Friday, April 25, 2003

Tip: gnutar and resource forks I found myself in a situation where I really needed to copy some files from a remote OS X box to my local system, but the only access I had was via SSH. Unfortunately, the files all have resource forks that contain pertinent information. As it turns out, it was quite easy to use gnutar to tarball the files and their forks such that it could easily be reconstituted on the local machine after using scp to copy the tarball over the wire. On the remote machine, create the tarball with resource forks: gnutar cfvp foo.tar file1 file1/rsrc file2 file2/rsrc file3 file3/rsrc Copy the tarball to the local machine: scp remote.server.com:foo.tar ./ Untar: gnutar -x -v -f foo.tar -p --overwrite Done! 5:39:51 PM  pontificate

Embedded filesystems... The DISC STENO CP100 is a portable image-copying machine which burns CDs directly from memory cards without a computer. At $300, the DISC STENO makes a fairly reasonably priced 24x portable CD Burner (includes rechargeable battery) that just so happens to be able to burn the data found on media cards commonly used in digital cameras. For those folks that don't like to drag their laptop along on vacation, the Steno could certainly make for a really cheap/easy way to archive off a boatload of images to CDR -- run out of space (ha!), it is just a matter of picking up another blank CDR. Neat, not revolutionary, but neat. The one downside is that the unit can't delete the files from the media once burned to CDR -- you have to delete or reformat the media in the Camera once you have archived off the images. Not that big of a deal, but the various random media documentation indicates that formatting somehow places more wear on the media (exactly how, I have not a clue). However, the implications of the device are particularly interesting. Clearly, someone has-- I doubt it is Jobo, they likely licensed some technology or purchased a bunch of components via an OEM-- come up with a chip set that can: deal with removable media deal with basic filesystems burn multi-session CDRs advertise all of these services via USB 2.0 (or whatever) can do all of this in a cheap, embedded, package that uses a reasonable amount of power It will be interesting to see where else this chipset pops up and what the other capabilities might be. In a similar vein, it appears that the iPod's embedded OS has the capability to to burn CDRs via the firewire port. Obviously, the feature is not available via the UI nor may all the hardware be present to make it even possible, but the OS that Apple licensed can definitely do so (it also appears to be able to record/encode stuff on the fly). Update: Jobo also offers the Nixvue Vizor. Other than its smaller size, I'm not sure why you would want one of the Stenos over one of these-- they will be the same price. Now you can fully concentrate on your photo-taking skills and forget about the hassles of backing up and archiving your precious images. No more needing to lug around heavy laptops, waiting for long boot-up times, transferring to hard disks and invoking the CD-ROM burning software to do a copy. With the Nixvue Vizor you simply insert your memory card, press a button and let the device do the work. And if CDR isn't your thing, they also make hard drive based media storage devices. Cool stuff. Maybe someday.... Anyone want to bet someone is already porting Linux to 'em. 12:13:06 AM  pontificate