We will first create a new partition on the backup drive, then clone the install DVD to this partition and finally boot from the external hard disk.

Add new partition

First of all, we need a new partition on the backup drive to boot from. Thanks to the OS X disk utility, this is quite easy. I use an SATA drive with 1 TB capacity living in a Sharkoon Quickport Pro connected via USB. So fire up disk utility, select your backup drive and open the Partition tab.

As you can see, there is already plenty of space used on the drive, but that’s no problem at all, as disk utility can resize partitions. Just drag the lower right corner of the partition upwards until it frees the space you need. I set up a 10 GB partition. Finally apply the changes.

Clone Install DVD to new partition

Next we clone the install DVD (Snow Leopard in my case) to the new partition. Insert the DVD, select your new partition in disk utility and go to Restore. Drag the Mac OS X Install DVD to source and your new partition on the backup drive to target. Then click on restore and wait.

That’s all you need to do. Let’s try to boot.

Boot from the backup drive

Finally, reboot your Mac and hold down option key on startup. If everything went well, the new partition appears in the list of bootable devices. Select it and be amazed how fast you enter the OS X setup.

I (mis)used this plugin to setup short URLs to my profiles on social networks. I own the domain frommknecht.net, which happens to be my surname followed by the .net extension. So I thought it would be a great idea to forward frommknecht.net/fb to my Facebook profile, frommknecht.net/twitter to my Twitter page and so on. With Redirection, that’s very easy. Just go to the Redirection-settings, enter e.g. /twitter as “Source URL” and the link to your Twitter page as target. That’s all. After adding the redirection, your Twitter page will be available via http://<your-blog-url>/twitter.

This way, you could even use Wordpress as your private short-URL service ala bit.ly.

You have other cool tipps for Redirection? Then please leave a comment.

Adjusting a prefix

Let’s say you want to rename your ripped Futurama episodes. The current naming convention is “Futurama 02×12 Raging Bender.mp4″. So it’s Futurama followed by a space and the season-episode identifier (season 2, episode 12), then the episode’s name and finally the extension.

First of all, we strip off “Futurama” and the space, because all the files are stored in a directory named “Futurama”, so we don’t need that info in the file-name anymore.

for i in Futurama*; do mv "$i" "${i##Futurama }"; done

What we do here is to loop over all files in the current directory that start with “Futurama” and assign the file-name to the variable $i. We use $i as parameter to the mv command for actually renaming the file. The interesting part is its second parameter, ${i##Futurama }

Here we apply a modifier to the variable $i, which adjusts the returned value, but not the variable’s value itself. In this case, the modifier is ## which removes a certain prefix from the variable, “Futurama ” (including the space), leaving “02×12 Raging Bender.mp4″.

Make sure to surround both parameters by quotation marks, because the file names may contain spaces.

Modifying the suffix

Now that we have removed the leading “Futurama “, we want to adjust the mp4-extension. iTunes prefers m4v, so let’s change this.

for i in *.mp4; do mv "$i" "${i%mp4}m4v"; done

It’s very similar to what we did in the first part, except that we loop over all mp4-files and use a different variable modifier.

The % modifier removes the given text from the end of the variable’s value, so ${i%mp4} removes the mp4-extension, returning “02×12 Raging Bender.”. To add the new m4v-extension, we just include it after the braces.

That’s all, the files are renamed the way we wanted to. There are two tips when using this way to rename files. First of all, put the file-name in quotation marks, otherwise you will run into problems if files contain spaces, leading to undesired behaviour or errors in the best case, to loss of data in the worst case. And the second recommendation is to echo out the result first before actually using mv, just to make sure the modifier produces the expected result.

Do you have other tips for batch renaming files? Please explain them in the comments.

But the usual format of my tweets when posting websites is the title of the page, followed by the URL in parenthesis. So I adjusted the bookmarklet to use this format.Just drag this link Post with Tweetie to your bookmarks bar. Tested with Safari 4 Beta and Firefox 3.0.7.

To solve this problem, I decided to use GMail as my one and only mail inbox. In this post, I show you how I set it up.

Previous setup

So far, I used Apple’s Mail.app with one account for every mail address I own. This was working fine as long as I went online with my Macbook Pro. But if I would like to check mail at work for example, I would have to visit 6 webmail sites for full processing of my mail inboxes. In practice, I just checked mail of my main account. Then I decided to read all my mail via just one webmail site, GMail.

Why GMail

Most of the setup I describe in this post can be used with any webmail, but I chose GMail for these reasons:

• Very good web interface
• IMAP support
• Use of various sender addresses
• 20MB as maximum attachment size

With these features present, an almost perfect setup is possible.

Import your mail to GMail

First of all, we need a way to import the mail of all other accounts into GMail. There are actually two ways

• GMail can fetch mail from POP3 servers
• Forward mails from all the other accounts to the GMail address

I first tried using POP3, but the result was not really satisfying, GMail decided to look for new mail only once a hour or even less. Sometimes I even had to trigger it manually. So I’m using the second method and forward any incoming mail to my GMail account.

Sending mail

When you send mail, you usually don’t want to use your GMail address as sender. If you reply to a mail, you want to use the address that the mail was addressed to. In GMail, you can use various sender addresses, not only your GMail address. The mail is still send via Google’s mail server, but the sender is different. This is not perfect, but acceptable if I have to send a mail via the web interface.

It would be much nicer if GMail would support a SMTP server per sender address and send the mail via this server. That’s exactly what mail clients would do.

Desktop integration

So far, all the mail we get shows up in our GMail inbox and we can send mail via Google’s mail server using any of our mail addresses. There is only one more thing to do, a proper desktop integration. The web interface is really nice and works great for anything it is supposed to, but there is no integration with your operating system. Using Mac OS X, you can for example send a photo via mail directly from iPhoto or attaching a file by dragging the file from the finder to the mail icon. That’s something I often use and don’t want to miss. 

Luckily, GMail offers IMAP access. This means, you can read your mail with any Mail application, but the mail stays on the server. So when you log in the web inerface the next time, all your mail is still there and all changes made in your mail application are reflected as well. So just set up your GMail account in your favorite mail application and make sure to use IMAP, not POP3. Many mail applications support to specify IMAP folders for Trash, Drafts, Send mails etc. Make sure to map them properly to your GMail folders. For outgoing mail, use the SMTP servers of your various mail providers. That way, the mail is no longer send via Google, but via the proper server, which looks much more professional especially for business mails.

Conclusion

In this article, I showed you how to set up GMail as your one and only mail inbox. Even sending mail with proper sender address works. All these features can be used without loosing any comfort of a proper desktop integration by using a mail client and the IMAP server. The only improvement would be support for SMTP servers in GMail.

You’re using a similar setup and have suggestions for me? Or you need some more details of my setup? Just leave a comment.

The short story: Pass 1 prints only even pages and in reverse order (see Paper Handling), Pass 2 odd pages in normal order.

If you’re lucky, this setup works for your printer, but here’s some more background information. There are some pitfalls we have to take care of. First of all, what happens if the second pass prints more pages than the first one? Then the additional page needs to be the last one of the document, as that’s the one without a backside. As a consequence, Pass 2 needs to print in normal order. And because this can only happen if the total number of pages is odd, we print only odd pages.

Now let’s have a look at Pass 1. Even pages are still missing, so select them. The order is highly depending on your printer, especially the way and the order it pulls in the sheets of paper in the second pass. My printer first selects the top most sheet, expecting the white side heading to top. Remember, Pass 2 prints page 2 first, so make sure page 1 is put on the other side. In my case that means using reverse order.

That’s the way it works for a Samsung ML-2010R, but I think you got the idea. After some test prints, your manual duplex is ready to go. As soon as you finished your setup, chose your document, print using Pass 1 preset, then put the stack of paper back into your printer and print again, this time using Pass 2. Done! Manual duplex the easy way.

The zshrc contains a nice prompt, several aliases, useful functions and some modifications of tab completion. You can download the file here.

If you also want to use the ZSH in your terminal, just open the terminal application’s preferences and enter the following command for execution on start-up:

/bin/zsh -l

The lowercase L is important. It tells the shell to perform a log-in, otherwise your configuration would not be read. This is a very nice way of using ZSH without changing your user’s default shell.

But there is one major limitation: while jumping between words works flawlessly using CTRL-Left and CTRL-Right, deleting one word backward using CTRL-Backspace does just not work. If you know a solution, please tell me.