CDFinder - Catalog Your Drives and Disks

Don’t let the name fool you, CDFinder isn’t just for CDs. It can catalog your thumb drives, external drives, internal drives - and DVDs too.  This allows you to view the content of your media without powering up the drive or bringing it online.

Drives have started piling up around here. There’s a Drobo that helps a little, but I can think of four loose 3.5″ drives that have stuff on them. And a couple of portable USB drives. And piles of CDs and DVDs.

There’s also an offline G5 that I want to retire. I forget what’s on there from time to time so I use CDFinder ($39.99US) on my Macbook to take a look. CDFinder catalogs the contents of all kinds of files allowing you to view them when their host drive or disk is offline. Images, video, text, Adobe pro stuff - it can even index EyeTV files.

CDFinder is a big help with images. The application can generate thumbnails to help you sift through your content. Geotagging features let you add location data to your images and view them on various mapping services. Commercial CDFinder customers use it for managing large libraries of various types.

CDFinder developer Norbert Doerner stays busy adding new file types and features to the application. It can generate thumbnail images for many file types, including video formats.

You can assign labels to files and other custom fields. If the drive is online you can select a file and press the spacebar for a Finder-like preview.

I don’t have Spotlight indexing my Drobo, but I’ve got a CDFinder index so I can quickly search for files.

I have little faith in the longevity of optical media, so I don’t have tons of CDs and DVDs to index. But I’ve got a few too many drives lying around. CDFinder can be a great help in getting your data organized -  and spotting what needs to be backed up.

I may not be the primary target audience of this product, but I can see where it could be useful and convenient for people with growing libraries of digital media or file archives at home. One thing I’d really like: The ability to tag files for removal and have them deleted when the drive is online again.

There are other products that perform similar functions. The CDFinder website has posted comparisons to other products - providing information on how they stack up.  Clearly CDFinder is a mature product with sophisticated features, like the ability to import catalogs from other indexing products.

The trial version lets you index 25 media items, that’s plenty to let you know how the product works. Keep in mind that CDFinder isn’t shareware, Norbert requires payment if you’re going to use it, even if you’re under 25 indexed items. Different licenses are available, including “Joe Average User.”

I started a small screencast for this post and it crashed on me. But Norbert at CDFinder has you covered with this walk-through video.

Airport Extreme E-Book

I’ve never understood how non-techies make sense of things like private IP addressing, DHCP, Wifi, etc. When they troubleshoot -  where do they start? The only thing more baffling to Murphy is how the technically-disinclined manage to upgrade their Wordpress installs.

But for anyone looking for guidance with an Apple Airport configuration (or any wifi network) there’s help: Glenn Fleishman’s Ebook, Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Network. The 265 pages are packed with information for anyone trying to get the most from their Apple Airport, Time Capsule, or Airport Express.

This ebook is part of an entire series of ebooks managed by publishers Adam and Tonya Engst. The catalog is extensive - and based on Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Network - the quality is excellent. I hadn’t read many electronic books before but one benefit became instantly obvious: searchable text. The book is also well hyperlinked, allowing easy hops from what you’re reading to related content.

So - do you really need this book? If you typically guess your way through networking and have set up wireless networks before you’ll probably get your Airport up and running using the Airport Utility’s guided setup mode. But is up and running good enough for you?  Consider these questions:

• Should your wifi be running on the 2.6 ghz radio or the 5 ghz?
• Can you stop your iPhone from slowing down your Mac’s wifi?
• Could an Airport Extreme be the bottleneck between your lan and an ultra-fast Internet provider?
• Do you know what channel is best for wifi in your home or office?
• Do you want to allow outside traffic into your network?
• Do you want to extend your signal outside or beyond the range of a single Airport?
• What kind of encryption is best for your network?
• Does it take entirely too long to copy video files across your network?
• Do you know how to interpret the information in Airport Utility, like the chart displayed here?

If you’re looking for guidance on any of those questions -or if you think the Airport should have included a detailed manual - you should take a look at Glenn’s book.

Your Airport has many configuration options, not all of them are obvious.  For example, when selecting a radio mode only a few choices are listed in the drop-down list.  Yet option-clicking the list yielded the choice I was looking for along with many others.  How was Murphy supposed to know that?  Read the book.

Advanced configurations can get confusing with two radios.  What are the best options for naming the two networks?  How will your guests access the network?  Are you going to allow access for 802.11a?  Glenn covers these questions in his book.

Yes, the Airport came with a 36 page manual. But the first eight pages explain how to plug it in and the last five cover how big it is and whether or not you can use it at the North Pole. In between you’ll find the same vague information found in many Apple publications. On the other hand, Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Network is one of the longer Taking Control titles - and it’s packed with useful information.  The material covers a wide swath of networking information with just the right amount of depth.

The book starts out by covering many general networking concepts, quite an undertaking in itself. But it’s not overwhelming and it won’t bog you down. All the content is cleanly presented with plenty of screen captures and diagrams - helping you understand the roles Apple networking products can handle. The presentation is easy on the eyes; the content is well written.

For those already familiar with the ins and outs of Ethernet and IP networking there’s an in-depth discussion about channels used by wifi networking gear. Glenn explains how wifi signals can be constrained by walls as well as devices in your home such as microwave ovens and cordless phones- as well as many other culprits.    The topic is covered even further in a new appendix.

Sure, some people can get their network running themselves.  But maybe you’d like to get a handle on networking yourself - or you’re considering calling the Geek Squad.  With this book you can easily set up a network without outside help.  A generous sample is available on the ebook website.  Don’t forget to check out the other Taking Control titles.

Direct Access to Screen Sharing

Murphy has a new favorite Snippet for TextExpander. Direct access to a Screen Sharing session with a couple of key strokes, from anywhere. Let’s back up and see Murphy’s awkward way first.

The Screen Sharing application is arguably tucked away, it’s not sitting in your Applications folder. Don’t know why. But you can select a computer on your network in the Finder and then click Screen Sharing to launch a session. For Murphy, this usually involved some keystrokes to bring a Finder window up front and then some mouse movement. Too much energy.

Now, wherever Murphy is within OS X, he can type a few characters on his keyboard, like ssz.   He doesn’t need to be in Finder, he doesn’t need to open Spotlight, he doesn’t need to poke around with the mouse. A window opens instantly with the Screen Sharing session live and ready to go.  It even works while running a full-screen Fusion session.

If you aren’t familiar with TextExpander ($29.95) take a look at Murphy’s introduction. The utility allows you to create “Snippets” - a series of keyboard characters that trigger different results. Snippets can replace “mmz” with the text “Murphy Mac” wherever you’re entering text. Or they can run a shell script or Applescript. In Murphy’s Screen Sharing example a brief Applescript runs to launch the session whenever “ssz” is entered. The key combination is up to you, but it’s probably best to come up with a system - and to not use words you’re likely to type just for the sake of typing them.

Here’s what the Applescript looks like. Not much to say about that. Change the ip address to the ip of the machine you want to control. That’s it. We’ll assume you’ve activated Screen Sharing on the remote machine.

What about the entry you need to make in TextExpander? That’s pretty easy too.
Here’s Murphy’s TextExpander entry. Very simple: The type of entry is AppleScript. Then the AppleScript itself. And finally the text string you want to type to kick off the script.

Murphy posted a while back about opening web pages directly with TextExpander. Here are a couple other related posts:

Launch applications from Terminal
Launch applications from Spotlight

Dropbox, SSH, and iPhone

Mrs. Murphy called and said she wanted to download a file from a Mac back home to her Macbook Air on the road. Away from the house I thought for a second about the easiest way to send her the file. I flicked through my iPhone apps and saw a simple solution.

My iPhone has both TouchTerm and Dropbox (syncs a local folder to the cloud) installed. TouchTerm let me ssh into the Mac at the house which was awake and recording a television show. From there a simple copy command let me copy the file into my Dropbox public folder. That was the hardest part.

Once the file copied over I launched the Dropbox app on the iPhone. The file was listed in my Dropbox public folder - allowing me to use the mail-a-link function in the app. Mrs. Murphy got the email, clicked the link to download her file - and she was all set.

Back when Murphy had more time to tinker he came up with far crazier solutions, like Retrieve a File on Your Mac by Email. Which is still great if you’re up against certain firewall restrictions or other obstacles. Better yet, that solution would have worked as soon as the Mac woke up, had it been asleep.

But this solution required far less preparation. I had ssh running on the remote Mac, and Dropbox was installed on both the Mac and my iPhone. That’s it. I could have used the Dropbox web interface instead of the app.

I realize there are other solutions Mrs. Murphy could have used. Logmein. FTP. VNC. Etc. Everyone has their preference, but I found this direct and efficient.

What do you think?

Snow Leopard Unboxing

Just kidding, Murph doesn’t unbox.

But Snow Leopard did arrive today.  And while I was pleased last month that it seemed Apple was keeping to its word — it’s not about shiny new features —  I kind of wished there were a few more today.  That said, I admire the goal Apple set for itself here, and I hope Snow Leopard proves itself with increased stability and performance.

Here are a handful of observations:

• My in-place install took 40 minutes.
• I reclaimed 20GB of space.
• The text replacement feature doesn’t apply to Terminal.
• Screenshots are now named with a date-time stamp.
• The new Expose stuff is nice.  Hover the mouse over a window and tap the spacebar to zoom in.
• I’ve never really used Stacks, but I’ll give it another shot with Snow Leopard.

And that’s about as far as I got.

I had two issues with applications.  I’m a big fan of 1Password.  There’s a slightly unusual situation there. They have a beta that’s compatible with Snow Leopard, jumping the product to version 3. That product is still in beta but available now with reduced pricing.  Working fine for Murphy so far.  If you stick with version 2 you’ll need to run Safari in 32bit mode, which can be done by selecting Safari in Finder and bringing up its Get Info panel.

The other issue was with Airfoil.  Same thing:  I had to run Safari in 32bit mode to make it work with Snow Leopard.

That’s about all I’ve gotten to so far.