As my friends know, I am a big Safari fan. Safari 3 is fine and 4 promises even faster performance.
I like that Safari keeps all of my web passwords in the keychain, and those keychains and bookmarks can be synced by Mobile Me.
However, the bookmark syncing sometimes fails, and Mobile Me costs $99 a year.
Firefox is massively popular and with version 3 now looks more like a Mac OS X application.
1passwd
However it still stores passwords in it’s own format.
Enter 1passwd. This $35 gem is something every Mac user should own.
1Passwd does the following things for you:
Generates secure passwords
Saves those passwords in your keychain (either your default or a specified keychain)
Saves off identities (like who you are) for easy form filling (more accurate than saving forms)
Saves off credit card info (also encrypted in the keychain)
Remembers forms
Ok that is fine, but I have that already, you might thing. But check this out:
1Passwd works in Safari
1Passwd works in Firefox
1Passwd syncs and works with your iPhone (via their own Webkit browser)
Hold the presses here! I can use safari, generate a password, store the login form, then switch to Firefox and use the same forms and passwords there!
This one fantastic little application has allowed me to finally try out Firefox.
Initial Impressions
Firefox does seem very fast and stable. I’ve had one crash and the crash reporter popped up to let me give more data about what happened. I believe it was a 1passwd issue, but in 4 days of browsing that is not bad.
I kept trying to press the space bar to pop up menus in forms, but you have to use control-down arrow. Not a big deal.
Extensions
Firefox supports some awesome extensions, which don’t need to be hacked in like with Safari. Adblock is awesome, as is Firebug for developers.
Bookmarks
For bookmark syncing, there is a free site called Foxmarks. Foxmarks will sync your bookmarks between all of your firefox browsers. You do have to trust them with your bookmarks, but I never bookmark anything serious anyway. Install the Foxmarks extension, create an account, and off you go. The syncing is very fast, unlike Mobile Me syncing.
The Firefox 3 bookmark editor is much nicer than it was in previous versions. I think it is actually usable.
Also nice are the smart bookmarks, which track things such as your most visited sites, or recently bookmarked.
You can also add tags to Firefox bookmarks, then make smart bookmark folder or search on those tags. Why hasn’t Apple done this? This smacks of Spotlight searching.
Zooming
Hold down the control key and mouse wheel scroll, the web page will zoom in and out. I wonder if I can disable this, because I use control as my key for Ventrilo voice chat, and while chatting and scrolling pages, Firefox zooms. Oops.
Themes
Firefox has themes which allows you to choose how the browser controls look. I don’t find myself using this but obviously many people love it!
Summary
Regardless of which browser you use, check out 1passwd. It will help you generate much more secure passwords for every site you visit. They even have a service to back up your passwords, if you trust them.
Give Firefox + Foxmarks a try. You might like what you see.
Yes! I bought TextExpander awhile ago and liked it a lot, but eventually ditched it for Type It 4 Me, due to the speed issues with the TextExpander menu.
TI4M is fine, but TextExpander’s preferences and shortcut setup is nicer. SmileOnMyMac, TextExpander’s publisher, is also very Portland Macintosh Users Group friendly, so I like supporting them.
Mix ‘n Match allows you to mix up different hair, eyes and mouths by sliding the sections of the face left or right.
While the lite version only includes three faces, the full version will contain many more, allow you to use your own photos as well as save your creations!
I have shipped the latest maintenance release of BetterHTMLExport, version 2.3.2!
Included in the changes are:
Added “Replace Existing Files” option - Uncheck this and BetterHTMLExport will abort instead of replacing existing files
Fix for only exporting to the first directory chosen
Fix for reading ISO from images
Changed tab to “BetterHTMLExport”
Fix for crash when selecting cancel
Fixed Documentation button on Info Panel
The “Replace Existing Files” option, on by default, allows you to disable the ability for BetterHTMLEXport to replace any existing files (duh). This is a good feature for those concerned about the software replacing any files.
I write to you concerned about the Internet. As we fully know, the Internet changed the world, allowing everyone to have the American dream of one voice, and a voice that could be heard.
Now, the Internet is threatened. ISPs are starting to get money hungry. I write to you to protect the Internet.
As written today on the net, “Time Warner Cable will begin imposing bandwidth caps on consumers in Beaumont, Texas this week as part of a trial program. Consumers who exceed the bandwidth caps will pay $1 for every additional gigabyte consumed”
Also, there are reports, which I grant may be some fear mongering, but need to be considered none the less, that the major ISPs are planning to attempt to change the internet from a neutral access to a subscription plan where you pay the ISP for access to certain major sites, then pay MORE for access to small sites.
This, if at all true, would be disastrous. We cannot let corporations hijack our right to express ourselves. They are already robbing us via oil prices, and now they would effectively silence the small sites.
Once they decide they can cram metered access down our throats, then they’ll take more and more away from us.
Please, please work with the FCC and do not allow ISPs to shape our access to the internet in any way.
Freedom of speech, and the freedom to be heard should be preserved at whatever cost.
Well Microsoft has finally caved in and realized they were wrong by not including Visual Basic Support in Office 2008. After some hand waving about Applescript blah blah, the reality is that some spreadsheets just won’t open on the Mac - So much for interoperability!
Anyway, now they are adding VBA support back - but not to the product you already bought. Oh no, it’ll be the next revision of Office.
While trying to fill out a voter registration form, I ran into this sad state of affairs:
Preview works with the check boxes and radio buttons, but the text fields are only 2 characters wide.
SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen application doesn’t work at all. Radio buttons are displayed randomly on the page, the text fields are not editable at all.
Adobe’s own reader works for editing, but they don’t let you save the document! To make matters even more insulting, they have gone out of their way to disable OS X’s “Save as PDF” from the Print Dialog! So you get this comical, yet infuriating sequence:
3a. “You cannot save this form, instead print it for your records”
3b. “Save as PDF has been disabled. Use File->Save instead”
ROFL. Stupid Adobe. Another company going down in flames, just like Microsoft, slowly but surely. Maybe this is some maneuver to push people to buy their distiller product or some other software?
Edit:
Found this hack on the Apple forums:
Adobe Reader and Preview can’t save filled-in PDFs, only print them.
You can install CUPS-PDF http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx
to create a virtual printer. When you print to that printer, it will
create a PDF file of the filled-in form
to set the global scaling (works pretty well except some apps actually go all fuzzy and others look fabulous)? It turns out it breaks the cmd-shift-4 to snapshot the screen and save the image to a file. The general advice if you google this stuff is to do:
Let me tell you a somewhat long tale about the week I’ve had. This will get a little geeky, but you’d find out exactly why you should be using Time Machine and maybe a few tips to help your disaster recovery process.
Time Machine is Mac OS X 10.5’s automatic backup system. You attach a drive to the computer and after a simple dialog, you’re backed up.
Time Machine backs up every hour, quite quickly, and then keeps the last day’s changes and one set of changes every week.
If your computer has a 140gb hard drive and you have a 300gb Time Machine, you can easily keep 3-4 months worth of data in your Time Machine. This allows you to go “back in time” and get a file you just ruined, etc.
I have three Time Machines:
One I keep offsite, that I plug in once a week or so to update. This is in case the house burns down
One I keep downstairs in the office
One I keep next to the couch
To switch Time Machines, you simply attach the drive, open the Time Machine preferences and select the different Time Machine.
Last Tuesday I had been on the couch using Time Machine as normal, then we went to lunch. As I usually do, I unplugged the Time Machine to take it with me, so that way, again if the house burns down, the laptop is lost, but not my data. Call it paranoid, but I did have a tree fall on my house once
We come back from lunch and get back to work. Later that night, around 7pm I am checking out World of Warcraft and noticing i have very slow graphics, like 8-9 frames per second.
Being a developer, I download the 10.5.2 graphics update 1.0 and reapply this to my Mac, thinking it couldn’t hurt.
Well, on reboot, my video was dead. Black screen of death. Over the next couple hours I tried everything, reset the SMC, the PRAM, try an external monitor, boot off DVD, boot off the repair disk, safe boot, you name it, I tried it.
Well this sucks. We are shipping Sophie this week and my machine is dead.
I have a second laptop, which Elizabeth uses, so I decide to use that. Now both of these machines have user accounts for me and both have the same ’short’ name. This proved to be very important.
I log into my user on the backup machine and attach my Time Machine. Then I use Browse Other Time Machines by holding down option when I choose the Time Machine menu in 10.5.2. I select my Time Machine drive and wham, there are my files!
So I go back in time, and the last backup is from 1:57pm, when we went to lunch. Crap! I had not plugged the time machine in again.
Since I knew the laptop was working, I removed the Time Machine from the backup machine, booted the now-video-less laptop, attached the Time Machine and waited. Then I logged in by typing blindly.
I then waited and waited until I saw the disk being used and yes, Time Machine was backing up. This took an hour, but you can start it by ssh if you are a geek - Another article on that topic later.
So after the Time Machine disk stopped accessing, I pressed power, then return to safely shut down. I plugged the Time Machine back into the backup laptop and wham, the most recent backup was now the current time.
I restored my email and work data and went back to work.
I took the laptop into the Apple store at 8:30pm and they said they didn’t have the motherboard. I called the next morning and Bridgeport Village had one. By 12pm Wednesday Apple had my machine and I headed home to get back to work.
This morning, Thursday at 8:30am I get a call. My laptop is repaired! Sweeet! So I go pick it up at 10am and notice they forgot to reset the serial number. This was a sure sign I did indeed get a whole new motherboard. They reset the motherboard and I come home. Talk about great service!
I use the time machine on the backup laptop (A different time machine disk) to restore the data I had worked on from the previous day and a half, remove the second time machine and plug in my downstairs time machine.
I didn’t want to touch my most recent time machine, and did this prove to be wise.
You see, my machine name is ’serenity’ and while I had a new motherboard, I had the same hard drive. So, I should just plug in the Time Machine, select Backup Now and be good to go, right?
Nope. “Not enough space to back up, please choose another Time Machine”
What? Alright fine. I look on the Time Machine disk and there are now two folders, ’serenity’ and ’serenity 2′ Oh noes, Time Machine thinks this is a new computer
Sure enough, with help from friends I found this article on Mac OS X Hints that describes how Time Machine records the Ethernet MAC address of your computer with the folder associated with your machine.
This data is kept at a very geeky layer, hidden in the Access Control Lists, so repairing this was not for the faint of heart. That is another article topic for later as well.
After a lot of mucking around, and an all important reboot, I had my time machine understanding that this new machine is really the computer for this time machine.
I’ll have to repeat these steps with my other two time machines. Joy.
So, after all of this, what did I learn that I can pass on to you?
Keep your Time Machine plugged in 100% of the time, so you always have your latest data
Do not use an internal disk for a Time Machine. Convenient? Yes. Easily usable on an emergency computer? No.
Keep file sharing turned on just in case your computer’s video dies.
Spend the money and buy multiple drives for Time Machines.
Be aware that if a computer repair replaces your motherboard, you likely won’t be able to use your old time machines for backing up. You can get the data off, but likely not put more data on, depending on the size of the drive.
I can see why Apple doesn’t just use a machine name to map computers to Time Machines. There are many scenarios where someone could wipe out a Time Machine by either naming their machines the same, or getting a new computer and wiping the time machine out by backing up an empty drive, etc.
However, Apple does need to handle this use case where nothing but the motherboard changed.
Regardless, use Time Machine. Use many Time Machines. Keep them running 24/7.
In my RSS was a Mac Mojo post from Eric Schwiebert about the 502 error in the Office 2008 Installer. I went to read the rest of the post but it has been removed, and seemingly not replaced yet. Here is what my RSS reader cached:
You may have seen recent reports on the web of a security issue in the installer for Mac Office 2008. The issue is that our installer is incorrectly granting ownership of the files to a particular local user as it installs them, so that if your Mac actually has a second local user and that user is not an administrator on your Mac, they could modify your Office 2008 install. The issue does not expose the Office 2008 install to modifications by any networked user account or to any local account other than the second one created on your Mac.
Microsoft and the MacBU take all security issues seriously, and we intend to fix this situation in several ways. First of all, if you have already installed Office 2008, you can run a command in the Terminal to fix the file ownership and remove the security concern (see instructions below). Second, the MacBU is working on an update to Office 2008 that will automatically fix the file ownership for you… …
Sigh, Microsoft. I can confirm the report at bruned that the Microsoft Office 2008 installer sets the owner to user 502, which is the second user on your machine.
In this case, my test user. Nice. What a security hole.
This installer also mucks with other user ids, so be careful.
I ran repair permissions in Disk Utility and it didn’t fix anything.
Really, this is useful. Thanks, now I get to sort out which of the 50 items I am administer for I don’t have permissions on.
It really is too bad the computer doesn’t know which items I don’t have permissions to replace, because if the computer knew, it could give me a list, that I could copy and email to the admin. That would be nice.
Alright, I know the bru-ha-ha over MacHeist, but seeing one of the chaching guys push the bundle made me at least feel that due to the success of MH1, the developers are getting a better deal this time around.
Why did I buy it?
Because I loathe Intuit. I am tired of their Mac apps being behind Windows, I am tired of paying for nothing more than bug fixes, and while chaching falls short of what I need, I want to support them somehow.
Now for what I was using QuickBooks for. Not accounting, just invoicing. I found a much, much better solution:
Billings2 is a nice Mac app that tracks jobs by time, by task, expenses, prints nice invoices, can auto save to disk with a filename of your liking, can auto email, integrates with address book, etc, etc. Very nice and for around $60, affordable.
I love where the Mac is these days. With indies giving huge corporations like Intuit a run for their, well, money, I am a very happy Macintosh user.
I saw your glowing review of Time Capsule and wanted to point out a few things.
1) Backups should be reliable.
Sure, a “server grade” hard disk that supports the proper buffer flush commands is great, but you are wedding a router and a backup. What happens when:
1a) The router dies, and you lose the backup while the router is fixed.
1b) You find out the router does not pass the new VPN your fiancé’s company uses (like I am stuck with in the current router), and now you have a very expensive WAP, just to have a backup
1c) Your hard drive dies, and you lose your router while the hard disk is replaced.
2) Backups should be movable
Again, being stuck inside of the router makes it impossible to move this backup offsite for any reason. You need another backup, or a second time capsule. You should be able to take a full time machine and archive it if you like. You cannot with the Time Capsule. You have to allow files to be deleted, or stop using it altogether.
What Apple should have done:
A) Made the USB port on existing extremes work. AirDisk works very poorly now.
B) Supplied this disk as a USB/FW drive, with the proper flush commands.
C) Sold Time Capsule as a Airport Extreme N router with firewire, and the drive from B.
Ca) Or even better, had a drive sit below the router on a eSata bus connector, so you can buy/swap more capsules.
Summary
This is an awful product because it ties people’s sense of backup security in with another piece of hardware, a router, which can fail, or need to be replaced, thus putting either component of the capsule at risk. It is similar to using two drives striped Raid 0 for a backup, thus doubling your chance of backup failure.
Steve
I have a large amount of respect for John and his body of work. I just don’t want to see customers use this product expecting to have a reliable backup system.
