If you’re like me and countless fellow Mac users that needed to reset their wireless keyboard, just to run into a lengthy process of research and frustration, well then you know what I’m talking about.

It’s completely inexcusable that such a simple, yet highly demanded task is poorly documented by Apple. After all, it appears that besides using a wireless device on more than one mac, users also seem to face issues with sudden connectivity problems at random.

The steps for resetting the wireless keyboard are really simple, just follow along:

1. Turn off the keyboard, better yet remove the batteries
2. Click the bluetooth icon in the upper toolbar, then select “Set Up Bluetooth Device”
3. When the Bluetooth Set Up Assistance is up and start searching for devices
4. Insert the batteries and HOLD the power button, do NOT let go
5. Your keyboard should now appear in the assistant
6. Select the keyboard from the list and click continue, while still holding the power button
7. Once you get the pairing code, let go of the power button and type in the code.

Your keyboard should now be paired and working. The trick is to hold down the power button during the entire process, simple yet rarely documented.

The user interface changes of Apple’s new operating system, Lion, are obvious to experienced Mac users. But some of the changes might have you scratching your head, when you don’t for example see traditional scroll bars, the mailbox and folder list, or large enough icons in the Finder sidebar.

You might also be annoyed by the new “reverse scrolling” feature, and the reappearance of that ping sound when you receive new mail messages. Plus, you may be wondering what the “Arrange” button and the extra items in the Finder sidebar are all about.

If you’re a veteran Mac user, you probably have figured out how to change a few things in Lion to get them back the way you like. But if you’re still confused, read on.

Scroll Bars and Sidebar

Likely the first thing you see missing in Lion are the accustomed scroll bars in Finder windows. The newly designed, leaner grey scroll bars look like by default when you move your cursor over to the edge of a window. This might be okay for some users, but if you want scroll bars back, open System Preferences and click General.

Where it says, “Show scroll bars”, you get the other two options to show scroll bars “Constantly,” or “When scrolling.”
Whilst we’re in this General section, you might as well want to difference the size of the icons in the Sidebar of the Finder, from the default small size to larger. On my MacBook Air, the icons by default were as well small.

Trackpad Gestures

Whilst we have System Preferences open, you might want to click on the Trackpad settings and see what new multi-touch gestures are at hand in Lion. The new gestures are great, but they are still not as advanced as what you will find in BetterTouchTool.

If you like using BTT or a similar multi-touch application, deselecting “Three finger drag,” under Point & Drag might accommodate you better functionality in BTT.
As well, if the reverse scrolling direction of the scroll bars is not your cup of tea, simply deselect “Scroll direction: natural” and you can scroll the way you constantly have on your Mac.

Finder Preferences

There are additional items in the Finder Sidebar, and most of them you likely want to keep there. But if you don’t need something like  AirLose or any other item, you can select Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and deselect any items you don’t want visible.
As well notice that by default, status information is missing at the bottom of Finder windows. If you click View > Show Status Bar in the Finder menu bar, you get back useful information like the number of files in a folder, or the amount of memory room you have at hand in the internal drive of your computer.

All My Files

You will as well notice a new sidebar item labeled, “All My Files”, which shows and sorts all your files by Kind, Contacts, Images, PDF Documents, etc. This is a great idea, but you might be overwhelmed by as well a myriad of files displayed at once.
So you could us the Arrange lose-down menu, described below, to sort your files by a certain genre. Or you may consider altering the settings for All My Files. You can control-click on it and select, “Show Search Criteria.” From there, you might add a criteria (by clicking the + button) to limit the files that show up. For instance, you may only want to see files created in the week or few days.

Arrange Button

Whilst we’re talking about the Finder, you might have noticed that there’s a new item in the toolbar labeled, “Arrange.” If you find your Desktop or any Finder window of items in chaos with files having no semblance of order, the lose-down menu in Arrange can quickly support you tidy things up. You can order items by Kind, Date Changed, Size, etc.

Mail

The new Mail interface is likely the most noticeable of all changes in Lion, which provides a widescreen display of your messages and neatly arranges and groups your messages—conversation style—in a single column.
However, when you open Mail you might wonder what happened to the sidebar that includes your list of mailboxes and folders. It’s not there by default, but simply click View > Show Mailbox List to get the sidebar back. There’s as well an icon in the upper-left of Mail in which you can conceal and show the sidebar.
As well, Apple by default turned back on the Ping sound for new Mail messages. If that sound annoys you, open the Mail’s Preferences > General and select “None” under “New messages sound.”

New Folder with Selections

One great little feature new to Lion is the ability to Control-select items on your desktop or in any Finder window, and then  choose “New Folder with Selection (…Items)” to have those items put into a folder. You will find this nifty feature a small boost in your productivity for organizing files into folders.

Though there are a myriad of interface changes in Lion, Apple has kept the option open for you to do some customizing to get things back the way you like. Let us know what changes you have made to tame Lion or which ones you wish Apple had added.

Beat Making can be a great way to earn money and build a career in the music industry. Up to now, you only had a couple of options when it came to selecting a beat maker.

The first was to pay a high price for high priced high end equipment.  The other option was to get affordable software that you could afford, but made beats that sounded like crap.

Here you find all types of software for making hip hop beats with software. Find Hip Hop Beat Making Software that is not only easy to use but free too and will support you find the easiest software to use when you need beat making software.

ACID Xpress

ACID Xpress (windows) is probably to most powerful of all free beat making software. It features a killer user interface and automatically increases or decreases tempo and pitch in order to ensure the best beats. A free download is available, simply register for free with Acid Planet.

LMMS

LMMS (windows/linux) feels like FL studio but is not even compatible. LMMS enables you to create beats, compose songs and master mix your entire track. Free beat making software like LMMS are hard to find gems. Download it for fee from sourceforge.

Ardour

Ardour (linux/mac) is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record audio, edit and blend multi-track audio recordings,  produce your own CDs, blend video soundtracks, or just test out new music and sound ideas. Ardour supports non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undos, 32 bit floating point audio path, unlimited audio tracks and buses and anything-to-anywhere signal routing.

Quartz Studio

Quartz Studio (windows) will certainly please DJs with its myriad of features like “direct to disk” format for recording sixteen individual tracks, editing and synchronization to other music formats and much more. The program as well includes, 4+2 audio tracks, real-time processing effects (Reverb et Chorus) on each track, along with volume and pan, audio track data editing functions, a spacialization interface and Skin difference.

Koblo

Koblo (mac/windows) is an extremely new open source player on the block. Besides audio recording and music making, Koblo has some unusual online collaboration features, as it’s connected to the Koblo cloud and therefore you’ll be able to work online with other musicians or band members.

Rosegarden

Rosegarden (linux) is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and sound editing environment and is an intuitive, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments. Rosegarden has just introduced the Glasgow Pitch Tracker and it as well supports synthesizers and some plugins unlike a myriad of other free beat making software titles.

With the release of Firefox version 4 last week, we thought it’s time for a fresh list of most powerful Firefox extensions for web developers. Even though couple of our mentions are not yet compatible with this latest release, we’re convinced they’ll be available in no time.

While release 4 also includes some HTML 5 enhancements, we like to see some new extensions to help developers with canvas, forms, local storage and other new features in the future.

In case, we mean just in case you don’t have Firefox yet, you can get it here.

FireBug

Javascript debugger, live DOM & CSS inspector and so much more. The de-facto single greatest web developer add-on for Firefox.

Web Developer Toolbar

Another great developer tool and addition to FireBug, adds a toolbar with powerful web developer tools at your fingertips.

Live HTTP Headers

As you browse, view live HTTP headers of any page loading in real time.

ColorZilla

An advanced eyedropper, color picker, page zoomer and various colorful goodies.

Cache Status

Easily check cache status and management from the status bar.

Edit Cookies

Edit browser cookies inside Firefox. (As of this writing, not yet compatible with Firefox 4)

Fasterfox

Test, record and improve performance and network tweaks for Firefox.

RefSpoof

Allows for easy spoofing of the HTTP referrer header.

Regular Expressions Tester

Great testing tool for regular expressions validation with colour highlighting.

User Agent Switcher

Adds a menu and toolbar button to easily switch the user agent of the browser.

Show MyIP

Simple but useful, display your current external IP address.

Ffmpeg is the de-facto open source standard for encoding audio and video. Especially with the arrival of html5 which uses codecs like Ogg, Theora, Vorbis, h264, webm among others, and the increasing popularity of devices from Apple, such as iPod, iPad and the iPhone, all of which require a different standard from flv, the version so widely in use by Adobe Flash.

Another positive aspect is that ffmpeg has a much revived developer group, posed to enhance the application on a much faster pace than it has been in recent years.

Installation on Linux systems is really straight forward, especially on common distro’s like Ubunty and Fedora. On a Mac, we will have to build it from source (if you’re not a fan of ports like me), including encoder/decoders we plan to use. Here is the breakdown to get ffmpeg installed on a Mac running Snow Leopard.

Install Git

If you don’t have Git installed, download the Git installer here, install the package and run the script in the source of the mounted image. CVS is included in XCode and that is located on the snow leopard installation disc.

Install LAME (latest version from cvs)

cd ~
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@lame.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lame login
(at the password prompt, press Enter)
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@lame.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lame co -P lame
cd lame
./configure
make
sudo make install

Install FAAC and FAAD

cd ~
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/files/faac-src/faac-1.28/ \
  faac-1.28.tar.gz/download
tar xzvf faac-1.28.tar.gz
cd faac-1.28
./configure --with-libmp4v2
sudo make install

cd ~
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/files/faad2-src/faad2-2.7/ \
  faad2-2.7.tar.gz/download
tar xzvf faad2-2.7.tar.gz
cd faad2-2.7
./configure
make
sudo make install

Install Yasm (for faster encoding)

cd ~
wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-1.1.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf yasm-1.1.0.tar.gz
cd yasm-1.1.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

Install Ogg, Vorbis and Theora

cd ~
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.1.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf libogg-1.1.4.tar.gz
cd libogg-1.1.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

cd ~
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.2.3.tar.gz
tar xzvf libvorbis-1.2.3.tar.gz
cd libvorbis-1.2.3
./configure
make
sudo make install

cd ~
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/theora/libtheora-1.1.1.tar.bz2
tar xzvf libtheora-1.1.1.tar.bz2
cd libtheora-1.1.1
./configure
make
sudo make install

Install ffmpeg

cd ~
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc \ 
--enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad2 --enable-libmp3lame \ 
--enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora \
--enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab --enable-libvpx-vp8

Note

As this article matures so will new versions of the above extensions become available. Especially webm will undoubtedly see a rapid development during the coming months and you should ensure that you use the latest versions of each.

Quick intro for creating folders on an iPad

Creating our own folders to organize files has always been on top of the wish list for the iPad. With iOS 4.2  we finally have the capability of creating desktop folders to store applications, photos, videos or any other content.

In addition, creating folders on the iPad is an easy way to limit the number of screens we have to scroll through when searching for a file or an application.

Create the folder

Create a new folder by tapping and holding down any of the application icons that you want to organize into a folder. Hold it until the icon starts wiggling.

Drag it

Drag the icon on top of any other icon which you want to include in your folder. This will cause the home screen on your iPad to fade. A folder display will appear containing both of the application icons which you touched.

Rename

Check the name that has been auto created in the folder name field and change it to your needs. To edit the name, tap the name field and type in the new one using the keypad on your iPad screen.

Adding files

Continue to drag and drop application icons into the new folder for all the files you like moved, just remember that the maximum items for any given folder is 12. When you are done adding itmes to the folder, tap the “Home” button to exit edit mode.

Deleting folders

To delete a folder on your iPad, open the folder and drag the application icons out of it until the folder to delete is empty. After dragging the last item out of the folder, the folder itself will disappear.

Use iTunes

Alternatively, you can use iTunes to create folders and organize the files, then sync it back to your iPad.

Moving, cloning and modifying Virtual Machines and their associated Virtual Hard Disks in VirtualBox has been no easy task and to make matters worse, are poorly documented at best. In this guide, we’re using VirtualBox 3.2.10 r66523 running on Ubuntu 10.10 64bit host operation system.

Merge Snapshots

Merge all snapshots that we want to be included, delete the ones we don’t want. Unless we do this, we only get the base version and loose all changes contained in those snapshots.

Run VBoxManage

Using VBoxManage clonevdi to copy the virtual hard disk to a new VDI file. The basic syntax is: VBoxManage fullPathTooldVdiFile fullPathTonewVdiFile. We need to ensure that a hard disk with that name does not already exist, otherwise we’ll get errors.
VBoxManage clonevdi /data/VirtualMachines/Windows7.vdi /data/VirtualMachines/Windows7_clone.vdi

Add Disk To Virtual Media Manager

We’ll add the new created hard disk to the Virtual Media Manager. This step ensures that the hard disk has been properly cloned, has the proper permissions and that there are no conflicts with other disks and virtual machines. In VirtualBox, select File -> Virtual Media Manager -> Add and select the cloned file, in our case Windows7_clone.vdi. If there are no errors, we should now see the hard disk listed among the others and are ready to proceed with the new Virtual Machine.

Create new Virtual Machine

In VirtualBox, select Machine -> New  and proceed with the steps to create a new Virtual Machine. At the point we we select a hard disk, click existing and select our new disk.
Start up the new Virtual Machine and change hostname in /etc/hostname and eventually the network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces.

Mac OS 10.6.5 + apachectl: /usr/sbin/apachectl: line 82: ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument

After the upgrade to Mac OS 10.6.5 a bug seem to have snuck in where apachectl tries to re-set ulimit to unlimited. The error appears as such:

/usr/sbin/apachectl: line 82: ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument

While apachectl was working flawless before the upgrade to Mac OS 10.6.5, I suspected the two were related. After a quick search into what the update entailed, I found that Apple upgraded to Apache 2.2.15, which in turn patched a number of vulnerabilities. As it turned out, one of those changes broke the apachectl script.

Referring to line 82 of apachectl, the shell script was referring to the ULIMIT_MAX_FILES variable that was trying to set to unlimited, which read:

ULIMIT_MAX_FILES="ulimit -S -n `ulimit -H -n`"

Changing the line as follows fixed the problem:

ULIMIT_MAX_FILES="ulimit -S -n 1024"

Should you be running a high amount of vhosts or do some testing that requires a significant amount of file descriptors, set this number higher accordingly.

Growing companies at some point are faced with the increased workload to setup, configure and maintain their servers and applications. Administrators try to script repetitive tasks and ultimately look for solutions that are scalable and provide a central management tool base. There are several software packages available, commercial and open source ones.

Puppet is probably the most used open source configuration management package available today and more system administrators and software developers are interested in setting it up within their environment. An excellent book about Puppet (Pulling Strings with Puppet) is available and so are numerous online articles and tutorials. However, lots of online resources are just not quite complete and can lead to lots of frustration, especially in the setup and configuration of Puppet.

So here is another step by step tutorial about how to install and setup Puppet to the point where we can run a simple recipe residing on the server (puppetmaster) and execute on the client. For this illustration we’ll install Puppet on Ubuntu 10.10 using a deb package.

Configure Network and DNS

Setting up configure hostnames on server and client is crucial. Since Puppet uses self signed certificates to secure communication, it’s essential that network is setup properly and hostnames are configured with fully qualified domain names.

Let’s open /etc/hosts and add the necessary entries. (note: If you use a DNS server in your network, those setting changes should be made on your DNS server and not the hosts file)

server hosts file (assuming server = 192.168.1.10, client = 192.168.1.20):

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost puppet
192.168.1.10 puppet-server01.example.com puppet-server01 puppet
192.168.1.20 puppet-client01.example.com puppet-client01

verify:

# hostname => puppet-server01
# hostname -f => puppet-server01.example.com

client hosts file:

127.0.0.1 puppet-client01.example.com localhost
192.168.1.10 puppet-server01.example.com puppet-server01 puppet

verify:

# hostname => puppet-client01
# hostname -f => puppet-client01.example.com

In addition, you should ensure that no firewall is blocking port 8140, as Puppet is communicating on this port.

Now we’re ready to move on to installing the puppet server.

The Baker E-book Framework is a free, open-source platform to create e-books for the iPad. The framework was developed by a team of Italian software geeks, allowing designers and web developers to transform fixed-width HTML5 pages into an e-book format and subsequently publish the finished product. All publishers have to do is follow the Apple App Store submission guidelines.

The first step involves creating a HTML5 version of your book with fixed width of 768 pixels that works and looks fine using Safari in iPad or via downloadable support CSS at Baker’s site. Keep all files in a flat directory called book and name the html files according to their page number (eg. 1.html, 2.html ….) which is the HPub format. The naming convention is still somewhat strict, but that will change over the next few releases.

Finally download the Baker Framework and follow the simple instructions contained in the readme.txt file:

• Rename the Xcode project
• Include your book
• Include your icon
• Follow the App Store submission instructions

You can check out a sample book created by the Baker folks, 5×15 Tokyo.

Casali and his team hope their creation will lead to more beautiful e-books and digital magazines on the iPad, and for other WebKit-enabled devices later.

You can download the Baker Framework files at the official site, and you can also join the project itself on GitHub.