Hostname instellen in Mac OS X
Sinds een tijdje was de hostnaam in de terminal van mijn iMac veranderd in de originele hostname met een prefix -2.
Nogal storend, maar wel eenvoudig te fixen…
Category Archive for Notes
UPS power consumption
Recently I migrated my home server (a Linksys NSLU2 a.k.a. ‘Slug’) to a more powerful device (Mac Mini). The Mini has more capabilities and hence will run more services. Time to invest in a UPS that will keep the computer running when the electricity grid goes down.
Since the power consumption of my home server is a major concern to me, I’m also interested in the extra power consumption generated by the UPS.
I was able to measure the power consumption of a MGE Ellipse 750. Power was measured with a Voltcraft Energy Check 3000 and the test load was a normal PC (note: not the Mac Mini!).
The result was: the setup consumes 76 Watt without UPS and 80.5 Watt with the UPS. Note that the batteries of the UPS were fully loaded when the measurement was done.
Setting the execute bit in SVN
When committing files to an SVN repository, it happens that I forget to set the proper ‘execute’ permission.
This results in problems when checking out a fresh working copy, as it seems that SVN does not take up a ‘chmod u+x’ on a file as a change when a commit is performed.
This is easily fixed: just do
$ svn propset svn:executable ON somescript
And then commit.
Permission hierarchy for Trac
How to implement a hierarchical permission tree in the project-management tool Trac.
Unroute a complete PCB in Eagle
Unrouting a complete PCB in Eagle means that all routed tracks on the board are reverted back into so-called ‘airwires’. Airwires are lines that show that there is a connection between 2 points on the board, but that no actual connection is routed yet.
Unrouting signals on a board is called ‘ripup’ in Eagle slang.
Extract and count unique items in a list
Excel easily allows to extract a list of unique items and count them. Handy when you have to extract an order list from a BOM of a PCB for example 
Comparing 2 Modelsim wave traces
Comparing the wave traces of 2 different simulations in Modelsim is quite easy.
Enable tab completion in Windows terminal
To enable tab completion in a command terminal on Windows, perform the following steps:
- Open regedit (Start->Run->’regedit’)
- Go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor - Set the value for the key
CompletionCharacterto 9
Outlook email blank subject warning
Ever now and so often, it happens that I forget filling in the mail subject when composing an email in Outlook (typically when I have to send a rather important email…).
Save yourself the annoyance by following the next steps.
Automatically mounting USB drives on Mac OS X
When plugging in an external USB drive on Mac OS X, it gets nicely mounted under /Volumes and appears on your desktop.
However, since I use my MAC mini as Slimserver machine for my squeezebox, I want this automount also to happen after boot, before a user is logged in.
This seems not to be so trivial. I’ve tried several mechanisms to obtain the automount feature, from scripts executed at boot time to modifiying the fstab. None provided an acceptable solution.
