I'm start to look into more secure ways to store sensitive data, and Apple's encrypted DMG disk images seem like a good compromise between security and convenience. If you're worried about long-term storage and retrievability it of course has the disadvantage of being a proprietary format, which means you would need an OS X machine to decrypt those disk images. Not any more! In one of the interesting talks I missed during last year's 23C3 (while being busy doing other things) Jacob Appelbaum, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and David Hulton presented their successful attempt to reverse-engineer the file format. They provide slides …

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The following text explains how to get the Linksys WUSB11 2.8 working on OS X, and probably any other wifi adapter based on an Atmel AT76c505 chipset. (Caveat: As far as I know Kismac still does not support Atmel devices.) Short version for people who have patched wifi drivers before: try the XTerasys XN-2122B drivers linked below. (mailtomomo indicates that AIN's AWU2000B also has a driver for OS X, and they do indeed have a download labeled "Mac driver", but that only links to an .exe) Skip the prelude if you only want the raw facts. Prelude London has a …

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I'm using a combination of fairly primitive methods to cope with blog spam. As this blog doesn't get too much comments the amount of manual work is relatively limited; main line of defense is an old-fashioned and relatively short blacklist. I'm notified of incoming comments, and in the rare event that a spam comment gets through I'll inspect it for new keywords. For a couple of months now it's become apparent that specific posts seem to attract more spam than others. I just thought that it may be great to have a statistic of this phenomenon -- so that I …

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I've been suffering from a minor iTunes annoyance for a while now and finally decided to look into it: There is no 'clean' way to import an audio podcast file into your main library. Audio files that come from a podcast feed are treated differently to 'normal' audio files in a number of ways, and sometimes that's not what you want. The simplest solution in most cases is of course to re-download the file from a browser or the commandline -- but in my case that didn't work because the file was no longer online. And dragging it to the …

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I decided on a whim to mirror "Network Forensics Evasion: How to Exit the Matrix" on my server, at least temporarily. This fairly elaborate text describes a number of technical (and some non-technical) means of hiding and obfuscating your "data trails". While this traditionally has mainly been a concern of crackers and dissidents, it's of increasing interest to the average consumer. I just started reading, so I can't say much about the quality of the document. The text comes with a disclaimer: I try to be as operating system agnostic as possible, providing information for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. …

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There currently are quite a number of very happy reactions over the announcement that Telestream's product Flip4Mac WMV is now available for free -- Flip4Mac WMV is a collection of "Windows Media® Components for QuickTime" that allows you to play certain Windows Media formats from within Quicktime, among them apparently some older formats that Microsoft's Media Player 9 for OS X can't play (I'm not actually sure about that, but this seems to be a reason why people install it -- that and the fact that MS has just discontinued their own Media Player.) It's curious that there is a …

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This documents how Apache 1.3 on OS X can be set up to serve .rhtml files using Ruby's ERB template system. Most of the required configuration is already described in Brian Bugh's article Using ERB/rhtml Templates On Dreamhost, but OS X's basic setup is conservative enough to require a little additional configuration. However the real reason I'm writing this is that I additionally wanted to limit the handling of .rhtml scripts to my user account's "personal web sharing" directory (which maps to a tilde URL like http://127.0.0.1/~username/), and this isn't as straight-forward, so it took me a while to …

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I just updated to 10.4.3, and after the first reboot Little Snitch reported a network request by Dock.app to apple.com -- something which had never happened before. The first time I let it slip, but the second request came when I opened Dashboard for the first time, and this time I started tcpdump before granting access. Among the expected traffic (updating the weather forecast) was a rather unusual request: 22:19:57.059318 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 27097, offset 0, flags [DF], length: 147) 192.168.0.4.50428 > www.apple.com.http: P [tcp sum ok] 1:108(107) ack 1 win 65535 0x0000: ..[.q>..$..^..E. 0x0010: ..i.@.@......... …

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Translation: The file 'iTunes Library' apparently is not a valid music library. iTunes has attempted to rebuild your music library and renamed this file 'iTunes Library (Damaged)'. Net result: the music is still there, but I have to manually reconstruct all podcast subscriptions... if I can even remember them. Otherwise: good luck reading the proprietary database format. Damn. Serves me right for being such a curious bastard. Note to self: next time wait. Let others do the mistakes of an early update. Update: Ok, I think I got them all. After about the third podcast I realized that Google …

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Judging from the screenshots, iTunes 5 has put an end to Brushed Metal!! Haven't installed it yet myself, but I'll take it as a sign for good things to come in 10.4.3. I'm also curious what other changes have lead to the major version jump -- let's hope they have made some improvements to the podcasting workflow. Judging from the feature overview page the sources list can now have folders, which is a really useful addition. And what the hell does this mean: "now supports iPod syncing for Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows PCs"?? …

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While playing around with the cool new <canvas>-tag, I found that Safari seems to have a bug in its canvas implementation -- it stops working as soon as you link an external style sheet to the HTML, even if the style sheet is empty. I'm not sure yet if this is an actual bug or if I'm overlooking something; but then, nobody is actually using <canvas> on styled production sites, and all the demos I saw online are using unstyled HTML, so it's not that unreasonable that it's not a well-known bug. Update: I posted this to the webkit-dev mailing …

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While writing another bug report for Apple's OS X feedback page I used the dictionary popup to look up the word "noticeable" (I always forget if it is written with or without an "e"), and found not only that I had gotten it right this time, but also that Apple has added a very nice description of when to use this term and when others are more appropriate. I use the dictionary popup all the time, but I've never seen this type of content: an introduction to better English language usage. Very nice! Here's the text: noticeable adjective easily seen …

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I'm currently testing the Safari CookieFilter script and have stumbled upon strange launchd behavior that I can't explain nor find a way to fix. Essentially launchd seems to be fairly liberal in how it interprets LaunchAgent triggers, and regularly seems to choke under conditions that I can't reproduce. The current release version of the CookieFilter LaunchAgent is designed to trigger the script every time there are changes to your Cookies.plist storage. But after running the LaunchAgent for a couple of days I found that it seems to stop responding to changes of this file. With some testing I found that …

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I was looking for ways to automatically start my Safari CookieFilter script, because if I had to launch it manually every time I wanted to clean up Safari's cookies I would never really use it. On a Windows machine I would put the script into the Autostart folder so that it would be executed upon system startup, but I've found that I never really reboot my Mac, so that wouldn't work. Another option would be a script that invokes CookieFilter before it launches Safari, and to only start Safari via this script -- but this idea seemed to simple and …

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Since Tiger I've been pretty satisfied with Safari, and there are fewer reasons to install third party plugins than ever. Yeah I could use Firefox's keyword search, but after having one too many browser crashes due to a SIMBL plugin running amok I figured I could just as well live without it. The only thing that has really been missing was a working Cookie whitelist. There is Cookies Eater, another SIMBL plugin; but that hasn't been updated for the current Safari version yet. And even if it had been, I'm not so sure that SIMBL is the best way to …

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