NTFS on Mac OSx using Mac Fuse and NTFS 3G

When I switched over to using a Mac it was because my PC had crashed. Two of the disks survived though, and now I wanted to mount them on my mac to salvage some documents, and use of of the disks as a backup disk for my mac book pro.

I got an IceBox to mount the drive, and hooked it up using USB. This worked like a charm, and I could access my documents. But hey - the NTFS driver on Leopard does not support write! My idea was to first clean out all the garbage from the disk and then copy it to my Mac (the disk is larger than the internal one). Crap!

Googled and found the cure - use Mac Fuse, an umbrella for plugging in support for various file system types, and NTFS-3g, a driver for Mac Fuse that support both reading and writing.

I found this blog-post how to do this.

First download and install Mac Fuse, then download a NTFS-3G as instructed in this blog-post.

Again everything worked fine - Except - it failed to mount one of the partitions on my disk because apparently I did not shut down the NTFS properly before installing NTFS-3G (merde).

This was a bit tricky to fix. An error message appears with instructions, but they are not accurate. Basically what is needed is a mount with "-o force" to make it clear the "unclean shutdown".

Googled, and found the answer in this forum. To get rid of the problem you need to do two things:

Create the directory where the drive is to be mounted by opening a Terminal window and typing:

mkdir -p /Volumes/C-DRIVE

Where C-DIRVE is the name of the volume, and then forcing it to be mounted by typing (all on one line):

sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/C-DRIVE
-olocale=en_US.UTF-8,force,auto_xattr,defer_auth,defer_permissions,volname="C-DRIVE"

Where C-DRIVE is the name of the volume. and "/dev/disk1s1" is the device name as shown in the error message displayed by NTFS-3G.

In my case this produced an error, as apparently /Volumes/C-DRIVE was already inside an ntfs-3g mounted partition (there are two partitions on my drive), but it did at least tell me that it cleared the Log File.

After this, it worked find to just eject the drives, and plug in the USB cable - no need to run the commands again. But I guess they will come in handy when there is an unclean shutdown sometime in the future....

Got my iPhone 3G - Love it, but why the US number format?

Absolutely love the iPhone 3G - the design and user interface is amazing. Syncing it with contacts from p900 worked like a charm, downloaded my entire music library, it synced email, and did everything on its own! The entire process went very smooth.

But what did they do with phone number formatting?!! It has US style formatting even though the international setting is Swedish. It is almost impossible to decipher the numbers - did I enter the correct number or not?

08 123 45 67 becomes 081 345 567 (sigh).

Telia's iPhone 3G pages says nothing about support - but refers to apple's pages. Apple on the other hand, refers to Telia for repair. I guess the packaging for Sweden is done by Apple - so this must be their problem. I reported this as "a bug" on apple's feedback pages.... wonder what will happen next...

Love everything about the device except:

• US phone number formatting of Swedish numbers
• Why does it take so damned long to sync when I just synced 5 minutes ago and nothing has changed in contacts (syncing contacts takes for ever - or at least that is what iTunes says...)?
• Would like to see the photos of my contacts in the Favourites list
• Battery life is a bit short...

Migrating from Sony Ericsson P900 to iPhone 3G

My iPhone 16G Black finally arrived after first having received two 8 GB iPhones (could it be because some idiot thought that two 8GB iPhones = one 16GB?).

Anyway, before jumping into all the fun with the iPhone, I needed to sync my old faithful Sony Ericsson P900. I did not really want to install the Sony Ericsson software for this, and I was very pleased when I found that Mac OS x Leopard ISync supports the device!

First hurdle - when scanning for devices in iSync having marked that I wanted to scan for "phones" produced no result, but scanning for "Any" worked, and the mac and p900 started talking ok.

iSync installs an iSync agent on the phone, and first attempt failed, because instructions where not 100% clear. You are supposed to "open" the message to install it - not just accept it with "ok". After a second install it worked ok.

Starting iSync - it quickly gets to 33% done receiving changes from P900, but then it is stuck there for a long time (several minutes), and I thought something was wrong, googled for possible solutions, and while reading some articles, iSync popped up a report with what it wanted to sync!

Worked just fine, and it even got the images for the contacts. Neat.

Heading out to pick up my iPhone... I hope I am going to be happy with it - I really liked the way the P900 was manageable with just one hand using the the wheel on the side.

Testing Publishing using Ecto offline publishing tool

This is a test of using the Ecto offline publishing tool. I found it quite tedious to write longer articles using the blogger web interface.

So here is a small test:

Dependency Icon

Dependent Icon

And a larger screen short of Buckminster showing embedded OPML and the new Component Outline View.

Works quite well.

OS X man pages GUI

Found a useful man page user interface for OS X called ManOpen - you find it here:  http://www.clindberg.org/projects/ManOpen.html

How to get a WMV video on to a DVD on the Mac

This was really giving me problems at first. I installed Flip4Mac (free edition) to be able to play WMV files using the QuickTime Player that came with Leopard - and it worked just fine. Trying to import the WMW file into iDVD however caused iDVD to hang (perpetual multicoloured rotating ball).  I then upgraded my QuickTime to a QuickTimePro to enable being able to convert the video to QuickTime mov format. This worked as a charm, and it was possible to use this file in the iDVD project.  Only flaw is that there is big letters telling everyone that the video was converted with the free edition of Flip4Mac.  sigh So, I spent an additional 29 USD to get rid of it, and I could now create the iDVD project. I am sure there is some free version somewhere, but I was in a hurry. If anyone has any info about free versions to perform the same conversion I would be glad to hear from you.

Oh man... Thunderbird and Lightning - not an ideal combination either....

Hm, this really sucks. Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 and Lightning 0.7 and GCalDeamon isn't exactly ideal. In the couple of hours I have tried it, Thunderbird managed to list one mail item twice while missing another item in the same inbox (IMAP). When deleting the double entry, the hidden email disappeared! The multiple tags features does not work. When leaving the mailbox (for any other view), only one of the tags remain (maybe this caused the earlier problem). Lightning, and GCalDeamon seems to have different views of the correct time in my timezone - DST screwup somewhere perhaps? An email viewed in Thunderbird that contained an .ICS attachment had no functionality associated - when clicking it, nohing at all happened. (This really sucks). I am actually better of with a functioning iCal which is integrated with Leopard mail, and having a read only view of my google calendar (and going to google online for editing). Crap. I was hoping for Thunderbird and Lightning + google to provide one set up for mail, usenet news, rss, and calendar.