If you’re new to the Mac, welcome. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d like to point you to some resources to help you get started. Apple, of course, provides some help itself. The Mac comes with a useful but often forgotten Help menu. Apple provides a support site, AppleCare phone number, and genius bars at their retail stores where you can go to ask questions. Then, of course, there’s Google. Let’s move beyond those, though. More… »
iTunes’ shuffle gives songs that were played 100 times the same chance of being played as songs that have never been played at all. Learn how to get a more balanced shuffle, while avoiding unwanted content, such as out-of-season holiday music. Unlike adjustments made to iTunes smart shuffle slider, this method will also apply to your iPod. More… »
Does the idea of blocking online advertisements appeal to you? Many solutions exist, such as the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox, CSS-based ad-blocking, and Privoxy. What you may not be familiar with, however, is using a router to block ads. Imagine: ad-blocking for an entire network, for all browsers and all operating systems, without any additional configuration on the clients. This includes devices which might not otherwise have a way to block ads, and it can be made even nicer by having the router automatically update its ad-blocking rules. All you need is the Tomato firmware on a compatible router and this guide. More… »
720p video from YouTube. Yes, YouTube. Click to enlarge.
Update: My bookmarklet has been broken by Google, but the script it was based on has been fixed and has added support for 720p HD downloading. Use that instead.
In addition to expanding their player to 960px wide for all videos, YouTube received a more quiet upgrade today. In addition to normal quality and high quality, they have now added 720p HD video. Few HD YouTube videos exist at the moment, but for those that do you can simply append &fmt=22 to the end of the URL. Interestingly, I seem to be the first to have figured out how to actually download (rather than stream) these new 720p HD videos directly from YouTube. More… »
When running a server, security is a major concern. Part of that means keeping the software up to date, and package managers make it very easy to update all of the software installed on a Linux system in one fell swoop. However, the person maintaining the server still needs to be made aware that updates are available, and servers are often headless. While it’s true that tools such as cron-apt are available to receive update notification via email, such tools require the user to run their own mail server, which many ISPs block in an effort to reduce spam. Fortunately, it is possible to get around this using Twitter. More… »