OpenDNS

A few months ago, a friend of mine got his mac hacked all to pieces after falling victim to either a honeypot router or having horrible personal network security, or a little bit of both. Probably a little bit of both. This led to him ending up on the wrong end of some phishing and all kinds of bad things developed from there. Like Chester Bennington kinds of bad things.

I am by no means an expert on network security, but some other people have turned me on to OpenDNS as a good step for reducing one's vulnerability to phishing. I made the suggested changes to my computer and to my router and I am pretty pleased with it. It has saved me from one phishing site so far, which, after seeing the ordeal my friend went through, is worth the 5 minutes it took to set it up right there. It's free, so it has that going for it as well.

OpenDNS does have its detractors though. I am watching the comments/ongoing discussion to the post on this site to see how it comes out now that John Roberts from OpenDNS has chimed in. Unless something more horrible comes out of it aside from OpenDNS' practice of retaining personal DNS request information for 2 business days, I'm staying with them. Besides, if you register (I did) you can choose not to have any data collected.

 

Three-Pane Viewing

One of the few good things about Outlook is the three-pane view: mailboxes on the left, message list in the middle, and message on the right. It is such a time saver when you have to crank through a ton of e-mail. 

One of the major shortcomings of Mail is its lack of the three-pane view. Thanks to some inspired work by Aaron Harnly and Dane Harnett, the three-pane view can be yours in Mail via a sweet plugin. 

Peep Letterbox and Widemail.  

I'm rolling with Letterbox right now, but Widemail has some nice unique features as well. Someday a mash-up of the code for the two of these will create the perfect three-pane view for Mail, probably just in time for Apple to enable a three-pane view itself. 

Eight Blogs of Note

Here are some blogs I check out on a regular basis. Reading these might give you a little background on where I'm coming from. Check 'em out.

1.    43 Folders is a life hacking blog ramped up by Merlin Mann and now with other contributors. I learned about it when I was trying (unsuccessfully) to implement GTD. Merlin is on point, but the other contributors are somewhat hit or miss.

2. Call Me Fishmeal is Wil Shipley's blog. Wil is with Delicious Monster who makes one of the best Mac programs out there, Delicious Library.

3. carpeaqua is from Justin Williams, a mac geek who is behind one of my favorite iPhone applications/sites, PocketTweets, for using Twitter on an iPhone.

4. Beth Cherry is not dead yet is Beth Cherry's daily or so update on what is going on in her world. I like her no archive style of posting. If you miss it, you've missed it. Might have to implement that some day myself.

5. HorsePigCow is from Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency. I don't remember how I came across her blog, but I still keep up with it. She has unknowingly introduced me to a number of cool 2.0 kinds of things, like tumblr and dopplr.

6. Factory City is Chris Messina's blog, a great source for the next big thing, conceptually, on the web. He's also at Citizen Agency.

7. My Money Blog is something someone else turned me on to a while ago. I've been following this dude and his financial exploits for a while now and have also been putting a number of his ideas into practice. The 0% credit card and high yield savings account idea has been absolutely killer.

8. Like It Matters is from Brian Oberkirch and it is also a place to learn about up and coming 2.0 issues and general cool stuff.

Remember, RSS is your friend for keeping up on your reading.

The Inquisitor

Despite the crazy speed of the new Firefox 3 beta, there are still some cool things about using Safari, like the Inquisitor.  

Here's their short pitch: Spotlight. Immediately. Autocomplete. Shortcuts. Free.

Here's my suggestion: Download. Install. Awesome.

Firefox 3 beta

Here's all you need to know: the Firefox 3 beta is fast! Like really, really, really, fast! Its speed shames Safari like someone with a can of spray paint and a passed out frat boy. (What? You guys just use permanent marker, bunny ears, a tiara, and a melon? Better step it up.)

It's also buggy as hell, but hey, it's a beta. Download here.  

Be sure to download and install the Proto theme as well.

Digital Signatures and Encryption in Mail

For those of you using Mail, you need to make sure you have your digital signature and encryption enabled.  Despite the rumors, it does not appear Apple is offering this functionality along with .mac subscriptions.  The reason why is beyond me; even more so now that iChat has encrypted chat through .mac.

Great instructions for getting yourself set up can be found at Joar Wingfors' site and at O'Reilly's MacDevCenter.com.

One hot tip if you are following the instructions from Joar's site and using thawte:  

When Firefox asks you to "Please Enter The Master Password For The Software Security Device" and you are like me and have completely forgotten what it is, enter

 

chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul 

in the browser's location field, go to that page and then click on the Reset button in the bottom-right corner of the window.  That will clear the master password and all of your other saved site passwords in Firefox. 

Or you could ignore Joar's recommendations on browsers and just use Safari and be done with it.

Travis Barker Soulja Boy "Crank That" (remix)

Just enjoy.  Nothing better than seeing Travis Barker jamming out.

 

Bring the Noise!!

It's not elegant, but it works just the same. To access your NAS via SMB in Leopard try the following:

smb://username@IP-address

That should give you a password prompt and you should be able to connect from there.

If you are like me and got used to the SMB connection "just working" once you set it up under Tiger, you've probably forgotten your username by now. You should be able to find it in Keychain Access under the Passwords Category. As for the actual password itself, you're on your own. Try looking on that sticky note under your keyboard. (If you actually looked under your keyboard and actually found a sticky note containing your password, please slap yourself for me. Hard.)

Just so you can appreciate what a big deal it was for me to get this connectivity back, here is my setup: 

NAS containing movie library and entire iTunes library wired to Airport Extreme

Speakers wired to Airport Express

Airport Express wireless to Airport Extreme

MBP wireless to Airport Extreme

Now I have movies and music wherever again.  I love this shit.

It is all gone quiet, too quiet.

I have all of my music stored on a SimpleShare NAS that I access as a network drive through SMB. Everything worked fine in Tiger. Unfortunately, there is something freaky going on with SMB access in Leopard.

I've tried messing with my Mac's firewall and network settings, the Airport Extreme's settings, and anything else I can think of. No success so far. I suspect this may have something to do with Apple pulling the wireless Time Machine support, but I've got no fix yet.

Until then, its oh so quiet around here. 

Get the APE off your back and overcome the Leopard "blue screen" startup hang

You've installed Leopard and gotten the "Install Successful" screen, but on the first (and after every following and increasingly frustrating) startup attempt, all you get is a little hard drive activity and a blank blue screen with the mouse cursor in the upper left corner -- not quite a blue screen of death, more of a blue screen of chemically-induced coma, but just as annoying.

This is probably a fairly simple startup problem and not a my-entire-system-just-ate-itself install problem, so don't freak out just yet. Remember all those cool Unsanity haxies you installed back in the day?  They might not be playing so well with Leopard.  Basically, you need to get rid of the Application Enhancer (APE), but that's hard to do when your machine is stuck in an unresponsive haze.

The fix I used comes from here.  If you follow the link, the instructions are a little more detailed.  The long and short of it is this:  

1) Find a working Mac with a firewire port.

2) Connect the working Mac to your Mac via firewire (If your Mac doesn't have firewire I have no idea how to help you).

3) Restart your Mac in firewire target-disk mode (hold down T while starting up).

4) Using the working Mac, find the following files on your Mac and pull them to the trash.

/Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane

/Library/Frameworks/Application Enhancer.framework

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application Enhancer.bundle

/Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

5) Empty the trash and unmount the firewire drive for your Mac on the working Mac.

6) Unplug the firewire cable and restart your Mac.

7) Everything should be fine.

This worked for me, but your mileage may vary if you have other haxies installed.  Check out the compatibility list from Unsanity for more info.  Good luck.

UPDATE:

If you are a l33t h4x0r, you can do this:

1)  Boot your Mac into single user mode (hold down command-s while starting up)

2)  Get into the Terminal and delete the following using these commands:

rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane

rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework

rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application[no space here, it's just that my blogger formatting sucks]Enhancer.bundle

rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

3) Restart

Use these at your own risk.  If you don't know what you are doing with the command line, don't do anything with the command line.

Good luck.

Leopard is coming soon.

Getting pretty excited for Leopard. So excited I think I'm going to spring for iLife '08 tomorrow just because of the expected synergy between the two. I'm still fence-sitting about upgrading to QuickTime Pro 7. My gut tells me there's another version of that just around the corner.

Even if you don't have time

Maybe you don't have to be doing something else right now.  Maybe you just need to sit there and read some things and watch some things and take it all in and then reflect.  I suggest watching Dr. Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture" (sample here, full version here).  It will take a while.  It's worth it.  You can Tivo whatever else you had planned on watching tonight.  When it's over, just sit there and think for a little while about whatever.  And for the record, the attendant circumstances of Pausch's presentation, and the irony associated therewith (on so many levels), really have nothing to do, in my mind, with the value that can be taken from his presentation.  

So where am I going with this?  

The other day I read this thing about the powers of meditation and the witty quip at the end was: "If you don't have an hour in your day to meditate, then you need an hour in your day to meditate."  Or something along those lines.  I'm sure I butchered the quote.  But the issue I'm not framing very well here is that actually thinking about things (focusing, meditating, brainstorming, mind-mapping, dreaming, imagining, etc.) seems like it is becoming such a lost art.  It's being squeezed out by an almost compulsive need to be constantly doing all of these repetitive, mindless, time-filling things in a quantity over quality feeding frenzy and at the end of it all, nothing all that great has actually been accomplished.  I'm going to start allocating more time to thinking and less to doing and see if the quality of the doing doesn't markedly improve.      

M$ Office 2008

Just went to check out the new Office 2008 preview page at Mactopia and it loaded with all kinds of errors.  It finally choked out a completely useless black box on the screen.  Part of the copy on the link is: "Jump into the future".  Future's not looking too good at this point.  Someone in Redmond needs to be spending a little more time in the lab.  So do the guys working on IBM Lotus Symphony which has "support for Apple Macintosh planned for the future."  When is this crazy future office suite utopia coming?  It better not require any X11 hacks.  iWork is looking better and better everyday.

Road Map

I wanted to let everyone know where I'm going with this, but I don't really know for sure yet. For now, it's just going to be about things I come across living life as a somewhat well-adjusted tech geek. Really, I just needed another creative outlet and here it is. Please plan on having no expectations concerning posting frequency, content, or overall usefulness.

Enjoy.  Think.  Comment.  

Wordpress vs. Blogger

I've been messing around with Wordpress to see if I like it better than Blogger.  Some of the things on Wordpress are great.  I definitely like the templates and the integrated statistics.  But I think if I'm going to have a hosted blog, Blogger is the place for now.  More messing around and posting about posting as I get back into this.

iPhone posting

Still having some problems posting from Safari on the iPhone. Lots of delays and quirky behavior. However, persistance definitely pays because this post was done from my iPhone.

Complete Revamp

It's probably not actually going to be a complete revamp, but things will be different. I've been absolutely neglecting this site while considering dumping it completely and switching to Virb or Wordpress or something along those lines with more layout and design options. 

I quickly found out how little tolerance and time I have to learn Wordpress and deal with coding and hosting issues at the same time.  Then I thought about using their hosted site, but if I'm going to do that, I might as well just stay here.  I'll set up my own site someday.  For now, I'll see what I can come up with using Blogger. 

Is this giving in to content over form?  Maybe.  But I still need some kind of creative outlet to get me going.