Archive for July, 2008
« Previous EntriesProtect your Mac against poisoned DNS servers
Thursday, July 31st, 2008As my colleague, Preston Gralla, wrote today, the potential for the very serious DNS exploit to leave your Macintosh and your network prone to attacks is significant. While most ISP’s DNS servers are patched (Comcast and Verizon) or will be shortly (AT&T), some smaller companies have yet to update their DNS servers.
Protect your Mac against poisoned DNS servers
Thursday, July 31st, 2008As my colleague, Preston Gralla, wrote today, the potential for the very serious DNS exploit to leave your Macintosh and your network prone to attacks is significant. While most ISP’s DNS servers are patched (Comcast and Verizon) or will be shortly (AT&T), some smaller companies have yet to update their DNS servers.
Create smart playlists in iTunes for audio flashcards
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008In my iTunes library, I have a lot of oral exercises obeying the following scheme: question, pause, answer. I can now train on these exercises, and track my progress on my iPod, without a dedicated flashcard program simply by creating some iTunes smart playlists. My algorithm can’t compare to Leitner’s or SuperMemo, but it’s really better than nothing!
Here’s how I did it:
- Place the desired exercises in an album named Flashcards.
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Create six smart playlists:
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0 stars:
- Match all of the following rules
- Album is “Flashcards”
- Rating is …..
- Limit to 50 items selected by most recently played
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1 star:
- Match all of the following rules
- Album is “Flashcards”
- Rating is *….
- Last Played is no…
10.5: Create any mobile phone plug-in for iSync
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
If you are slightly tech-savvy, Apple has introduced (on the Xcode Developer DVD that ships with Leopard) an application to help you create your own mobile phone plug-ins. If you have not already installed the Developer Tools, do so. If you have, go to /Developer » Applications » Utilities in the Finder.The application you are looking for is named iSync Plug-in Maker, which is essentially a graphical wizard that assists you in rapidly putting together and then testing your own plug-in for any mobile phone device. After testing, the program helps you create a distribution/installation package.
A lot of people are using the tool and then making money selling their own plug-ins — but now you know where to find the same tools, so you can do this on your own. Apple even has …
Ease the task of arranging new App Store installs
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008One of the more annoying things about the iPhone is the process of rearranging application icons. When all you could add to your phone’s screen were a few web shortcuts, things weren’t so bad. But now that you may have 50 or more third-party programs on your iPhone, it can be a real pain to drag newly-installed programs to the proper position on the proper screen. (How about a Mac program to ease the process, Apple?)
This is especially true if each of your screens are completely filled with the maximum of 16 icons, as something will have to shuffle off to another page while you’re dragging — and if you drop the new program onto a full screen, you’ll then need to go find the application that got shuffled away, and move that one to its desired location, too.
To avoid this, just leave an empty spot on each screen, placing only 15 icons per screen. This solves the drag-arrange issue noted above. As you drag from screen to screen, no icons will jump off the page, as th…
What about the button? Will future MacBooks have a physical mouse button?
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008Yesterdays post about the potential for glass touchpads on upcoming Macs gained a lot of attention. Most of the analysis on the Web focused on whether or not there would be a screen below the glass trackpad - frankly, I don’t think it would be that useful in a traditional setting. How much time do you spend looking at your trackpad? On that issue I am torn.
What surprised me is that no one is talking about the potential "death of the mouse button".
Rumor: MacBook updates to include glass trackpad, other goodies
Monday, July 28th, 2008As I hinted in my “fun” blog, I have been hearing some interesting things about Apple’s line of portable computers. The talk amongst insiders on the new MacBooks are kind of scattered but here’s a summation of what I’ve heard…
Send clickable URL as the subject of a Mail message
Monday, July 28th, 2008This is perhaps more of a curiosity than a hint, but it may be useful to someone out there. Did you know that if you send a URL as the subject of a Mail message, it will arrive as a link (if the recipient is also using Mail.app)?
The strange thing is that the URL will open the browser when clicked, but the cursor does not show the text as a URL (i.e. the cursor does not change to a pointing finger when over the text).
[robg adds: I had to experiment with this before I was able to get it working. To have the link work, you must compose in rich text mode (which makes sense), and there must be some body text. If you send a blank e-mail, then the URL isn’t parsed, even when writing in rich text mode.]
Change the icon used for zipped files
Monday, July 28th, 2008If, like me, you find the default white zip file icon in 10.5 bland and boring, then it is quite easy to change it if you are using the built-in Archive Utility:
- Open up Finder and go to /System/Library/CoreServices.
- Find the Archive Utility, Control-click on it and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
- Navigate into Contents » Resources.
- Make a backup copy of bah-zip.icns (or any of the other compressed icons you’d like to change) by dragging the file to a folder in your user’s home folder. The system will create a copy.
- Find an icon you’d like to use, and copy it into this folder, renaming it to bah-zip.icns. I chose to copy the nice green bah.icns file from this same directory, renamed it to bah-zip.icns, and then copied it back in. (You will need to enter your admin password to modify this folder.)
- Restart Finder or logout/login, and you will now have a nice customized zip icon …
Change the icon used for zipped files
Monday, July 28th, 2008If, like me, you find the default white zip file icon in 10.5 bland and boring, then it is quite easy to change it if you are using the built-in Archive Utility:
- Open up Finder and go to /System/Library/CoreServices.
- Find the Archive Utility, Control-click on it and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
- Navigate into Contents » Resources.
- Make a backup copy of bah-zip.icns (or any of the other compressed icons you’d like to change) by dragging the file to a folder in your user’s home folder. The system will create a copy.
- Find an icon you’d like to use, and copy it into this folder, renaming it to bah-zip.icns. I chose to copy the nice green bah.icns file from this same directory, renamed it to bah-zip.icns, and then copied it back in. (You will need to enter your admin password to modify this folder.)
- Restart Finder or logout/login, and you will now have a nice customized zip icon …
Use iPhone as a speaker phone in the car
Monday, July 28th, 2008Something that maybe not everyone has thought about with the iPhone is that the microphone is good enough to use in conjunction with an FM transmitter in the car as a speaker phone. This is a cheap and secure way to drive and speak at the same time.
The quality of the sound for the receiving part may not be the best, but it’s good enough and it’s better than using a headset. It even stops the music when the phone rings, such as a good installation of a phone kit for a car will do when receiving a call.
Malware, spam: Bad, getting worse
Monday, July 28th, 2008Even the legitimate, commercial part of the Internet cannot be considered safe.
Steve Jobs is healthy
Saturday, July 26th, 2008Jobs is basically healthy. That’s good news.
Apple takes extraordinary step to blogging… about its MobileMe woes
Saturday, July 26th, 2008MobileMe continues to have significant problems even two weeks after its launch. Apple’s solution? Keep users informed of outages and updates via their first ever, “blog”…
Find corrupt fonts using Spotlight in Terminal
Friday, July 25th, 2008In doing an mdimport -A in Terminal, I noticed a particular attribute called com_apple_ats_font_invalid. Spotlight seems to set this attribute for files in a font folder (e.g. ~/Library/Fonts) that aren’t valid font files. Try this is a Terminal window to see if you have any bad fonts:
$ mdfind "com_apple_ats_font_invalid == 1"You can see this in action if you use the -live switch on the above command. Once the mdfind starts, in another Terminal window, create a bad font:
$ echo "bad font" > ~/Library/Fonts/badfont.ttfYou’ll see that the query in the first window now shows one match; remove the file you just created (rm ~/Library/Fonts/badfont.ttf), and the query count will drop to zero. Press Control-C to end the mdfind in the other window.
I’m not sure if this is new for Leopard or whether Tiger has it as well.
Date calculations with stock and Gnu versions of ‘date’
Friday, July 25th, 2008The stock OS X date command ships with a useful -v command that allows date calculation. For example, to determine the last day of February, you could use the following:
date -v3m -v1dThat’s the third month in the first -v, and then less one day in the second -v. man date gives many examples. On the other hand, the Gnu version of date that’s available from MacPorts does not support this option. Playing a bit with the –date option for Gnu’s date, I came up with:
date --date="march 1 1 day ago"This results in the same date calculation as in the stock date function. Gnu’s date also includes the option of printing rfc-2822 and rfc-3339 dates. The latter can be used for applications like Google that require xls dates:
date --rfc-3339='ns' 2008-07-23 18:28:00.110568000+05:30The …
Date calculations with stock and Gnu versions of ‘date’
Friday, July 25th, 2008The stock OS X date command ships with a useful -v command that allows date calculation. For example, to determine the last day of February, you could use the following:
date -v3m -v1dThat’s the third month in the first -v, and then less one day in the second -v. man date gives many examples. On the other hand, the Gnu version of date that’s available from MacPorts does not support this option. Playing a bit with the –date option for Gnu’s date, I came up with:
date --date="march 1 1 day ago"This results in the same date calculation as in the stock date function. Gnu’s date also includes the option of printing rfc-2822 and rfc-3339 dates. The latter can be used for applications like Google that require xls dates:
date --rfc-3339='ns' 2008-07-23 18:28:00.110568000+05:30The …
Manage the periodic logs
Friday, July 25th, 2008There has been some discussion here about the periodic maintenance tasks and making them run:
10.4: Reschedule periodic maintenance tasks
A simple shell script to run system maintenance tasksWhat hasn’t so far been addressed is the logs themselves. I got very interested in these as I suddenly (under 10.4) couldn’t account for 5GB on my hard disk. It turns out that the primary culprit was the daily.out log file that had simply grown out of all proportions. The periodic logs are never cleaned up, and thus just grow in size each and every time the periodic maintenance tasks are run. For example:
[21:02:...Manage the periodic logs
Friday, July 25th, 2008There has been some discussion here about the periodic maintenance tasks and making them run:
10.4: Reschedule periodic maintenance tasks
A simple shell script to run system maintenance tasksWhat hasn’t so far been addressed is the logs themselves. I got very interested in these as I suddenly (under 10.4) couldn’t account for 5GB on my hard disk. It turns out that the primary culprit was the daily.out log file that had simply grown out of all proportions. The periodic logs are never cleaned up, and thus just grow in size each and every time the periodic maintenance tasks are run. For example:
[21:02:...Connect to a LEAP wireless network with iPhone 2.0
Friday, July 25th, 2008My company uses the LEAP security protocol for its wireless network. The iPhone doesn’t list LEAP as a network security option, but the following workaround works with iPhones and iPod Touches that have the 2.0 software update.
Go to your Settings app. Then select Wi-Fi. Next, select Other. Enter the name of your LEAP network. Under Security, select WPA Enterprise. Then enter your username and password. That’s it. It works like a charm for my company’s wireless network.
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