The Author – Bart Busschots
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Dec
5
Irony of the Best Kind – MPAA Site Taken Down for Copyright Violation
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | 1 Comment
According to this article on Boing Boing the MPAA were hit with a DMCA take-down notice for copyright infringement. I have to say I actually laughed out loud when I heard this first. Then I stopped and thought about it and am just disgusted at their hypocrisy. They spend all their time up on their high horse as defenders of the rights of artists and here they are, violating the rights of a different breed of artist, programmers. I for one can not believe the MPAA are actually genuine about their desires to protect those poor artists copyright when they shit upon the copyright of others from a height. The MPAA is about money, not the defense of the rights of copyright holders and here we have yet more proof of that. Down off your high horse already!
Dec
1
Skype has a feature called Automatic Gain Control which it uses to try to improve the audio quality of your call. When skype thinks your sound levels are not right it starts messing with your volume controls behind your back. Most of the time this works fine but not always. And when it gets things wrong you have a problem. There is no way to turn this feature off anymore! It used to be an option in older versions of Skype but not anymore. To be honest that’s a pretty retarded thing for the Skype people to do. Myself and Allison Sheridan ran into this problem when we tried to record our weekly ‘chit chat across the pond’ segment for the NosillaCast podcast over skype. No matter what Allison did her levels always dropped too low. She’d put them just right and then within 20 seconds they’d be all wrong again. Took us a while to figure out what was causing this, but in the end we figured out that it was Skype’s Automatic Gain Control ‘feature’. It took a lot of Googling but Allison found the right answer in the end.
[tags]Skype, Automatic Gain Control[/tags]
Dec
1
I’ve been looking for a good fast fixed-focus lens for a while. It was quite tough because I have a Nikon D40 and very few lenses autofocus on this camera because it doesn’t have it’s own built-in focusing motor. This means that only lenses that contain their own motor will auto-focus on the D40. After a lot of searching I finally settled on the Sigma 30 mm F1.4 DC lens. It arrived earlier this week so I’ve been doing a little playing around with it since.
[tags]30mm, Sigma, DSLR, Nikon D40[/tags]
Dec
1
Apple’s security reputation takes another dent this week with yet another zero-day exploit in its QuickTime media player. There is now proof-of-concept code out there which uses this exploit to remotely compromise computers running both Windows and Mac OS X. The vulnerability exists in QuickTime’s handling of media streamed over the RTSP protocol. If you are a bad guy all you have to do to use this exploit to attack someone is to get them to open a specially crafted RTSP URL (a url starting with rtsp://). If the victim’s browser has JavaScript enabled you can make things even easier for yourself, you can get JavaScript to open the RTSP URL for you! What this all means is that you can now have your Mac compromised by simply visiting a web page. This is a lot worse than the Trojan that I discussed a few weeks ago where you had to actually download and install a program giving it admin access in the process in order to be compromised. I should mention that this exploit does NOT give the attacker admin access to your machine, it ‘just’ lets the attacker run any code they want as the user running QuickTime. This is not as bad as an exploit which would allow the attacker to execute any command as root/admin but it’s still very bad.
You can get more details from US-CERT. That page also gives you some guidance on protecting yourself. However, those instructions are very windows-centric.
[tags]Apple, QuickTime, Zero Day Exploit[/tags]
Nov
26
Irish Residents – BEWARE of Audible.co.uk
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | 26 Comments
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Loads of them are sponsored by Audible.com and the service they offer sounds fantastic. With that in mind I went to sign up today. I didn’t get far. Firstly the US site told me to go to the UK site instead. Pity, there goes my free book for using a promotional link from a podcast. However, their service did sound good so I did as I was told and went over to the UK store. It let me sign up no problem. Took my credit card details and welcomed me aboard. Unfortunately it all went down-hill from there.
Read more
Nov
26
Another Nice QuickLook Plugin
Filed Under Computers & Tech | Leave a Comment
Following on from my post yesterday about the Enscript QuickLook plugin I came across another nice QuickLook plugin today. When it comes to viewing images, movies, text, office documents etc. QuickLook is great. When it comes to showing you a folder it is USELESS! It just shows a massive folder icon. What’s the point of that! Well, Folder.qlgenerator offers a nice alternative. It shows a list of folder contents with thumbnails as the QuikLook preview for a folder. This is a great little third-party tweak for OS X Leopard.
[tags]Apple, Leopard, OS X, QuickLook[/tags]
Nov
25
Bart’s TimeMachine Tips
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security, System Administration | Leave a Comment
Time Machine is the fantastic new backup feature built into OS X 10.5 Leopard. It’s pretty simple to set up and it will work if you leave all the defaults as they are. The defaults are fairly intelligent. For example, your Library/Caches is automatically excluded from the backup. However, if you wish to use space on your Time Machine disk efficiently you may wish to configure Time Machine to exclude a few more folders.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, Time Machine[/tags]
Nov
25
This week I installed my first QuickLook extension, QLEnscript by Dave Dribin. It uses the Enscript libraries to provide syntax highlighting for a number of common languages within QuickLook. Nothing fancy but handy for programmers none the less. You can find out more in this post on Dave’s blog.
[tags]OS X, Leopard, QuickLook, Enscript[/tags]
Nov
19
Yesterday I pointed out that OS X Leopard actually looks BETTER on old hardware because some of the fluff is turned off. This obviously implies that there is some hidden internal setting for controlling the fluff. Well, someone has found that setting! With a simple terminal command you can now get the nice solid Menubar on any Mac. Just fire up a terminal and enter the command (all on one line):
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1
You can only do this from an administrator account and you’ll have to enter your password. The command won’t have an immediate effect. You have to reboot your Mac to see your new and improved Menubar. I’ve tested this on my G5 PowerMac and my MacBook Pro, it seems to work flawlessly.
You can get more details in this ars technica article.
Nov
18
I have Leopard running on a range of machines from a first generation MacMini with a G4 processor and 32MB of graphics RAM, to a 17″ MacBookPro with a CoreDuo and 256MB of graphics RAM. Leopard runs brilliantly on both machines, however, there are some subtle differences in the visual window-dressing Leopard chooses to use on these two machines. This results in Leopard being a little more visually pleasing on one machine than on the other. Naturally you’d assume that it’s the modern machine that gives the best experience, but you’d be wrong. Surprisingly and somewhat ironically it’s the old G4 on which Leopard looks the best. This is because some of the fluff is disabled on older machines like the G4 MacMini. The two biggest differences are in the presentation of the Menubar and TimeMachine.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard[/tags]