Airport Express - changing the channel

I needed to change the channel on my Airport Express because the automatic setting had it on the same channel as my neighbours wireless.

To change the channel open the Airport Utility which is in Applications > Utilities on OSX and if it doesn't find your network, scan. Then make sure your device is selected on the left hand pane.

Click Airport, and then wireless, and in the drop down list select a different channel. Try to use one that is 3 or 4 away from any other wireless.

Click update and allow the device to restart.

You can use APGrapher to scan for all the local wireless networks and checks which channel they use.

OSX Server - "the items path may have changed"

I got "the items path may have changed" on an OSX Server while using Workgroup Manager the other day when trying to change the sharing on a folder. I never found out why, but I fixed it by manually removing the share manually in NetInfo Manager, and adding it back using Workgroup Manager.

OSX Server - manually removing Shares

On OSX Server you can manually remove Shares by using NetInfo Manager. Go to Applications > Utilities and launch NetInfo Manager. First Authenticate yourself by going to Security > Authenticate
and put in your credentials

Then click through the directories to locate the share. The path is SharePoints > fileshare

find the one you want to remove ie unshare and click Delete. Go back to Workgroup Manager and it'll be gone.

OSX - convert DMG to ISO

If you have OSX Leopard 10.5 then converting from DMG to ISO is very easy, using Disk Utility.

Go to Applications>Utilities and double click Disk Utilty. When it opens you can either drag the DMG into Disk Utility


or, you can click on Convert
and select your image. Then in the Image Format at the bottom select 'DVD/CD Master'


Allow the file to be named .cdr, and when its finished you need to rename the image to .iso

Safari uses CPU 100% - corrupt SafeBrowsing.db

On 2 of my OSX (10.4 and 10.5) machines, Safari started consuming 100% CPU. After a bit of research it seemed that it was the new Safe Browsing feature introduced in 3.2(?). Basically with the feature "Warn when visiting a fraudulent website" after 2 minutes Safari would ramp the CPU to 100% and it would stay there, for ever if you left it. Then when you tried to quit it would crash.


I tried a different account, and found that other accounts on the same machine didn't have this problem.

Then I used Activity Monitor while Safari ramped to 100% to see what Safari was doing. In Activity Monitor, click on Safari, then get-info, click on 'Open Files and Ports'


and copy and paste into a text file. Reading through I see

/Users/name/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/SafeBrowsing.db

so the next step was to force quit Safari, and rename this file

cd /Users/name/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari

mv SafeBrowsing.db SafeBrowsing.db.old

restart Safari, and this file gets recreated. Safari does ramp the CPU but after a minute or so its back to normal.

BTW this file is created by Safari downloading from safebrowsing.clients.google.com, so you should ensure access to that hostname.

Geo-tag photos with OSX

Previously I've blogged how to geo-tag photos using an Android as the GPS logger with the ActiveGPS Lite application to create GPSX files, and GPSPhotoLinker to read them. You can also consider HoudahGeo to import your GPSX files.

Well, the author of ActiveGPS Lite has removed it from the Market, so we need another logging application.

Step forward Google's own MyTracks. It too records tracks and can export as GPSX files. After you've recorded your track, export it as GPSX to your SD card, and then copy it to your Mac.

Launch HoudaGeo, and then go to Geocode > Load GPS Data from File

but also does some cool things like

• iPhoto, Aperture & Lightroom integration
• Writes to iPhoto '09 Places

and very handily doesn't change the file date, so you don't need to use jhead.

Probably well worth the $30.

Google - manually changing search language

Google use some fancy IP - based tools to present you with a local language interface.

But what if say you are visiting another country and you still want your own language? What you do is start with a different URL:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en

searching on say Zurich gives you
while

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=de (German)

gives you
Nice!