The Practice of Code

Was using my MacBook today tethered to my iPhone 4 over Bluetooth. WiFi was disabled on my Mac, and not connected on the iPhone. I launched Things.app, and to my great surprised, it synced! I tried syncing Jumsoft Money and Bento, and they also synced without a hitch.

This makes perfect sense as OS X speaks Bonjour out of all its interfaces. I’m all but certain it would just fine over USB as well. Naturally, syncing over Bluetooth was not as quickly as syncing over WiFi.

P.S. I even used PasteBot Sync (over Bluetooth) to grab the screenshot for this post.

I’ve never been able to accept a foreign event invitation directly into a CalDAV calendar instead of being forced to put it into a local calendar. With an event I received today, not only did it properly show up in iCal, but holding the Accept button gave me the choice of which CalDAV calendar to put it in:

This must be a result of the 10.6.4 update. It’s long due.

I like Time Machine. It’s automatic, incremental, efficient and easy to use. However, there are two features that Time Machine doesn’t have that I really like: encryption and rotation (for offsite backup). With the help of others, along with a bit of hacking around on my own, I’ve successfully enabled Time Machine to backup to an unlimited amount of rotating, encrypted hard disks. Here’s how…

Ever had a disk that wouldn’t mount under OS X? In my case, it checked out under Disk Utility and fsck just fine. A look in Console revealed errors like:

Jun 24 11:38:31 computer kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s3: open: journal magic is bad (0x0 != 0x4a4e4c78)
Jun 24 11:38:31 computer kernel[0]: hfs: late jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).

We were able to resolve it by disabling the journal. We had to use the diskutil command line tool to accomplish this, and we had to add the force parameter. Use diskutil list to identify the device ID of your volume. In my case, it was disk2s3. So the command to forcibly remove the journal was:

diskutil disableJournal force /dev/disk2s3