Category: Guides

How to burn your own bootable Mac OS X Lion media

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Found an interesting tidbit on the web showing how to burn your own bootable Mac OS X Lion disc. Unlike previous OS X releases, only a single layer 4.7 GB DVD is required. The actual image is just slightly larger than a 4 GB SD card so if you’re going to use flash media, you will need to buy a 8 GB one. I guess most of the system apps are now in 64-bit thus reducing the overall size of the disc image.

Anyways, use these instructions to make your own bootable backup install media for Mac OS X Lion. It would allow you to clean install without having to install Snow Leopard first, as Steve Jobs suggested.

  • Purchase and download Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store.
  • Locate the installer after it is downloaded. It should be in /Applications/.
  • Right click on Mac OS X Lion Installer and choose Show Package Contents.
  • Inside the Contents folder that appears you will find a SharedSupport folder and inside it you will find InstallESD.dmg.
  • Open Disk Utility, and drag InstallESD.dmg to its sidebar.
  • Click the Burn to make a bootable DVD, or use Restore to make a bootable USB/Flash/external HDD.

You can also save a copy of the image elsewhere for future use.

Compiling and install Apache 2 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Who knew Apple changed so many settings with the Apache 2 install on Mac OS X Snow Leopard? According to this page it is pretty much scattered everywhere on the system according to “Apple logic”. I decided that I want to update to the latest Apache (2.2.17 as of this writing) and while preserving some of Apple’s paths, also consolidate some so Apache related files can be relatively easy to find.  

To start, download and extract the latest Apache source. You should find a folder called “httpd-version”, in my case it’s called “httpd-2.2.17″ because that’s the version I downloaded. 

If you want to keep the Mac OS X desktop layout, just use:
CFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″
./configure -enable-layout=”Darwin”
 -enable-mods-shared=all
 -with-ssl=/usr
 -with-mpm=prefork
 -disable-unique-id
 -enable-ssl
 -enable-dav
 -enable-cache
 -enable-proxy
 -enable-logio
 -enable-deflate
 -with-included-apr
 -enable-cgi
 -enable-cgid
 -enable-suexec
Darwin already exists as a default in the Apache layout. But then your httpd.conf will end up being in “/etc/apache2/”

I went out of my way to make it a little bit different. Of course you don’t have to do any of these things below if you just want to stick to Mac OS X defaults.

Remove the remnants of the Apache 2.2.15 install from Snow Leopard according to the distros default layout page I linked earlier, but that’s not necessary. I did it so I don’t get confused where configuration files are located and I wanted to minimize as many copycats as possible. If you follow my guide step-by-step, and want the same setup as me, just delete the following folders: 

/etc/apache2/
/var/log/apache2/

Not too bad right? Only 2 folders to remove. 

Now we need to change a few lines in the layout configuration file that came with your Apache source. 

Inside the “httpd-2.2.17″ folder you just extracted you will find a file named “config.layout”, open this with a text editor, TextEdit would work. I’ve been using TextWrangler, makes no real difference. 

Find this line: <Layout Mac OS X Server>, change the prefix path to “/Library/WebServer”. Do the same to “config.layout” file in “srclib/apr” and “srclib/apr-util”. Then run these commands in Terminal. 
CFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″
./configure -enable-layout=”Mac OS X Server”
 -enable-mods-shared=all
 -with-ssl=/usr
 -with-mpm=prefork
 -disable-unique-id
 -enable-ssl
 -enable-dav
 -enable-cache
 -enable-proxy
 -enable-logio
 -enable-deflate
 -with-included-apr
 -enable-cgi
 -enable-cgid
 -enable-suexec
Once the configuration is finished, run “make”, then “sudo make install”. 

Go into your system preferences and restart Web Sharing and then check your Apache version with “httpd -v”. You can also visit http://localhost/ to see “It works!”

Enjoy! All related Apache files that you need to modify, such as httpd.conf is now located in /Library/WebServer/. I just think it’s so much easier to find httpd.conf in a pinch this way. 

Update: use directions from DIY Mac Server instead, they adhere to using /usr/local/ and I believe it’s a better setup. 

mkv2vob revisited: Mac OS X and WineBottler = win

Still stuck in the past and can’t let go of .mkv? mkv2vob is a niche app that allows for a quick remux of a .mkv file into a .mpg, .mp4, .m4v or other MPEG-4 containers that are more compatible with other devices.

Problem is this awesome niche app is only developed for the Windows platform. I was able to use CrossOver to run it in the past and wrote a guide about it. Due to the recent moves, the search engines hasn’t indexed my new hosting so the old link may be beyond lost. Well fret not, here’s a guide that will hopefully help you in your endeavours to successfully run Windows apps, such as mkv2vob in the Mac OS X operating system on your own in perpetuity.

Meet WineBottler. This app basically act as a packager that will make a .app file for you that would include all the dependencies that’s required to emulate an runtime environment for your Windows app. There are a lot of things supported out of the box, and apps such as mkv2vob that only require a couple of Windows dependencies runs like a champ. Let’s get started.

  1. Download WineBottler, Intel Macs only, sorry.
  2. Mount the disk image and drag Wine and WineBottler to Applications. Simply put Wine is the app that makes all the magic happen, WineBottler is the packager that makes it simple for the magic to happen.
  3. Run Wine, the preferences should pop up, I usually like my apps updating automatically, so check that, the updater should also execute on 1st run, if it doesn’t, update Wine.
  4. Download mk2vob, save it somewhere, say your desktop.
  5. Run WineBottler, choose custom prefix, select mkv2vob.exe that you downloaded (if it’s on your desktop it should be easy to find)
  6. Select the dependencies, mkv2vob requires Visual Basic Runtime 6 SP6, and Windows Script Host 5.6.
  7. Let WineBottler do its thing, it’ll ask you where you want to save the bottled app, just choose your Applications folder.
  8. You’re done, run mkv2vob.app when you want to use it!

Note: Windows Script Host 5.6 has several different flavours. I chose the one that didn’t specifically say JavaScript or VBScript. The option that says just “Windows Script Host 5.6″ is a package that includes both. I assume mkv2vob is programmed to use Visual Basic runtimes only but I haven’t tested this and the difference in the packaged app filesize is minimum.

If you want to use WineBottler with other Windows apps that you can’t do without under the Mac OS X environment, just find out what dependencies those apps require and use WineBottler to set it all up. Word of caution though, the compatibility is not 100%, even for mkv2vob there are some things that just don’t work right. I haven’t discovered any, but you may.

I also make an effort to discover native Mac OS X apps that would do the same thing. Trust me, I have replaced pretty much everything that I was used to on Windows by now. The new Mac App Store will only make app discovery easier in the future, as more developers adopt it.

Update: Subtitles are hardcoded to use Arial font, so make sure your custom prefix includes that too! You can always do it manually: You can copy any ttf in C:WindowsFonts and just name it Arial.ttf.

How to migrate from WordPress to Tumblr

Migrating from WordPress to Tumblr involves an exporting and importing process using a PHP script. This was the easiest way I found. During my search for migration methods I also discovered a Python script, as well as a Ruby on Rails script. But neither worked as well as this simple PHP script. 

Note: You’ll need some technical knowledge and should be comfortable with manipulating some PHP code. It’s not difficult but if you don’t know what PHP is, it’s probably a good time to stop here and do some reading on Google. This method also does not import any comments, tags or categories from WordPress. I was okay with that loss but you may beg to differ. 

You will need a web server running the latest PHP interpretor. The easiest way to do this is to use install a LAMP/MAMP/WAMP (Linux/Mac/Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. I like this method because after the migration, you can just uninstall this stack and it’s like as if nothing has ever happened. I’m not going to cover how to configure a LAMP stack, there are plenty of guides you can Google for. If you’re not comfortable with this, well you’ll have to pay for a web hosting service temporarily. I suggest NearlyFreeSpeech. They’re a reasonably priced prepaid hosting service that doesn’t require a service contract. 

There are people out there that prefers to just use the web server that came with their OS. Nothing wrong with this. I just don’t want to go in-depth on how to set this up. If you’re on a Mac you should already have Apache and PHP installed. 

Export your WordPress blog by going to Tools -> Export under Dashboard. Download this file and save it to your LAMP server’s root path (typically public_html, but whatever you have it configured to). I had some trouble with importing large XML files. My blog has over 500 posts. I had to specify date ranges to export 6 months at a time. Basically the script can handle around 50 posts or so at a time. Too many will result an error from Tumblr saying “Rate limit exceeded”, basically Tumblr’s API spam protection. 

Create a php file (I called mine wp2t.php) and copy paste the code from this source. You’ll need to edit the source to fit your account names at Tumblr, as well as specify the path to your WordPress XML export. $xmlFile, $tumblr_email, and $tumblr_password variables need to be changed to your information.

That’s it. Start the server, launch your browser and navigate to http://localhost/wp2t.php (or whatever you called your php file) and watch the automatic post happen in your Tumblr account’s Dashboard. 

I had to export 6 or 7 XML files from WordPress due to the sheer size of my blog. So I basically had to run the script 6 or 7 times with a different $xmlFile variable and the process finished just fine. 

Enjoy! Welcome to Tumblr!

Updating NVIDIA drivers for Boot Camp

So you have a Mac, and you’re running Boot Camp, and you want to get some performance enhancements or bug fixes that NVIDIA has rolled out in their latest drivers, but you’re stonewalled when you download the drivers and install them.

This is because although NVIDIA adhere to UDA, they failed to include the identifiers for many of the mobile GPUs that they sell to OEMS!

To get around this. Try laptopvideo2go.com’s Enhancer. You can use it to generate a modified .INF file that will allow the NVIDIA drivers you downloaded to install.

There are many options but none of them applied to me. I simply chose the driver version I downloaded from NVIDIA’s website, picked Performance, then hit Submit.