Author Archives: mychal

May 10 2012

Why You Should Watch and Record Video in 720p Instead of 1080i

Despite the many technological advancements we’ve had over the past few years, interlaced video seems to have stuck around. Interlaced is the “i” in 1080i and the reason it’s not quite as good as 720p. It’s in your cable, your televisions, and your camcorders. You should stop using it. Benjamin Higginbotham, the Technology Evangelist, explains why in the above video. More »


May 3 2012

Generate and Set a Random Valid MAC Address from the Command Line in OS X

Generate and set random MAC address in OS X

We’ve shown you how to generate MAC addresses randomly and then how to go about changing a MAC address in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, but why have those be two separate actions? Using the command line, you can combine the two events into a single action to generate a valid MAC and then set it immediately.

Launch the Terminal and paste the following onto a single line:

openssl rand -hex 1 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' | xargs echo "obase=2;ibase=16;" | bc | cut -c1-6 | sed 's/$/00/' | xargs echo "obase=16;ibase=2;" | bc | sed "s/$/:$(openssl rand -hex 5 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')/" | xargs sudo ifconfig en0 ether

There is no confirmation or output, the MAC address is set immediately which you can verify with the following command:

ifconfig en0 |grep ether

You will probably need to reconnect to the wireless router after issuing the command, and in some cases turn wi-fi on and off again.

If you intend on using this often, setting up an alias in .bash_profile would be a good idea to avoid having to cut and paste the massive block of text.

May 1 2012

Instantly Send Any Gmail Attachment to Google Drive

Now that Google Drive has built file storage into your Google account, it’s only natural that you’d like it to play nicely with your other Google apps. With a few tricks, it can—at least with your Gmail account. Tech blogger Amit Agarwal details how to set up a system in which applying a GoogleDrive label to any email in your Gmail inbox will automatically save its attachment to Google Drive—syncing those files directly to your desktop. More »