Howto: Automate backups to external drive with Check For Disk

Thanks to the wonderful Automator action Check for Disk made available from automator.us, you can setup an Automator workflow that will execute your backup script/launch your backup app every time you plug that external volume in your computer. Here's what you have to do:
1. Go to automator.us to download & install the Check for Disk action; read the online example while your at it.
2. Start up Automator.app and create a new workflow and add Check fro Disk as the first action. Setup any number of disks you want to backup to using the examble on automator.us as a guide
3. Add a second action, which depending on what you want to do could be 'Launch Application', 'Run AppleScript' or 'Run Shell Script' setting the 'Ignore results from previous action' will probably help you.

And that's it! each time your backup volume of choice is mounted on your desktop the script/application will be launched in my case PsyncX is launched and I have to manually press the previously created backup item. I could potentially make a shell script that calls psync directly I prefer to leave it like that.

Howto: Run Windows, Linux, DOS, FreeBSD on Intel Macs and MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger)

MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) with its rumored built-in virtualization technology has been delayed until October, so what can you do if you want to run an alternative operating system on your Apple hardware? You have several options, each with its Pro's and Con's:

1. BootCamp Beta (Current version:1.2)
Officially Supports: Windows 2K, XP-SP2 and Vista
Pros: Fastest (in terms of hardware performance) option available. BootCamp is not, in fact a virtualization machine, but a bunch a patch of the EFI firmware that allows for the installation of other operating systems plus a bunch of hardware device drivers that Apple engineers developed to allow Windows to support specific hardware devices found on Macs with Intel processors. Supports Windows XP, Windows 2000 and several modifications of Vista.
Cons: Carefully read that small print - Boot Camp beta is a time limited demo of a feature of MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard), the focus on time limited. Users are not allowed to keep their installations beyond September 30th. Also, don't expect any form of support for that project.
Available for free from Apple as a time-limited beta.

2. Parallels Desktop for Mac
Description: The first available and somewhat most widely known virtualization solution for the Intel based Macs.
Officially Supports: Windows 3.1 to Vista, Various Linuxes, OS/2, FreeBSD, SunSolaris, MS-DOS. See complete list
Pros: Various unique features such as Transporter (ability to Migrate remote Win installation), Coherence Mode (transparent integration of Windows and MacOS X applications), support for Intel's x86 Virtualisation technology and a generally nice and friendly interface; Can use the BootCamp installation on another drive/partition;
Cons: Lack of 3d graphics hardware acceleration; steep price - 80 bucks + the license fee for the OS you're about to use (if applicable).
Available for $79.95 from parallels.com


3. VMWare Fusion
Supports: widest possible range of OSes you can imagine
Description: VMWare is probably the most known name in virtualization for Windows and in general. Their products range from free to enterprise level and Datacenter products. VMWare Fusion is their first (AFAIK) product for the Mac, with a public beta currently available and a release date for version 1.0 set for Summer 2007.
Pros: Popular name in virtualization; Compatibility with other VMWare products - 350+ ready to use virtual appliances; Unique: 3D acceleration with (limited) DirectX 8.1 support; BootCamp compatibility;
Cons: Pricing is not available yet but it seems VMWare want to charge MacOS X users for something they are giving to Windows/Linux users for free.
Available as public beta from www.vmware.com/mac

4. CrossOver Mac
Detailed elsewhere on this site.
Pros:See Darwine below
Cons:Supports only Win98-compatible applications
Available for $59.95 from www.codeweavers.com


5. Q [kju:]
Detailed elsewhere on this site.
Supports: Various free operating systems, several Linux flavors, several UNIX flavors, Microsoft Windows (95 till Vista)....
Pros: Free, Open Source. Great integration of different OSes; Tutorials; Exportable VMs (Export Guest PC to Flash Drive); VirtualPC Import; lots of x86-on-x86 hardware optimizations not available in QEMU.
Cons: Well...Beta stage of development?
Available for free from www.kju-app.org

6. Darwine - Windows macs on the Mac, without Windows
Dawrine is an open source Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) port for the MacOS X. The final goal for the project is to allow Darwin and MacOS X users to be able to run applications for Windows without the need for Windows itself.
Supports: Win32 Api compatible. Requires Apple's X11 implementation (available on every Mac's install DVD)
Pros: Cheap, easy way to run Windows apps, no need for Windows.
Cons:Early stage of development, Win Api only Windows 98 compatible
Available for free from darwine.opendarwin.org

7. the list will probably grow....

Verdict: My current top favorite is Q [kju:] because of its FOSS philosophy, active development blog and nice documentation. Performance-wise you can't beat BootCamp, but if you go that way you'll probably have no choice but to upgrade to Leopard. VMWare Fusion seems the logical choice if you currently have lots of virtual machines on other platforms and want to be able to use them. Parallels Desktop offers the easiest interface for complete beginners... the choice is yours, but please... give the little guys a try before spending money on the big guns.

HOWTO: Watch (Cyrillic) subtitles right inside QuickTime, FrontRow

Problem: quicktime gives us great stuff like full-screen view through Front Row, AppleTV, browser integration and what not... but for most of us non-native English speakers subtitles are a must. Most of the popular video players out there like VLC or MPlayer support the viewing of subtitles along with the video content. Anybody who has ever played a XviD movie with Cyrillic(wikipedia.org) subtitles will tell you, that the process is far from double-click. Theoretically, Quick Time supports text tracks, but not anything like the popular .srt or .sub subtitle file formats.
Solution: While browsing through a long AppleTV related discussion last weekend I saw a post that promised built-in subtitles support for version 1.0. Turns out the guys that are behind the Perian project have the feature already working, but they are still not offering it for download. Well this got me interested and a couple of days later I had a QuickTime component that allows to watch XviD movies complete with .srt subtitles. Here's how you can also build one for yourself.
Requirements: Apple's Developer Tools, available for free from Apple's Developer Connection or the install disc of every Mac and Subversion, which is a version-control system. You can get background info on Subversion at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/, but I recommend installing the MacOS X packages available from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/mbo/. After installing the them you'll be able to download the programming code for the Perian project. Use the following command

[localhost:~] username% svn co http://svn.perian.org/trunk Perian

which will create a folder called perian and will download the source code for the whole project in it. Then double-click on Perian.xcodeproj which is the Xcode project file and if you've never used Apple's IDE follow these steps:
Locate the file Categories.m and double-click on it:

Now find the line that says something similar to:
NSStringEncoding encodings[] = {NSUTF8StringEncoding, NSUnicodeStringEncoding, NSWindowsCP1252StringEncoding, NSWindowsCP1251StringEncoding};
This is the magic line, by re-ordering those items you set the preference for the encoding of your subtitle track. If you want to be able to view cyrillic subs, you change the line to:
NSStringEncoding encodings[] = {NSWindowsCP1251StringEncoding, NSUTF8StringEncoding, NSUnicodeStringEncoding, NSWindowsCP1252StringEncoding};
Ok, we're almost ready. Now you need to set the build phase of the project to 'Deployment' like on the picture...

And now, build the project:

After a minute you can look into your Perian project folder, where you should have a new subfolder called 'build', inside which you should have 'Deployment' in which at last should be your brand new Perian.component!
Now you can copy it to /Library/QuickTime and immediately you'll be able to view XviD content complete with .srt subtitles! Just make sure you name the .srt file exactly the same as the XviD file and place both files in the same directory. Thats it!
Note: If you previously had Perian installed, play it safe, move the component file somewhere, log out and log back into Finder before installing your new version.
Update: As already noted elsewhere on this site the good folks from the perian dev team have now shipped version 1.0 with complete subtitle support an language recognition. Means you no-longer need to play with svn if you don't want to. Just grab your pre-built copy from perian.org