Exit Your SSH Session Without Killing Your Job

Murphy loves this one. If you connect to a remote machine and kick off something like a file copy you have to stay connected to the remote machine for the job to complete. Unless you use the screen command, which lets you detach from the running session while your job chugs away.

This is great for a process that might take a long time to complete. Murphy can use his hacked ipod touch to ssh to a remote machine, tell it to start copying files, detach, then turn the touch off. The screen command will even let you reconnect to the remote machine to check the progress of the job.

In the screencast Murphy covers how to get screen going, and how to switch between active screens and close them down. There’s plenty of other information on screen if you look around.

With screen running you can hit CTRL-A and then a key to issue a screen command. For example, CTRL-A followed by D lets you detach from a screen without closing it. Murphy also uses CTRL-A followed by ” (double-quote key) to get a list of screens he can switch to. Follow the link above for more screen tips. Or take a look at the screencast.

Jailbreak an iPod touch

Murphy spent an evening hacking the iPod touch he got for Christmas. It should have taken about fifteen minutes but he glossed over some details on one step and overlooked a simple solution elsewhere. Be sure to read Adam’s disclaimers before proceeding. Here are some of Murphy’s observations on the experience:

First - I started with the Adam Pash post over at Lifehacker. It’s written using the word iPhone instead of touch, but there isn’t really any difference. Here are the basic steps to jailbreak an iPhone or iPod touch:

• Restore version 1.1.1 of the iPod touch or iPhone firmware using iTunes
• Go to the jailbreak website with the device’s browser - the application installer will be installed on your device automatically
• Run OktoPrep from the installer
• Upgrade to 1.1.2 using iTunes
• Run Jailbreak
• Install applications using the installer

The first stumble came with downloading the 1.1.1 firmware. The firmware file Lifehacker linked to has a zip extension and when Leopard-Safari downloaded it the contents were automatically extracted. That’s not what iTunes is looking for when you reset your firmware.

The solution was to right-click the link and save it using Download Linked File As… - problem solved. Then I just renamed the file, removing the zip extension. Read more »

New Selection Tools in Leopard Preview

Selecting part of your image and masking your background to make it transparent is tricky business. Even with Photoshop.

Apple gave us some tools in Leopard that make a quick and dirty extraction pretty easy. There’s an Instant Alpha tool like the one in the iWork applications. But there’s also a nice Extract Shape tool that looks a lot like the one in Photoshop, minus all the fancy options.

You can make your web pages and other documents look a little more polished by adding transparency. The transparency opens up new possibilities, like subjects that pop out of their frames.

In the screencast, Murphy uses the Extract Shape tool to select a kitten in a photo and make the background transparent. The tool allows for further enhancement by dragging across colors you want to matte. This is similar to using the Instant Alpha tool that’s now included with Preview.

Here’s another example of what you can do.

Reminder from Murphy: Amazon is having a sale on Apple products. This Macbook is $1097 before a $75 rebate at post time. That’s $1022.91 with a rebate. The black Macbook has a $100 rebate. Get yourself some Merry Christmas stuff.

Salling Clicker Remote Control for iTunes

Murphy stumbled across an old HP iPaq the other day and intalled Salling Clicker on it. Instant remote control for iTunes, via the Salling Clicker pane installed in System Preferences.

It’s amazing there aren’t more Wifi remotes these days. With computers acting as media libraries line-of-sight infrared seems totally inadequate. That’s where Salling Clicker comes in. The software works with either Bluetooth or Wifi to control functions on a remote computer. And the list of devices it works on is extensive. The bad news is for LG phone users. You’re on your own.

Watch the screencast to see how Murphy controls his iTunes library. He can even use the hardware buttons on the Pocket PC to advance to the next song or go back. The same button also controls the volume.

If you dig a little further into Salling Clicker you’ll see it can be used to control a slideshow in iPhoto or to send a Mac off to sleep. There are functions for news feeds and mail too.

Murphy is looking forward to seeing Salling Clicker on an iPod Touch and iPhone when the platform is opened up to developers early in 2008. The Touch might be the perfect Wifi remote control.

A trial version of the software shows all the functionality, but locks after a finite number of clicks. If you’ve got an old Pocket PC lying around you might want to take a look. Or check to see if your phone is on the list of supported devices. There’s a Windows version too.

VMware Converter, Fusion, and Boot Camp

At some point, you might want to convert your Boot Camp volume to a true VMware virtual machine using the VMware Converter.

Murphy’s first experiment with VMware Fusion was to access his Boot Camp install of XP while running Leopard. Fusion made it easy. After installing Fusion it was a simple task to add Boot Camp to the list of Virtual Machines on Murphy’s Macbook Pro.

VMware suggests getting away from Boot Camp unless you have a compelling reason to boot into Windows at startup, suggesting that Fusion performs better with non-Boot Camp virtual machines. There are other reasons to do this as well.

First, you don’t get all the features of Fusion with your Boot Camp partition. You can’t suspend the virtual machine and resume it later. In other words, if you’ve quit Fusion you need to go through a Windows reboot next time you use it. With a regular virtual machine Windows opens up right where you suspended it after your last session, saving lots of time. Adding this functionality would have caused a conflict between the VMware session and the state of Boot Camp when it was selected at startup.

Second, a regular virtual machine adds flexibility to your system. You can offload the virtual machine to another drive or a different computer when you need to free up disk space. Moving a Boot Camp partition isn’t so simple, nor is it a supported feature.

Murphy’s going to play around with Fusion a little more. Then he’s going to reclaim the space Boot Camp has been taking up by deleting the partition.

The screencast shows how to covert a Boot Camp partition into a regular Fusion virtual machine. Here are the basic steps Murphy followed:

1. Enable Windows sharing on your Mac hosting the Boot Camp partition.
2. Run your Boot Camp install under Fusion.
3. Install the VMware Converter utility under Windows.
4. Use the Converter utility to create the new virtual machine in a folder on your Mac, writing it via Windows sharing.

You’ll probably want to make sure everything you do in Windows works well before you delete your Boot Camp volume.

Related links:

Get a trial version of VMware Fusion.

Download the VMware Converter.

Buy Fusion from Amazon - $41.99 at the time of this post after a $20 rebate.