A lot more freedom choosing terminal.app colors

Very quick ‘before and after’.

What you can change on terminal.app’s color menu is pretty pointless if you can’t change whatever is beeing “force”  fed into it. so here’s the trick:

Download SIMBL

Copy this plugin into ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

Open terminal.app, go the the screen where you chose the colors and now you have a button there that reads “more”, click on it and go wild.

Before:

After:

Controlling the mic volume on skype (OS X)

Losing your mind with the automatic mic volume control on skype that you can’t switch off?

Amazingly the feature is there, just not on the interface. You’ll have to edit an XML file located at

<user folder>/Library/Application Support/Skype

Open shared.xml with your text editor of choice, find the <VoiceEng> element create a new line and  add <AGC>0</AGC> (that’s zero, not “o”) so it will look something like this:

<VoiceEng>

      <AGC>0</AGC>

      <MicBoost>

        <Built-in.20Microphone>0</Built-in.20Microphone>

      </MicBoost>

      <MicVolume>

        <Built-in.20Microphone>90</Built-in.20Microphone>

      </MicVolume>

      <SpeakerVolume>58</SpeakerVolume>

    </VoiceEng>

Save, Quit and you’re done.

AGC stands for Automatic Gain Control, and you just turned it off. So now you can open System Preferences, go to Sound then chose the Input tab set the mic volume and rest assured that it won’t move by itself wile you’re on skype.

mounting ext2 / ext3 on OSX

okay, since I struggled with this for a bit (and because I’m a warm hearted individual that wants everyone to be happy) here’s the gist of it:

you’ll want to download ext2fsx from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ make sure you download the latest development version (as of the date of this post: 1.4d4).

Install, reboot, after you are done you might notice that when you plugin your drive, it doesn’t mount automagically, even if you go to system settings where ExtFSManager lives and try to mount it there it could very well fail (especially if your drive wasn’t cleanly umounted the last time). So here’s what I did:

Open a terminal and fsck your harddrive (if you want to wild guess where it is osx in a very friendly way links the proper device to /dev/drive0,1, and so forth). This step is only required of course if you have the unclean umount issue.

Create a directory under /Volumes to mount your drive and then mount the drive with something like

sudo mount_ext2 -o rdonly -x /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/linux

Now it could be that the device still doesn’t show on the desktop, under Finder just click on “Go” and then “go to folder” and type in the mount point of your drive (that would be that last part of the mount command).

et voilá. it’s on your desktop.

Should be easier? Yep, damn straight it should, and apple should really get the ext2/3 fs by default out of the box.

what’s cooking???

http://iruel.net/?p=64

http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2007-November/060846.html

SMB shares

It took about about 20 minutes to figure out that smb shares between ubuntu and osx should be done without password encryption… it’s really dumb, but I looked on the web for solutions that simply did not work (including a few ones about messing on the client’s side smb.conf, hellllloooo?!) and with no results. In a total shot in the dark I disabled password encryption on the ubuntu side and everyhting worked fine.

Geeez.

File Encryption in Multi-Platform Scennarios.

Blowfish still seems to be the cross-platform encryption system of choice. Even as AES moves at a fast pace as the de facto standard I failed to find anything that would work on my Windows, Linux and Mac OS boxes without mind boggling hassle. I wasn’t even demanding much… I didn’t need a live encrypted file system or something of that magnitude. but actually had my hopes up for something I didn’t had to install on a windows computer as a stand alone application, some binary I could store on my usb memory stick and expect it to work without registering 4 dlls, add 12 registry keys and create another entry on add and remove programs.

I don’t mind bcrypt, I really don’t. Most people tend to find it arcaic: the lack of any sort of options, the inability to process more then one file at a time, the windows version doesn’t even mask the password as you type it, for the love of god! But in all honesty it’s so damn simple it’s great! sure, wildcards would be nice and a software created towards security that doesn’t mask passwords is a contradiction by itself…

But it works, and it works flawlessly in all three platforms (and some others I haven’t found a computer lying around to install them on) and I wish it was all as simple as bcrypt. a file copy away or a make away.

I’m waiting for AES, it’s got the juice one expects from today’s cryptography, but I’m also waiting for it to be useful and non obtrusive for a multi-platform user.

For the folk using only Mac OS there are these three nice apps from Steve Dekorte for your delight:

Crypt1 and 2 blowfish encryption

Crypt3 AES encryption

These are nice and easy to use, but the blowfish version does not decrypt anyhing encrypted with bcrypt. crypted files must have .blowfish for the app to decrypt them, otherwise it will encrypt them again.

gnuPG is great, but again, I need to install a bunch of stuff to get it to encrypt or decrypt anything. it’s truly cross-platform, but i’d need to install it in every single computer I’d use.

Googling for some news on the issue I came across a lot of posts in forums of people pretending that zipping or raring file with a password would produce a similar effect. Are these the people who actually failed at cracking a zip password? because that’s the point isn’t it? your encryption is only as good as your password and as good as the system that saves that password from peering software.