Lost and found: putting contact info on iOS and OS X login screens

Most people are reasonably honest, and for some integrity is a point of pride.

So if you lose your iOS or OS X device there's a good chance it will be found by an honest person. Alas, at that point they're stuck. They have no way to know who to return the device to, especially if it's encrypted (as it should be).

It's easy to remedy this for an iOS device. You can make any image the background for the iOS login screen. I typed my contact info into an iOS Note, saved it as a screenshot, then made it my login background. For good measure I taped a business card into the back of my Speck iPhone case.

Things aren't as easy for OS X, including Lion. There's no tool for changing the login screen background, you have to hack it. On an Air, you can't even tape a business card or write contact info on the battery. (Yes, you could try a Sharpie on the back. That takes a Vulcan dedication to logic!).

For my Air I put my contact info into the password "hint" box. If someone clicks on the question mark next to my name on the login screen they'll see it. This is subtle though, so I'll probably hack the login screen too, and use a pixel editor to put my contact info there too. I did something like this once with a digital camera.

Apple should make it easier for honest people to help us out ...

Update: Yay! There's an official way to do this in Lion. KimH had the tip in comments. I'm starting to like Lion a bit more ...

Gmail and Google Contact Groups: At last, simple paste of a list of email addresses

I've not seen mention of this, but for me it's the biggest improvement to Gmail/Google Contacts in months. Heck, it may be the most valuable thing Google has done for me in 2011.

Years ago, when Gmail was definitely beta, we could create email "lists" (Groups) by pasting a list of email addresses into a text field. Gmail would digest the list and create a Group. Google removed this functionality, perhaps to reduce abuse by spammers. Instead we had to create Groups one member at a time. This was a serious PITA for the various sports teams and organizations I work with.

I gave up hope that Google would ever restore this functionality, but today I discovered they have -- probably in the past few weeks.

It's subtle, but the UI for creating a Group, or adding email addresses to a group, is now an expandable multi-line text box. If you paste in a list of email addresses Google will match them to existing Contacts and add the Contacts to the Group. Failed matches become new email-address-only members.

My Lion bugs - collection

I'll be using this post to collect the Lion (OS X 10.7) bugs I run into, and track which are fixed. I think Lion will ready for general use by summer 2012.

1. Not a new bug -- but Lion Parental Control log display, like all prior versions of OS X, truncates the visited or blocked site descriptions.
2. You can't create a guest account on a FileVault 2 encrypted disk. The option to do this is grayed out. If you are careful you can rest a mouse pointer on the checkbox and get an explanatory text. This makes sense, but the bug is a failure to notify the user; the UI doesn't work.
3. There are problems with security and privilege escalation when users do administrative tasks from non-admin account. I think these will take a while to fix. They probably play a role with these bugs; I use a non-admin account most of the time.
1. Printers shared by 10.6 machine are not visible to Lion machines. I was able to get the printer to show up by applying a pending 10.6 update and restarting both the print server and my Lion (Air) client. I have a hunch this is somehow related to the 'download from internet' bug (see below) and at root it's a security bug.
2. Lion does not remember 'download from internet' 'do you want to open' choices. It can persist is asking them.

File these under criminally negligent design rather than mere bugs ...

1. iCal
2. Address Book

OS X: Firewire 400 networking faster than Gb ethernet

I've idly wondered about this and today I had a real world test.

I am copying a 64GB VM image between machines.

I knew it wouldn't work, but for fun I tried 802.11n. That was estimated to take days.

Then I tried Gb ethernet. OS X estimated 6 hours.

Then I tried firewire 400. It's little known, but 10.6 and earlier supported networking using Firewire (probably using Bonjour/Rendezvous discovery). Both machines assigned the one another an IP address and they connected (there was a little pizza spinning because I forgot to dismount a network share first).

The transfer was initially estimated to take 5 hours. Now it looks like it will complete in 30 minutes.

So it appears that OS X Firewire networking is much faster than Gb ethernet, which one wouldn't guess from the specs (Gb > 400 Mb). On the other hand, the firewire estimate started out as 5 hours and then suddenly sped up, so there's something quirky here.

Incidentally, doing firewire networking makes the laptop run hot. It's working ...

Shrinking a pre-allocated Mac VMWare Fusion virtual machine image

My "pre-allocated" VMWare image was taking up 120 GB on my drive for about 40GB of data. I found many references on how to shrink these images (.vmdsk), but they were largely obsolete and misleading. It takes a while, and the steps are weird, but it's fully supported by VMWare 3.

At a high level, here are the steps. Alas, I'm short of time so no details.

1. Close down the guest OS.
2. Using VMWare settings for 'hard drive' you can change the image from pre-allocated to the default. This takes hours but it works.
3. Open the guest OS and run XP defrag.
4. In the guest OS update VMWare tools.
5. In the guest OS Run VMWare tools "shrink". Takes hours.
6. In the guest OS Defrag again as a nice-to-do.
7. Shut down and restart to make it all nice and clean.

My image now consumes about 45 GB of drive space. It's not pre-allocated, so it will get host OS fragmented as it grows but I can live with that.

Strangest sync error ever - Google Calendar

This is very strange.

I use Google Calendar Sync to sync an Outlook/Exchange calendar to Google Calendar.

On that machine I authenticate with two Google accounts, one has two factor authentication.

It looks like Google Calendar Sync is posting transactions to both accounts even though it has only one account's password.

At least, that's the best explanation I have so far.

Again - one of the weirdest things I've seen in a while, even allowing that sync is fraught with weird errors.

Steve Jobs hates me: Viewing Mac OS X Lion Parental Control logs

OS X Lion is not all bad. [1]

Yes, it's a memory hog (64 bit hurts). Yes iCal and Address Book drive strong geeks to drink. Yes, it's insane that it can auto-quit background apps (really, that's nuts).

On the other hand, 10.7.0 is less buggy than 10.6.0 or 10.5.0. That's progress. I might even upgrade my main machine after version 10.7.3 instead of waiting for 10.7.4.

Better yet, Mission Control and Full Screen are very nice on an 11" MacBook. Well done Apple.

Indeed, Mission Control is so good I dared to hope that Apple had fixed one of the most ridiculous bits of OS X -- the non-resizeable Parental Control log file window (See: Viewing Mac OS X Parental Control logs).

In 10.5 and 10.6 this screen has a control for a resizeable window, but it would only extend vertically. Most of the logged URLs were unreadable.

So what happened in 10.7?

You are guessing nothing. You would be wrong. The resize control was fixed. It now correctly indicates that the window can only be sized vertically.

Think about that.

Apple recognized there was a bug. They put some (small) amount of resources into fixing the bug. Instead of making the window resizeable however, the engineer fixed the control.

That can't be incompetence. That has to be malice.

There's only one possible explanation.

It's personal.

Steve Jobs hates me.

[1] The best review isn't the celebrated, and quite good, Ars Technical Review. It's Robert Mohn's Macintouch review. If you are only going to read one, read that one.