The problem:
I find the slot-loading “Super”drives in most of Apple’s lineup way too noisy to comfortably watch movies; since Apple introduced the Macbook Air (and maybe before that, although I wasn’t particularly aware of it) it has been possible to share a DVD drive over a network. I thought this would be a good way to use my PC DVD drive to watch a DVD movies on my Mac, however, although one can enable drive sharing in the Sharing System Prefs, there appears to be no way to access another computer’s drive.
The solution:
After a bit of googling it appears to be a simple command line hack to get drive sharing to work on any Mac, not just the Air. Here’s how…
- Install drive sharing software on the PC. I downloaded this from the Apple support website. It’s labeled as “DVD or CD Sharing”. A quick search on the downloads page should bring you the required file.
- Once installed, go to your Windows Control panel and click the “CD/DVD Sharing” icon and activate the required checkbox.
- On the Mac, activate CD/DVD Sharing in the Sharing menu of System Prefs.
You’re almost ready to share those drives. Firewalls shouldn’t be a problem, but you may need to check them just in case.
Now for the clever bit; as usual, Apple have turned off the Remote Disc feature on Macs that aren’t Minis or Airs. To activate it on my machine I used a quick terminal hack:
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool TRUE
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool TRUE
Restart the machines and all should be well. If you ever want to turn this feature off, just uncheck the sharing option in Sys Prefs/Control Panel. To hide the “Remote Disc” in the finder, re-enter the above code but change the booleans to FALSE.
Update
When trying to play back DVDs in VLC I’ve been getting some errors along the lines of “Can’t access this disc”. If this is the case you’ll have to manually add the particular DVD in the Sharing menu/DVD sharing Advanced of System Prefs.
Posted in Computers, Tips
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There seems to be a never ending battle to keep WP functioning properly at the moment. Every time my back is turned there seems to be another issue that crops up. This time it was the mobile theme that somehow activated whenever someone viewed the site using Safari. This had the strange secondary effect of removing the default theme. This shouldn’t happen and I’m beginning to wonder whether I might need to switch hosts. I think this must have something to do with the SQL database; it seems to keep getting corrupted and reverting back to previous settings. Everything has been reset so lets see how long I can last without something else going wrong. WP was supposed to make everything easy; a nice smooth CMS that would enable me to expand the site. At the moment it just seems to break it!
Posted in General, Website
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Tagged Wordpress, WP
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Well, I guess it had to happen sometime, but this week my site was ‘infected’. I spent ages trying to work out how this happened and how to fix the problem, but I just can’t see how the site was broken into. For the time being the site will remain in WordPress format, but I hope to update it as soon as possible.
Recoding the front page turned out to be a lot more difficult than I imagined. The main issue was the was WP handles CSS styles in the wp_list_pages and wp_page_menu functions. In the end I ended up creating my own custom function to render the links with some custom meta data to add the subtitles when the mouse hovers over a link. I might write up this process in more detail if I get time, or possibly post some code snippets. I think I need to improve my php skills in any case!
I’ve recently been playing around with WordPress themes as part of a project I’ve been working on. As a result I’ve designed my first couple of themes. One might get used somewhere on this site in the not too distant future (although don’t hold your breath!) The other has been implemented on a company website.
As a result I’m going to attempt to redesign this site to use WordPress as the CMS and create a theme that combines the home page (the link cloud) with the main content pages.
The tricky thing with the cloud is that it’s rendered using CSS, with the main content pages using the same info to create the background. That may take some work to recreate in a WordPress theme. We’ll see how I get on.
