• Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Using Tor with Mac OS X

    Tor is a tool that can be used to proxy your online communications between multiple, randomly selected, global providers effectively anonymizing your Internet traffic. Tor is a free anonymizing service, but doesn’t also encrypt your traffic. Privoxy is a non-caching proxy that also has a certain amount of filtering built into it. Many may use privoxy to do adware removal. But it can also be used to filter information for Tor. Installers are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ijbswa/files. Once you have installed privoxy you can access the configuration page at http://www.privoxy.org/config/. Because privoxy is a command line tool, you can also access the help page for that using the following command (using…

  • Uncategorized

    Safari Command-Clicks & Tabs

    Using Safari is like going to In-n-Out for a burger – it’s all about ordering off the menu.  But instead of a “4 by 4 animal style” I’m going to order a browser that attempts to open every link I click in a new tab, even if it tries to open in a new window.  Even realizing that if I click on it using the command-click it will open a new tab anyway.  To do so, we’re going to use the TargetedClicksCreateTabs key in the com.apple.Safari.plist file by using the following command: defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true I have an opposite day situation.  I also need to completely disable…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Editing the Custom Dictionary in Mac OS X

    In the en file located in the ~/Library/Spelling directory you’ll find any custom entries into the Mac OS X dictionary. Each will be followed by a ^@ and there will be a final one with no characters at the end. You can remove entries by removing the word followed by the ^@. You can also add items into the custom dictionary by adding the word at the end of the en file along with a trailing ^@. Each item is stored in the order that it was added and so you can also gain a little insight into when each word was added. So, if you push out a custom…

  • Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    6TB of Hot Swappable Drives for $600

    IcyDock makes a 4 port chassis for SATA drives that allows you to build your own RAID out of large and inexpensive drives. The resultant JBOD can then be formatted into RAID0 or RAID1 (software RAID) and presented to backup applications (ie – Retrospect) as offline storage. Amazon sells an IcyDock, populated with 1.5TB drives for a total of 6TB, which is how I’m now snapshotting my VMs in my lab. I’m also using it as the backup destination for my home Kerio server.  Works nicely so far. You can also buy the IcyDock with no drives and likely populate them with 2TB drives, although I haven’t tested this yet…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Looking at Google Android's Internals

    Google’s Android is a very small Linux distribution. Recently I needed to test some applications that were developed by a couple of friends of mine. Rather than run out to T-Mobile I figured I’d just install the new LiveAndroid disk and thought I would write up how to get setup using VMware Fusion and then go about doing some tasks with Android. To get started make sure you’re running the latest Fusion (or Parallels or Q or VirtualBox). Then download two ISO files from http://code.google.com/p/live-android/ liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 and liveandroidv0.2.iso.002. Once you have downloaded the two ISO files we’re going to need to join them.  To do so cat liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 liveandroidv0.2.iso.002 >…