BigDiver

There are many situations that require you to restore backups to different computers, other than the one from where the data was originally backed up from. In the case of Apple’s Time Machine the restore procedure is not that intuitive

There is a supported way to restore Time Machine backups of other computers using the “option-key” click on the Time Machine menu. If you want to use it just do the following:

1. Connect the Time Machine disk to the Mac you want to restore the files to
2. Set the “Show time machine status in the menu bar” In System Preferences -> Time Machine.
3. Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and keeping the mouse button pressed, press the “Option” key.
4. Select “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”

You should now see a window with all available disks.

If, like me you, are using a non supported Time Machine configuration, where my the backup disk is mounted using SMB or AFP then the procedure above will not work. In my case I backup to my Buffalo TeraStation NAS, and the “Browse Other Time Machine Disks” window shows up empty, with no disk to select.

In order for this to work you need to first mount the Time Machine disk in command line. So open a Terminal window and

1. Mount the shared folder where your Time Machine backups are stored
2. Open a Terminal window and cd to the Time Machine volume. in my case I called it backups
   sudo cd /Volumes/backups
3. use hdiutil to mount the specific Time Machine .sparsebundle file
   hdiutil attach <time_machine_file.sparsebundle>

Now you should be able to see the mounted volume in Finder, with all the backups listed as folders, and you can copy any files directly from it.

Another option is to repeat the supported Time Machine procedure  outlined in the beginning of this post. You should now see the mounted disk as a Time Machine disk. Select the the disk and click “Use Selected Disk”

The Time Machine will open with the selected disk and you can use it to restore the files. Personally I like to copy them directly from the Finder but your preference may vary so I document both ways of achieving this goal.

Hope this helps.

After upgrading to Snow Leopard you will need to update your Mac Ports. Please download and install the new Snow Leopard version of Mac Ports open a Terminal window and change to the /opt/local/bin directory, then run the commands

./port -v selfupdate
./port -f uninstall p5-xml-parser
./port clean --all p5-xml-parser
./port install p5-xml-parser
./port -f uninstall libxml2
./port clean --all libxml2
./port install libxml2
./port upgrade outdated
./port -f -p clean --all all

If a particular package gives you trouble just remove it and install it again.

Hi I feel that this  a prety common request: Bind the Home/End keys to move to the beginning and end of lines respectively.

In Mac OS X (10.5 and 10.6) some applications use the Cmd-Rigt and Cmd-Left to perform these actions but, call me old fashioned, I like to use Home and End instead.

It is actually very easy to change the Cocoa Key bindings for any user under Mac OS. Just follow these steps:

1. Create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict in ~/Library/KeyBindings directory

   mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings
   cd ~/Library/KeyBindings
   touch DefaultKeyBinding.dict

2. Edit your DefaultKeyBinding.dict file so it contains:

   {
   /* home */
   "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
   "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* Cmd-Left */
   "@\UF702"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
   "$@\UF702" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* Cmd-Right */
   "@\UF703"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
   "$@\UF703" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* end */
   "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
   "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* page up/down */
   "\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
   "\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";
   }

3. Restart the Cocoa Application.

This example works very well with TextMate.

In order to bind other keys you need to find their Scan code, and you can use the following modifiers
For more information please check this article

Started developing my first iPhone App, it is going to be a sort of a game/funny app.
Having some difficulty adapting to the programming model, but that is always the case when taking on a new language, and SDK.

The project is coming along nicely and I hope to have it ready in the next couple of weeks.

For a newbie like me the book Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
was a huge help and save a lot of frustration with good examples and simple approach.

Hope they can help you as well.

Finally I got my iMac backing up to the TeraStation using Time Machine by following the instructions on this site.

The trick was creating the Sparse file by hand, after enabling the use of network volumes. I am using AppleTalk to mount the TeraStation share for the backups, and I setup a different share just for the backup files.

If the file “com.apple.timemachine.supported” does not get created automatically by Time Machine you’ll have to create it yourself.

Some sites discourage the use of SMB, all I can say is that the referenced procedure only worked for me with AFP. Maybe your mileage will vary.

Great job Newb @ MacTimes!
Thanks!

While configuring Apache on my MAC Leopard I ran into Forbidden 403 errors while accessing the ~user/ directory. Read a ton of posts and Apple forums but in the end what got it fixed was a post by Ricardo at Mutantur

chmod 701 ~
chmod 705 ~/Sites

Thanks Ricardo!

After installing Adobe Acrobat Safari was asking for a PDF viewer instead of just opening it. To fix it I just had to delete the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin.

This will disable Acrobat and Safari will go to its default behavior of using the Apple Preview to open PDFs in Safari.

If you really want to use Acrobat check this out.