Light of the World: Lion

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Enable VNC Server in Mac OS X

This is so easy I can't believe it's taken me this long to find it. This works for Snow Leopard and Lion as far as I know, though I've only tested it on Lion.

Go this route:

System Preferences
Sharing
Choose "Screen Sharing" and check the box to turn it on
Click "Computer Settings..."
Enable the "VNC views may control screen with password:" option and give it a password. Password length is limited to 8 characters.

Now you can connect to and control your Mac from your favorite VNC application, including free versions like Mocha VNC (Lite) for iPhone or Chicken of the VNC for Mac. I personally use Mocha VNC and it is a very good VNC app for my casual use. It is surprisingly fast over my home network Wireless-G iPhone 3GS to Gigabit-connected early-2007 iMac, and it works perfect with my iMac's dual monitor setup. It's the best Spotify "remote" I've found yet.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Get Mac OS X Lion to Work with NTFS [UPDATED]

From a comment in a neighboring blog I successfully got my NTFS drives to mount again after upgrading to Lion. There are paid solutions to NTFS on Lion, but I use Windows-formatted drives so rarely that I can't justify $39.

[UPDATE Aug 31, 2011]

MacFUSE 2.2 has been released with Lion compatibility: There is a 2.2.1 out in the wild, but many have reported that it makes your CPU run like crazy. 2.2.x is expected to be the last MacFUSE release with the new Fuse4X project taking over, but not yet useful for NTFS, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, install NTFS-3G: http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/NTFS-3G%20for%20Mac%20OS%20X/2010.10.2/ntfs-3g-2010.10.2-macosx.dmg/download

Then install MacFUSE 2.2: http://www.tuxera.com/mac/macfuse/MacFUSE-Tuxera-2.2.dmg

Its working great for me ~~and not throwing that weird 15.00000 second timeout error that MacFUSE 2.0.3 was doing.~~ and is simpler than the original method I posted.

[/UPDATE]

Old way...

How to do it:

1. Install the latest version of MacFUSE: http://macfuse.googlecode.com/files/MacFUSE-2.0.3%2C2.dmg

1b. If you don't already have it then install the latest version of NTFS-3G http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/NTFS-3G%20for%20Mac%20OS%20X/2010.10.2/ntfs-3g-2010.10.2-macosx.dmg/download

2. Install the lastest MacFUSE core of Tuxera (aka NTFS-3G): Install http://www.tuxera.com/mac/macfuse-core-10.5-2.1.9.dmg

3. Install the 64-bit BETA version of the MacFUSE preference pane: http://content.wuala.com/contents/grahamperrin/public/2010/07/31/a/MacFUSE.prefPane-2.0-64-bit-2009-09-10.zip?dl=1

Restart as necessary to make it all happy and stuff.

Enjoy!

Credits: Commenter David @ http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3156578562014006371&postID=2651866977865603342

About Me

I'm a Christian, husband, electrical engineer, Mac guy, dirt bike freak, dog owner, and photographer. One of my classic statements about any given project is "I could have done this in high school if I spent enough time reading (and hacking)." Sometime in the last couple years I realized that this really is true, but I'd have to spend about 10 years reading and hacking to do it. Oh, wait, that's what I did.

Over those 10 years of reading and hacking I've been listed as co-inventor on 10+ patents; architected new embedded communication and data encoding schemes; taken multiple PCB projects from napkin sketches to preproduction shipments including power, high voltage, analog, and digital circuitry; designed, wrote, and sell software for automated industrial machines; published an iPhone app; and hacked Apple mobile device hardware and software.

I publish these articles because I fully agree with Brett Victor's Method of Learning infographic. I may be an average engineer, but I'm an above average internet searcher, if nothing else. With this in mind I'm starting to understand that if it took me hours/days/weeks of research to learn then there are many people out there who could save hours/days/weeks because of some of these articles.