Are you mad about this outrageous Wikipedia censorship?

Disable JavaScript.

The black censor never appears.

Here’s how:

Chrome

Open up the preferences, and go under the hood.

Remember when they said it was English language Wikipedia only? That’s why we use en.wikipedia.org.

Firefox

Safari

A few years ago I re-purposed an old desktop PC from uni as a media and file server. A design goal was having the machine be as close to silent as possible. Noisy stuff is annoying anyway, but doubly so in a living room where silence really is paramount. To achieve that goal I used my steadfast Antec Sonata case with rubber-washer HD trays, an old fanless video card, and a new power supply with a 120mm fan (let me know when they make fanless ones for AT motherboards). The only noisy component left was the stock CPU fan which I replaced with a Thermaltake ‘quiet’ model. The result was a success if I say so myself, especially considering the total cost.

Last week that Thermaltake CPU fan hit the dust. The bearings just gave up. Luckily, that failure didn’t cause any other damage and since the motherboard is a few years old the replacement Zalman model fan was cheap. Unluckily, this Zalman was significantly noisier than what it replaced, despite claims of silent operation.

The solution was wonderfully simple: I attached a resistor to the red wire connecting the CPU fan to motherboard for slower RPM.

For a project that has lasted for so long and been so affordable I’m stoked how cheap and easy the simple solution was. EE FTW.

CLI junkies, this one’s for you.

Mac OS X doesn’t ship with an official package manager in a Unix/Linux sense. And why should it? Apple has a proven track record targeting the casual technology user ready to trade a credit card number for convenience, and this approach earns buckets of money. Thus the recent introduction of the Mac App store should come as no surprise. (And personally as a fan of ‘Internet as change agent’ I love that it will, even marginally, help reduce carbon emissions – Apple already plans to remove boxed software from its retail stores.)

Unlike in the smartphone world, software distribution for both producers and consumers on PCs/Macs has been traditionally been ‘everybody is on their own.’ On Windows there are standard 3rd party conventions, such as NSIS, and Microsoft/Apple-sanctioned ways of packaging software for distribution (.MSI and .PKG respectively). But developers/ISVs are not required to use them, and many don’t. (I’m looking at you, Adobe – your Mac installers are seriously the worst I’ve ever seen! Sometimes devs have reasonable grounds (read: limited time/resources) to employ them, but VISE and other Java-based installers I’ve encountered are unabashedly gross.)

Let’s jump away from the commercial side of computing for a moment and talk open source. Command line junkies (read: me) are into simple, lightweight solutions. We probably won’t ever use the Mac App store, preferring traditional open source package managers. We’re the folks comfortable at the command line and with modifying config files. Debian’s apt, Gentoo’s portage, FreeBSD’s ports, Red Hat’s yum are our bread and butter. The philosophies between us and the App Store’s target audience couldn’t be more different.

Speaking from the command line junkie perspective, I recently made the move from Darwin ports to homebrew. The best experience so far was the first one:

brew install git

It pulled the source and ‘just worked’ with minimal messing with my existing system.

ports, we’ll chat again when

port install git

doesn’t start weirdly compiling perl 5.8 on top of the perl 5.10 already supplied, supported by Apple, and working fine, thank you very much.

Interesting experience today: every single Apple Store in New Jersey was sold out of the iPhone 4 today. I know because I called them all.

A couple things: One, congrats to Apple. New Jersey today is hardly a representative sample but so-called “antennagate” doesn’t seem to matter in the state. Two, I got to experience first hand with building incredulity over each successive call how much people don’t care about the inherent inferiority of American-sold iPhones. What do I mean?

At first glance the US price appears to be the cheapest, but you’re locked into a 2 year contract with a $350 early termination fee. Much worse, the phone is artificially locked to AT&T’s network. If you want to travel, count your blessings that an unlock was released yesterday but it is of course temporary and will be assuredly be patched by Apple. (Unlocked phones are different from jailbroken phones.

Want to listen to your iTunes music at home from work, a coffee shop, etc?

It takes two steps: setup an SSH tunnel and forward zeroconf (‘Bonjour‘) traffic.

If you do it my way everything is already installed on your Mac and, especially nice for you corporate folks, doesn’t require admin privileges.
Windows users, you’re not necessarily SOL but Windows doesn’t ship with what you’ll need.

I use this technique on Snow Leopard, but I think it will work on Tiger and higher.

• Enable SSH on your home computer.
  System Preferences->Sharing->Remote Logon
• Enable iTunes Sharing.
  Preferences->Sharing->Share my library on my local network
• Still from your home computer, browse to 192.168.1.1 (or whatever your router runs on) and enable SSH port forwarding if you haven’t already. This technique definitely won’t work without this step.
• Protip: Optionally, register your public IP with a free Dynamic DNS service so you only have to remember a single domain name.
• At your work machine, go to a terminal and use the following two commands:

  dns-sd -P "myTunes" _daap._tcp. local 3689 localhost 127.0.0.1 &
  ssh -N -f homeComputer -L 3689:localhost:3689

  The -N means non-interactive, the -f means go to the background.
  The -L xxx:hostname:xxx enables a tunnel on the iTunes sharing port (3689).
  homeComputer is your router’s public IP address, or the domain name you hopefully setup earlier.

• To clean up when you’re done, you can run a

  killall ssh dns-sd

Finally, if you’re cool enough to keep your music on a Linux machine, you can also use this technique with Firefly formerly (mt-daapd).

Posted originally for my personal reference, but since my Mac tips get lots of Google hits hope this is useful to you too.

Screen Sharing on Mac OS X Snow Leopard – very convenient to have built-in*, and I use it to logon to my Ubuntu server when the CLI doesn’t cut the mustard – infrequent, but it happens.

If you’re like me, you occasionally get an unexpected blank or white screen when you connect to your other computer. It turns out the mouse and keyboard pass through just fine but the display is all white. Fix it by getting info on Screen Sharing.app and ticking the ‘Open in 32-bit mode’ box.

* Technical addendum: I would be remiss to sing accolades of the VNC-based Screen Sharing without mentioning Microsoft’s [Citrix] Remote Desktop. It’s significantly faster than VNC due to some sweet implementation differences – to my knowledge when you connect to the Windows host it switches to a special display driver that sends small drawing instructions over the tubes that are subsequently recreated on your client. VNC, while open source and commensurately ubiquitous in Unix/Linux/Mac land, is not so smart and blindly sends a compressed image of the screen. Just sayin guys – Remote Desktop is awesome.

I really don’t like waiting, especially when I can avoid it. Therefore, when I got tired of waiting for my computer recently I did something about it.

On SSH and passwords

The average ssh logon time consumes what feels like 3-4 seconds on my 2007-era machines. The delay has worsened since Ubuntu 0910, which now retrieves system information on logon (in its default form, nearly useless to me). I really like the idea of seeing useful info at logon time, but bottlenecking logon – the most common act that happens – for multiple seconds is unacceptable. If you’re like me, just use your own script instead of landscape:

apt-get remove landscape-common

I banged out some bash that runs nearly instantaneously and shows only what I actually care about, and it only took some lines in .profile. simple version:

echo 'df -h' >> ~/.profile
PATH=$HOME/bin/

Finally for a really good one that totally pays for itself: think about how many times you type in a password. The net time saved by not having to spend a few seconds typing in your password each time is huge.

echo "PubkeyAuthentication yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

It’s called public key authentication in SSH, and it’s one of the best kept SSH secrets.

Just finished optimizing the page load time by recompressing several large JPGs that used to be part of every page that had a sidebar (i.e. most pages on this site).

Load times are down to an average of about .983 sec from about 1.8 sec before. Hooray for more speed.

RAID5, generally speaking, is a bad idea. Unless you have some very specific needs, RAID5 increases complexity, is more prone to hardware failure and administration errors, and does not automatically back itself up. If two RAID5 member drives fail at the same time, *all* your data is SOL. Individual drives, such as a bunch of externals, are probably a better choice for most people. And if two individual drives fail, you can still get data from the rest of them.

But people are nevertheless drawn to RAID5′s speed and size; it’s a great way to effectively have a freaking gigantic drive. It’s set and forget, easy to expand in the future (with some filesystems), and for reads is substantially faster than one drive. If one RAID5 drive fails, it’s an easy fix via drop-in replacement.

Some advice: when building a RAID array, use drives from different sources. Going different brands is probably a good idea, but caveat emptor: Company A’s 1TB drive will most likely not be the same ultimate size Company B’s. The available space will quite probably be skewed by a few KB or MB.

It should go without saying, but build your array only when you have all drives in hand. To more easily allow future expansion of your RAID, when it comes partition time shave a meg or so off your smallest drive. And when you decide to expand your array, buy a drive that’s the exact same model as one already in there. It will probably be cheaper than the newest model anyway.

To keep your bookmarks and RSS feed favicons looking shiny, I changed the onpaws.com favicon again. I was getting tired of the crusty current one which I made on a whim one day:

Passable at 64×64, but it always looked crummy at the more commonly seen 16×16:

After becoming intimately reacquainted with the various ways to disable Photoshop’s on by default selections and fill anti aliasing, I started with a 16×16 canvas this time, using the pencil tool and as per usual keeping the background transparent. This was a candidate:

But I’m happy with this new one for now- it retains the motif of circle + ‘p’ descender from onpaws -> op.

What do you think?