Category Archives: General

Insomniac Mac

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Since upgrading to Mac OS Lion I have been unable to persuade our ageing MacBook to go to sleep when it’s supposed to. The OS X Energy Saver preferences were set correctly, but it would not sleep of its own accord. Putting it to sleep manually worked, but the computer sleep idle timer was just ignored.

I put this down to a quirk of the older hardware and worked around it by defining a nightly sleep schedule, but when our shiny new iMac did exactly the same I knew there must be an application overriding the default behaviour.

Sure enough after a morning of trial and error and eliminating all the other options, I finally discovered the culprit to be Dropbox LAN sync.

If Dropbox LAN sync is enabled then the Mac won’t put itself to sleep. The mystery is finally solved!

If you’ve disabled Dropbox LAN sync and your Mac is still powering on periodically (like every hour), then make sure you have also unchecked ‘Wake for network access’ in the Energy Saver preferences.

(Note: Mac OS X 10.7.3 & Dropbox client v1.2.52)

Business As Usual?

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The more observant among you may have noticed that there have not been any updates on this blog for a while. There is a good reason for this, I’ve had other battles to fight.

Today marks the two month anniversary of my being rid of the evil tumour that was making a pretty decent job of silently killing me from within.

I don’t want to dwell too much on what I’ve been through (other than this explanatory post), but such a life changing experience has inevitably changed my outlook and this will no doubt be reflected in my posts from now on.

Below are my top 10 musings on my cancer journey to date:

  1. Listen to your body. If there are signs that something isn’t quite right inside, then get yourself checked out properly. Which brings me to my next point …
  2. Don’t trust GPs. I went to a GP with my symptoms and they sent me away with a totally incorrect diagnosis. We only found the cancer after my wife’s persistence in insisting that I be referred to a specialist consultant. GPs are General Practitioners, an odd-jobs man for the human body. You wouldn’t ask a builder to service your boiler, so why trust a GP to know everything about your body? Seek a second opinion if you’re not satisfied with your GP’s diagnosis.
  3. We are all unique. Just because you don’t fit the classic profile of a condition doesn’t mean you don’t have it. Lazy doctors use statistics to assist with their diagnoses. I didn’t fit the profile of a typical bowel cancer patient, so they dismissed it as a possibility.
  4. Time is of the essence. My tumour had advanced to a critical stage and was about to wreak havoc on the rest of my body. Having surgery as quickly as I did potentially saved my life, another few weeks and the prognosis would not have been so positive. If you’ve had symptoms for a while and put off getting yourself checked out, do it today!
  5. Positivity really does work. I have an incredibly supportive group of friends rooting for me and I was swelled with positive energy going into surgery. I strode into the operating theatre with a strength and determination that I still find hard to understand. But it worked, so why question it?
  6. Don’t sweat the small stuff. I’ve written about this previously, but this was never more clear to me than when I thought I had just a few short years left to live. Suddenly all the petty worries and annoyances in my life were totally wiped out.
  7. Less is more. Rid yourself of clutter and irritants in your life. I unsubscribed from dozens of web sites and email lists and even closed down a business. It was a cleansing experience and I don’t miss any of them. I now have less distractions in my life and more time to concentrate on what’s really important.
  8. You can’t buy your health. The late Steve Jobs was sad proof of this. Look after yourself, enjoy a little of what’s bad for you and a lot of what’s good for you.
  9. Wake up and smell the barbecue. Red meat and processed meat is killing us. Hardly a week goes by without another report on the dangers of red meat consumption. This isn’t fear-mongering from the veggie brigade, there is hard evidence that cannot be ignored. I confess that my diet was heavy with red and processed meat. Is this what triggered my cancer? I’ll never know for sure, but I won’t be eating red meat again.
  10. Carpe diem. It’s a cliche, but don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. One day you might wake up to discover you don’t have a future, that’s when you really kick yourself for having wasted your opportunities.

Where am I now? My recovery has been excellent, I am feeling well and getting my life back to some sort of normality. I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the next few years but that’s all good since I have the right people looking out for me and my insides.

So it’s business as usual, I’m just in a different business now 🙂

Remote SSH using Back To My Mac

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One of the less well publicised features of Apple’s iCloud service is Back To My Mac.

This service provides a private IPv6 network which you can use to securely connect all your Mac hosts.

To use BTMM you will need to upgrade all your Macs to OS X Lion and sign them all into the same Apple iCloud account. You will also need your unique BTMM account number.

When you are signed into iCloud you can discover your BTMM account number as follows:

$ dns-sd -E
Looking for recommended registration domains:
Timestamp     Recommended Registration domain
12:07:46.550  Added     (More)               local
12:07:46.550  Added                          icloud.com
                                             - > btmm
                                             - - > members
                                             - - - > 123456789

The final line shows your individual BTMM account number.

For example, if you Computer Name (set in System Preferences > Sharing) is mymac and your BTMM account number is 123456789, then the fully qualified domain name of the host is mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com.

If you have spaces in your Computer Name then replace them with dashes, e.g. “My Mac” becomes the hostname my-mac.

To test connectivity to your remote host use ping6, e.g.

ping6 mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com

To list all the SSH enabled hosts on your domain:

dns-sd -B _ssh._tcp

You would SSH into your host using this command:

ssh -2 -6 username@mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com

Note that you will only be able to communicate with the other hosts on your iCloud private network if the Mac you are using is also signed into the same iCloud account.

You can also use an open SSH connection to access your non-Apple hosts on your internal network by using SSH port forwarding. This tunnels the destination traffic over the BTMM private network via your remote Mac.

For example, if you have a web server running on a host with the IP address 192.168.1.2 then you can use this SSH command to set-up a forwarded port:

ssh -2 -6 -L 8080:192.168.1.2:80 username@mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com

To access the remote host from your local machine you would go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Uninstall Symantec Enterprise Vault Client on Mac OS

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Since Symantec doesn’t provide an uninstaller script for their Enterprise Vault Client, here’s how to remove it on Mac OS.

Open a Terminal window and execute these commands:

launchctl unload -D user /Library/LaunchAgents/com.symantec.ev.daemon.plist
sudo killall -m  "Enterprise Vault .*"
sudo rm -f /Library/LaunchAgents/com.symantec.ev.daemon.plist
sudo rm -rf "/Library/PreferencePanes/Enterprise Vault.prefPane"
sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Symantec Enterprise Vault"
rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/Symantec Enterprise Vault"

Holidaylight Robbery

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Center Parcs marketed itself as the original “British holiday the weather can’t spoil”, but they are doing a pretty good job of spoiling holidays without the weather.

Consider the pricing matrix above. What could possibly cause the astronomical price hike in that one specific week? It’s the half-term school holidays.

I do expect to have to pay a premium because of the school holidays. 50% would seem acceptable to me, but a 300% price hike? Even Michael O’Leary would find that hard to defend!

I have studied Economics, I know all about supply and demand and differential pricing. The prices above do not seem to be not reflecting a shortage of supply however. There is no “only x remaining” in the middle week, so I can only deduce that the huge cost spike is a deliberate and cynical manipulation of the pricing model to take account of school holidays.

While some families might bite the bullet and succumb to the exorbitant price tag, their stay must be tinged with bitterness at being financially exploited in this way. If you are being ripped-off so badly before you even arrive, what more do they have in store for you while you’re there? It’s not the kind of business that I would like to spend my money with.

Center Parcs certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on this exploitative behaviour. It’s an industry-wide phenomenon which has been allowed to run wild.

The blatant profiteering at the expense of parents and teachers is discrimination on a massive scale. Isn’t it time the UK Government acted on these unfair business practices?