Category Archives: Nerdery

Items of interest to fellow computer nerds.

Using curl to test .htaccess redirects

A quick tip for testing htaccess redirects with curl

How to make a VirtualBox guest boot from an external drive on a Mac host

This is the story of how I used VirtualBox to set up a virtual machine to boot a Windows 7 guest from an external hard disk on a Mac OS X host.

Changing the default scan format on a Canon imageCLASS MF8450c

I provide tech support for an office with a Canon Color imageCLASS MF8450c. It’s a printer, scanner, fax machine, and copier all in one. It is a usability nightmare. It takes dozens of button presses to accomplish anything. This is made worse by the fact that it has some pretty stupid default settings. For example,

File references relative to DERIVED_FILE_DIR in Xcode

Let’s say you have a Mac or iOS app which stores its data in an SQLite database. It looks for this database file on launch; if missing, the app copies a template file from its bundle. How do you configure your Xcode project to store that template file in the app bundle? Let’s also say