Letter From EFF on Net Neutrality
Posted by technohermit in FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality on 2010/01/14
If you don’t know about the Electronic Frontier Foundation, here is an e-mail request I just received from them to sign a petition to the FCC. It would be great if you could do it as well, it’s important. Here’s the letter, the link is at the bottom for the petition. Thanks!
“Last fall, the Federal Communications Commission proposed rules for “Net Neutrality” — a set of regulations intended to help innovation and free speech continue to thrive on the Internet.
But is the FCC’s version of Net Neutrality the real deal? Or is it a fake?
Buried in the FCC’s rules is a deeply problematic loophole. Open Internet principles, the FCC writes, “do not…apply to activities such as the unlawful distribution of copyrighted works.”
For years, the entertainment industry has used that innocent-sounding phrase — “unlawful distribution of copyrighted works” — to pressure Internet service providers around the world to act as copyright cops — to surveil the Internet for supposed copyright violations, and then censor or punish the accused users.
From the beginning, a central goal of the Net Neutrality movement has been to prevent corporations from interfering with the Internet in this way — so why does the FCC’s version of Net Neutrality specifically allow them to do so?
Go to the Real Net Neutrality petition to tell the FCC that if it wants to police the Internet, it first needs to demonstrate that it can protect Internet users and innovators by standing up to powerful industry lobbyists. Sign your name to demand that the copyright enforcement loophole be removed:
Sincerely,
Electronic Frontier Foundation”
Plus One for Red Laser
Posted by technohermit in Apps, iPhone on 2009/12/18
I found myself at a Best Buy about three weeks ago, looking around for things to go back home and buy over the internet. What I was doing was my annual adventure into real world Christmas shopping. I hate the real world honestly, mostly because of shopping…at a mall. Anyway, I found this hard drive I’d never seen before, so I pull out my iPhone, and start searching the intrawebz for some reviews. I don’t see anything favorable, so I move on.
Next item, a flat panel TV. Samsung. Nice, so again I go about trying to find the model number and such, type it into Google, find some reviews. Onto another site to check for prices. Rinse, repeat. Boring, really, and somewhat embarrassing. You look like a toolbag standing there hunting items on your iPhone only to walk out of the store an hour later with nothing in hand. How is Best Buy supposed to keep their brick and mortar operation going?
I’ll tell you how, and they need to thank the folks at Occipital Inc for writing the application Red Laser. This handy application costs at present $1.99, and is worth ten times as much in my opinion. It scans UPC’s of products using your iPhone’s camera. Then it searches the web for the item, returning web prices, local prices (by GPS if you choose to turn it on), nutritional info, and more.
So if you’re in Best Buy, you can show them that Wal-Mart has the same TV for less, price match it right there and buy it hassle free for the best price. Sweet. I have been using this at places like Borders and Barnes and Noble, where it is tremendously helpful with books and pricing. Try it out, trust me you’ll use it!
Occipital also makes some other apps, which I’m probably going to check out since Red Laser rocks so hard. Keep up the good work guys, truly genius.
Clearing Safari on iPhone
Posted by technohermit in iPhone on 2009/12/18
Safari on the iPhone is pretty straightforward. Open it, and you can search Google. You can open a new page while keeping your current page, or clear out the url and open another page right in the one you are viewing. Sometimes, though, that nagging buddy or family member wants to jump on your iPhone because they are stuck with a dumbphone, or worse–they are on Verizon.
You want to show off your technology, so of course you oblige. However, reliquishing your phone will let them see your browsing history and the last page you had open. Maybe the last page you had open was the site you ordered their holiday gifts from. Maybe it was worse, perhaps the site you thought about ordering them something from but then didn’t–you stingy son of a…
Well, fear not, clearing the history is simple enough. Click the little book icon on the lower toolbar, and it brings up the Bookmarks page. There you’ll see a link for your History. Click on that, and your History page opens. On the lower toolbar, on the left, is the Clear button. Click that, click confirm, and done. Simple enough.
If you don’t want them to see the last page you opened, that’s easy enough as well. Just open Safari, click the new page icon on the lower right, but don’t type in an address or a search. Click the new page button again, and close the page you don’t want them to see. This way, when they open Safari, it simply opens a blank page. This should be done regardless if you expect someone to use your phone or not. When I am finished browsing the web on my iPhone, I make it a habit to clear my recent pages. If they would only add this as an option to open blank windows by default, I’d be much happier.
You can also do the following from the Settings application on your home screen:
- Purge Cookies
- Choose How to Handle Cookies (Always accept, Accept from Visited, or Never Accept)
- Turn JavaScript on/off
- Enable/Disable Pop Up Blocking
- Clear Your Cache
- Clear Your History
- Turn on Autofill
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to clear single items from your history like you can do in big boy Safari. Hopefully that feature is coming down the line! The cache is something you may want to clear out once in a while, although there is no definitive way to find out its size on a stock iPhone. Or, at least they don’t make it obvious.
Moving Around in Vim
Posted by technohermit in Apple, OS X, OS X Shell, Uncategorized, Unix, vi on 2009/11/19
I’ve written a couple of beginning UNIX for OS X entries, such as creating a .bash_profile and .bashrc file using vim. Here is another vim tutorial for moving around in the screen editor, so you can see just how powerful it’s commands can be.
This post will deal with mostly command mode, the default mode when you open vim (or an existing file with it.) To move the command marker around the file without entering INSERT mode consists of four basic keys. Moving to the next/previous word, to the beginning of a paragraph, etc. will require a bit more memorization.
You want to first familiarize yourself with the h, j, k, and l keys. The outer two (on a standard keyboard) move your cursor left or right one-character; h, to the left, and l to the right. j will move your cursor up to the next line, while k moves it down one line. The fact that you are in command mode means no changes are made to your text at this point. You can use the arrow keys for the same functionality, but getting used to the keys will help you keep your hands where they belong–typing and editing text.
Moving to the beginning of the current line is done by pressing O (zero). To move to the end of the current line press $. + moves your cursor to the beginning of the next line, and – moves you to the beginning of the previous line.
Next are some basic ideas for commands. Some will take a number argument, followed by a command. Some can be written with a number argument followed by another command. For example, x in command mode means delete a character. To delete a word, or the rest of a word if you are in the middle of one, you type dw. If you precede x with a number, n, vim will delete the following n characters from the line. The command to delete the next four characters would be written, simply, as 4x. To delete the next four words, you would type 4dw.
Vim is a very capable text editor once you learn more about its commands, and get used to bouncing between INSERT and command modes. Below you can find a table of common commands and their function, at least enough to get you on your way as a skilled vim user.
|
Movement Command |
Function |
|
h |
Move Left One Character |
|
j |
Move Down One Line |
|
k |
Move Up One Line |
|
l |
Move Right One Character |
|
0 |
Move to First Character Of Current Line |
|
$ |
Move to Last Character Of Current Line |
|
+ |
Move to First Character Of Next Line |
|
w |
Move to Next Word or Punctuation Mark |
|
W |
Move to Next Word |
|
e |
Move to End of Current Word |
|
E |
Move to End of Next Word |
|
b |
Move Back to Beginning of Word or Closest Punctuation |
|
B |
Move Back to Beginning of Word |
|
) |
Move to End of Current Sentence |
|
( |
Move to Beginning of Current Sentence |
|
} |
Move to Start if Next Paragraph |
|
{ |
Move to Start of Previous Paragraph |
|
Delete Command |
Function |
|
x |
Delete Current Character |
|
X |
Delete Character Immediately Left Of Cursor |
|
dw |
Delete Current Word |
|
10dw |
Delete Ten Words |
|
D |
Delete To End of Current Line (also d$) |
|
dd |
Deletes Current Line |
|
20dd |
Deletes Twenty Lines |
|
dG |
Deletes From Cursor to End |
|
u |
Undo (doesn’t work for single character deletion) |
Cron Jobs on OS X
Posted by technohermit in Apple, OS X Shell, Uncategorized, Unix on 2009/11/15
Since OS X Tiger, cron has been replaced by a utility called launchd, and three separate launch daemons. Rather than having to run crontab to manipulate scripts, they are run by launchd according to three separate directories inside of /etc/periodic.
The scripts contained in these folders are run at specified intervals by three preference files, in XML format, found in the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons folder. You can manipulate the .plist files with a text editor or Apple’s Property List Editor (if you’ve installed Developer Tools.) They are named, simply enough, com.apple.periodic-daily.plist, com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist, andcom.apple.periodic-monthly.plist. They are, by default, set to run at the same time as the old cron jobs, in the middle of the night. If you happen to shut down your Mac, it might be a good idea to change these intervals to a time when you’re sure the computer will not be shut down, as these jobs are important.
You will find a script in each of these folders called 999.local. This file is set to read-ony by default, and is for ”backwards compatibility with the old /etc/daily.local” according to the comments in the file. (I’m running Snow Leopard.) I’d recommend not modifying the scripts in the /etc/periodic folders, and creating a /etc/daily.local, /etc/weekly.local, and /etc/monthly.local file for your cron jobs, as you have the 999.local script in each of the daily, weekly, and monthly sub-directories of /etc/periodic to tell your scripts to run. Any future system updates could change the default files in those three directories, so if you modify those you may end up losing your scripts. Avoid that by setting up your own.
If you are running aTiger, the 999.local file may not exist, and you will have 500.daily, 500.weekly, and 500.monthly files inside their appropriate /etc/periodic directories. You should still create a daily.local, weekly.local, and monthly.local script file and place them in the /etc directory, and they will be called from the respective 500.* file.
Stop error c0000218 Hive file Corrupted or Missing
Posted by technohermit in Boot Problems, Uncategorized, Virus Issues, Windows on 2009/11/11
I was searching around for this error on an older Dell 8300 running Windows XP. It seems Microsoft’s KB Article doesn’t have a fix for someone with an OEM installation of Windows XP. Also, it doesn’t mention anything about the SECURITY file mentioned in my stop error message.
The problem here was a pretty bad virus infection. What I was able to do to fix it and get Windows to boot, was to pull the drive and connect it to another Windows machine and run chkdsk. I probably could have used my XP Pro CD and run chkdsk from the Recovery Console, but I’m going off the assumption that if you have an OEM CD, this feature may not be available to you. If you have it, run chkdsk /f at the command line. Otherwise, connect the drive to another machine running XP or better via USB and run it from there. To access the drive, you need a USB enclosure and a computer running XP, Vista, or 7.
In Windows, type Windows Key+E to access Explorer. Find your newly connected drive in the left-hand column and right-click to open the menu. Click on Properties. Click the Tools tab, and then click Check Now. Be sure to check for bad sectors and file structure errors, even though it takes a little longer for the sectors check…mine had bad sectors. After it finishes, if it’s found and corrected the errors, you should be able to boot into XP when you reinstall the drive to the problematic computer. From there, be sure to pick up Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware and either Kaspersky Anti-Virus or NOD32 Anti-Virus, as you probably have a case of the virus blues.
I highly recommend you get Dr Web’s LiveCD, a bootable anti-virus disk. The image you download will be in .iso format, so be sure you can burn it to a CD from the computer you are using. I assume, if you’re reading this, you do have access to a bootable computer 
There are a few things you should do, once you get your computer back to running condition.
First, get off Internet Explorer! Use a browser such as Firefox or Google Chrome.
Second, be sure to get yourself a paid for subscription to one of the above mentioned anti-virus programs. Obviously the one you are (or lack of one, for that matter) using isn’t effective. Good luck getting up and running, and thanks for reading!
Time Machine Not Backing Up Anymore? Try iBackup Instead.
Posted by technohermit in Apple, OS X, iBackup on 2009/11/08
[Check out iBackup here, if you hate to read.]
Well, what I thought was totally awesome the first time I ran it turned out to be not so good. OS X’s Time Machine let me down, and for the past three days I’ve been searching for a way to fix it. I managed to make a full backup to my FireWire drive the first time I ran it, and it seemed really cool. I am backing up to an external FireWire 400 drive, and trying to backup my MacBook Pro.
This is a notebook, and keeping Time Machine running didn’t seem like such a great thing for me. Keeping an external disk tethered to my MacBook Pro wouldn’t win any awards for mobility, for sure. I backed up, turned Time Machine off, and ejected my external drive. I was happy. A week later, I mounted the FireWire drive, and all seemed well. Turned on Time Machine, and it recognized the backup, I could flip through hourly backups, and it all looked great. I tried to run a new backup before going off to sleep, however, the next morning only 27KB had been transferred.
Obviously something went awry. No errors, no warnings, and the little backwards running icon in the menubar was still happily plugging along. What was apparent, though, is Time Machine had failed miserably. As I’ve looked deeper into this across many a forum, as well as various blogs, this is widespread and most users with difficulties such as this have moved to Snow Leopard 10.6.1. If you are running 10.6.0 and don’t have any issues with Time Machine, don’t update to 10.6.1. I did run across one cool widget that tells you Time Machines logs, called Time Machine Buddy.
I tried various things, from deleting the com.apple.timemachine.plist file in the Macintosh HD –> Library –> Preferences folder. This is a system-wide application and you won’t find a plist file in your home directory. I tried deleting the partial backup from my FireWire drive, and the alias file as well. I checked the .Trash folder on the FireWire drive to be sure there weren’t any remnants on the drive. Reboot after reboot, unmount and mount, nothing would fix it. So, as a last resort, I formatted the FireWire drive and started over. I made sure it was set up by the book. Nothing works to fix it, and the weird part is I never get an error. On my last attempt before looking into alternatives, I waited 6 hours to transfer 11KB. The furthest I ever had gotten was 5GB, which I thought would be it. Nope, stuck there for eternity. So, until Apple helps us out and gets it fixed, I’m moving on.
I found this sweet donationware application called iBackup. It doesn’t do nearly what Time Machine is supposed to, but for someone like me who just wants to backup my home folder, where my Sites, Downloads, Documents, etc. reside, it seems like it’s going to work out beautiful. 14GB of data transferred over to my FireWire drive in about 20 minutes, with no headaches. I like that. And it’s free for personal use, although I will probably throw the creator a donation because it’s what you should do when someone writes a handy application that you are going to keep using for eternity. I want them to keep publishing it, of course!
So here are some screenshots, you can read more about the Preferences and Plugins following the images (click to enlarge):
Main iBackup Screen
System Settings Plugins
Profile Preference 1
Profile Preference 2
Profile Preference 3
Profile Preference 4
Profile Preference 5
Profile Preference 6
iBackup doesn’t support incremental backups, however, it does only copy items that have been modified. It uses straight up UNIX commands to copy your files, which you can see in the screenshot directly above, labeled Profile Preference 6. iBackup, on the initial backup uses the ditto command, and for subsequent backups (I’d rather they called them “synchronizations”), it uses rsync. As Apple has developers moving away from resource forks, rsync will be an easier tool to use for OS X consumers. If you hate the Terminal, this backup solution makes it quite easy to use a complicated command.
Other features I like to see, that Time Machine completely lacks, are the ability to backup to Windows hosted shares, via both AFP and SMB servers, ethernet connected drives, as well as encrypted sparse images. Quite nice. I must admit, I was going to try Time Machine down the road if I see Apple has fixed it’s problems, but something like iBackup for Mac is a product that will be tough to get me away from. Being able to use ethernet connected drives on my Gigabit network will certainly be a necessity; since I already own some LaCie drives, I never planned on buying a Time Capsule anyway.
Setup Your .bash_profile On OS X | A Sample Bash Profile
Posted by technohermit in Apple, OS X, OS X Shell, vi on 2009/11/07
This is another addition to my entry level OS X shell category. This one covers setting up a more detailed bash profile, so certain things are done by default when you open your Terminal.
We start by opening the Terminal in your ~/Applications/Utilities folder. If you don’t know what that means please start with this post, as it will show you a very basic beginning to the Terminal in OS X. Be sure you are in your home directory by typing pwd at the bash prompt and hit enter. It should look similar to this:
Next, we start vim opened to your .bash_profile. At the bash prompt type vim .bash_profile and hit enter. If the file exists, it will open it, if not it will create one for you. Your Terminal window should now look like this:
My screen shows one alias I created in my last tutorial. I like that one but technically it doesn’t belong in your .bash_profile, it belongs in a file called .bashrc. The .bash_profile is for your login shell options, and the .bashrc file is read for subsequent interactive shells; meaning a shell opened to type commands, not just to run a script from a file automatically. You can launch another shell on top of your login shell by typing the shell name at the prompt, i.e., bash, and then hitting enter.
This lesson will focus on login defaults, such as the PATH variable in your .bash_profile. In the process, we will be using vim, so if you are unfamiliar with that, practice makes perfect!
The PATH variable is where the system searches for binaries (shell scripts, programs, etc.) to execute. All UNIX systems provide a default path, but you can add to it. As you add scripts of your own creation and such, you probably want to create a directory in your home folder to store them. This way if you screw something up, it will affect you and not the system. For example, an erroneous rm command if you are in the /bin directory could be really bad news.
Let’s go ahead and first create a new directory called bin in your home directory. Create a new interactive shell by pressing ⌘-N. Type mkdir bin and hit enter. Now type ls and hit enter. You should see the new directory listed with your other folders:
This is where you can store any shell scripts that you create, as they are easy to find in this folder. In vim, type “i” without quotes to get you into INSERT mode. You will see –INSERT– at the bottom of your Terminal window. Now you can begin typing text. You should comment your script files, and your other various profiles so you know what something does if you ever need to edit. It’s just good programming practice to get the comments done as you progress with coding, not when you’re done!
To make a single line comment, the first character on the line needs to be the pound sign, #. Type in #Additional binary folders, and hit enter. Next, we set the PATH like so, to *add* to the default PATH: export PATH=$PATH:/Users/yourusername/bin
You can see in my screenshot below what the file should look like. Replace the yourusername with your actual username for your account. Mine is Tech, so that’s how it shows in my screenshot. Also keep in mind, that UNIX is case-sensitive:
Now you can save this by hitting the escape key, and typing :w then pressing enter. Let’s add some more commands to the profile. We can set a welcome message to the login, and set the shell’s timer to check for new mail. This really only matters if you use a text-only mail client, such as PINE or Alpine. It will not affect the OS X Mail client.
Set a message to display when you login with the echo command. This is a good command to know for the command line as well, as you can see certain system variable settings, such as your current PATH. You can do this by typing echo $PATH at the bash prompt and hitting enter. To use echo in your .bash_profile to set a welcome message, type echo followed by the message:
echo Welcome back, Mr Awesome! Your present working directory is: $PWD
looks like this when you log in:
To set the mail check timer, write a line in your .bash_profile like so: export MAILCHECK=30
The time set is in seconds, and OS X’s bash shell by default is set to 60 seconds. Your .bash_profile should now look similar to this:
Next time I will cover creating a simple shell script, and changing file permissions to run them. Also, I will try to cover some common aliases, as well as creating your .bashrc file, which is where we store the aliases. Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to ask!
Using vim In OS X — A Text Editor Tutorial For Beginners
Posted by technohermit in Apple, OS X, OS X Shell, Uncategorized, vi on 2009/11/03
Here is a quick tutorial for people unfamiliar with text editors in UNIX. If you are just getting started with the Terminal in OS X, you probably need to create your .bash_profile and such, so that you can keep your settings upon logging out of the shell. I will show you how to create this file in a text editor called vim, which stands for vi IMproved.
Vim is a very powerful text editor, and if you have any experience in UNIX at all, you probably were shown pico, which is easier to use at first due to some of the commands being shown at the bottom of the screen as you work in pico’s buffer. In pico, there is no separation from command or input modes, also making it a bit less confusing. The buffer simply means what is shown on your screen, not yet written to disk. While a GUI text editor such as Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages do not tell you that you are working in a buffer input mode, technically it is the same thing. If they crash, you lose what you changed if it was not saved prior to the crash.
Vim is a little obscure, yet extremely functional. You start vim by typing vi or vim at the bash prompt in Terminal. Terminal is located in your ~/Applications/Utilities folder by default on OS X. When it opens, you are by default in command mode. Vim shows you this startup screen, which has a bunch of tildes (~) on the left-hand side, and some version information in the center:
vim Startup Screen OS X Snow Leopard
If you type something in, the startup screen goes away and the first tilde also disappears. The tilde characters simply clarify lines in the buffer. They will not print, they are just there showing you where the next lines are. Once started, you are by default in Vim’s command mode. If you type vim testfile.txt at the bash prompt, vim will open the file testfile.txt in whichever directory you are currently in. If testfile.txt doesn’t exist, vim will create the file and open into the edit buffer for you, skipping the welcome screen:
Vim Buffer
As shown in the screenshot (click to enlarge it, as with all screenshots on this blog), the buffer is in INSERT mode. By default, no matter what file you open or create, vim starts in command mode. It doesn’t ever show —COMMAND— at the bottom of the screen. Vim lets you know you aren’t in command mode by telling you that you are in INSERT mode.
To get back into command mode, which is where you will end up saving files to disk, changing the contents of vim’s 26 named buffers (consider them like the clipboard in a GUI text editor), moving around the screen, deleting lines, etc. Anything you want to do with the file besides type in text will generally be done in command mode. Let’s save this file now, so you can see how it works to get in and out of command mode.
First, hit the ESC key. On almost every keyboard ever, this will be the key at the very top-left corner of the keyboard. You should no longer see –INSERT– at the bottom of the Terminal window. Now type the following command, without the quotes: ”:w testfile.txt“. See screenshot below:
Write Command
File Saved
You can see at the bottom of the Terminal window that the write command was successful. You also see that three lines were written containing a total of 138 characters. You can verify the file was written by typing (again, without quotes) “:q“, and hit enter. This quits vim. At the bash prompt, type “ls” and hit enter. You should see your new file in the list of the directory. To remove (delete) the file, type “rm testfile.txt” and hit enter.
Now to create your .bash_profile, so you can save certain settings. When Terminal starts, it will read this file to load alias information, screen settings and such, if they are explained in this file. As you become more familiar with the Terminal and start to have preferences for certain things, i.e., showing hidden files when you get a list of a directory, you may want to create an alias for the ls command so it shows them by “default” because of your .bash_profile.
First, navigate to your home directory if you are not there now. You do this by typing the command “cd ~” at the bash prompt and hitting enter. Terminal will show your computer name, followed by your present working directory, and yourusername$, which is the bash prompt. You should see something like this:
Bash Prompt
Create your empty .bash_profile by typing “vim .bash_profile” and hitting enter. We will create a simple alias and save the profile. Then we will quit Terminal, restart it and verify the alias still works.
Alias in Profile
By default, the alias wouldn’t work again after you quit Terminal. If it is in your profile, it will work when you open a new Terminal, such is the point of having a profile. To type in what I show above, press the letter “i“ on your keyboard to put you in insert mode. Then type the following exactly:
dirA=”ls -lia”
Hit the ESC key, and type: “:w” to save the file. Now type “:q” to exit vim and return to the bash prompt. You can verify the file was written and it’s contents by typing “cat .bash_profile” and hitting enter:
Verify File Was Written
Now quit and re-open Terminal. You should now be able to get a detailed list of your directory, showing hidden files, by typing dirA and hitting enter:
Working dirA Alias
Next time I will show you how to navigate through text, delete lines and add or retrieve lines to and from the named buffers. If there are certain things you would like to learn about Terminal or vim, please leave comments below. Please also let me know if any of this could be better clarified, as I check my comments often and will respond promptly. Thanks for reading!
Encrypt Your Email Address On Your Website
Posted by technohermit in Internet, Web Tech on 2009/11/02
No one likes spam, except spammers. When you put an email address on a website for the world to see, you expect that a human will be sending you something interesting to read. What you get is a bunch of robots telling you how cheap they can sell you something to make your junk bigger, or your butt smaller.
I found this sweet website that will let you put in your email address and a link text (what people will see), then hit submit and it hooks you up, right there, with an HTML encrypted anchor tag to copy and paste onto your website. Sweet. I’ve seen programs that do this, but this way there is no need to download anything. Robots won’t read it, but humans can. People can even click on it to open their mail application. Nice.
Here’s the link: Mysterious Ways
