Not too long ago I put together a screencast which aims to introduce Mac users who haven’t played with Terminal or command lines before and try and explain some of the initial concepts and to get doing a few things.
I’d love your feedback on the screencast — you can watch it either at its page on The Stealth Mac podcast website or Part 1 and Part 2 on YouTube.
I don’t like to browse the web with JavaScript and Flash and so-on automatically enabled unless I think I need it. A large percentage of ‘web annoyances’ can be avoided simply by turning off JavaScript and plugins unless you really need them. There’s also a security argument to doing this too.
In Firefox, I use NoScript to do this and it works really well. I’ve been using Safari more and more frequently in recent times, however, and I am not aware of a similar solution for the Mac’s default browser.
So I have devised a couple of AppleScripts, which were heavily inspired by and partially derived from the example on this Mac OS X Hints page. They allow me to toggle on and off JavaScript and plugins, respectively (I never have big Java switched on at any time!)
Please note that this is for Safari for Mac OS X only and is designed specifically for the new Snow Leopard Services functionality.
I have created them as Automator Services. The benefit of making them Services is that you can then assign a keyboard shortcut directly to the script and be able to simply press that keyboard shortcut to quickly invoke the script and do the toggle. It’s a lot quicker than hunting through a script menu or launching an application and doesn’t require any third-party software.
If you’d like to use these Services, download them below. Once unpacked, drop the files in ~/Library/Services, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, select Services from the list and assign your desired shortcut to the two scripts.
These scripts use Growl to notify you of the toggled state after the script has run. You’ll need Growl installed to make full use of it.
The first worm to infect the Apple iPhone has been discovered spreading ‘in the wild’ in Australia.
The self-propagating program changes the phone’s wallpaper to a picture of 80s singer Rick Astley with the message ‘ikee is never going to give you up’.
The worm, known as ikee, only affects ‘jail-broken’ phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.
The news of this worm is likely to attract the attention of some anti-Apple and anti-iPhone crowds and used as an argument as to why the iPhone isn’t secure, and Apple people should no longer feel safe and so on and so on.
To those who would seek to lose a sense of perspective on this story:
This worm works only on jailbroken iPhones (an unsupported procedure), where the user did not change the default root password and left the remote login SSH service running.
This attack says nothing about the security of the iPhone software — it exploits little more than very poor configuration on the user’s part. If you choose to jailbreak your device, you have a responsibility to understand the implications that has. Which means, change the damn root password to something other than ‘alpine’. While you’re at it, also change the password for the user mobile too.
Despite having defended the iPhone thus far, I’m not in the business of assuming Apple get every aspect of security right all the time and I’m not in the business of declaring the Mac or the iPhone to be ιsecure’, or more secure than anything else. As hope I made clear in my previous post, a simplistic black-and-white approach to looking at computer security doesn’t make any sense or do anyone any favours.
I’m not complacent about security because I use a Mac*. I am confident because I feel I have grasped a good understanding of the risks and of trust.
* or Linux, or anything that I perceive as being more secure.
I just wrote a review of Tweetie 2 for iPhone OS on the App Store. I republish it here; I’m extremely impressed with the new release.
Tweetie 2 has an impressive feature set, including retweeting, image and video (3GS only) uploading and almost every built-in Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible feature that is exposed by the API.
The real star of the show here, however, is the interface. It feels iPhone-native and intuitive while also introducing some innovative features such as the flick-to-reload mechanism. The app’s simplicity isn’t hampered by the sheer volume of functions and features — things are kept out of the way until and unless you want access to them.
I’m not a fan of the somewhat bland icon, but otherwise I can’t fault this beautiful little app.
You may be reluctant to pay for a Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible app, even at £1.79 — but if you appreciate great UI, you really should consider it.
I’ve been busy beavering away in Xcode and I am now proud to release version 0.3 of DfontSplitter for Mac.
So, here are the release notes:
As always, go across to the DfontSplitter project page to download the new release.
If you’re already using DfontSplitter for Mac, simply go to DfontSplitter > Check for Updates within the application to upgrade to the new release.
Thanks to a great suggestion by Nick Charlton, I decided to put together a screencast demonstrating how to set up public key authentication for logging into SSH servers on the Mac.
Setting up a keypair and then using it to log in to remote systems, instead of remembering separate usernames and passwords, can be a bit of a fiddly business, but I hope that in this screencast I can show how to get it set up.
Set Up Public Key Authentication for SSH on the Mac from Peter Upfold on Vimeo.
Take a look and let me know what you think!
I appeared alongside Hugo Poon and Jodi Spangler as guests on a roundtable episode of Matt Hillyer’s Stealth Mac Podcast. We talked for over an hour about Snow Leopard and particularly our install experiences and first week of using the new Mac OS.
It was great fun just to have a chat about Mac stuff with some great people. If you want to take a listen, go over to the podcast page or listen directly to the audio file.
UPDATE 2011-05-09: While some particularly stubborn fonts do require this process, users who have previously experienced difficulty with older versions of DfontSplitter should first try with DfontSplitter 0.3.1 or later, which include a possible fix for this issue.
I think I’ve finally found a solution to this annoying error message that Windows gives when you use DfontSplitter to convert some fonts and then try and use those converted fonts in Windows.
It involves using a third-party open source application called FontForge to convert the TTFs that DfontSplitter gives you from a Mac-specific TTF format into ‘regular’ TTF format.
A full tutorial on using this method is included as a YouTube video screencast below.
If you can’t or don’t want to watch the video, essentially the process is:
Please do let me know if this process works for you and give any feedback — especially if you’d previously had problems using a .dfont you had wanted to use on Windows.
UPDATE: As of iOS 4.2, you can now change the font via Settings > Notes. No hacks required!
If you don’t like Marker Felt, the default font used when writing notes in the Notes application in iPhone OS, you can actually write in a different font. It’s not a feature that is exposed via the user interface — in fact it seems to be something that is an unintended side effect rather than a feature.
First, you need to enable the Japanese QWERTY keyboard. From the home screen, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards. Now scroll to Japanese, tap it and switch on the QWERTY keyboard.
Now fire up Notes and make a new note, or edit an existing one. Press the globe button at the bottom left of the keyboard to switch over to the Japanese keyboard.
Then type a character — doesn’t really matter which one — and immediately press the globe again to switch back to your default keyboard. The rest of this note will be beautifully typeset in Helvetica.
A dual keyboard setup! Unnecessary? Perhaps. But it does prevent you from straining if you are typing ‘at’ something on the second monitor, which you want to look at whilst typing.
It’s also useful if you want to have something open for reference and glancing at up on the white MacBook screen (*cough* Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible *cough*). Just don’t need to type anything on that machine. And if you do, you hook up the wired Apple keyboard to that machine instead.
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