A Collosus of Genius

Suck at this, Kinect – I am off to the holodeck now… kthxbai!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zOrV-5vh1A

I know: it is old. I know: everyone has probably seen it. Get off my case! Somehow it came up at work today – i guess it was because of the second hack but i am not sure. In any case, I realized that i haven’t honored this piece by posting it on my blog yet (and I can’t stop asking myself why i haven’t done so before). Why do I? Because I also know: it is awesome! There are three things about it that make it worth watching over and over again:

1. It is not one of those obvious mind manipulating advertisement for some crappy product nobody wants but an emotional short clip that has nothing to do with the product in the first place.

2. It was NOT computer generated, to my surprise – because when I first saw it, I thought it was.

3. The song is just pure gold, thanks to José González and even without the clip worth listening to.

Overall, I might even go so far as to claim this to be the best advertisement I have ever seen. Sure there are some pretty funny heineken spots out there. But without being funny, good ads are rare and therefor ads are to be avoided altogether… Well, except like I said: this piece of art! Check out the making of, to see the idea behind it and most importantly: the firing of the ball cannons yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KPjWZQ1lp0

PS: Did I mention that I find the song just beau-ti-ful?!

I do not own a Time Capsule, I do not plan to get one, nor do i want to connect a usb disk every time i feel like making a backup of my stuff. What i do have however is a wireless network and a Windows 7 PC. Why not use the available disk space in my PC for the backups of my Macbook Pro? I found out how to Time Machine Backup to a Network Drive…

In Snow Leopard it was still possible with a few tweaks and manual image file creation to get the OS to actually backup over the Network onto a Windows NTFS disk. Hoozah! In Lion (MacOSX 10.7.2) there is even another step required to get the backup process running. Using just step 1 it will fail with the message ‘The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features’.

1. So besides the same steps as in Snow Leopard to prepare the Backup Image File (my previous post) you will also need to…

2. Download and run the script from this file to modify backupd in such a way that it accepts remote disk on the network share: backupd_anyafp_r2 – just unpack and run ./install.sh from the terminal.

Thanks to msft.guy for the script!

PS: I still get the feeling that the backup of a FileVault encrypted home directory even on Lion still doesn’t work while being logged in. Meh.

Correction: I had to switch to FileVault2. Now the whole disk is encrypted and my guess is Time Machine can handle that…

What if I still can’t find my share in TimeMachine?
(added 24. Jan. 2013)

Here is a checklist what I would try then:

1. close the preferences or even reboot after running the script above.
2. Find out your Computer Name:
   1. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences and click Sharing.
   2. Note the computer name appearing at the top of the window.
      – For example “ZergasMacbook”.
3. Find your MAC address:
   1. In Apple menu, select System Preferences...
   2. From the View menu in System Preferences, select Network.
   3. In the left column of the Network preference window that opens, click the name of your connection ( Ethernet or Built-in Ethernet).
   4. Click the Advanced... button, and in the dropdown, click the Hardware or Ethernet tab.
   5. The address is the string of letters and numbers next to “MAC Address:” or “Ethernet ID:”.
      – For example “00:15:20:aa:fe:a1”.
4. Create your sparsebundle:
   1. Follow the steps described in my guide: Create a sparsebundle on your Mac manually with the name “ComputerName_MACaddressWithoutColons.sparsebundle” and move it into the shared folder on the windows machine.
      – In the case of the examples above it would be “ZergasMacbook_001520aafea1.sparsebundle”.
5. Connect to the share:
   1. On your Mac, in Finder go to the menu Go -> Connect to Server…
   2. Choose the share with the sparsebundle in it on your Windows computer. The share will now be mounted under Volumes with the name of the share folder you gave in windows.
      – For example let’s call the directory “MacBackup” on the computer “WindowsPC” then you a folder on your Mac called “/Volumes/MacBackup”.
6. Mount the sparsebundle:
   1. Open a terminal and mount the sparsebundle as a drive under /Volumes on your mac by typing: hdiutil attach -verbose /Volumes/MacBackup/ZergasMacbook_001520aafea1.sparsebundle
      You can also just double-click on it to mount (thanks, mike!).
7. Connect the sparsebundle:
   1. Now add the sparsebundle as the Time Machine destination with the terminal by typing: sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/mounted_sparse_bundle
8. Then try starting the preferences and go to TimeMachine looking for the sparsebundle again.

BTW: In the terminal you can hit TAB and OSX will complete the name of a file or folder you were about to write. Like this you dont have to type all the sparsebundle file name.

Good luck!

Fall is coming and even though there were quite a few very cool indie games this year (see my review of Limbo for example), the big blockbusters are still to come! Sure there has been Blink and Homefront out already, but although being hyped a lot, i somehow never got myself to show any interest in them. Instead, here is a short introduction into my most anticipated ones:

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This HD video of the view from the International Space Station down on earth gave me a very intense realization of how it must be like up there. Its like a long distance night flight on a plane – just bazillion times more awesome. I am curious to see more footage but preferable in real time. As impressive as this clip is, everything is just going by too fast for me to really enjoy it. So if you know a place where to get more video, let me know! Although i can imagine its quite complicated: the images seem to been taken with an extremely long exposure time (observe how intense the sunlight gets), otherwise the amazing glow in the atmosphere would not have been that visible. The surface (where there are no city lights) and clouds seem to be very well illuminated by the moon (plus the mentioned long exposure takes care of their visibility). I am wondering where on earth that is, what we are seeing here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mhQyuyELQ

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0_everything-is-amazing-and-nobody-i_fun

First of all: maybe I tricked you a bit with the title there to get your attention. Please accept my apology for that! But the following is really important to me. Since you are apparently still reading this, let me take the opportunity to clarify: I believe there are probably bazillions of things that are not OK at this very moment…

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Shocking – what people are capable of doing to others in the name of their religious believes. They even don’t stop themselves killing and destroying people’s lives based on a mere theory, which often has not even been built up on their own thought process. I always hated people that do not have the mental capability to reflect, criticize and judge themselves (religious or not). More amazingly, those are usually the ones that at the same time are the loudest when it comes to criticizing and judging others. What if god was never on your side?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAzb3KzaigY

Since a while I was kind of missing something like a wall or guestbook on my blog. Why? So you can leave comments that are not related to a particular post and (most importantly) not rely on Facebook and the like for staying in touch. Even though i am still registered at Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Twitter, Deviantart and i don’t even know where else, I was getting a bit annoyed. It sort of feels like a couple of years ago with all the Instant Messengers out there, remember that? Everyone had their favorite and to stay really in the loop with all your important contacts, you had to maintain a bunch of separate buddylists on every one of them – at least until the rise of Jabber, Trillian, Pidgin, Adium…

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People (like me) are running around with their headphones on and their eyes on the phones all the time. Especially commuting to and from work is kind of boring if you have no music in your ears  and sometimes even spooky because you realize that nobody is talking to anyone at all. Why not break the silence and ask those people what they are listening to? I find this idea inspiring and the answers sometimes even surprising:

Totale Koerperbeherrschung, absolut unerschuetterliche Ausdauer und musikalisch grossartigster Geschmack – all dies sind Faehigkeiten, die ich mir selbst nicht zuschreiben kann – aber diesem Team! Sie sind einfach faszinierend im Breakdance on Dubstep und das auch noch synchronisiert! Besonders gefallen mir die fastforward und slomo moves, sowie die Wechsel zwischen eben diesen. Und was die Mucke angeht: Dubstep loest bei mir haeufig einfach nur ein innerliches Grinsen aus. In diesem Fall inbesondere das Stueck von Minute 3 bis 4… Continue reading