Archive for March, 2010

http://www.toyota.com/recall/videos/stoppingprocedure.html

Funny thing… This procedure was taught in my high school driver’s education class… 30 years ago…

As one reader noted in this article on xlr8yourmac.com, the muddy blacks you get when connecting a Mac Mini to a HDTV via DVI-HDMI adapter are caused by the difference in gamma space between PC and TV (0-255 and 16-235 respectively).

You could use the Gamma control on the Mac Mini to dial up the black to 16 and the white down to 235. As the author discovered in the Plex forum, a freeware software product called  Gamma Control has created a preference item to solve this problem more simply in his newer product, Black Light: http://michelf.com.nyud.net/projects/black-light/

Here are the step by step instructions I built to rebuild with a fresh install of OpenSolaris on a new hard drive and bring back my ZFS arrays…

1. Export Zpool on old machine
#zpool export -f <pool name>
1.5 make sure to copy or move current shell scripts from <user home> and root dirs. Make sure you copy the current crontab, to be safe copy group and passwd files.
2. Install Opensolaris on new HD
3. install SMB server components
SUNWsmbs, SUNWsmbskr
4. edit pam.conf
#sudo gedit /etc/pam.conf
add the following line to the end of the pam.conf
other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn
5. check the status of the cifs server
# svcs smb/server
6. turn the cifs server on
# svcadm enable -r smb/server
7. Join the workgroup
#smbadm join -w <workgroupname>
8. Add all the users to the system, reset all passwords.
9. Import the zpool
zpool import <pool name>
10. Check the shares
# sharemgr show -vp
11. Reset the perms and you are good to go….
12. Download VirtualBox and install on main machine (If you copied all the VM info in the user homedir and you install as the user then VirtualBox should be the same when you are done).