Extra Pepperoni

iSync and .Mac Sync are great. I keep my Treo synchronized with three different Macs, and they all have the same data. Unfortunately, while Apple was enhancing the capabilities of .Mac Sync during the Tiger betas, they broke a bunch of things (including compatibility with Panther). Things have gotten better since then, but I still see problems on about a monthly basis. Symptoms are data not making it over and “.Mac login failed.” errors from the .Mac System Preferences pane. Apple has a “fix”, but it’s pretty draconian, and Sync Services tends to get corrupted again. Here’s the procedure:

1. Disable .Mac syncing (if applicable)
2. Close all programs. Log out and log back in.
3. Make sure no programs are running after logging back in. If the user is [the original email I received trails off here. --cp]
4. Create an archive of ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices. Delete the directory after archiving it
5. Re-enable .Mac syncing (if applicable)
6. Sync with .Mac: go to the advanced tab, click Reset Sync Data and choose to Reset Sync Data on .Mac or on this computer depending on which one has the most recent data
7. If you have devices, now is the time to manually synchronize them (manually add any new data from the device that is not on the computer), then do a sync with the device choosing Erase data on device then sync

I add step 0: Back up your data (iCal & Address Book have handy “Back Up” items, and Safari has “Export Bookmarks”). When logging back in, hold down the Shift key to avoid automatically launching Login Items.

I needed to reinstall XCode on our Developer Transition System (P4-based Mac) to confirm a problem, when I was at home. I didn’t want to deal with VNC, so the wizards on #fink gave me the missing incantations.

To uninstall the Developer Tools: sudo perl /Developer/Tools/uninstall-devtools.pl

To mount the XCode 2.2.1 disk image: hdiutil attach -noverify xcode_2.2.1_8g1165_018213632.dmg. Normally I would have used open xcode_2.2.1_8g1165_018213632.dmg, which mounts it with Disk Utility.app, but I wasn’t logged in, so Disk Utility couldn’t launch.

To actually install XCode from the disk image: sudo installer -verbose -target / -pkg /Volumes/Xcode\ Tools/XcodeTools.mpkg

• It’s on its 3rd hard drive (this one is 120gb, but I was unable to find 5400rpm).
• It has a 100mbit Ethernet TurboNet card (previously I had an old-skool 10mbit TiVoNet card).
• It is accessible (on our private home network) via telnet, tivoftp (normal Linux filesystems, not MFS filesystems), and HTTP (TiVoWeb 1.0, with MFSStream v.98).

We watch all our TV on the PowerBook (TiVo2Go only supports Windows as of January 18th, 2005). Unfortunately there are several issues with sucking video off the TiVo onto a PowerBook. TiVo tools seem to be most advanced on Windows, where there are several slick tools for decoding, transcoding, and streaming. Next is Linux, and least-advanced are the Mac OS X tools.

I use MFSStream (a plug-in for TiVoWeb 1.0) to download .ty files through Safari, and tyc (which usually works, but not always) to strip the extra TiVo data and convert them to MPEG2, viewable in QuickTime (with the MPEG2 plug-in) or VLC. I’d like to upgrade to TiVoWeb 1.2.1, but haven’t found a compatible MFSStream module.

Unfortunately, MFSStream generates bogus content-length headers for recordings over 2gb (feature movies). Both curl (latest version, from fink) & wget can ignore content-length, but the human-visible URLs in MFSStream aren’t usable. My current workaround is to click on the link in Safari, which produces a 0-byte .ty file in the Downloads window. Control-clicking on the empty file in this window provides a Copy Address command, which can then be fetched with something like “curl --ignore-content-length -O http://tivo:2000/longpath.ty “.