When I got the chance to play with the new iCloud features in OS X Lion, the only thing that left me puzzled was the feature called «Back to My Mac». Yesterday I finally figured out how it works, and today I gave it a proper try.

The whole thing works very simply, between two Macs. On both Macs you turn on «Back to My Mac» in iCloud preferences, and from then on they behave as if they’re on the same local network.

I tested it today by taking my MacBook to work and leaving the iMac switched on at home. Once the MacBook connected to wi-fi, it reached into iCloud, saw that my iMac was online, and showed it to me in Finder’s left sidebar under Shared.

From there it’s all just like the machines are on a LAN. You can connect to it and browse files. By default you connect as a guest.

If you log in, you get to see all the files. You can authenticate either with the user account on the other machine, or with the iCloud account.

That said, I couldn’t log in via the iCloud account. But I did manage with the local account on the Mac. Got access to my files. You can copy or upload a file, just like over LAN — only the speed limit depends on the providers on each end.

But the most important and valuable thing for me is the «Share Screen» button.

I can finally drop TeamViewer, which is rather flaky on macOS and where to connect you need all sorts of numbers/codes or logins/passwords. Plus the constant pop-ups telling you it’s only free for personal use, and the connections that constantly drop out claiming the free session has ended.

And the client is rather pleasant. You can take a screenshot of the remote screen. If the remote Mac has more than one display, you can either show both, or switch to whichever one you want. It’s probably the standard built-in client; I just last used it back on Lion and didn’t pay attention to the rest of its features. To me it all looks great. There’s no option to change the quality of the streamed picture, but I don’t need that — my connection is fast enough.

So TeamViewer will from now on only be used for emergency Windows cases. Finally there’s a simple, convenient way to connect to my home machine. Beautiful.

P.S. Maybe someone can tell me how to stop the wretched TeamViewer from launching at boot? Even after I quit it, it just starts up again, and I have to quit it the second or third time.

Updated Nginx and PHP on my server to the latest stable versions. PHP is currently 5.4.6.

After the update FCKEditor stopped working — instead of it I was getting an «Access Denied» message.

FCKEditor is rendered on the page through an iframe, and that’s where the message was hanging. I dug through the editor’s sources thinking maybe there was some PHP version check somewhere, but didn’t find anything special. The iframe loads fckeditor/editor/fckeditor.html. Opening that file directly produced the same error. I started suspecting Nginx, but it turned out to be neither Nginx nor the editor’s code — it was PHP itself (php-fpm).

Googling «Access Denied» wasn’t easy, but glancing into the error logs I spotted the keyword security.limit_extensions. From the name, this php-fpm.conf option controls which file extensions PHP code is allowed to execute in. Starting with PHP 5.3.9, for security reasons, if this option isn’t specified in the config, PHP only runs in .php files (I don’t know what it was before). FCKEditor wires itself up through PHP in some clever/messy way that ends up executing code in that very fckeditor.html file (even though there’s no PHP code inside — just a long framework setup). That’s why php-fpm was returning «Access Denied».

Fix: in php-fpm.conf, or better, in the pool .conf file (something like /etc/php-fpm/pulls/mysite.conf), add this line:

security.limit_extensions = .php .html

That’s the fix. Spent almost an hour and a half tracking it down — without knowing the editor’s code I couldn’t immediately figure out where to dig. So I’ll leave this here. Maybe it’ll save someone else the same trouble.

Video from my July holiday. The route was Saint Petersburg — Riga — Berlin — Barcelona — Porto — Lisbon — Barcelona — Saint Petersburg. Riga and Barcelona were just stopovers. In Lisbon there was the Optimus Alive festival. Music — Slugabed; performances in the video — Zola Jesus, Tricky, The Cure, Radiohead.

Related Linux posts:

• How to install Sublime Text 2 on Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.
• Connecting via SFTP using a Public Key (.pem).

• Add files to a tar archive:

  tar -cvf archive.tar file1 file2 directory1 directory2

• Extract a tar archive:

  tar -xvf archive.tar

• Find all files containing a given string:

  grep -rl 'search_string' start_directory

• Show .php files in the current directory modified in the last 7 days:

  find . -type f -name '*.php' -mtime -7

• How much space directories take up:

  sudo du -sh /home/*

• Who’s listening on a port:

  fuser -v 8080/tcp

• How much disk space is left:

  df -h

E-books bought from the Amazon store come with DRM, meaning the book can only be opened and read by whoever bought it, through a special app, after entering their Amazon login and password. But the protection can be stripped — and the book can even be converted to another format.

It’s simple. Download and install the official Amazon Kindle app. Sign in. Pull down your purchased books from the cloud.

Next, download and install an e-book manager called Calibre (free, cross-platform).

From here grab the archive — what you need from it is just the Calibre plugins. Each plugin is in its own archive. Go into Calibre Preferences → Plugins, click «Load plugin from file» and add all 5 plugins from the archive one by one.

That’s it. Go back into Kindle, open the settings and check where the content is stored (Content Folder); on macOS that’s ~/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content. Find the right .azw file — the name is usually unfriendly, but more importantly, next to it sits a matching .mbp file that’s used to open the book (the key, presumably). Drag book.azw into Calibre and voilà — no more DRM. Now you can happily convert the book into any format you like — EPUB, FB2 or PDF. The converted book you can use however you want.

The English-speaking author who originally described this method asks people to use it only for personal use with books they own — so am I.

Probably the most memorable moment from yesterday’s Google I/O keynote livestream. They delivered Sergey Brin a package in pretty spectacular style.

Went through the footage from the Est Est Est show on May 25 at Zoccolo. Got 5 full songs out of it. The Reflection video is above; below the cut are 4 new songs (Squirrel Island, Victory Day, Morgunchik, The Parfenovs) — some of which will be released this autumn on an EP, the rest in the spring on a new album.