I don’t know if you take a lot of time looking on the sidebar section of my site. There is one section in particular I’d like to draw your attention to though: The Utility Of The Day section.
Though I haven’t been posting a whole lot on the blog, I have been updating that Utility Of The Day link. This is nothing but an RSS feed to my UtilityOfTheDay tag on my del.icio.us profile.
You can always check that on here, there is a whole lot of really cool utilities, a lot of which is now becoming web 2.0 tools, all the better… that means less downloading and installing stuff on your machine!
Of course you can always have my feed straight into your RSS reader that will deliver the UtilityOfTheDay straight to you:
I am a relatively new Mac user, and I am still learning the ropes. One of the things that I used to be bale to do very easily on the PC was to create an ISO (CD Image file) from a CD. On the Mac, I attempted to do it using DiskUtility, which is a native tool that comes with OS X, but it does not really do the job. So, after a little bit of research, I found a cool way to do it, which is fairly easy. For this to work, you probably have to be a little comfortable using your “Terminal” application. I will try to put the steps in as much detail as possible, so that you can follow along:
Disclaimer: Please note that the tool used in this article (dd) can be dangerous, and, if used incorrectly, can end up wiping your whole hard drive, so, consider yourself warned!!
- Open “Terminal” : Applications / Utilities / Terminal
- With your CD mounted. (You should be able to see the CD on your desktop, type: df -h
The important line is /dev/disk1s1s3 . This is the device reference to your CDROM drive.
This number may vary, and in order to be sure that your CD device reference is the correct one, you can run the following command, and that should give you at lease the first part of the device without the reference to the volume:
drutil status
This /dev/disk1 is the CD Drive.
- Unmount your CD:
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted.
- Now create the ISO
dd if=/dev/disk1s1s3 of=mynewcd.iso bs=2048
- When the process finishes, you should be able to mount that image using this command:
hdid mynewcd.iso
Or you can mount it by double clicking on the iso file, and it should show up on your desktop.
Gotchas:
- The main problem that I had with doing this process was to refer to the CD device, instead of the volume that I need to rip. (i.e: /dev/disk1, as opposed to /dev/disk1s1s3). If you use dd and get the final file, it’ll look fine, but when you try to mount it, you will get an error. So make sure you refer to the correct volume.
- Make sure that you are writing the ISO file somewhere within the filesystem that you have WRITE access. The safest place would probably be your home directory, so your dd line would be best that way:
If you’ve never heard of Zoho, you may be wondering what the heck that subject means. Well, it’s very easy to explain: 99% of users have used an office suite of some sort, whether it be Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, Open Office, or any other product. Unfortunately, up until very recently, most of them were actually offline productivity tools. With the new and upcoming Web 2.0, the world has changed, and shifted to online collaboration and productivity tools.
If you are at all involved in the online world, you may be familiar with the Google Docs applications. Zoho is a very similar set of online tools, whose sole purpose is to not only provide a set of application that seamlessly integrate together, but also allow for simple collaboration between groups. The applications range from any thing simple like creating a word document or an excel spreadsheet, to creating a full fledged application with backend database supporting it, using a very user friendly interface, as well as options to script the application manually (for advanced users) using the Deluge scripting language.
One of the very cool features that I personally like about zoho, is that they allow you embed any application, anywhere, they also have plugins for outlook, to collaborate when using their CRM product, as well as other plugins to integrate with other office products, as as facebook.
Now, even you can create something really cool to impress your friends on your MySpace page, or even your professional website, collecting customer’s contact information, or a poll or what have you …
If you are intrigued as to what Zoho can do, you can check out that YouTube video that gives a brief demonstration of the product.
You can also run this search to get a whole slew of additional videos that demonstrate the different products that Zoho offers.
If you’ve never heard of Zoho, you may be wondering what the heck that subject means. Well, it’s very easy to explain: 99% of users have used an office suite of some sort, whether it be Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, Open Office, or any other product. Unfortunately, up until very recently, most of them were actually offline productivity tools. With the new and upcoming 
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