Cross Platform

Dec 29 2011

FireFox tip

Those of us in Canada are aware how our government keeps “shooting itself in the foot”. Those outside the country may not be aware just how silly and petty our government can get. For example they have this thing about promoting Canadian culture in the media. Not too bad on the surface of things right? Rather than encourage Canadians to produce our own material they de-regulate the media so they can purchase more American programming. Some of the stuff from South of the border is OK so it can rise and fall with the local ratings. However they take it a step further. If a Canadian station schedules a TV show at the same time as it is scheduled on an American station the cable companies are supposed to replace the American station with the Canadian station. This way the Canadian station can count local commercials as “Canadian content”. Of course this adds five minutes to the amount of commercials… The nasty part comes when we get to on-line content.

When viewing on-line content the government censors what we can see. I’m not talking about stuff like kiddie porn. I’m talking about over the air content. If a show is broadcast in Canada on a Canadian station, but is supplied by an American outfit Canadians have to go through the Canadian web site to view it. Part of the problem is some sites view on-line content as a preview rather than an archive or time-shift. So often not all of a show is available. Some times it is even missing. Yet on the American site it is all there. In this situation we have a message stating “This content is not available in your area”. Very frustrating…

There is a plugin for FireFox which seems to work with a few sites. It is called “Modify Headers”. True to the name it changes the header of what is sent out by FireFox to indicate a different geographic area. Essentially it persuades the computer to lie for you. This is different than going through a proxy server. The proxy server may actually be located in the same geographic area so essentially your computer wouldn’t by lying.

The directions for using this plugin are not inherently obvious. After some reading on the net I found out what to do.

  1. Surf to the site which has the blocked video.
  2. Under the tools menu access the Modify Headers plugin.
  3. In the first box enter “X-Forwarded-For” (it should auto-complete).
  4. Enter a numeric IP for the area in question (12.13.14.15 is suggested for the States,  no suggestion for Europe is given).
  5. Refresh the page.

At that point things should run properly. Apparently this doesn’t work on all sites. The reason I waited to post this was to see if I could find a site through every day surfing which wouldn’t work. So far I haven’t found one.

Followup: I tried this on a Mac running Snow Leopard. It didn’t work. Worst case… It should work in an emulator.

By BlankMike • Browsers, Cross Platform, Documentation, Review, Software, web browsers • 0 • Tags:

Dec 6 2011

Linux Mint 12

This article is presented for those with Intel Macs (and PCs) who choose to have an alternative operating system available. It is possible to install it as a Dual-Boot system, Virtual Machine, or just run it from the live DVD.

Late last month (November) Mint 12 was released to the public (free). Mint is a full multi-media distribution of Linux. There has been a lot of extremely positive press about this version. It’s almost as if someone hired the PR departments from both M$ and Apple. ;-) With all due respect, I disagree with their evaluation. I work with older computers and find it is barely usable. Here is why:

  • On a 32bit IBM Netvista running at 2.5GHz with 1GB of RAM it takes multiple attempts to install from the CD.
  • Once installed the default setting is to run Gnome 3.
  • The Gnome 3 desktop is very bare. There is no menu only the icons to access programs directly.
  • In order to access any sort of menu from Gnome 3 the user has to right click on the desktop and open a shell. From there they have to type “gnome-panel” every time they login.
  • The different system settings are spread across three different menu items.
  • In Gnome 3 I have yet to find a way to add items to the panels.
  • Most users have apparently stayed with Gnome 2 because most of the features they want are still there.
  • To change the panels in Gnome 2 the process has been changed from a right click to holding the <Alt> key while right clicking.
  • The whole system is slower than previous releases.
  • This release looks like it is becoming more bloated (still not as bad as as Windows or OS X).
  • The operating system is convinced my desktops are laptops. This means a whole lot of useless software gets installed.

There are a number of good reasons to consider this version:

  • IF it installs correctly, it is stable.
  • The eye-candy is appealing.
  • Under Gnome 2 all the previous software remains available.
  • Although I haven’t tried it, I have been told KDE works really well.
  • It includes newer programs than previous releases.
  • It installs very well in a Virtual Machine.
  • It is still faster than Windows and OS X.
  • The authors have bent over backwards to support laptops and netbooks. This is somewhat useless if it is installed on a desktop though.

My final impressions are the authors are telling the users what they want as opposed to listening to what the users want. Also that the new desktops resemble pre-OS X Macs or Windows 3.1 without the speed.

By BlankMike • Cross Platform, Emulation, Macintosh, Microsoft, OS X, Software, Updates • 0 • Tags: , ,

Nov 29 2011

Ghostery

Ghostery is an add-on to FireFox (and other web browsers) which stop sites from tracking users as they surf the web. Installing it depends on which web browser and which version is being used. A good place to start is either tools, extensions, or add-ons. Once installed and the browser is restarted, Ghostery will go through three or four configuration screens. The last screen lets the user select which tracking cookies/bugs to block.

One of the options is to let the user know which cookies/bugs are being blocked. My record is seven or eight sites. The average is around three. If you are like I am and want to maintain at least a minimum of privacy on the net, this is a good place to start.

By BlankMike • Ads, Cross Platform, Freeware, General, Software, Software Ads, web browsers • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Oct 13 2011

rsync

This is a command coming from the *NIX world I found to be useful for maintaining a backup for important software. It works either on a single computer or with two computers. The details can be found in the man page for the command. I’d like to thank Mike Doob from the MUUG for reminding me about this command.

The simplest way to use the command is “rsync <file list or directory 1> <file list or directory 2>”. All it does is copy files from area 1 to area 2 if they are newer than those in area 2.

To copy files from one computer to another the account name and computer name are needed. An example would be “rsync sbalmer@microsoft.com:/Secret_Meetings_To_Control_The_World.txt timc@apple.com:/Sunday_Coffee_With_Friends.text”. Incidentally, since they are different computers, passwords are needed.

I tried this a number of years ago with 10.2 and FreeNAS (FreeBSD) and apparently that was the only configuration which (according to everything I read on the net) would not work.

By BlankMike • Cross Platform, Macintosh, OS X, OS X Shell • 0 • Tags:

Oct 10 2011

Handbrake: A review

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving everybody.

This review will be just a quick one. I’m not an expert with this sort of thing and have only dabbled with it from time to time…

What is it?

Handbrake is simply a transcoder. It converts DVD’s to video files and video files from one format to another.

Does it work?

Yes. It does what it was designed to do quite well and actually is fairly stable in spite of having not been updated in a while.

What platforms does it run on?

It is cross-platform. It will run on Mac (Intel), Linux, and Windows. I reviewed the 32 bit Mac version.

Where can it be found?

http://handbrake.fr/

How much does it cost?

Like almost everything I review, it is free to use.

Any thoughts?

Yes. Plenty.

I rather like the interface. All the information is on the screen where I need it. It is quite intuitive. It even includes tool tips if anyone wants to know what the various settings do.

As I said, it converts DVD’s to video files as well as  video files from one format to another. I’m not sure how many formats are accepted for the source file. The output file will be one of two formats. It will be either an MP4 or MKV. There are lots of options for both.

It is possible to include subtitles with the final file. The program will look for internal or external text streams and add them to the resulting file. Through experimentation I found it is possible to add them as hard subs (as part of the video) or soft subs (the player displays them as a separate stream on the screen).

More features include optimisations for Macs and iPods.

Of all the similar tools I’ve used, it is on the slower side of things. For a 25 minute file it can take over an hour to convert.

In many countries (including Canada in a few weeks) this program is considered illegal since it bypasses the encryption of the original file in order to produce the new file.

By BlankMike • Converters, Cross Platform, Freeware, iPod, Macintosh, Microsoft, OS X, Programming, Software, Video Editing • 0 • Tags:

Oct 1 2011

aTunes – a cross-platform music player

A few minutes ago I downloaded and tried out a free music player called aTunes. They had a version update to 2.1.0. My impression is it is a good try. There are a couple of features which iTunes doesn’t have but (on the Mac at least) the interface is a little clunky. For the moment Apple doesn’t have much to worry about. However I can see where this project is going so it may be worth considering in the future.

The program itself can be downloaded from http://www.atunes.org/ but for the Mac there is a dependency. It also needs mplayerx to drive the sound. Mplayer needs to be installed first. This is fine for Linux users but Mac users will need to get it from the app store or go to their website and download it from Google apps. Since Apple doesn’t need to have my information I prefer to get the program elsewhere.

Once everything is downloaded and installed, aTunes will want to know the location of your “tunes”. I told it to select the user directory. It took so long looking for the files I told it to perform the search in the background. Since I only have a couple of tunes it seemed like a waste of time.

The way it plays the “tunes” is to call up mplayer and play it through that. Mplayer on Linux is a great program which everyone who isn’t running a server should install. Even on the Mac it is pretty good. On the Mac it likes to run everything. In order to stop a tune the user has to leave aTunes and tell mplayer to stop. This is the first of a couple of annoyances I find with aTunes.

When aTunes is running it presents the user with a multi-paned window similar to Banshee or RhythmBox on Linux. One of the panes shows the lyrics to the song which is currently playing.

I tried a couple of the features. They didn’t work out too well. The “Radio” section wouldn’t stream anything (could be my ISP) and nothing showed up in the podcast section.

As I said up front, it is a good effort. Keep working at it folks. I think they aren’t too far away from a very good product.

By BlankMike • Apps, Cross Platform, Freeware, iTunes, OS X, Review, Software • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Jun 5 2011

How to automatically mount an NFS drive (UNIX network) on OS X

This article is a variation/enhancement to a post I found at http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=9289 for a FreeNAS server. Of course purely Mac folks would likely want to stick with the AFP protocol. In terms of generalities the NFS server does not necessarily have to be running FreeNAS. It just has to work. FreeNAS is basically a “Swiss Army Knife” of external storage. I find it does a lot of things very easily. It doesn’t work on all machines (I’ve had a 60% success rate) but when it works, it works well.

The question of why anyone would want to run storage of any sort connected to a network drive over their LAN is simple. When people upgrade to new machines they frequently have the old machine sitting around doing nothing. In the case of some Intel Macs (or PCs) they can just throw in a HUGE amount of storage for the price of adding a little amount of storage to a current Mac. In my case I have access to free/cheap old PCs and parts. This allows me to use these machines to experiment and learn for free. Since we were looking at a problem regarding NFS at the lab this is exactly what I did.

First off the person doing this needs access to a working NFS machine. As I suggested before, FreeNAS isn’t necessary but is easy to install and configure. This step is one I will leave to the reader.

Second, go into a terminal and edit the /etc/auto_master file. The reader will have to use the sudo command to do so since it is a system file. If the reader is paranoid like me they should back up the file first so they can recover if there are any mistakes. The author of the article I used as reference wanted to install things under the /home directory. This is fine. Personally I wanted to see if I could put things in a different location. In this case I wanted them in /nfs. Rather than modify the existing line I added the following line…

/nfs                    auto_nfs        -nobrowse

The first part says where to mount the drive. The second is another file with further instructions. I have no idea what the third part does, but it was made clear it was to be there.

Third was to create the auto_nfs file. In this case I copied the auto_home file to auto_nfs. At that point I’ll skip ahead an hour and a half to the point where I replaced the last line in the file with the following line… ;-)

server 192.168.X.Y:/mnt/main           # Use directory service

First there has to be the name of a directory. In this case the drive will be mounted under /nfs/server. I gather it is set up this way because there is the possibility someone may want to mount multiple machines this way. Then is the location of the NFS device. The 192.168 part refers to a non-internet LAN. The reader should replace “X” and “Y” with the detailed location of the NFS server. The /mnt/main is the location on the server where the area to mount is located. The final part is a coment left over from the previous file and sort of kind of makes sense.

Apart from Step 5 everything is the same as in the reference article. Essentially all the reader has to do is type “sudo automount -vc”, test things, and they are done.

The down side is it appears to be mounted as read only. I’ll post an update when I figure out how to make it read and write. It may just be a permissions issue but it may be something else.

As a final thing I thought it would be a good idea to have quicker access to the device. I made a symbolic link to the mounted directory in my home area. This can be done in a number of ways. I just went into the terminal and typed “ln -s /nfs nfs”. So now I don’t have to go hunting through the whole computer to find the directory.

Considering I can access things with less trouble through afp, I’m not sure I’ll keep this available on the Mac.

By BlankMike • Cross Platform, Disk Images, Disk Storage, Hardware, Macintosh, OS X, OS X Shell, Software, Tips • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Apr 10 2011

Live Game CD

By now folks realise I’m into free stuff. I was looking around some of the social networking sites I frequent when I found this little gem. It’s a live CD with old DOS games for the PC. So why am I writing about it here? Simple answer… It works better on Intel Macs than it does on PCs. Well, at least it does on the machines I use. ;-)

The CD contains a whopping 40MB of games. Back in the day, that was a lot. Since it’s a live CD any games saved will only be saved for that session.

The system is a Linux system and emulates DOS with DOSEmu. There are about 10 public domain and freeware games including Doom and Heretic.

To find out more about the CD surf over to http://4mlinux.com/news.html. The only thing is a blank CD and knowledge on how to burn an ISO image.

By BlankMike • Cross Platform, Emulation, Games, OS X, Review, Software • 0 • Tags: ,

Apr 5 2011

Macports: Running Linux/BSD software directly on a Mac

I can hear “Mac purists” complaining about “polluting their computer with foreign software”. Sorry to dissapoint, but no computer, Mac or otherwise, is the be-all and end-all of computers. There are some things which work better on other platforms and conversely there are some things which work better on a Mac. The objective here is to add to the basic functionality of an excellent machine and make it better.

As the title suggest Macports is a way to add the functionality of other *NIX platforms to OS X. It is one of a series of packages which do pretty much the same thing. They go out to the Internet, download source code (and dependencies) of specified programs, compile them, then installed the compiled packages on the computer. For the geeks out there this will no doubt produce a “THIS IS FANTASTIC” reaction. For the non-geek, the translation is “this is a very good thing”. Compiling software for an individual machine means, depending on the quality of the compiler and source code, it would be very difficult to get faster and more stable software. Much of the software in the list has been reviewed, tested, and found to be good quality.

Macports is easy to use. It is run from the terminal and requires some typing. For example I found the ftp program installed in the shell to lack some features found in other programs. To install the ncftp program I typed the command “sudo port install ncftp”. After a few minutes the program was installed and running. It had to install the curses (cursor manipulation) package as a dependency first. The “sudo” is necessary unless the command is run from an administrator account. A special note… It is possible to install GUI programs (eg. gftp). However in order to run them it will be necessary to install a *NIX window manager. This means it will take up some space on the hard drive.

Other useful commands to know are “port help” for directions and “port list all” to get a complete list of programs which can be installed.

There are a few more games for Linux than there are for the Mac. This may help the Mac overcome its “game deficiency” (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mac+vs+pc+south+park&aq=8). ;-)

Installing Macports is simple. First make sure there is a lot of hard drive space. It is only necessary for the installation process. After that the actual amount of space used is quite small. Install the XCode either from the DVD which came with the computer or directly from Apple itself. Apply any updates if necessary. Get Macports (http://www.macports.org/). Open the DMG file. Double-click on the only file in the folder which opens on the desktop. Once authenticated, that’s all.

One last thing… I was very impressed to find newer versions of software available in the Linux repositories.

By BlankMike • Apps, Cross Platform, Freeware, Macintosh, OS X, Programming, Software, XCode • 0 • Tags: ,

Mar 30 2011

BASH reference

As is one can tell from the dates on my posts, I spent a while tracking this one down. The original link is in a now inaccessible e-mail account so I went out and located it directly on the web. The date of the manual is in 2010 so it looks as though it is being kept relatively up to date.

For those interested in why I am posting this particular link, the reason is simple. BASH is the shell used by OS X and one of the shells used by Linux/BSD. It ties in with the shell programming articles I’ve written recently. This link is to the reference guide/manual for the shell. All those Apple// folks who ended up with Macs can now start programming again. ;-)

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/

Incidentally to view the manual on-line the second of the first group of links is the best place to start.

By BlankMike • Cross Platform, Documentation, Manuals, OS X Shell, Programming • 0 • Tags: ,

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