Backup your blogspot/blogger blog

Good news - it's now easy to backup your blog as an XML file - using the draft version of blogspot - see here

GeekTool - powerful way to display info on your Mac's desktop

GeekTool

This is a seriously awesome app - sure you can do some of it using external or dashboard apps.... but this is just so simple and oh so customizable if you are a perl or shell guy.

For some examples - check out these, as well as the comments. Loads of gold in there me mateys. Mac only as well

• At life hacker
  
• Over at Keynote2Keynote
  

Just passing time, trying out new FF addons - Video DownloadHelper

This is a neat old addon - as soon as it detects you having loaded some media in your browser window it offers you the choice of saving it as a file!

Video DownloadHelper

(the number 1 FF3 addon)

Mrs Bollocks is about to have another baby......

Well we still have a few weeks to go. But - not knowing the sex and not having decided on a name for baby (yes there's only one) I have turned to the Interweb....

I went to the BabynameWizard to see how 'old' a name is and how 'common'.

Google Notifier (Mac) - for multiple Gmail accts

Great tip at macosxhints - props to MELON here.
Basically:

• install Google Notifier for MAC
• duplicate it once its installed
• edit the Info.plist for the new copy of Google notifier
• change CFBundleIdentifier
• save your name and dets then quit.

You might want to change the icons for the different mail accounts - Patrick Joyce has described how, modifying the png icons for the particular instance of the app as duplicated above.

Now - lets say you have done this - but you also want to be able to just check a certain Gmail 'Label' - for example this might be 'important' email - a label that is updated by a Gmail filter for important mail.

If you were to do this, then the command:

defaults write com.google.GmailNotifierWORD Label -string "nameoflabelhere"
(note that WORD here is whatever you modified the Info.plist entry to be)

See here
for more.

Piclens - seriously kool

PicLens is a great firefox addon - really great for visualizing images from most of the image sites out there.

No Linux support yet but you can use it for images on your hard drive.

Toilet time from Cool Tools

One blog I follow is Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools - we both appear to appreciate the fine art of a quality bidet. And they are everywhere in Japan - bit scary when they don't come with instructions in Engrish!

"Help - turn this thing off!!"

That said - not only can you save paper - and water - they are fantastic! Especially the ones that have warm water and air drying features!


KK has just reviewed the Toto Washlet Toilet - which is a bit expensive for my taste. But the cold water model is a bargin. Maybe they use them in the Japanese armed forces? I'm not tough enough for that.

In case you're still wavering - check out what other people think at the Poop Report

Debian Sarge and DNS Vuln VU#800113

Well blow me down - I didn't notice that Sarge has stopped being supported for security updates - as of March 2008

This makes it a bit trickier to patch up for the DNS cache poisoning advisory: VU#800113

But never fear - it's possible. Using aptitude, make sure your sources.list has etch hard coded (instead of sarge like you probably previously had), then run aptitude and start off selecting from bind9 and keep the minimum number of changes in order to resolve all broken links.

Once this is all done, you'll have to restart most daemons - aptitude will get most of them - I had to restart a few others that don't come with Debian.

Hope that helps some - sorry I'm low on the details - busy!

Mac OSX Addressbook to Samsung A412

I use the Mac addressbook for my contacts - how upset I was when I got a new phone for my trip to Oz - and found out that Samsung GH-A412 didn't support syncing to my Mac for contacts etc.

I got around it by running the software under Parallels, binding the usb port to Parallels when I hooked up the phone.

I also had to:

• export all contacts in Mac Addressbook to vcards.vcf
• import vcards.vcf into Outlook Express in the Parallels XP o/s
• export Outlook Express into a .wab file
• import .wab file into Samsung phone management software.

In the end most things were imported - talk about a pain if I was to do this all them time!

Trying to get my hands on an iPhone 3g asap!

Want more realestate for your Macbook?

Want to hook up a few extra monitors on your MacBook??

Check this competitor to the Matrox Dual Head 2 Go - http://www.villagetronic.com/vidock/techspecs.html

Setup your own WiFi hotspot - get paid via Paypal

I got thinking - I'm away from home a lot - all that unused DSL is sitting there - why not earn something with it!

It's a lot easier these days to setup a captive WiFi portal:

• http://www.idealinternet.co.uk/hotspot-radius-server.tpl
• http://ilovemywimax.com/wizard/
• http://www.howtoforge.com/wifi_hotspot_setup
  

MuCommander

Been having a play with muCommander again - it is really a very neat file manager (written in Java - very cross platform)

I certainly prefer it over the Finder!

If you are a keyboard shortcut junkie then you can customize keys (for Mac OSX) - in ~/Library/Preferences/muCommander/action_keymap.xml

Mouseless browsing

I used to do this with Vimperator - but now that I'm using FF3 on all my machines I'm looking for something else to do it - Vimp was a bit too big for what I wanted. I might go back there later on.

I looked at the HitAHint extension - it wasn't supported on FF3.

Mouseless browsing was though. I went with the latest beta - off their homepage


I've pretty much gone with defaults, except I set the post key for opening in a TAB to t and for selecting I set the postkey to s

I also set the up and down keyboard shortcuts to Alt P and Alt N (Alt is Option key on the mac)

Clever DNS Cache poisoning attacks going around

There are new DNS vulnerabilities affecting a large number of DNS implementations - this means that DNS servers can be tricked into return ip addresses of malicious websites instead of, say, yourbank.com.

This cert advisory says more.

You can test your ISP's dns server here

Stay tuned - example exploit code out 20080808

skypein not displaying caller id?

Right now I'm in Ireland - sipping on a smoooth Kilkenny beer - have noticed that I don't get callerid on my SkypeIn number. A bit annoying. Turns out this is a Telco issue is several countries that probably don't like Skype: http://support.skype.com/index.php?_a=knowledgebase&_j=questiondetails&_i=1269

Slideshows in iPhoto

It was my mother-in-laws birthday - I was given the job of slideshow.
I went with iPhoto - and used ComicLife for some extra annotations.
These links were of use in working out how:

http://www.macworld.com/article/54292/2006/12/jandigitalphoto.html

http://www.ehmac.ca/anything-mac/50844-keynote-slideshow-imovie-idvd.html dddd

and especially this from teachertube http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=bcfe8450a1a41c200364

What does TimeMachine backup - TimeDog

I found this neat Perl program from a post on MactricksandTips.com

It can be used to summarise what files are backed up in a particular TM incremental.

It is rather commandline - that's fine for me but its not everyones cup of tea.

Anyhow I've had a look at the Perl code and it's quite neat.

Say if you wanted to summarize what files you had backed up a particular TM incremental - you could do a (setup timedog as per the above post first):

timedog -d 5 -l 2008-07-20-002027

and then it would summarize what files changed for this particular backup.

I see this as being useful for working out what changed between backups - aka a blunt form of tripwire - or a tool to work out what else you might want to exclude from your TM backups.

Backing up to TimeMachine - remotely! Use it with Time Machine Editor

The wise Alan Zisman has discovered that you can backup to another Mac's shared hard disk using TimeMachine - cheaper than getting a Time Capsule!

I'm definitely going to give this a go - I have a iMac which I have a few firewires off it - running TM already and this will keep my MBP backed up whenever it's on the LAN.

I should also mention Alan's post reviewing the Time Machine Editor - lets you schedule TM to run in a more useful manner.

Stop procrastinating!!

Seriously - this post from the Mann has some really good advice in it. I think the timer option is my favourite.

Although I don't use a physical timer - instead I found the best free one (for Mac) is the Chimoo timer

Now - I'd better get back to some work.

Good youtube/flash video downloaders

Vixy.net came to my attention on an old Lifehacker post - it works very nicely. I've used others as well like Keepvid that are also very good.

Managing profiles in Firefox

I have been an firefox extension junkie in the past. Recently though I have been noticing that my uber Mac was getting a bit slow in FF - I traced it in a very unefficient manner to the Vimperator extension - that I had just updated to the new version 1.1.

I new it was time to trial a dev/prod approach to using Firefox - found a nice tute on using different FF profiles here

The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great / Ray Bennett M.D.

Isn't it funny that medical doctors call them selves MD in the states. Reminds me of Doogie Houser (apparently there's a genius out there who is a MD at age of 12?).

Anyhow this book is interesting - and it's short - like you can read it in 20 minutes! That's right you can read it and accomplish something quick!

GTD (Getting things done) on the Mac

(I was going to add that on the iPhone would also be nice...)

I've been a big fan of Thinkingrock in the past - however procrastination has managed to stop me from using it reliably - which is essential I think.

I just found a link to a new GTD type app - that also has an iPhone interface. Things looks like it might be good. Maybe I'll look at it later! haha!

Omnifocus is another favourite of some.

I've also used RemberTheMilk as well in the past - but that was like a year ago. Somethin made me stop. I believe there's an iphone version out now though so perhaps that will help me? :-)

Lifehacker also have a survey which has some goodies in the comments.

Good file upload sites?

Now that I'm using blogspot - it only allows me movies and pics - sometimes I want to upload something for you guys to grab - like say a modified FF xpi to install. So I guess I need a fileshare/filestore out there for this that
- could link to files easily
- didn't expire files quickly


I've had a quick look:

• FileFactory is one of them - you can upload files and then link to them as needed. And its more or less Free. But files are expired quickly if they are not downloaded.
• Rapidshare keeps files for 90 days. So does Megaupload.com
• Pownce will let you upload files - not sure how long they will be left for without expiring
  
• Or could store on a colo elsewhere
  

Scribefire - great blogging FF addon

Scribefire
seriously - what a great extension - I use this in Firefox to maintain content on my blogs. What took me so long to find it!



Nothing's perfect though - Scribefire is usually activated by the F8
key - and on my Macs this isn't so useful as its owned by OSX - so I
remapped it to F7.

I first tried to do this using the Keyconfig
extension - but that didn't work. So instead I edited the java script
inside the performancing.jar file in the Firefox chrome. I also noted
that there was a bug logged for it but its been marked as 'wont fix'....

If I make time I'll see if this can be reopened... might also put the redone xpi up somewhere.
I also need to fix the other shortcuts for macs - eg. Command B for me brings up bookmarks, Command I brings up 'Page Info'...

I did this by editing the performancing.jar and changing the js for the ones that annoyed me the most. I really have too many shortcuts... there's a bit of conflict with other extensions!

[Update: I did check bugs - someone else has already flagged this - I've added my pleading voice fwiw]

Welcome to a whole Load of Bollocks

Welcome Trendsetters!

I enjoy researching and figuring out solutions to tricky problems and love working out new and more efficient ways of doing things. I think that its good to share and hopefully you readers out there get something out of this as well. Even if you don't at least I will!

Namaste!
The Captain