Jim’s Junk Drawer

My 3G iPhone works great, but causes an inductive buzz on pretty much anything with speakers within a 5′ radius. After some googling about, I came on the approach of using an anti-static bag (sometimes called ESD packaging). If the phone is shielded by the bag it knocks down the buzzing almost completely, while still allowing the phone to stay in touch with the tower.

Perfect size ESD bag for the iPhone

With some experimenting, I have found a small tray with curved sides - just setting the iPhone in the tray on top of the bag solves the problem.

Perfect no-hassle buzzkill for the iPhone

There’s a product idea in here somewhere. In the meantime you can order ESD bags and trays from here: http://www.correctproducts.com

A heartier take on the peppermint patty, these have a thick coating of dark chocolate over a smooth mint center. The chocolate is very good, without an overt malitol taste, and the center is perfect. Made by Russell Stover, a company gaining a huge presence in the sugar free ghetto of our local drug stores.

Wow! These are, to my buds, indistinguishable from the real thing - delicious! Dark chocolate over creamy mint, and often (as in the picture) a bit fragile. These are becoming widely available at grocery stores and Walmart, which is a good thing. Sweetened with the usual sugar alcohol suspects, malitol, isomalt, and sorbitol and made by Hershey (alas probably in Mexico, where they moved most of their production after closing down their plant in Oakdale, CA).

Hard candies sweetened with Sucralose (same as Sweet ‘n Low coffee sweetener), these don’t have the rich flavor of some other coffee candies. The Amaretto flavor in particular has a chemical taste (although maybe that’s just Amaretto). 

Produced by Simply Lite Foods Corp, which appears to be either a division of or an authorized producer of Sweet ‘n Low products.

Intense dark coffee flavor, slightly bitter but with just the right sweetness. Sweetened with Sucralose, contains real coffee & butter. Produced by Adams & Brooks.

Here’s hoping they will produce some additional flavors from their sugared Coffee Rio line, which includes: Original, Irish Mint, Kona Blend, Amaretto, Orange Cappuccino, Raspberry Mocha, Suisse Chocolate, Espresso Roma, French Vanilla, and Decafe (not really sure why you’d want a decaf “flavor”, as caffeine is not a listed ingredient of the regular variety).

Wonderfully rich and chewy, as good as the real thing imho. They also come in an equally good Coffee flavor. Sweetened with malitol, but containing heavy cream, butter, and milk. A Nestlé product.

For some reason my Mac Mini running Leopard tends to drop its VNC server. Here’s how to turn it back on via the terminal:

sudo sh -c “/bin/echo -n enabled > /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd”

I think this will also work for Tiger, not sure about previous versions.

If you are using office XP or 2003, you can change the view to HTML-Code using Microsoft Script-Editor by pressing the [Alt]+[Shift]+[F11] key combination.

Search for “Password” and you will find somethimg like this:
ReadOnly
19E8E61E

To remove the protection:
-Just remowe those two lines, and after saving the document , the protection is gone.

To remove the password:
-replace the Password, here “19E8E61E”, with “00000000″, save the Document and close “Script-Editor”.

Alternative you can save your document as .html and use a html-Editor.

(from Alex Scoble’s blog)

Try drutil from the terminal:
drutil list
drutil tray eject 1

Or try enabling the eject menu found in System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras (just double click it and it will be in your menubar)

A few years ago I purchased a backup program called Impression from Babel Software, written by Steve Elliot. He had sold the program and development rights to another company, ineedyoursoftware.com, which appears to have gone out of business. So never trust your backups to a company which doesn’t have some kind of code escrow and fiduciary accountability. Anyhoo, here’s how to restore from an impression backup:
1) Manually copy each file tree to a hard drive, recreating the file structure
2) For files which have been split in the archiving process:
- join the pax files using this command: cat file1.pax.part_a file1.pax.part_b file1.pax.part_c > outputfile.pax
- unarchive the pax file: pax -r -f outputfile.pax
3) Pax will recreate the file hierarchy of the original file in the directory you expanded to. So look for a folder in the current directory called Volumes (the top of the original file tree) and your file will be nested in there. Just restore it to the original location.

Alternately use hfspax, available here.

Use these instructions, which were included in the Impression backup:

The ‘Archive.imps’ folder is an OS X package that contains each file that was archived in ‘(hfs)pax’ format, as well as a catalog containing information about the files. The archived files are contained within a directory structure that mirrors the original one from which the files came.

To list extended information on files from an archive:
hfspax -v -f /path/to/archived_file.pax

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to a location of your choosing:
cd /directory/of/your/choice && hfspax -r -f /path/to/archived_file.pax

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to their default location without overwriting existing files:
cd / && hfspax -r -f /path/to/archived_file.pax -k

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to their default location without overwriting existing files while preserving all file permissions (useful if running the command with su or sudo access):
cd / && hfspax -r -f -pe /path/to/archived_file.pax -k

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to their default location (and overwrite any files in place!):
cd / && hfspax -r -f /path/to/archived_file.pax

To take a file split across two disks and restore it (.part_a and .part_b files), use the following commands to address the issue:
cd /directory/of/your/choice
cat path/to/archived_file.part_a path/to/archived_file.part_b | hfspax -r -v

To check a freshly restored file’s integrity, use the following command to generate a checksum and then compare it to the one recorded (if present) in the archive content list at the time of the backup:
md5 -q /path/to/file.name