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September 10, 2011

Picocom 1.6 binary package for Mac OS X 10.6

I'm finding I need to do more stuff talking to a serial port, and picocom seems to be the best terminal emulator I've found for Mac OS X. I was previously using screen, which is shipped with Mac OS X and...
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July 9, 2011

Putting my money where my mouth is…

I've always thought that there is a place and a time to use the cloud, and to be honest, Automatica has been using Google Apps for the past two years to host email and calendars. Overall the experience hasn't been...
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June 7, 2011

Set up a transparent Apple Software Update Server

Update - Jan 2013 - this is quickly going to become obsolete, with Apple's release of Server.app version 2.2 for Mountain Lion, this enables a transparent caching service. If you network clients are running Mountain Lion (maybe Lion as well,...
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May 30, 2011

How to get a real IP address on Telstra Next G

The Telstra Next G 3G internet service is fast, works well in a lot of areas around Australia and can be sorted out fairly cheaply these days. One big downside to the service however is that by default you receive...
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May 26, 2011

Console not updating or asl manager taking 100% CPU

Here's how to restart the Mac OS X 10.6 log managers after removing asl data. Corrupt asl data will either cause the logs in Console.app to not update or the aslmanager process to consume 100% CPU. Open the Terminal application...
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April 29, 2011

Bad Sectors on a hard drive

I was recently discussing hard drive errors with someone and they came up with the idea of zeroing out a hard drive to fix the bad sectors. Zeroing out the disk may appear to fix the issues for a while, but...
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February 3, 2011

Headless Install of Mac OS X Server 10.6

I had to install a Mac mini Server today and couldn't get a spare monitor to plug it in to for the installer. In the past, I'm sure I've been able to use Apple Remote Desktop to connect to it...
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February 2, 2011

Unzip Mac OS X Archives from the Command-line

I was under the impression that most, if not all, OS X command-line utilities are resource-fork aware (where they need to be anyway) It seems that this isn't the case. The Unzip command does not understand the way that BOMArchiveHelper...
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