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AirSharing - an application for your iPhone or iPod touch, turning the device into a wifi storage drive and file viewer.
It would be nice if Apple would let you copy files directly to your iPhone or touch over the USB cable, but they don’t. What we can do is copy files over from a Mac or PC using AirSharing. As a bonus you get a viewer providing support for a variety of file types. More on that at the end. First, let’s look at how we copy files onto your device, and how we get them off.
Placing Files on Your Device
To copy files on from your Mac just go to the Go menu in Finder and select Connect to Server. Or hit Command-K. In the box that opens (see image to the right) enter http://w.x.y.z — but replace w.x.y.z with the ip address of your device. Don’t know the ip? Don’t worry, AirSharing will help with that as we’ll see in a minute.
A Finder window will open displaying whatever folders you’ve created on your iPhone or touch. You can drag files in or out, delete files or folders, or create new ones.
If you’re on a PC you’ll start with Internet Explorer. Go to the File menu and click open. Enter the address of your device just like the steps above - and make sure to check the box. A window will open displaying the folders on your device.
Getting Files Off Your Device.
When activated on your device, AirSharing turns it into a pocket web server. Your friends (on the same wifi network with your device) can access your files by pointing their web browser to http://w.x.y.z:8080. 
Again, replace the w.x.y.z with the ip address of your device. The 8080 is the port number where the web server is running. For more on what port numbers are read the end of this post.
Just like any other web page, users can right-click the file links to perform operations like saving the referenced file to disk.
File Viewer
As a bonus, AirSharing includes viewers for many file types you might want to open. iWork, photos, office docs, pdf, web docs - in addition to music and movies. This really comes in handy. See the developer site for a list of file formats supported. Instead of having to use iTunes to copy photos onto your device you can just drag a folder of images over and use the AirSharing viewer to display them.
Notice in the image to the right that the ip address of the device is displayed at the bottom of the screen. The ip address can be seen elsewhere in the interface of AirSharing too, like the settings page. You can also turn AirSharing off when you’re not using it, which Murphy would recommend.
If you’ve got a big web page you want to review later you can save it as a web archive in Safari and transfer it to your device using AirSharing. That way you can read it later offline.
Summary
AirSharing makes ferrying files using your iPhone or touch easy. Yes, wifi is a little slow, but it’s a pretty simple solution that doesn’t need any third party software on your Mac or PC.
In addition, you can copy content like photos, audio, and movies to your device without going through iTunes. For some that might be worth the price of admission. Check out AirSharing at the developers site. $6.99.
Free Shipping at Amazon
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A true Apple fan from deep in the backwoods of County Meath - that’s Ireland - dropped two nuggets of info on Murphy today: Two ways to remote control a computer from your iPhone or iPod touch.
logmein.com
First, there’s logmein.com, which has become a favorite remote control option for Murphy. It’s secure, it’s free, and it makes maintaining a list of the computers you connect to simple. When Murphy signs into logmein.com he sees which computers are online - and can connect with a click from a web browser. From anywhere.
This post by the Technology Evengelist shows how you can make a simple change to your logmein.com preferences so your iPhone or iPod touch can be used as the client. First you select the computer you want to make the change for, then update the preferences to use an html client when connecting. Details in the post.
VNC Lite
If you prefer VNC there’s a client in the App Store called Mocha VNC Lite, as reported by Just Another Iphone Blog. I was connected to my Mac in about 45 seconds including the install. VNC on a tiny screen requires a little patience, but it’s great to have the access when you don’t have a computer.
More Remote Tips
Murphy has tons of posts - tons - to help you with gaining access to a remote Mac. We’ve got you covered from getting started with SSH and SCP to emailing yourself a filename - and automatically having the file sent to you in a reply. Murphy also has posts on auto-emailing a file that’s dropped in a Finder folder. So you can ssh in, copy a file to a folder, and it’s on its way.
More on VNC
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Wait until you see what a clever pun this title is. Using the sleep command in Terminal you can update your Twitter status while you’re away. Or sleeping.
Apple has jumped around a little with regards to command line scheduling tools, but the sleep command is still dead-simple to use. (Read more about scheduling with lingon and launchd here)
Suppose you have a command you want to run once, at a future time. Use sleep followed by the number of seconds to wait. Then use a semi-colon to separate the command to run at the appointed time.
sleep 30 ; command
The above example will execute command 30 seconds after you hit the return key. 3600 seconds is an hour. 86,400 seconds in each and every day.
So now you just need a command to update Twitter. The curl command comes with your Mac. Twitter Development Talk boasts the easiest way to update Twitter from the command line. Scroll down to The Easiest Way to Play Around with the Twitter API. Christopher Penn has a post on it too, but the command is cut-off on his blog.
The command should look like this:
curl -u username:password -d status=”your message here” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
Enter that all on one line. It would be better to make it into a shell script. Just copy that line into a text file, maybe name it tw.sh, and replace the your message here part with $1. Then use chmod to make it executable.
Note: Don’t know how to make it executable? Read more about making a shell script. Learn even more about shell scripts: make an interactive shell script.
From there you can enter the following in the Terminal:
./tw.sh “Looking into starting my own airline…”
And you’ve updated your Twitter status. You can make that cleaner by setting an alias for your shell script.
Finally, to have your tweet post onto Twitter hours later you could enter something like this in the Terminal:
sleep 7200; ./tw.sh “I’m sleeping” (you’ll need to leave your Mac on)
If you’re a stickler about your Twittering and want to be accurate, this is the way to go. Schedule that I’m in the shower tweet in advance. People need to know.
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If you use Windows you might not be overly fond of the little bubbles that pop up down on your Task Bar. You know the ones — warnings about your firewall and unused items on your desktop?
A simple registry edit will stop the bubbles, for all applications. You can watch the screencast to see two ways to make the change. You can either make the edit manually using regedit, a registry editor that comes with Windows. Or you can download a file from Murphy and double-click it. The file will make the change.
You don’t have much to worry about. In fact, you can right-click the file (after unzipping it), select Edit, and you’ll see it’s just a couple lines of text. The change is easily undone. Simply delete the entry from your registry.
The balloons will stop appearing for all applications - only for the user you’re logged in as when you make the change. Log out and back in to test your results.
If you’re comfortable in the registry go ahead and make this entry:
Add a DWORD value in the following key, and name it EnableBalloonTips. Set its hex value to zero.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
Not a registry person? Watch the screencast.
I don’t even know if they have bubbles in Vista…
Watch Now
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I picked up a stack of Sony DVD+R DL disks this morning in preparation for my first attempt at DL burning. The objective: Backing up my Fusion install of Windows XP onto two disks.
The XP vm is about 15 GB. I don’t back it up with Time Machine, but I have a separate volume on the Time Machine drive where a copy of the vm is kept. Now I can delete it if I feel the need. The way I use Windows doesn’t require updating the backup with something like SuperDuper. I’m just saving myself from ever enduring the install process by storing a copy.
Burning more than 8.5 GB ? Use Split.
First I dumped the vm folder into a .sparseimage file created with Disk Utility. Then I used the split command in Terminal to split the sparse image into two files. That was simple enough, apart from the annoying difference between GB and GiB.
The disks have 8.5 GB stamped on their tops. That’s the manufacturer’s way of making the capacity look bigger - using decimal notation instead of binary. OS X reported the blank disk as having 7.96GB free.
The disks burnt well, no coasters. If I ever need to restore the XP vm I can copy the files from my dvd+R dl disks and reconstitute them with the cat command. For two bucks I reclaimed 15 GB on my external drive. Not bad. That’s thirteen cents per GB compared with around twenty-five cents per GB on an external HDD.
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