Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Media, Software, Utility
Thursday May 22, 2008
Here are a few quick looks at some interesting freeware for the Mac. We are strong supporters of freeware unlike the ‘hard cider boys!” Take a look and let us know what you think of these freeware programs.
Smultron Text Editor
Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs - like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on.
[ http://smultron.sourceforge.net/ ]
Cyberduck
Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour, QuickLook and the Keychain. Cyberduck is free software. Current available localizations are English, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Danish, Polish, Indonesian, Catalan, Welsh and Thai.
[ http://cyberduck.ch/ ]
Delivery Status 4.2.1
Can’t wait for your packages to arrive? Don’t waste your time checking the site constantly, just open this all-in-one delivery tracker and enter your order number or tracking number. The status will update automatically for you, and even count down the days! It also works with Growl to give you pop-up message, email notifications, and more, whenever your package status changes. If you have more than one order, just open another copy of the widget so you can keep an eye on them all at once!
[ http://mikepiontek.com/software/mac/delivery-status.html ]
Mactracker
Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made, including items such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, Apple TV, iPhone, Wi-Fi Base Stations, Newton, and Mac OS versions.
[ http://www.mactracker.ca/ ]
AppUpdate
App Update is a free Dashboard Widget that can automatically check for updates to your installed software. It supports Apple’s software directory, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. It will present you with a tidy link list of all the updates found, enabling you to read release-notes and download the the updates quickly and painlessly.
[ http://gkaindl.com/software/app-update ]
WidgetUpdate
Widget Update is a free Dashboard Widget that can automatically check for updates to the all the other widgets that you have installed. It supports Apple’s software directory, DashboardWidgets.com, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. It will present you with a tidy link list of all the updates found, enabling you to read release-notes and download the the updates quickly and painlessly.
[ http://gkaindl.com/software/widget-update ]
VLC media player
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
[ http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ]
Amaya Editor/Browser
Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium. Work on Amaya started at W3C in 1996. Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.
[ http://www.w3.org/Amaya/Amaya.html ]
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Software, Utility
Sunday May 18, 2008
This article assumes that you are already able to ssh into a remote server using a password (that is, that your account has been created on the remote system and you are able to access it). Here’s how to set up ssh public/private key authentication so you don’t have to use the password on future logins, or so you can use Public Key authentication with MacFusion.
First, open a terminal or iTerm window as we will be using it for most of the following operations. First, navigate to your home directory, and see if there is a folder called .ssh. Note that Finder will NOT show you this directory unless you have it set to show all file extensions, so since we are at a command line prompt anyway, it’s easiest to just type “cd ~” (without the quotes) to go to your home directory in Terminal or iTerm and type “ls -a” (again without the quotes - always omit the quotes when we quote a command) to see if the .ssh directory exists. If it does, go into the directory (”cd .ssh”) and see if there are two files called id_rsa and id_rsa.pub (use “ls -a” again). If either the directory or the files do not exist, you will need to create them.
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "your@emailaddress.com"
Replace your@emailaddress.com with your email address - this is just to make sure the keys are unique, because by default it will use your_user_name@your_machine_name.local, which might come up with something too generic, like john@Mac.local. It’s unlikely that anyone else is using your e-mail address in a key.
Now, from your terminal or iTerm window, execute the following commands. Replace username with your login name and remote with the address of the remote system. Note that you should NOT be logged into the remote system when you execute these - these are run from a command prompt on your local system, and you probably will be prompted to enter your password (for the remote system) after each of at least the first couple of commands:
ssh username@remote ‘mkdir ~/.ssh;chmod 700 ~/.ssh’
The above creates the .ssh directory on the remote system and gives it the correct permissions.
scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@remote:~/.ssh/authorized_keys
The above copies your public key to the list of authorized keys on the remote system (creating the list if it does not already exist).
ssh username@remote ‘chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys’
This fixes the permissions on the authorized_keys file on the remote system.
And, that’s basically all there is to it. If you are the system administrator of the remote system, but you don’t ever plan to login from a remote location as root, then for extra security edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the remote system (you’ll probably have to be root, or use sudo to do this task). Just use your favorite text editor on the remote system to open the file, and look for a line that says:
PermitRootLogin yes
And change the “yes” to “no”. If you don’t have permission to edit this file (even by using sudo) then don’t worry about it, because you probably can’t login as root anyway.
The above are very basic instructions for setting up ssh public/private key authentication. There are other ways to do this (including some that are arguably a bit more secure) but we wanted to keep it simple. Hopefully this will help someone who is using ssh, MacFusion, etc. and wants something a bit more secure and less bothersome than password access.
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Programming, Review, Software, VoIP
Saturday May 17, 2008
Gizmo5, formerly known as Gizmo Project, is both a service and a software client. The software is available for many platforms, including Mac OS X, of course.
Basically it allows voice and video calls and instant messaging between Gizmo5 users. The calls are free as long as you’re calling another Gizmo5 user, and you can purchase credit to use for outgoing calls to regular landline phones. Now, you probably are already using another instant messaging client, so we won’t dwell on that functionality, except to say that Gizmo5 will work with most of the major IM services.
As for VoIP, most people are familiar with Skype. The problem with Skype is that everything about it is closed - it uses its own protocols, and doesn’t play well with other VoIP services and devices. Gizmo5 uses SIP protocol, and this opens up some interesting possibilities. For example, you could use the Gizmo5 client to access another SIP-based service, or you could use a hardware VoIP adapter or even an Asterisk server trunk to access your Gizmo5 service. If you don’t understand anything of what I just said, let me mention something that everyone will understand - with Gizmo5, you can potentially get more free calls, if you know how. Not only that, but your friends around the world may be able to call you from their landlines or cell phones, using a number that is a local (or nearly local) call, if they’re willing to dial a few extra digits.
Really, the problem with Gizmo5 seems to be that it was designed by true geeks, and they gave it all sorts of interesting capabilities, but they don’t do a great job on their site of telling you all about the various capabilities in a nice summary - the information is there, but the site has so many pages that finding anything specific might take a while. So, we’ll just point out a few things. We’ll warn you now that if you have no interest in getting free calls, and you’re not particularly interested in VoIP or geek-type stuff, you might not care to read any further - go ahead and skip to the next article. Still with us? Okay, here’s how to get to the free stuff!
First, there is what Gizmo5 calls Backdoor Dialing. As their site explains:
Approximately 11% of US telephones, including mobile numbers and land lines from carriers such as Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc., are connected via VoIP. Working with telecom partners we are now making it possible to dial these numbers without going through the traditional phone system.
This means you can call certain mobile and land line numbers from any computer connected to the net and talk for free. Because these calls are bypassing the traditional phone network entirely there is no per minute fee or other charge for the caller regardless of where they call from.
Now, interestingly enough, this “Backdoor Dialing” can even be used if you have set up a trunk on an Asterisk/FreePBX box but the one thing they don’t tell you is that the moment the called party answers, both parties hear a short recording that says, “This is a free call from anywhere in the world using Gizmo5″ (or something pretty close to that). They probably do this to keep businesses from (ab)using the service, but the recording is still a bit annoying. Still, it’s possible to use Backdoor Dialing without purchasing any outgoing call credit, so if you have friends with cell phones with U.S. numbers, you just might be able to call them for free. We were surprised to discover that we could make calls even to customers of MetroPCS in the Detroit area using the 0101 free calling prefix, even though that carrier is not mentioned.
When you call someone using “Backdoor Dialing”, they receive a Caller ID number that is not the same as your Gizmo5 number, but which from then on (or, at least, for some period of time) can be used to call you back - but only if they call from the same number that you called them on! So, for example, if you call their cell phone and they get a Caller ID number, they can call you back on that number from that cell phone, but not from a landline phone or from anyone else’s cell phone.
But wait, there’s even more potential opportunities for free calling - it seems that you can make calls to customers of many VoIP providers worldwide if their provider has a Sipbroker SIP-Code and accepts incoming connections. Sometimes it takes a little experimentation (and the use of Google) to figure out how it works. For example, let’s suppose you have a friend that gets VoIP service from Viatalk (a U.S. based VoIP provider). By looking down the SIP-Code list (or, preferably, using your browser’s search function on that page) you find that Viatalk has been assigned a SIP-Code of *507. So, in theory, you could dial *507 plus your friend’s Viatalk number from your Gizmo5 client, and talk to him for free. The problem is, you don’t know the format that they want to receive the number in - do they want *507 plus ten digits (area code plus number), or *507 plus eleven digits (country code + area code + number)? With some providers, one of those formats might work, but as it happens Viatalk wants to see *507+ plus 11 digits (yes, you actually put a plus sign after the SIP-Code and before the 11 digit number). If you use that format, maybe it will work and you can talk to your friend, assuming everything else is working as it should.
If that doesn’t interest you, maybe this will: You can call U.S. (and possibly Canadian) toll-free numbers free by prefacing the number with a star, e.g. *18005558355 to call TellMe.
Gizmo5 will sell you a dedicated number for incoming calls from regular telephone users for a monthly fee. What they don’t mention is that even if you don’t pay for an incoming number, your friends can still call you using any of the Sipbroker local PSTN access numbers in various locations around the globe. They would call the nearest local access number, then when prompted, dial *747 (the SIP-Code for Gizmo5), then your Gizmo5 number starting with the 1-747 (so the first digits will be *747-1-747 followed by seven more digits). It’s a lot of dialing but if you have a friend who lives overseas, or who would just prefer not to pay some wireline phone company an outrageous per-minute charge, that is a way they can call you for free.
It’s the capacity for free calls that makes Gizmo5 so interesting to us here in the CrabApple Forest. Sure, Skype would let us talk for free to other Skype users, but Gizmo5 will let us complete and receive certain other types of calls for free, if we are willing to spend a little time exploring their site and learning all the opportunities for free calls. And moreover, should we decide we’d prefer to talk using a real phone, we can always set up a hardware VoIP adapter using the standard SIP protocol, or an Asterisk SIP trunk, and use the service. No way will Skype let you do that!
We will grant that Gizmo5 isn’t the only way to make free phone calls these days. There’s just something about the geekiness of their offering that interests us, even if it does only let us make free calls to a small percentage of U.S. numbers. But even if you couldn’t care less about that sort of thing, you might find Gizmo5 handy to have installed on your laptop, so you can talk to the folks back home (those who are also using Gizmo5, or a VoIP service that’s accessible using a SIP-Code, or if they’re in the U.S. maybe you can call their cell phones using Backdoor Dialing).
By the way, if you’re the sort that would like to find any and every opportunity to make free and/or low cost calls using VoIP, you might find a blog called VOIPGUIDES interesting (be sure to check out their RSS feed). We’re not affiliated with them in any way, but they seem to be interested in finding new ways of making free/cheap calls. and frankly, we think the old wireline phone companies have been nickle-and-dimeing us to death for far too long!
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Crabapple
Friday May 16, 2008
There are dozens of applications that will place information and/or icons in the top menu bar (many of which are on this list, which is by now a little bit dated - there are many more such apps now). But why, oh why, is there no way to place those icons in a specific order and have them stay there?
You can drag icons around in the dock to your heart’s delight, and even off the dock to watch them go “poof” (which is just a little too appealing to some children - we suspect more than one parent has discovered an empty dock, because one of their offspring was having so much fun dragging the icons and watching them explode! But at least you can put the dock icons in the order you want them). But the top menu bar items can only be moved if they do not produce a drop-down menu when you click on them, and even if they don’t react when you click on them, that doesn’t guarantee that they will be moveable, nor that they will forever stay put at their current location.
For the small percentage of top menu bar icons that can be moved, you can hold down the Command key, then click and drag. But try this on an item that produces a drop-down menu, or otherwise intercepts mouse clicks for its own purposes, and it just isn’t going to work. Thus, we put up with a disorganized top menu bar, with icons in no particular order.
The thing is, if we reboot the system the icons usually reappear in exactly the same spot, so there’s got to be something, somewhere that determines the order in which they appear. But what, exactly? We doubt that Indiana Jones could discover the preference file or other mechanism that controls the order of these little beasties.
You’d think that by now some Mac software author that has an obsessive-compulsive streak (like Monk, the fictional TV detective) would have figured out how to reorder the icons and would have published the details, or even some software to assist in the process. But noooo….. So, we figure this must be something buried deep in the bowels of OS X. Otherwise, how could it possibly be that utilities that will allow you to tweak the dock seem to be a dime a dozen, but there is nothing out there that allows even the most basic reconfiguration of the top menu bar (including the icons that won’t move in response to Command-Click + drag)? If there is, we sure haven’t stumbled across it, and that unordered top menu bar is what’s making us crabby this week.
We haven’t seen too many episodes of Monk, but we suspect he’d hate the Mac, or at least this aspect of it. We know, because we’re a little OCD too, and this drives us right up the wall!
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Games, Review, Software
Friday May 16, 2008
The weekend is upon us again, and with the record high price of car-go-zoom juice, a lot of folks here in the CrabApple Forest are looking for ways to keep ourselves amused without driving too far. There are games that just pass the time, and then there are games that make you think. Reversi, also known as Othello, definitely falls into the latter category. It’s an easy game to learn, but you’re not going to master it in a single weekend!
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the game:
Reversi and Othello are names for an abstract strategy board game which involves play by two parties on an eight-by-eight square grid with pieces that have two distinct sides. Pieces typically appear coin-like, but with a light and a dark face, each side representing one player. The object of the game is to make your pieces constitute a majority of the pieces on the board at the end of the game, by turning over as many of your opponent’s pieces as possible.
For more information on the game, including the rules of play, see the Wikipedia article on Reversi.
If you’ve never played Othello as a board game, it’s probably because all that manual chip-flipping can get pretty tedious, and few people have the patience for it. Of course, when computers came along, it became possible to let the computer do the chip-flipping, so the players could concentrate on the game, and that brought about a revival of interest. And, as it turns out, a computer can make a pretty good Othello opponent, in case you’re stuck at home alone and feel like playing something a bit more challenging than solitaire.
That’s where MacIago comes in. MacIago is a freeware Othello/Reversi style board game for Mac OS X.
The MacIago options are shown here:
And if you don’t like the appearance of the board, there are a handful of plugins that can be downloaded to change it.
How good a game does MacIago play? Well, it could beat BigCrab, but then that’s not sayin’ much. We think that unless you are some sort of Othello master, you’ll find it a worthwhile opponent. And we like the fact that the difficulty level can be changed, so that if you’re teaching the game to the kids they won’t become frustrated because they always lose.
The only option that we think the game is missing is to flip the chips individually, in slow motion, so you can see exactly what’s being turned. Right now it just flips all the chips at once, so you are often left with that “What just happened?” feeling. Another nice option might be the ability to go back a turn or two - not only would that be helpful when you are learning the game, so you can see the relative effects of various possible moves, but also it would give you an opportunity to see exactly what changed in the last move. Even if you could simply click a button or hold down a key and have it highlight the chips that were flipped on the last turn, that would be helpful.
Even so, we think that MacIago is a great way to stretch your mind, and you can’t beat the price. So, what’s your favorite Mac OS X freeware game? Tell us in the comments and maybe we’ll review it in an upcoming post.
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