thewetbeaversmileswhentickled.com

Annoying MBP and region lock

Posted 1 year, 5 months ago on September 10, 2007 by yerma  Apple

My macbook pro is great, very few complaints with it at all but one of the biggest ones is the firmware locking of the DVD drive meaning you are locked to a certain region after a number of attempts. I find this annoying and restrictive especially as I travel to the US quite a lot, so I googled a bit and found that other people are using IDE->USB converters(avaialble on ebay _really_ cheaply and lo and behold it actually works!!! I can rip my favourite US DVD's without worrying about when to re-install my laptop - I can even rig up a couple at a time and use handbrake and visualhub together.

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OSX phoning home.....

Posted 2 years, 8 months ago on July 6, 2006 by yerma  Apple

According to an article on engadget my mac is now phoning home 3 times a day in order to "verify that my widgets are not insecure" - what a load of old shite.... One of the commenters on the blog gave the following link which shows how to disable it. Short version is:

sudo mv /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist.disabled

Also, a link to prevent the dashboard from being run.

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It's a fake

Posted 2 years, 9 months ago on June 25, 2006 by yerma  Apple

Unfortunately the post I linked to a couple of days ago is a fake. Here's explanation.

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Leopard Screenshots

Posted 2 years, 9 months ago on June 23, 2006 by yerma  Apple

This page has pictures of what it claims is the new Leopard desktop for OSX. the interesting points to note are:

• IE appearing to run natively
  
• A windows disk icon on the desktop
  
• a windows version supposedly appearing in the "about this mac" dialogue
  

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Boot Camp

Posted 2 years, 11 months ago on April 5, 2006 by yerma  Apple

After someone winning $10k to get windows working on an intel mac Apple have released some software which will let you do it natively :)
Called Bootcamp it will allow windows to run on an intel mac natively. This is something that I've been waiting a while for - there are only a couple of apps i have to run in virtual pc. One of them is visio and the other is project. Ideally I would like darwine to be able to run this but that's not working at the moment so this sounds like the best alternative. From the Apple site:


"More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today."

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1 0WNZ0R UR M4C

Posted 3 weeks, 6 days ago on March 8, 2006 by yerma  Apple

ZDnet were reporting about a competition that was held to break into a mac. How can they hype this up to be as bad as some of the windows flaws??? You never give an account to someone you don't know and trust - this applies to windows/osx/skyos/linux etc etc. IMHO most people would be able to find a way to elevate their privileges once they get access. MJ offers a great checklist of items to keep the average user safe and secure. Another link stolen from that article goes to a site setup with a more solid security test, try and break into a mac with only ssh and http ports open without a user account. The results were published yesterday:

• The response has been very strong, and the test has illustrated its point.
  
• Traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps.
  
• Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus.
  
• The machine was under intermittent DoS attack. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up.
  
• The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations.
  
• There were no successful access attempts during the 38 hour duration of the test period.
  

---One comment

Windows XP boots on a Macbook Pro

Posted 3 weeks, 6 days ago on March 8, 2006 by yerma  Apple

This link should explain everything ;)
However, there is a bounty available for just this achievement.

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Weird trouble on OXS 10.4.5

Posted 3 years, 1 month ago on March 6, 2006 by yerma  Apple

I upgraded to 10.4.5 of OSx the other day and restarted the machine as requested, all seemed well. Since then the finder is slow and spotlight doesn't even respond at all. Macfixit have a special article about it here which seems to have some tips and tricks. Personally, I did a reboot and all seems to be better now but it's not what I expe ct from apple :(

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iTunes and illegal music

Posted 3 years, 1 month ago on March 3, 2006 by yerma  Apple

There is an interesting article on the register today about illegally downloaded music and whether itunes has had an effect. Some choice excerpts:

"a few statistics we gleaned at this week's Digital Music Forum (DMF), held only days after Apple boasted of its billionth download, help put it all in perspective."

"Apple has taken just short of three years to reach one billion downloads"
"one billion songs are downloaded illegally every month"

"There are 21 songs bought from iTunes Music Store on the average iPod."

"Aydin Caginalp, a partner at the law firm Partner, Alston & Bird, who specializes in entertainment" :

"The iTunes Music Store [ITMS] buyer buys 25 songs in the first year, 15 in the second year, and in the third year, the battery has died, so you have to go out and buy a new iPod."

"And you paid $300 for that machine," he said, before concluding: "This is why Steve Jobs isn't in the music industry."

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Clearing DNS cache on osx

Posted 3 years, 1 month ago on February 28, 2006 by yerma  Apple

Annoyingly enough, mac osx seems to keep dns cached for a long time which means that any dns changes must be pushed through. The shortcut to clear your cache is:

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