waitress tells him time will start again. He knows he will die. He walks out the door and the show ends.

Does that ring a bell for anyone? I’ve looked online but it’s hard to find information about an obscure show from so long ago.

Ogre Battle

Spotify opened it’s doors to the Irish public today (well, to those who hadn’t used a proxy or some other means to pay for the UK service that is) so I gave it a go and of course looked for Queen music. The usual suspects are there and some material I hadn’t heard before like B-sides and “work in progress” versions of some songs. Great!

Then I found Deep Cuts, the first in a series of album compilations of more “obscure” stuff. I saw some favourites on there so I tried Ogre Battle first.


What the hell? Almost 30 seconds of near silence building up to an annoying wail! Argh! This wasn’t the Ogre Battle I remembered. It’s the version from their second album, Queen II.


The version of the song from “Queen at the BBC” is so much better, but that one isn’t on Spotify. I won’t be throwing out my MP3 or CD collection any time soon. Humph.