Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Hardware, Review, Software, Utility
Monday Jun 16, 2008
There are some Mac models that come with a built-in camera - if you have one of those, you’re golden, at least until the camera malfunctions or you want higher resolution. But if you didn’t get a built-in camera, or for whatever reason you want to use any typical off-the-shelf webcam, you will find that Apple’s support for webcams sucks. I mean it REALLY sucks. You can take a perfectly good webcam that works great under Windows, and just try to use it under OS X. It will see that the camera is connected, but unless you are very lucky, it just ignores the camera’s output.
This is generally NOT a hardware incompatibility, although it can be, particularly if the webcam is an older model. However, there is a very nice third-party software program called macam, which is a driver for USB webcams on Mac OS X. The developer’s site explains that “macam consist of an application and a component. Run the macam application to verify whether your camera works with your Mac and your USB setup. The component is the actual driver that allows other applications to access the video-stream.” Macam currently supports just about half of the known cameras out there.
photo credit: mangee
The problem is that that even with Macam installed, Apple’s bundled software won’t work with it. Got Photo Booth? Forget about using it with your unsupported webcam, although macam’s application (and some third party software) will let you snap single images of yourself or your kids. Want to have a video chat? iChat refuses to recognize a USB-connected webcam unless you purchase a third-party program (which we might have tried and reviewed, except that once we installed it and tried to use it one time, in an attempt that was unsuccessful due to an unrelated problem, on the second attempt it immediately thought that its seven day trial period was up and refused to run!). But you have to wonder, if a third-party program can make iChat work with a USB webcam, how hard would it be for Apple to enable this capability? It’s exactly this sort of thing that sometimes makes us wonder if we made the right choice by getting a Mac.
Of course, if you want to use Yahoo! Messenger, you can install their Mac client and use that to chat with your friends. Although we haven’t had the opportunity to fully test it yet, we do note that it at least recognizes our webcam (presumably using the macam driver) and displays a preview. That’s more than iChat does. As for AIM, for some inexplicable reason they distribute AIM 4.7 for Macintosh using a .bin format file, which must be expanded using Stuffit Expander. That put us off a bit, and since every review we’d read about it didn’t exactly give it a stellar recommendation, and since nowhere on the page for the Mac version did they say that it supports video chats, we decided to forgo attempting to install it for the moment - though we may revisit that decision later.
Oh, and before anyone comments that Adium has got a “mebeamIntegration” plugin that handles video - if you can get it to work, more power to you! We have it installed and when we try to access it (by right clicking on a contact, for example) it simply does not appear in the menu of choices. But then, we would add that the majority of comments we read about it (the plugin, not Adium itself) weren’t exactly glowing (though you could tell the hard cider drinkin’ boys in the bunch - their attitude was that if you got it for free you shouldn’t complain about it, even if it lays there like a giant turd on your hard drive and works poorly or not at all. After all, what did you expect for free, you ungrateful cheapskate?).
Come on, Apple - you put USB ports on your computers, and people expect that they can just plug in standard USB devices and they will just work. We will even put up with a little aggravation to get a device going, but when in your arrogance you decide that you simply won’t support an entire class of hardware, that’s simply going too far. We know that the hard cider drinkin’ boys will always think you can do no wrong, but those of us who have switched from Windows aren’t going to talk your products up to our friends and relatives if you can’t even support basic USB hardware properly. And yes, we do understand that you can’t support every older-than-dirt Webcam that was sold for use with Windows ‘98, but you should at least be able to support those webcams that are supported by the spca5xx/gspca Linux webcam driver project (which is given credit in the macam documentation). If the Linux folks can support these webcams, why can’t Apple? The answer is that there is no good reason why not, they just haven’t felt it’s a priority. Well, Apple, I suspect that many of your customers may feel differently about that.
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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 Configuration, Media, Review, Software
Thursday May 15, 2008
FStream is an interesting piece of software that has probably escaped the attention of many Mac OS X users in the English-speaking world, because its web site is entirely in French. It’s a small program that makes it possible to listen to, and to easily record Web radio stations and audio streams.
Features of FStream are as follows:
- Decoding of streams in any of these formats: OGG Vorbis, AAC/AAC+, MP3, MMS (ASF for WMA)
- Encoding of the streams to any of these formats: MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV
- Recognizes the Apple infrared remote control
- Very low CPU usage
- Minimalist Interface: Simple to use, and does not take much display space
- Customizable interface
- Great flexibility in recognition of streams (among other things, IceCast and ShoutCast streams)
- Access to pre-selected lists (ShoutCast and SourceMac)
When they say minimalist interface, they aren’t kidding - there’s a lot more to this software than you might think at first glance. Normally, this is all you see on the screen:
We should note that if you don’t care for the basic style of the interface, there are a number of skins available for download. Anyway, when FStream is the foreground application and you press the SHIFT key, it changes color and now you are at the recording panel:
The button on the left hand side controls playing or pausing the stream unless the SHIFT key is depressed and you’re at the recording panel, in which case it starts or stops recording. Note that in the program preferences you can select whether pausing the audio will simply mute it, or will actually buffer it so that when you un-pause it will play the stream from where you left off (like a PVR). We wish this functionality wasn’t buried in the preferences, but instead was on two separate buttons (or a “split” button as is used on the right side), because there are times when we may want to pause but don’t care that much about what we’re listening to (as when it’s in the middle of a long commercial break) and other times when we really don’t want to miss the discussion on whatever talk show we’re listening to.
As mentioned above, the button on the right hand side of the interface is split into two halves. Clicking on the lower half reveals a volume control slider:
While clicking on the upper half brings up the main menu:
From the main menu you can select Quick Open, which lets you enter (or paste) a stream URL directly:
But most of the time, you’ll probably want to use the Streams Manager, which allows you to select any of a multitude of preset streams, or streams that you have previously saved:
FStream actually has a fairly comprehensive help file (accessed from the top menu bar, and yes, it’s in English if you’ve selected English as your primary language) and it would be a real good idea for you to scan through it if you want to utilize FStream to its fullest capabilities. Also, if you want to visit the author’s web site, we suggest using either Yahoo Babel Fish or Google Translate to translate the page to English (here are links to the translated main FStream page using Yahoo and Google).
FStream is a great FREE program, and it is the only one we know of that will give you the ability to pause live audio streams and/or record them for future listening. The only way it could be made better (other than the aforementioned suggested change in the pause control) would be to actually allow recording on a schedule, so that you could have it automatically start recording your favorite show at the time it begins (and stop when it ends), in case you aren’t home, or simply forget that the show is on. If there is a way to do this with FStream, we haven’t discovered it yet, but if you’ve figured out how to do it please leave a comment and share what you know!
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