The drive must have a GUID partition scheme and the partition must have a HFS Journaled filesystem. You can view the partition information by typing diskutil list in a Terminal. The final column of output shows the IDENTIFIER you must use in the next command (disk1s2 in my case).

Encrypt the partition using the command:
diskutil cs convert disk1s2 -passphrase

You will them be prompted for a passphrase (do not lose or forget this, there is no way to recover the data if you do!). The drive will then be converted to a special corestorage volume and encrypted. Converting and encrypting a 1TB drive (with 500GB of data) took nearly 24 hours for me. You can monitor the process using the command diskutil cs list (the cs stands for core storage).

1. Western Digital being one for which this is not true, their My Passport drive has been an excellent Mac citizen.

While the Southern Highlands were pleasantly off the main international tourist route, the spectacular vistas in the Blue Mountains fully justified its reputation.

A nearly deserted expanse of beautiful beach in Cornwall. Taken on an unseasonably sunny October day with an iPhone and stitched together with hugin.

In an ideal world a networked printer would be similarly simple: connect it to your network and proceed as before but without the USB cable. Entering a non-trivial wireless password into device with just 6 buttons would be a tedious but infrequent task. Sadly not that simple.

After failing to work out how to instruct my new HP printer which wireless network it should join I was forced to turn to the manual. Or I should say manuals since it came with two 77 page tomes along with a pictorial “setup poster” and little addendum about OS X Lion. Unfortunately only seven of those 154 pages are in English, and the grand sum of the installation advice is insert the CD into your computer and “follow the prompts to automatically configure your printer.” That instruction is actually superseded by the additional piece of paper in the box that informed me the CD was not compatible with OS X Lion and it was necessary to download the software from the Internet. Even the USB port is covered by a little sticker that makes it clear you should insert the CD before attempting to connect it to your computer using such old fashioned technology.

Somewhat stumped by the lack of prompt for a network and password, I duly downloaded and ran the software but the application was unable to locate my printer. Unsurprising given that it was not connected the network but I noticed in the Wifi menu that there was a new network called HP-Setup-[random-string] so I had my laptop connect to that. The printer was then found and the installer completed, still without any sort of wireless configuration. More inspiration followed as I used Apple’s Bonjour technology to connect to the printer’s embedded web server. Unfortunately the network settings page wanted to have me reconnect to a secure version of the webpage and that timed out.

A tea break followed and when I returned the printer was no longer broadcasting the temporary network that I had used earlier.¹ Some reading of the HP website revealed that the printer has a technology called Wi-Fi Protected Setup, but also known as WPS and by various vendor specific names. On an Apple router it is buried in a sub-menu labelled “Add Wireless Clients”² and on my O2 router it is disabled by default, possibly because of a known security vulnerability in the protocol. After some fruitless attempts to make it connect to the Apple router I checked the spec and discovered that its 802.11n compatibility is only for the overcrowded 2.4GHz band so would not be able to see my network.

The house 802.11g network runs on an O2 router which has a limited web interface but permits advanced configuration via telnet. The command to enable the WPS button on the front of the box is: > wireless wps config state=enabled

Success! Printing worked immediately although I was still perplexed why I could not access any settings via the printer’s built-in web server. In each web browser I tried, whenever I clicked on a settings page the current webpage told me it was now going to redirect me to a https:// link and then the web browser sat twiddling its thumbs forever more. Google was unable to help so I tried to connect to the https port directly using the current IP address. However I could not get the printer’s name to resolve when given to the usual tools of name resolution, host and dig. Not entirely unsurprising given that this is Bonjour not real DNS, but OS X does not have the UNIX getent command so I was stumped. Then I tried to ping the name and that did not work either, which made me realise that that Bonjour is about service advertisement not name resolution so simply taking the Bonjour name and trying a different protocol was not supposed to work. There are a number of apps which allow you to browse all advertised Bonjour services and from there I could see that no https:// service was advertised by the printer—connecting to https://printer.local could not work. Connecting to the printer’s actual IP address was successful for both secure and in-secure connections. Simple, really?

1. It turns out that it will only do this for the first hour after it is turned on for the first time. After that you must use “Reset to Network Defaults” to put it back into that mode.
2. and not available in Airport Utility 6.0, you must install the older version

Canberra is a very bicycle friendly city, relatively flat with light traffic and ample space for bicycle lanes. Nearby hills such as Mt Ainslie also make for excellent mountain biking apparently, and the coast is only two and a half hours away if you hanker for a weekend on the beach.

In Australia, amaysim have been particularly good value although I only discovered their existence after considerable Internet research. A $10 purchase in-store sim card purchase gave us 1GB of data valid for 30 days plus $10 of pre-pay phone credit (90 day expiry). The network is provided by Optus, in common with most of the cheap prepaid sim offerings. There were a couple of issues though which I document here for future travellers.

• We bought the sim card in a Seven-Eleven. The website claims you can buy them in post offices but the one we tried did not stock it so the availability might not be great. The same pack contains a sim that may be used with either the normal or micro sim formats.
• Online activation claimed to work but actually failed because of my non-Australian address and credit card. You must call them to get your $10 purchase converted to a data plan. I have not tried to top up the credit yet but it makes me think that credit card top ups might be difficult. Buying vouchers works around this, but see the note above on availability.
• The sim we bought has been used in multiple devices. I can report that despite rumours to the contrary, a sync with iTunes is not required to change the provider on an iPhone (at least on iOS5). However some devices could not access the Internet until the APN had been set manually to “Internet”, others just worked, for reasons I have yet to figure out.

Having come to snorkel we also thoroughly enjoyed the inland expedition to Cheow Lan Lake. The highlight of this was a trip on the lake in a long-tail boat which gave us a close up view of the imposing limestone islands that rose vertically up out of the water and towered over our little boat. The limestone had beautiful red colouring too, complimented by the green of the trees clinging to a precarious life on a sheer vertical wall of cliff and overhanging the water. Some of the islands have developed cave systems and we visited one which had spectacular stalactite and stalagmite formations, the iron giving them a rich red colour that invited comparison to the marble cathedrals of Italy.

Although we were only in a small part of Thailand for a few days, we really enjoyed our stay. Thai people were universally friendly and genuinely welcoming of tourists. The absence of pushy street salesmen that are commonly found in tourist areas the world over was also very pleasant—I look forward to returning.