Apple news blog

It bugs me that Time Machine won’t backup my encrypted home folder, provided by File Vault, while I’m logged in. I rarely log out of my account, and that makes Time Machine pretty useless in my opinion. I wanted some way to create a backup while logged in.

I’m more concerned about my laptop being stolen than my backup drive, since it’s sitting in my closet, attached to my AirPort Base Station. So the fact that the backup won’t be encrypted with this hint is no big deal for me. As a side effect, it makes single file restoring much easier. (One caveat being that Time Machine complains that it can’t find the original location of the file, since it treats the home folder as a disk and not a path on the startup disk. You need to manually select that.)

To sum it up: I need my home folder to be encrypted. I don’t need my Time Machine disk to be enc…

I looked everywhere on the net to find something that I could afford with which to connect my USB serial port to a Sun machine. I couldn’t install Fink or MacPorts, and screen was garbling all of the text for the Solaris install. Finally, I started looking in general UNIX support, which led me to the cu utility.

Use the cu command to get a (more-or-less) clear line. It’s part of OSX’s BSD heritage, and was originally used to allow UUCP batches to dial modems and link with each other. Here’s how to use set up a connection:

sudo cu -s [bitrate] --nostop -l /dev/cu.[serialdevice]

This could also be used with /dev/tty.[serialdevice], I believe, though I have not tried it.

Caveat: If you use the ~ key, make sure you type it twice. Also, the --nostop parameter disables cu interpreting XON/XOFF software flow control. If you don’t use it, and the system gets a Control-S character for whatever reaso…

If you ever need to install (or reinstall) OS X on a drive other than your current boot drive, you can do it without rebooting. (Normally, when you launch the OS X installer, it reboots your machine before starting the installation.) With this hint, you can do the whole install process while booted normally from your current drive — so you can keep working while the install is going on.

To do that, just launch the Unix executable for the installer application on the DVD, by running the following command in Terminal:

sudo /Volumes/Snow\ leopard\ Install\ DVD/System/Installation/CDIS/Mac\ OS\ X\ Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Mac\ OS\ X\ Installer

To make it work even faster, you can clone the install DVD to a small partition on one of your d…

Independent developer Esa Helttula today released a new educational math app Trade-First Subtraction 1.0 for iPhone and iPod touch. It is the first Everyday Math app in the iTunes App Store. The app can be used to teach and study the trade-first subtraction method. The Trade-First Subtraction app allows the user to solve subtraction problems step by step and animates all the steps. The app is easy to use and it has an intuitive interface with customizable colors and other settings.

Sounds Broken inc. today announces gogoDocs 1.0.1, an update to their Google Docs reader for the iPhone. gogoDocs keeps all of your documents handy by syncing with your Google Docs account. Documents are downloaded to your iPhone while connected to the internet, and kept available for offline viewing. Background syncing, blazing fast PDF viewer, automatic bookmarking, document filtering, and document sharing make gogoDocs an essential tool for all Google Docs users.

Paris-based Conceited Software today announces Tracks 1.2, an iTunes and iTunes Music Store controller for Mac OS X. Tracks lets users play their music library and browse the iTunes Music Store right from the menubar. No need to interrupt your workflow and switch to iTunes to change songs. Tracks lives in the menubar and is available at all times via global, customizable keyboard shortcuts. Browsing the user’s iTunes library is as easy as opening the Tracks bar and typing a few characters.

Charlotte-based game developer Dan Russell-Pinson today announces Collider 1.0 for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Collider is an addictive strategy game featuring crisp graphics, a powerful physics engine, randomized music and a unique style of gameplay. The goal of Collider is to destroy all of the positive and negative particle balls on the screen. The iPhone port has preserved and enhanced every aspect of the original game and offers more than twice as many levels.

Dejal Systems, LLC today announced that Dejal Caboodle is available as part of TheMacBundles, a bundle of great Mac products. Caboodle is a lean, clean, snippet machine to store and organize useful tidbits of text, images, PDFs, and more. Caboodle is elegantly simple, but includes some innovative and useful features. You can arrange the items in an outline-like hierarchy, and include both structured fields and free-form text and pictures in each entry.

Byte Squared today announces the release of Office2, its office application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Office2 provides Word compatible document editing and Excel compatible spreadsheet editing with support for the DOC and XLS formats. It also provides tight integration with Google Docs, allowing editing of Google Docs documents and spreadsheets from within the Office2 app.

Apimac today announced participation in the January bundle of TheMacBundles with the inclusion of the latest version of its popular software Clean Text. Clean Text is a popular tool for Mac OS X for eliminating all text formatting issues as well as performing many other useful functions. All of the programs included on TheMacBundles are the latest versions. Combined purchases are eligible for an additional discount. The latest weekly specials can be found on TheMacBundles website.