kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: November 2007

Mac Lab Rat – GGP #70: Timmy Opts Out

This week, I join the geeks live to record GGP #70. We decided to make use of the segment I prepped up for last week’s show before I found out about the Second Life Special Edition that Dave put together with the guys from

DMGConverter

As the name suggests this tool will allow you to convert all sorts of disk image files between various image formats. These include three ISO formats, CDR, Mac DMG image files, and others.

This application that will also help to create disk image files from folders on your computer. You can use this to create a burnable disk image like an ISO for easy distribution across platforms, or a downloadable DMG file so that your Mac buddies can download and mount the image on their systems.

This application will also support several Mac and PC file systems, including the new Extended file systems and FAT16 & 32. There currently is no support for NTFS.

This is a great tool for anyone who needs to distribute large quantities of information, or needs to make copies of any type of existing disc (legally of course!).

Where I see this for myself is creating image files and using them to archive things like photos, or music and podcasts that I’ve finished listening to.

DMG Converter is a free application.

Secret Notepad Plus

SecretNotePadPlus is a dashboard widget created by Japanese developer N. Wajima that will allow you to make and keep notes on your OS X dashboard the biggest difference between this widget, and many other similar ones is, you guessed it, the secure part.

SNP allows you to password protect the widget so that its secrets can be kept hidden away from the world, and would be particularly useful in one-mac homes where the computer is shared among many different people.

Yes, there are many other ways to do this, and storing the information in this way isn’t the most secure mechanism available. Where this might be useful though, is keeping a list of your frequently used ID’s and Passwords for various websites. It’s easily accessible, and can be quickly hidden once you’re done your session.

Finally, SNP makes use of keychain to store its own password information as well as the notes and text. So this is a fairly secure method of being able to write this information to the disk. While you’d never write your latest novel, or the secrets to cold fusion technology in SNP, it’s great for quick notes.

SecretNotepadPlus is a free application.

AirPort Radar

The folks over at MacWireless.com have put together Airport Radar, a simple wifi scanning tool which shows you the networks in the area as well as the strength of their signals. Airport Radar performs it’s scanning magic from your OS X dashboard. This is a good way to troll for networks in those cases where you just have to download the latest episode of the GGP and can’t make it home to the comfort of your regular broadband connection.

The scans are done at a user-configurable interval; the default is just under two seconds. The widget will display any networks it detects. If a network drops off, or drops below a detectable level it will remain on the screen in a ‘greyed out’ state, and will stay on the screen for a set number of scans (default is 5).

While not the most full-featured wifi scanner around, it’s a pretty good little tool. It should be noted that it only searches for “Infrastructure” networks, or access points. It won’t detect the wifi connection on other wifi ‘client’ devices like laptops, xboxes, ipod touches, psp’s, cell phones… well you get the idea.

Airport Radar is a free application.

XBox 360 Controller Driver

Last up this week is something kinda fun that I just had to share. For any of you who own an XBox 360 and have always wanted to use the controller in your favourite Mac games, I have the solution for you! Developer Colin Munro has created a driver package for the 360 controller to allow it to be used on the Mac.

For me there’s just something deliciously ironic about using a Microsoft controller on an Apple computer. The 360 Controller driver is also a freebie.

While I’m sad to see Tim go, he’s moving on to new challenges and I think we’ll see him around from time to time…  I’d like to extend a personal thank you to Tim for his help with my budding podcast career.  Looking forward to seeing the next big thing!

Understanding your Nerd…

I realize that the target audience of this blog probably doesn’t need to read this article, but chances are there’s someone in your life who should. I found this essay, The Nerd Handbook, via Wil Wheaton’s blog and found it extremely insightful. Being a computer nerd myself I found several of the items pertained directly to me.

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

If you’re a nerd, or know someone who is, do yourself a favour and read The Nerd Handbook by Rands.

YouTube dot CA eh?

youtube_canada.pngYouTube has launched a Canadian focused version today.

The Canadian portal will focus on Canadian content, and content uploaded from Canadian YouTube members.

[youtube:http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=_y5MfzSnFLM]

Hidden Details in OS X Leopard

I found an interesting bit of hidden text in OS X.  The icon for “TextEdit” actually contains legible text if you can enlarge it enough to read.

This is in addition to the other little “hidden gem”… Those cute kids in Cupertino thought it would be cute to paint every non-mac computer with the Blue Sceen of Death… funny… Cobalt (seen below) is running Ubuntu 7.10…..

I wonder what other hidden gems might be waiting for me… a working flash player perhaps?

Mac Lab Rat – GGP #68: Security Holes and Feature Fixes

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Mac Lab Update for Global Geek #68.

Off the top, I’m going to start with a couple of Mac security items.

Trojan.Mac The first is a new Trojan affecting Mac OS X. OSX.RSPlug.A is a trojan that buries itself in your OS X installation and redirects you to porn and phishing sites while you’re browsing the net. This is done by forcing your computer to read DNS information from some less than reputable sources.

This is far from the nastiest trojan I’ve ever seen, despite some mac-pundits who seem to feel that “This is really bad. Really.” It doesn’t damage any files, and only messes with some settings that can be relatively easily restored.

The second is the report on the McAfee Avert labs blog stating that several other fake codec sites have been popping up with the Puper family of malware. This fake codec that messes with your system settings has been plaguing Windows since 2005, but is now making it’s way to the Mac Platform.

Now, far be it for me to get up on my soapbox… aw who am I kidding.

<rant> This is the latest in a series of examples of people who are starting to dabble in the Mac Exploit business. Is it true that only a minuscule percentage of threats against desktop computers can hurt the mac? yes. But lets keep in mind that only a minuscule percentage of all the threats created are targeted at the mac. As the popularity of the mac platform increases, and more vulnerable targets are created, mark my words: We will see more Mac Exploits in 2008. </rant>

Add to this a story that broke this week with regards to the firewall that ships along with the new package. A review on by Heise Security in the UK pointed out several significant flaws in the setup, configuration and default settings that come with OS X Leopard. The final verdict of this review is that “Mac OS X Leopard firewall failed every test.”

So for those of you who think that the Mac is invulnerable, you may want to reconsider relying on Security by Obscurity.

OpaqueMenuBar Last week, during our Leopard overview, I mentioned that the Leopard Menu Bar is now semi-transparent resulting in some extreme cases, in readability issues with menubar text. Eternal Storms Software has put out a quick little application called OpaqueMenuBar to take care of this annoying little “feature”. I tried this one out and it did perform as promised… but I removed it in a heartbeat. Why?

  1. It’s a TSR. Terminate and Stay Resident. It doesn’t just change the menu bar and terminate, it sits there and runs in the background. Ew. I feel like I’m back in the DOS days.
  2. When I double-clicked the program it didn’t appear to do anything… I had to go and change my background for the change to take effect.
  3. The solid menubar that it enables isn’t the metallic-grey colour of the rest of OS X… it’s WHITE, with black writing. Welcome back to the B&W version of Mac OS System 7…

DockDoctor The other issue I discussed with regards to the new Look of Leopard is the new 3-D Glass-Shelf dock. Last week I already wanted to get rid of it, and apparently I wasn’t the only one. I found no less than a half-dozen dashboard widgets and applications to swap your 3D-Dock for a 2D version. I even posted the command-line fix to my own blog last week.

Intermind Media’s DockDoctor is an example of one of these. Pick a dock, and do the restart. This really could have been done as a single button, but maybe that’ll be adjusted in a future version.

Here are some of the other iterations of this idea that I found this week:

Last up this week a non-Leopard item. iVol is a utility that allows you to adjust your system volume by sliding the scroll wheel on your mouse. To adjust the volume up or down on your computer, click the wheel on the mouse, and then scroll it. There’s also an option to Shift-Scroll option as well. To toggle the mute function you can also double-click the wheel. iVol is a free application for both Mac OS X and Windows.

Updates: Windows vs. Apple

I realize that many of you reading this are well aware of the tediousness of regularly performing your windows updates.  Hopefully it’s not as bad as this guy… I mean hell we’ve all done it.  Reload your Windows PC and spend 30-60 minutes running Windows Update multiple times to make sure you’ve covered everything.

So why, prey tell, would it be any different on the Mac?

Well, it isn’t.  At least not entirely.  When I bought Leopard last week, there were two software updates for me to do when I installed it… a mere 4 hours after its release!  2 updates in four hours?  That has to be some kind of record.

Leopard Breaks Flickr Uploader

Caught this story over on DownloadSquad tonight.  OS X Leopard causes a problem with the Adobe Flash plugin for all browsers on OS X (Firefox, Safari and Opera were tested).  The problem has been acknowledged by Adobe but no release date of a fix has been determined.

As I found out last night it makes the uploader very broken.  You can select files to upload, but once that’s done the uploader simply does nothing.  Sits there like a bumpkin on a log.  One wonders why Adobe didn’t take the time to test this with one or two of the Leopard Betas / Release candidates…

The DS article does mention a partial workaround, but it’s a HACK.  I would caution against even attempting it.  If you need to upload in the meantime, just use the client application and ignore the issue  until Adobe get their act together.