Friday, November 06, 2009

Move Your Home Folder Off Your SSD Boot Drive in OS X

SSD (Solid State Drives) are the future, kids. They are insanely fast, have no mechanical parts to wear out and run cooler than their platter based counterparts. The main problem with SSDs right now is that in order to get a decently sized drive, you have to sell off one or two of your kids just to pay for it.

As of this second, the cheapest 256GB SSD at NewEgg is hovering at around $600. Ouch. Something in the “reasonable” price arena of less than $200 will only fetch you a 64GB drive. Plenty of room for the OS and a load of useful applications, but not a lot of wiggle room for your stuff. Where will you put your giant collection of bagpipe music in iTunes, your scads of text files with truly bad poetry and an iPhoto Library chock full of compromising photos of co-workers? In all likelihood, you won’t be storing much of your data on the thing. You’re going to have to litter your junk around on another drives/volumes. (i.e., your iTunes media, iPhoto, Lightroom, etc.) That’s all well and good and perfectly reasonable, but you have to do a bunch of fiddling within the individual applications to make all that work. (Don’t get started on how persnickety iTunes can be about having its files live on a separate drive.) And you’ll probably customize your Finder sidebar so you’ll have easy access to where you park your files. Well behaved Mac apps expect to plant their “stuff” in the user’s home directory. (Try this: Hit “Open” in any application. The hit Cmd + Shift + D. Where are you? Your Desktop! Where’s your Desktop? Inside your Home folder, silly!)

So while you can work around the speedy, but decidedly cramped quarters of your SSD, what we really want to do is tell the OS that your home folder “lives” on a different drive. After all, 1TB hard drives are way cheap these days, relatively speaking. Plus, you have a MacPro with a zillion SATA bays in it, right? The following instructions tell you how to move your home folder from your spiffy SSD over to less constrained quarters. You’ll still boot off the SSD and run your apps from it, so your computing life will move faster than you ever thought possible, but all those pesky personal bits will be somewhere else.

Step 0): Back up your mojo. Don’t be an idiot, K? This is pretty painless stuff, but make sure you have a working back up of all your files before you dive into this. Pretty please.

Step 1) Create a new account in “System Preferences --> Accounts”

The home folder for this new account will land on the boot volume, which is the expected behavior. Boo. Let’s fix that!

Step 2) Go make a folder on some other volume. Make sure the name of the folder matches the “Account name.” (the lower case username)

Step 3) Fire up the Terminal and issue the following command:

sudo ditto -rsrc /Users/test_account /Volumes/07-Sette-TB/Users_n/test_account/

(This command is basically an über “copy” command. Obviously, your folder structure and account name will be different. The -rsrc” switch tells the “ditto” command to snag resource forks and all that HFS meta-data goodness along with all your precious data. The man page for ditto tells me that this switch is the default behavior since 10.4 so it’s probably not necessary; but I do it anyway, because I’m old skool and I have numerous trust issues which I won’t delve into here.)

Step 4) Now comes the cool part. I’m all aflutter just thinking about it. In the Account Pref Pane, Control + click on the account name. Ooooh baby, you had no idea that was there, huh? Smack that “Advanced Options…” pop up like it was a puppy who peed on a rug that really tied the room together.

You should now choose that folder you created in Step 2 as the location for that account’s Home directory:

Step 5) Reboot. (Since you are the proud owner of an SSD powered machine, this is the quickest step in this whole process. Heh.)

After you’ve rebooted, you can logout of your “normal” account (At the bottom of the Apple menu) and log back in as that new user and shazam on a seesaw, that user’s home folder is somewhere else!

I’ve tested this on Snow Leopard (10.6.1) and it works fine. I suspect these instructions probably work fine for Leopard, too; but I don’t have a Leopard machine handy here at the Deal Family Compound to test. (Update: Jamie emailed me and said me he’d tried it out on 10.5 and it works. He also noted that you should be able to upgrade to 10.6 without any problems (which makes sense to me). Thanks, Jamie!) You’re on your own for 10.4 and earlier. Sorry, and have fun mucking around with NetInfo, you poor dear.

If you’re feeling brave, you could skip creating a brand new account (Step 1) and blast straight to ditto-ing your current account to a new location, changing the Home folder setting in the Accounts Pref Pane and rebooting. Should work perfectly well. Me? I’m a safety nut and like to make sure things work, but I can tell that not only are you a fetchingly attractive specimen of a human being, but you also like to live on the edge. Godspeed, my young Padawan. And! Don’t forget to tell Time Machine to back up both your SSD volume and the drive where you’re parking your files.

You could also go nuts and put your home directory on a removable volume (i.e., a USB or FireWire drive), but I wouldn’t recommend it. Depending on when in the boot process your Mac mounts the removable drive, odd or potentially freaky things could happen. Having said that, I’ve put a Portable Home Directory account on a lowly thumb drive in an Open Directory/Portable Home Directory friendly environment and it’s worked fine. No fuss, no muss. But I can also pull sparkle ponies out of my booty on demand. THAT’S HOW SPECIAL I AM. As with all things, your mileage may vary.

Anyway, just thought I’d share. If anyone needs me, I’ll be back in my hole trying to finish this unholy creation I’ve taken to calling “The Decidedly Mediocre, Taking Forever to Write and Tragically Not So Great American Novel.”

Newegg is currently having a sale on 64GB Kingston drives. That’s what I just picked up. $143.99! Plus a $30 mail in rebate I’ll likely forget to do, because though I have that sparkle pony thing going for me, I’m not actually all that bright.

Good luck and please, for the love of all that is holy in the world, never skip Step 0.

Comments are closed because I borked my blog’s commenting system a couple months ago and haven’t bothered to fix it. (Plus, there’s that whole “not actually bright” thing and I may not posses the necessary skills to fix it.) Feel free to email me if you have something to say. Or be a pal and offer to fix my blog’s code. :-]

Jon scribbled this mess on 11/06/09 at 03:49 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Friday, October 23, 2009

My Wise Investment

Yesterday, one of my many fake Internet friends (Scott Simpson) made an offer on a house:

Being the helpful (and shrewd) sort of person I am, I leapt into action.

I sent him $2 via PayPal.

Scott wrote back to thank me:

You are a true friend. This just might put us over the top.

Best. Paypal. Gag. Ever.

But, like so many things in Scott’s life, he’s wrong about this. I wasn’t making a joke. There’s no gag here. I’m making an investment. Even in this freaky market, real estate is still a solid long term investment strategy. I whipped out my creaky Vic-20 and responded:

If you get the house, I need to tell you that because of my contribution(s) to this endeavor, I will consider certain nails, screws and/or boards located in the house to be my property.

Furthermore, I will feel perfectly justified in visiting my property any time I see fit. Oh, it’s 2:30 in the morning, I’m drunk on peppermint schnapps and in my underwear at your doorstep? It’s cool. Don’t freak out. The doorstep is mine.

I will also reserve the right to collect my property from you any time in the future. Yeah, you want those nails in the joists that hold up the second floor above the kitchen? Those are mine, pal. I OWN THOSE. NOT YOU. And I need them now. Gimme. Be glad you’re a friend and I probably won’t charge you any rental fees for the duration of your use.

Should you sell the place, you must transfer any profits from the sale of my share of the house to me within 30 days.

—jon

So good luck on your house negotiations, Scott! Just remember, you’re planning for both your family’s future and mine.

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/23/09 at 08:49 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Monday, April 20, 2009

Fish in the Sea

This is a bit from the “cutting room floor.” I wrote this, thinking I’d be able to squeeze it in to my novel thing-y somehow, but I just don’t think it’s going to work with my main character. So, yeah, I’m shoveling it out to my blog. It’s either this or a picture of me in a one of my new hats.

You’re welcome.

“Hey, buck up little camper! There are plenty of other fish in the sea.”
“Oh, excellent, I pour out my soul and you shoot back a clichéd platitude.”
“Yes, but just because it’s a cliché doesn’t make it untrue.”
“Let me tell you a little secret about me and ‘the fish.’ I don’t actually enjoy any aspect of fishing. I don’t like having to go to the sporting goods store and pick out a special rod and reel for the occasion. I don’t like getting up at the crack of dawn and trekking down to the sea. I don’t like to bait the hook. I hate waiting forever for a nibble. I hate the excitement of feeling that initial tug on the line, only to feel the crushing disappointment that I’ve merely snagged my line on some piece of garbage from the bottom. Then you have to re-bait the hook and the worms are all dead by then and too much time has passed and it’s hot and uncomfortable out there while I endlessly cast a line into the water and so I realize that since I’m never going to catch anything anyway I may as well stop trying even though I’ve put this huge effort into the process. Add to that the fact that I look and see all these other stupid, moronic and disgusting fishermen who have landed amazing catches off the same pier and I wonder what the hell is wrong with me, I can’t even catch one lousy fish and I just go home dejected, depressed, eternally empty handed and smelling like the stale beer I drank while waiting interminably on the shore for any fish to come by.”
“Um.”
“And! What about the fact that I don’t even live close to the sea? I live in a land-locked version of reality. In truth, I live in the desert on the ruins of a dry lake bed. Sure, millions of years ago, there was an inland sea and it teemed with life and vitality, but those days are long gone. Now it’s a vast wasteland of horror and sterility. There is only dust, a million fossils littering the ground and the past to examine and try and guess what happened. There are no more fish. There was one sea and it held one fish in it. I came along exactly at the right time and she was the one fish willing to…” and I faltered for a moment.
“Go on, say it, she was the one fish who’d consent look at your worm and nibble at it.”
“Well, I didn’t want to be gross, but, yeah, exactly, I hit just the perfect moment to hook her and that moment has passed. Plus, I’m just saying, it’s a terrible cliché and it’s also not based in reality.”
“I think you’re wrong, it is based in reality and I think you’ll find that out eventually, but I also think you may have strained the limits of the ‘fish in the sea’ metaphor to the limits. It’s possible you may have even broken your line.”
“Rim shot.”
“Rim shot, indeed.”

Jon scribbled this mess on 04/20/09 at 08:59 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Stuff that's not true (fiction) Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Monday, April 13, 2009

Birdhouse Review, For Reals

My, my, those crazy kids over at Sandwich Dynamics have come a long way from the interesting beta I reviewed a couple months ago. My “official” review hasn’t posted on the iTunes App Store quite yet, but this is it, in case the powers that be at the Apple mother-ship end up rejecting my precious words:

One Thing

One of the reasons I really like this app is that is sets out to do ONE thing and do it well.

Birdhouse is for WRITING and EDITING individual twitter posts before you send them out into the cold, cruel world. It does this with aplomb and with a minimum of muss and fuss. Birdhouse isn’t trying to be all things to all people (i.e, reading other people’s tweets, posting links, photos, etc.), it’s just a nice little app that helps you craft your thoughts into some semblance of order. And it’s got a great interface which is well thought out.

Now, you may quibble with the idea of putting any thought at all into something as fleeting and silly as tweets/toots on twitter, but if you are trying to toss some quality into your twitter stream of consciousness, give this app a whirl. You won’t be sorry.

Full disclosure: I know one of the developers as we had a torrid affair in Hong Kong one steamy night back in ’72. Sure, he *says* he doesn’t remember it and that I’m making it all up in order to blackmail him into footing the bill for my extensive laser skin treatments to cure my chronic and debilitating back acne, but we both know the truth.

Get the app here. And some great info and a bit more about the app here.

Jon scribbled this mess on 04/13/09 at 11:46 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Thursday, March 12, 2009

New Glasses!

New Glasses!, originally uploaded by zuhl.

I got new glasses last weekend.

They’re growing on me.

Which is actually kind of uncomfortable. You ever had a pair of glasses grow into your face?

Painful.

Jon scribbled this mess on 03/12/09 at 02:59 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Friday, November 06, 2009

Move Your Home Folder Off Your SSD Boot Drive in OS X

Friday, October 23, 2009

My Wise Investment

Monday, April 20, 2009

Fish in the Sea

Monday, April 13, 2009

Birdhouse Review, For Reals

One Thing

Thursday, March 12, 2009

New Glasses!

Proximus

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