But once and a while I run into strange errors when trying to boot my VM’s. Errors like “VERR_SUPLIB_WORLD_WRITABLE”, which basically mean the file permissions on some component of VirtualBox are too general.

You can fix most of these errors by opening up Disk Utility (Spotlight search or Applications > Utilities). From there select your system hard drive (likely Macintosh HD) and click Repair Disk Permissions. This process may take a few minutes. When its done restart your computer, open up VirtualBox and you should be good to go!

If you still have trouble, open up the Applications folder and find the VirtualBox app. Right click and open the Get Info screen. At the bottom in the permissions section, make sure “Everyone” only has read access.

Header screenshot by Rafa Espada.

It turns out you can! Just update your devices to iOS 4.3, enable Personal Hotspot on your phone and Bluetooth. Then open up the Bluetooth menu on your iPad and pair with your iPhone. It’ll pair up and show the Personal Hotspot icon at the top of the screen. Congratulations, you’re connected.

The setup was seamless, and certainly easier than the jailbreak + iTether method I’ve been using thus far. Pages and videos load reasonably fast, and emails come through without delay. And because this is essentially Bluetooth tethering, it has a relatively low draw on batteries.

iDentify file list

So let’s say you have a bunch of movies or TV shows converted for your Apple TV / iPhone / iPad / iPod. It syncs and plays great on your devices–but something is missing! Its the metadata (aka tags).

When you buy media from the iTunes store it comes with epidsode info or a film description, posters, cast info, air dates and more that make it easy to find what you’re looking for or pick something good to watch. Media ripped from discs (or obtained by other means) simply doesn’t come with those goodies.

Enter iDentify

But we can add that metadata after the fact. All you need is a piece of software called iDentify 2, and it will do all [at least most] of the magic for you. It works very well and once all is said and done it looks just like iTunes store content.

To use simply drag all the files you want to tag into iDentify. Let it scan them, check at least a few to make sure it got the right show or film (hint: click edit tags to view) and click “Process Files”. Then import your freshly tagged media to iTunes, and stream or sync to your heart’s desire. That’s it!

iDentify "Edit Tags" page

For the app to work, your files have to be named logically (eg: house.s05e03.mp4, lost.s04e16.m4v). Once and a while iDentify will mess up. If you’re tagging a batch of TV episodes and it can’t find any data, you can select all the files in the app, click “Edit Tags” and manually enter the “Show Name”. Then “Rescan Items” and 9 times out of 10 it’ll work. If you have trouble with movies, first try adding the release year in the filename or the iDentify directly. If that fails find the film on IMDB and paste its code (last number of the film’s URL at IMBD) into the “Edit Tags” page and “Rescan Items”.

Also certain files will crash the app rarely for no apparent reason. Just file an error report when you reopen iDentify (it asks you on launch). The developer is extremely responsive and helpful. If you like the app you might consider making a donation to the developer or registering your copy (this will gets your more features like file renaming).

So we convert. I’ve found a relatively painless workflow that will allow you to convert your media from just about anything (AVI and MKV included) to Apple friendly formats, and tag it with metadata so you can enjoy film description, movie posters, episode information and more on your Apple TV (just as if you bought it on iTunes).

Conversion

The first, and most time consuming step, is to run all your media through conversion software. I’m using two pieces of software. Video Monkey and Handbrake.

The benefit of Video Monkey is that it has a queue interface, so you can drag a selection of videos into the app, choose your options, hit start and grab a coffee.

Handbrake is a little smarter than Video Monkey and it allows you to preserve 5.1 audio tracks if your vidoes have them. It also has a queue, but its cumbersome and you have to add each file individually.

If you’re using Video Monkey:

1. Drag in your videos
2. Select the Apple TV preset
3. Check “Limit output params to input” (doesn’t work with MKV’s)
4. Default quality is good enough for me, but adjust to your fancy
5. Hit Start (it could take minutes or hours depending on your machine)

If you’re using Handbrake:

1. Use the Source window to choose one file (or drag the file from the Finder into the Source window)
2. Select the Apple TV preset from the presets pain on the right (might have to “Toggle Presets”)
3. Handbrake automatically limits output parameters to input, and this does work with MKV’s
4. Default quality is good enough for me, but adjust to your liking
5. Hit Start (it could take minutes or hours depending on your machine)
6. To add another file to the queue, click Source from the toolbar and repeat the process, clicking “Add to Queue” instead of Start at step 5

I recommend trying it with one file first to make sure quality is what you expected.

My next post covers tagging your converted media so it displays nicely in iTunes/Apple TV.

There’s actually a surprisingly wide selection out there, and these are some details you should pay attention to when looking for a backup / external battery for your phone.

• Capacity: iPhone’s have about 1200 mAh capacity, so bear in mind how many times you mind want to charge your phone.
• Size/shape: For this to be useful you’ll have to carry it with you. Pick a battery that fits in your bag, case or purse.
• Price: Prices range from about $9-$60. More expensive batteries aren’t necessarily any better. Read on for my suggestion.

I chose the Monoprice iPhone Battery Pack (1900mAh). Its holds enough to charge my phone 1 and 1/2 times, its small enough to slip in my bag and it was super-cheap! $9 + $2 shipping to Canada got this to my door in just under two weeks.

Monoprice is an excellent company; in my experience their products are exceptionally high quality and very reasonably priced. The backup battery was no different-it does exactly waht its supposed to. You charge it with your iPhone cable or dock and pack it away for when its needed. Then when you’re running low on power just plug it in the bottom and the phone starts charging immediatley.

So if you’re thinking about getting the Monoprice device, or any backup battery, go for it. You won’t regret having the security.

Here’s the deal: you can use push email from MobileMe, Yahoo or a Microsoft exchange account. This is kind of limiting, seeing as most of the world doesn’t want to drop $100 on MobileMe (see my older post), doesn’t use Yahoo mail and isn’t a corporate email junkie. The good news is that someone has been thinking about the rest of us and that entity is Google. They are offering a free service called Google Sync, which is essentially a personal Exchange account that you can use with your iPhone and other mobile devices.

I have four email accounts that I want pushed to my iPhone. 1 Gmail, 2 Google Apps, and 1 external account. Since you can only use 1 Exchange account (Google Sync) on your iPhone I had to come up with a crafty solution.

You could forward all mail to one MobileMe / Yahoo / Exchange / Google Sync account. The problem with that setup is that when you reply to emails they will all be sent from your push enabled account, and not necessarily the one they were sent to.

Instead, I setup all of my email accounts using IMAP and set the fetch interval to 1 hour. This way I can open emails on the right account and reply normally. I’m still not getting push, so I also went into the online settings for my email accounts and setup forwarding to a single Google Sync address (eg iphone@mydomain.com). Now I have the four normal email accounts and one push (iPhone Pushmail) that receives all mail from the others instantly.

Another problem. Now I receive immediate notifications of new mail, but once I open up Mail it fetches from the IMAP accounts, and now I have duplicate new emails. Gross. To solve this problem I logged into to my iphone@yourdomain.com Google Apps (Google Sync enabled) account, and setup a filter that makes all messages “skip the inbox” and applies a label “iPhone” to them.

Then I went in to my Mail settings on my phone and enabled push for the new “iPhone” folder on my iphone@youdomain.com account.

The result: when new mail is received, I get an instant notification. The counter on Mail doesn’t increase, but there is a sound and the phone vibrates just the same. From this point I can open Mail and new messages are quickly fetched from the IMAP accounts.

This solution is far from elegant and I hope if you find something better you’ll share it with me. Hopefully Apple can work with more email providers to make push support a little more common.

Using the built-in zoom and screen sharing capabilities (or any VNC) together on OS X can be a real pain in the posterior. If you leave your screen zoomed it becomes virtually unusable via screen sharing or VNC. That’s because there is no way to effectively move the cursor (and therefore the screen position) or turn off zoom (since you can’t easily access System Preferences, and the keyboard shortcut isn’t applied to the remote machine).

As someone who uses zoom quite extensively, I often find myself trudging up flights of stairs to manually zoom out one computer so I can access it from another. Its pretty counter-intuitive. I would have though Apple to make zoom usable remotely, make it easy to shut off or just disable it when the Mac is being controlled remotely.

But no, there was no solution. So I found one myself. I put together a cute little AppleScript and packaged it up as an Application. It executes the keyboard command to zoom all the way out, re-enabling your Mac for remote use.

It can be used in a number of ways.

1. Put in your dock for a painful, yet possible, launch.
2. Executed via SSH in Terminal (I’ll explain in a follow up post)
3. Soon using a companion app on your local Mac (this will do the SSHing for you)

So here’s the app. It is an AppleScript that zooms out your screen. That’s it, it zooms right out and quits. As usual, released under the Creative Commons license (with no warranty).

I know this of limited utility even to a small group of people, but it was irritating enough to me I though I would share. Tell me if this turns out useful for you.

It started a few months ago when I got my new iMac. Long story short; it was a disaster, I got a new one, its a little off as well.. Anyways, it scratched my Leopard DVD. No problem though, I acquired a new image and tried to burn it to a double-layer DVD. Toast quit halfway through and seems to have toasted the DVD drive. The half-baked disc was stuck in my iMac and the drive isn’t recognized anymore. This pushed me to find a different way to install OS X, and I learned a lot in the process.

Booting from an External Hard Drive
Most people know you can boot almost any OS X capable Mac from a FireWire hard drive. All you have to do is restart the machine, and hold down the Option key until it shows you the list of bootable disks and click on it. Many people don’t know that all Intel Macs can also boot from USB hard drives. This means you can clone your internal HD to your external USB drive, and have a fully bootable backup whenever you need it. Its also possible to copy the OS X installation DVD to an external, boot from it and install (this method is faster than using the DVD). This takes us to the next possibility.

Booting from your iPod
I recently went on a house-call where an OS X reinstall was needed. Rather than carry around a bulky external HD, I stuck the OS X installation in a partition on my iPod video. Just like any other USB drive, its fully bootable (by Intel Macs) and be used to install OS X.

Leopard is Universally Bootable
But the system that needed a repair was PowerPC Mac mini. Uhoh. PPC Macs can boot from USB drives, right? Well that’s true, but if you install OS X 10.5 (Leopard) there’s a way to get around this problem. As long as you own or can borrow an Intel Mac you’ll be fine.

1. Start the PPC Mac in Target Disk Mode. (Turning into an expensive, shiny FireWire HD)
2. Plug the iPod or USB drive into the Intel Mac.
3. Boot the Intel Mac holding down the Option key, boot from the USB drive containing OS X Install. 
4. Choose the PPC’s HD as the destination (you made need to change to use the GUID boot record).
5. Install OS X as normal.

This fresh OS X Leopard install is universally bootable. That means it’ll run on either a PPC or Intel Mac. So after the install is complete and you restart the PPC computer, it’ll work just as if you installed it directly on that machine. This method is typically faster, and great if your PPC Mac doesn’t have a DVD drive (or doesn’t quite meet the requirements like my 800Mhz iMac G4). Its also worth noting that you can use Leopard recovery discs from one Mac to install OS X on the HD of another. Just follow the instructions as posted above, but the PPC Mac could also be another Intel Mac. For example, I used this method to reinstall Leopard on my MacBook and my iMac G4. I’m not sure about the licensing implications of this method. I own a Leopard family pack disc, its just scratched.

My goal is to sync or stream all of my digital media (music, TV shows, movies, pictures etc) to a large SDTV (standard definition television) in the family room.

 1) AppleTV

The AppleTV is an amazing little box. It’ll sync or stream nearly all of your media from any computer that can run iTunes. There’s also some nifty plugins to extend its functionality. On paper it looks perfect, but in practice it caries a number of limitations.

• Initial cost
• File type limitations (think DIVX etc)
• Limited configurability/tweaking
• No support for SDTVs

These limitations are somewhat superficial, I could solve most of them by hacking and having a bigger wallet. At this time, however, the AppleTV just isn’t a viable option.

2) Tiger + ATV4mac

Because I already have an unused Mac mini, this option removes the up front cost of running my media center. AT4mac is a really cool project that lets you run the Apple TV OS as an application on any intel Mac running Tiger. It requires OS X 10.4 because the Apple TV OS is based on the older version, and it turns out that installing Tiger on my mini was the most difficult step. I installed Perian to cover those missing formats and picked up an Apple DVI to Video converter to connect to the television. Audio went through a headphone to composite adapter directly into the receiver. The procedure to get ATV4mac up and running was quick and painless. Afterwards I was able to sync, stream and play with my media flawlessly. All the functions of the Apple TV were present and functional. 

The problem is, once again, that I’m using an SDTV (See update below). While the ATV4mac brings down the resolution, it still has a widescreen ratio. This means the right most 1/4 of the picture is cut off. By using this solution I avoided all the issues surrounding the Apple TV except for the problem related to my SDTV. 

3) Leopard + Front Row

Until an HDTV enters the equation, it looks like the Apple TV route isn’t the way to go. The next obvious solution is Front Row. I had problems with Front Row on Tiger crashing, so I reinstalled Leopard on the mini and chose some tools to make things work. 

I installed Perian again, and I also got a copy of Sofa Control. It lets you do almost anything you can do with your mouse and keyboard right from your Apple Remote. Then I installed Syncopation. This little app is idea for our project. It connects to iTunes libraries on the network and automatically merges them into to one. All the media can then be played in Front Row. Its pretty slick, but I’m disappointed that there isn’t a free alternative. I’d really like to sync remote iTunes libraries just like you can an Apple TV. You can’t buy or rent content directly from Front Row either, and there’s also the missing YouTube and Flickr access. This solution is less than perfect, but at least it works without cutting off the screen.  

In conclusion I have to say none of these solutions turned out to be all I hoped for. The good news I can watch video and play my music, even if the process to do those is convoluted. I hope that someone finds a better solution or that I get an HDTV, and I’ll update this story once one of those things happens.

Update: I found a solution (SwitchResX) to the ATV4mac / SDTV problem. I’ll provide a tutorial soon outlining how to get your intel Mac and old SDTV to work together.