I’m going to briefly explain how to setup a new Raspberry Pi as a basic desktop computer with file sharing and screen sharing so that Macs can connect to it. This will be useful for quickly transferring files over, and taking control of the Pi remotely. I will be assuming that you have basic command line knowledge (running commands, installing packages, editing text files), and some Mac knowledge. I am not going to be too paranoid about security as I only intend on using my Pi on my home network, but if your Pi is going to be Internet-facing, you Continue Reading
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Mac OS X Terminal startup slow?
Tonight, I was finally fed up with my Terminal window taking nearly 10 seconds to show the initial prompt. I regularly use Terminal to SSH into other computers and to commit and pull code changes in git repositories. The delay was annoying so I looked for help. Luckily, other people on the Internet have noticed the same issue so it wasn’t hard to find a solution. The first one I came across was on this blog post on OSXDaily. Initially, I was a little skeptical of log files having anything to do with the Terminal startup time, but other Google Continue Reading
Using Mac’s Automator to Make Diffing Easier
Recently I’ve been needing an easy way to paste two versions of a text, and get the differences between the texts, specifically changes within a line (most diff programs only show which lines have changed). After some searching, DiffMerge came up as one of the best free diff programs that would work on the Mac. DiffMerge is great in many aspects, however, it lacked the interface to paste in text to diff right off the start. I set out using Mac’s Automator tool to create an application to prompt the user for two texts, create the temporary files, then pass it into DiffMerge. Continue Reading
Saving keystrokes with a SSH client config file
I regularly have to SSH into my servers, and on most of the ones I connect to the SSH server is running on a non-standard port for obvious security reasons. I used to include the port number manually in the SSH command, for example: [shell] ssh seymour.dennistt.com -p 922 [/shell] This worked… as long as I remembered to type the port number in, which was probably less than half the time on the first go. So I finally got tired of having to retype the command with the port number in it. Luckily you can create a SSH client configuration Continue Reading
XDMCP Login from Mac to Lubuntu 11.10
My old desktops run Lubuntu (Ubuntu but lightweight!) 11.10, which just became part of the official Ubuntu release. Life is a lot zippier in Lubuntu compared to Ubuntu when you’re on Pentium III and Celeron machines. I wanted to be able to login to these computers remotely with a GUI, sort of like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop but Linux style. I didn’t want VNC because I wanted to be able to create a new login session instead of using the main console. Luckily XDMCP does exactly that and most of it is built into Ubuntu. The Setup Following one question previously Continue Reading