To get to the SSH escape sequences, you need a new line, followed by ~ and ?. That’s a newline (return), followed by a tilde and a question mark. This is what you get

Supported escape sequences:
  ~.  - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)
  ~B  - send a BREAK to the remote system
  ~C  - open a command line
  ~R  - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
  ~^Z - suspend ssh
  ~#  - list forwarded connections
  ~&  - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
  ~?  - this message
  ~~  - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

There are a lot of interesting things you can do with this. My favorite being if you ssh to host1.cainmanor.com then ssh to host2.cainmanor.com and then ssh to host3.cainmanor.com and host3.cainmanor.com locks up, you can newline ~~~. and the third session will be closed.

But wait!! There’s more

You can do some very nifty things in your ~/.ssh/config file. First, you’ve got to make sure you have very restrictive permissions on that file – 600 or bust.

Host nickname
Hostname host1.cainmanor.com
Port 22
User gcain
ForwardAgent yes

Host – put a nickname you want here. You can use a wild card (*), if you’d like the apply the changes to all servers (for instance, change the port for all your servers)
Hostname – DNS name (FQDN highly recommended) or IP address.
Port – Port
user – user name you want to log in with.

You can also use this with rsync, but I won’t go too far into it.
Before

rsync -avr --delete --exclude '.DS_Store'  /share/MD0_DATA/Video/ gcain@host1.cainmanor.com:/share/external/sdz1/Video/

After

rsync -avr --delete --exclude '.DS_Store'  /share/MD0_DATA/Video/ nickname:/share/external/sdz1/Video/

Not as clear as a shorter example, but I wanted to keep this around for myself.

Not all Macs that are capable of booting a 64 bit kernel will boot the 64 bit kernel. The Mini is one of those… (This is from Apple.) Getting those machines NOT on the list to boot into a 64 bit kernel is possible, but it’s beyond the scope of this article (it involves editing your boot.efi.)

First, make sure your Mac can support 64 bits. Make sure your server is on the list above too.

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi

If you are 64 bit capable, you’ll see the following.

| |   "firmware-abi" = <"EFI64">

There are several methods. The easiest method is to hold the 6 and the 4 key when booting. This isn’t permanent, but the following are.

As root, type…

nvram boot-args="arch=x86_64"

To change it back to the default

nvram boot-args=""

I didn’t like this particular method, as I prefer to have a verbose boot

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

There is one more way, that some people have had more success with. It involves editing /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Kernel</key>
	<string>mach_kernel</string>
	<key>Kernel Flags</key>
	<string></string>
</dict>
</plist>

You need to replace the null value below Kernel Flags () with “arch=x86_64″. The correct version -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Kernel</key>
        <string>mach_kernel</string>
        <key>Kernel Flags</key>
        <string>arch=x86_64</string>
</dict>
</plist>

To check if you’re 64 bit or not, you can use

uname -a

If you see

x86_64

You’ve got a 64 bit kernel.

This also works

system_profiler | grep "64-bit Kernel and Extensions"
      64-bit Kernel and Extensions: Yes

Enter FireRecord. It makes it much simpler, but with caveats. To use it…

1. Plug a firewire cable between your Mac (I use an older, slow Intel Mac Mini hooked into a QNAP Nas for storage) and your cable box. This is designed for most standard cable boxes – the FireRecord site has more information on supported boxes.
2. Download and install FireRecord.
3. Run the program, pick a channel and set the start and end time.
4. Once the recording is done, you have a large file with a .m2t extension.  You need to massage it before it very usable.
5. Download MPEG Streamclip. There are other solutions for the Mac, but they cost quite a bit more. I’ve not found a free solution.
6. You need to install the QuickTimeMPEG2.component, which you have to purchase from Apple (~ $20/US.) When I ran the install program it said that I needed to install Rosetta for the program to run. Rather than do that, you can drill down into the package and find the file. It lives in the package as Archive.pax.gz. If you copy that file to your desktop, you can uncompress it by double clicking the file. Once you’ve got the resulting QuickTimeMPEG2.component file, just copy it to /System/Library/QuickTime (you’ll need to authenticate before copying it over.)
7. Now you can use MPEG Streamclip to export the video to other formats.

That’s it. It’s crazy easy.

There are caveats

1. You don’t get a guide. You need to know what channel and what time your program is.
2. You can’t watch anything else while recording. The firewire port spits out what’s on your television. The flip side is that anything you can watch on TV you can record, even premium channels (not tested yet.)
3. The resulting file is only tagged with the file name you gave it (i.e. Discover.m2t.) No fancy file tagging like you get with EyeTV, but a pass through MetaX can fix that.
4. (NEW) Apparently you can’t turn off your cable box or your Mac will have trouble finding the device when you power it back on.

I use TextWrangler for all my limited coding needs. You should (emphasis on should) be able to do this for any other editor you want. This is what I had to do.

Edit /Applications/TextWrangler.app/Contents/Info.plist. Towards the top you’ll see a bunch of file extensions. I added vbs to the list.

<string>text</string>
<string>txt</string>
<string>vbs</string>
<string>wml</string>
<string>WML</string>


In the same file, but before the very last</dict>
</plist>
Add

<key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
<array>
<string>public.text</string>
<string>public.plain-text</string>
</array>
<key>UTTypeDescription</key>
<string>Microsoft Visual Basic</string>
<key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
<string>com.macromates.textmate</string>
<key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
<dict>
<key>com.apple.ostype</key>
<string>TEXT</string>
<key>public.filename-extension</key>
<array>
<string>vbs</string>
</array>
</dict>
</dict>
</array>

And then

touch /Applications/TextWrangler.app

:%sort

Sort in reverse

:%sort!

Sort numerically

:%sort n

Sort, removing duplicates

:%sort u