by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 6, 2006 | Uncategorized
The OS X Operating System might be free of virii and trojans at the moment but I cannot imagine this situation will last. Also being free from malicious code doesn’t prevent otherwise trustworthy companies from ‘phoning home’ as is the case with OS X 10.4.3.
In the windows worlds the obvious answer is to just get the free edition of Zone Alarm but sadly there is nothing free in the Mac world.
I’ve often come across mentions of Little Snitch so I figured I’ll check it out, from its website:
You start an application that tells you that a new version is available. You suddenly realize that with every start this application connects to the developer’s server. Even statistics information about your computer may be sent this way. Little Snitch helps you avoid this situation.
Trojan horses – i.e. programs transmitting unconsciously data stored on your computer – can be detected by Little Snitch and prevented on the transmission of data.
So I tried its free demo for a few days and last night bought it via PayPal thanks to the strong Pound it was a bargain, below is a screenshot of it in action showing it even blocks shell commands etc.
I can really recommend this app, grab a copy if you are concerned about privacy and general security on your Mac.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 27, 2006 | Uncategorized
Over the last few days I’ve come across a couple of really spiffy mac related apps, I just have to share.
If you’re a del.icio.us user you’ve probably wanted better integration between the Mac and del.icio.us, enter Delibar it sits in your menu bar and provides convenient drop down access to your bookmarks.
Some more del.icio.us related goodies, this time to integrate your search results into Spotlight, now I’m not a big Spotlight user but this might just get me to use it. Delimport will suck down all your bookmarks regularly and let you find them using spotlight, it searches tags, descriptions, headings etc.
I’ve previously linked to some Firefox Intel Mac builds, they’ve been lagging a bit and not getting updates but it seems now there will be regularly nightlys for Firefox, you can get them here. They’re fast, looks pretty and are tracking the head so they’re essentially 2.0 betas. So far I’m happy with mine, even my extensions worked which is surprising.
For users on Laptops and older Macs they might be running out of drive space, not a problem on my nice 150Gig SATA disk so I did not try these instructions but if you’re having problems have a look at this blog post that might help. Essentially default OS X installs comes with support for every language known to man (including Klingon!?) it also installs tons of printer drivers, removing these will clear up several Gigs worth.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 29, 2006 | Uncategorized
Podcasting is all the rage these days and I can see why, there are some really good stuff out there, at the moment I really enjoy the Ricky Gervais podcast. Mostly its 3 guys talking absolute bollocks while being pretty funny about it, incredibly mindless fun.
On the video casting side there isn’t as much that I enjoy though I’ve only really checked into 4 or 5 shows. Now everyone seems to think that this is the future of entertainment, independent guys making tv shows or radio shows bypassing all the networks, syndicates and all that crap. I can see the value in that argument as well and for most of the videocasts this holds true, short, focussed niche type shows that you either enjoy or don’t and it’s very easy to just move on to the next thing.
One show though stands out to me in it’s incredible level of annoyance and outright insulting of its viewer base and that is the Photoshop TV show. Now this show has received a lot of raves in the past and this is the 2nd time I tried to watch it. The Photoshop related content is great, the tutorials are at many levels from beginner to advanced and the guys know their stuff, they’re a bit keyboard shortcut happy which makes it hard for people to know how what they are doing relates to the tons of Photoshop menus but that not the end of the world.
So what’s the problem? Like all of the podcast world they obviously have massive bandwidth bills to pay and they do this by promoting a number of sponsors, nothing wrong with that at all. The problem though is that the signal/noise ratio of the show is off the scales. As a little investigation I took their latest show and cut out all the advertising related content but leaving their inane chatter in. I was left with 2/3 of the 30 minute show. Cut out the chatter, startup jingle, ending jingle, competitions etc and you end up with less than 1/2 of the 30 minutes.
Apart from the signal/noise ratio they are obviously trying hard to look professional in the editing together of the show, things flow nicely into each other and so forth. Problem again is that the continuity of the thing is just crap. Person A hands Person B a PowerBook to do a Demo on, screen movie shows a XP box. Person B is done with the presentation and he is stood with a Windows Laptop in-front of him. Why? Why do they need to go and do silly things like that just put the box you’re going to use in-front of you and get it over with, don’t show of Apple kit cos it’s sexy or is this just another product placement deal?
Each week they give viewers some kind of homework assignment to review websites etc, well this week there were 3 websites – one from each presenter. The 2nd recommended website was from a training center where the person recommending it is teaching a class. The 3rd one was a recommendation of the website for one of their sponsors! Immediately followed by a ad for the particular sponsor as well. During the show the one guy was constantly pushing a book he wrote, giving copies away telling you to buy it, where to buy it etc. Shameless self promotion.
So I left a quick comment on their blog, something along the lines of:
The photoshop content of the show is great, pity its spoiled by the 1/3 advertising content, not even the worst of TV shows are that bad with advertising.
Naturally they didn’t approve my comment and it never showed up, nice one. I’d love to see how far television would get if for a hour show you end up with this level of absolute noise? The slashdot/digg crowd always go on a total freak out about the likes of Tivo moving towards not letting them skip over ads but then they stand for much worse from this grass roots tech that is supposed to save the video/audio entertainment world? I’m not sold.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 18, 2006 | Uncategorized
Today the new Intel based iMac’s went on sale in London, I happened to be working about 5 minutes walk from the Apple Shop in Regent Street so I popped in and picked one up. I tried to call but the phone was never answered not even after 10 minutes of ringing.
The shop staff were busy setting up the new iMacs on the floor but the 20″ was already sold out, I got a 17″ model. Apple Store London does not yet have RAM for the machines but I guess I can just pick up some DDR2 SDRAM from a PC dealer.
So far I’m very impressed with the machine, the screen is absolutely stunning, the build quality and packaging is excellent and the everything is certainly a lot faster than on my old 800Mhz G4 machines ๐
The big question is of course software compatibility, below my experiences with 3rd party applications so far.
It seems anything that installs a preference pane and requires that to work will be out of luck, so far that’s SynergyKM and Growl.
Firefox works great, Safari (a universal binary) outperforms is in all respects but it works and its a lot faster than my iBook or G4 Powermac runs it so thats a good thing.
Thunderbird works great, like Firefox I’m keen to see a universal binary though.
AdiumX works perfectly, slight delay here and there which will no doubt be fixed with a universal build.
You Control: Desktops works OK, sometimes screen flipping is a bit slow and sometimes it doesn’t change active desktop to the application when selected using alt-tab.
Quicksilver being a universal binary works flawless.
Eclipse does not work, but I didn’t try to hard to get it going so who knows.
GLTerm does not work at all, I guess it’s screen card dependant.
Office:Mac works ok, it’s not screeming fast but its usable.
NetNewsWire works perfectly through rosetta.
UPDATED:
Adium X 0.88 is a universal binary and it works great, it also includes a universal binary of Growl complete with working pref pane ๐
Mozilla has some unofficial binaries as part of their “Deer Park” program, Camino, Thunderbird and Firefox are available. They work great, quite a bit faster than the power pc versions.
SynergyKM has been updated to be a universal binary, it works a charm.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 3, 2005 | Uncategorized
Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while know that I’ve got no time for Feedster and don’t mind saying so. My previous posts on this sad sad service:
So why do I rehash all this again now? Because if you look at those entries you’ll always see someone from Feedster post about how they’re improving, how I shouldn’t give up on them etc, but really it’s all just talk.
Tonight while trying to figure out why BSDUpdates is down I tried a Google blogs search but found little recent info, so I figured I’ll give Feedster another try, big mistake.
It also had very little useful content so I’m inclined to think people just don’t blog about BSDUpdates – fair enough. The problem is though Feedster is still broken!
First I do a search for ‘bsdupdates’ using the main feedster page, that went well and I found some stuff, then I tried the blog search button which will restrict the search to just blog posts. First there is the fact that the user experience is crap, if you do a Google search for whatever and click on one of the other search modes – like Images – it will know you searched for whatever and show you results immediately. Not feedster, no way, you have to just type your query in again.
So I type it in again, and get a page full of result, it looks like the screenshot below, all good so far.
See, next page, more results, all good there is hope for finding something useful, so I press on the next button.
Wtf? Maintenance? Seems more like their default internal server error page is claiming every problem is Maintenance related because this is not the first time I’ve seen it, and I don’t use this service often. It’s a bit like when the Underground in London says something is ‘Signal Failure’ it’s just something they say. The real problem seems to be database related.
So back a page, reload, do the search again which gives me (immediately, right in the middle of their ‘maintenance’ no less) a page similar to the first one. Try the next button again to get the promised more results:
And there it is, nothing, empty page, no results. Complete. Waste. Of. Time.
If you are still using Feedster you really should be doing yourself a favor and jump ship. There are a number of competitors, I can’t even list them all but here are some: Clusty, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, Daypop, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! and many more. Natural selection on the internet is a great thing, Feedster had a chance to do it right but they didn’t. The big boys will run over them, rejoice.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 21, 2005 | Uncategorized
I’ve been using Desktop Manager on my iBook to get Virtual Desktops going on OS X but it’s been suffering a bit since Tiger came out, you have to use their Alpha release which is dodgy to say the least.
Most annoyingly it doesn’t always save preferences, so I use command-f1 to get to desktop 1 etc, but this setting does not save, so each time I reboot I have to manually reconfigure the whole thing. I could stand it and wait for a fix when the alternatives was a $50 product from somewhere.
Now however the wonderful people at You Software has a promotion on their product You Control: Desktops so instead of the usual $30 it’s now $10. I do not know how long this offer is for, it certainly isn’t well published or anything.
I bought a copy of the software and am using it at work and home – the license allows for multiple installs as long as only one is being used at a time – and am very happy with it, does nearly all I would want. I’d strongly recommend it, you can’t go wrong at that price!
