Helene

I have been wanting a notebook for a long time. A small computer I can just put in my bag and have with me everywhere I go. I have for a long time been reading every rumor that has been available on the iPad, so when it was launched I swallowed everything I could find about it, and then I started comparing it to what I want in a notebook. The iPad fell short quickly because of two main reasons:

• HDMI, there isn’t a way to connect it to a TV using HDMI. When looking at the iPad specs it also haven’t a good enough resolution to support it. I want a a computer that I can easily connect to a tv and watch films with as little hassle as possible. Plug-and-play, baby!
• Portable keyboard. The iPad supports a pluggable FULL-SIZE keyboard. But, I don’t want a full size keyboard. I want something small and easy – a small, portable, foldable Bluetooth keyboard like the Stowaway iGo keyboard.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist yet – as in there is no drivers on iphone (iPad just seems to be a large version of iPhone without telephone capabilities) that recognizes it.  I have seen one video where it works with a jailbreaked iphone on an apple bluetooth keyboard, but that keyboard isn’t very foldable – and still full-sized.

My conclusion is therefore that I will not purchase an iPad any time soon. I will instead go for a notebook sometime before I go on vacation. But  what notebook to buy?

For about a year now I have not bought myself any gadgets, and because of this I have been suffering from gadget withdrawal for some time now. The result have been that for christmas I bought Nintendo Wii and Wii Fitness Board to myself.

Yesterday I purchased an iPhone and spent hours playing around, downloading apps and playing around.

Today, I fell in love!

When walking to the train station it was incredibly cold, and when the train didn’t arrive I started wondering where the hell it was! I was freezing my butt off. So I took up my iphone, found the train app that told me my train was delayed by 6 minutes and was at Nordstrand. Then I found out that it was -21 degrees outside, no wonder I was freezing.

2 minutes later it was announced over the speakers that the train was delayed – but that’s just plain old news for me

Many pdf’s comes with big white borders. This becomes a problem when reading pdf’s on ebook readers since the borders takes up a lot of space on an already small and challenged reading area. Or when one wants to save some trees when printing the document. Well, there’s a solution for this in macosx.

Open the pdf in Preview.
Open the sidebar: Preview Menu –> View –> Sidebar
Choose Thumbnail view: Preview Sidebar –> On the bottom left there is an icon, click and choose Thumbnails. Ensure that you have one of the pages selected/marked.
Select all the pages: Preview Menu –> Edit –> Select All
Choose the Select Tool: Preview Menu –> Tools –> Select Tool

Now you can mark the area of the page that you want to keep. Since you previously selected all the pages, the changes will occur on all the pages.

To remove the unmarked area: Preview Menu –> Tools –> Crop.

Now you can save the document.

This worked as a charm for me and the pdf’s ended up looking good in my iliad, though the font size is still a bit small (but still readable) in most cases.

MacHeist gives away free software gifts for free on christmas day. Today it’s 1password, doseido, iConquer, SantaSnaps, Enigmo and Synergy. Run and download.

A sample encrypted pdf file can be downloaded from Adobe’s site:
Sample

NB. The encrypted file must have printing permissions.

1. Open the file with Preview
One can verify that it is encrypted by going to Tools -> Inspector -> Encryption Inspector (the lock icon)
2. Go to File -> Print -> PDF -> Save as PDF. And voila, an unencrypted version of the file is saved.

It’s sad to say it, but I had my first incident of spyware… on nothing less than my macosx.

I found out because I had these popups that came up when browsing in firefox:

It always pointed to the same ip adress 216.255.186.11. At first I thought it was something wrong with popup blocker in firefox, so I installed adblock in hopes that it help. It didn’t. That was what pointed me in the right direction.

I installed MacScan, and what do you know. It found a Trojan called DNSChanger..

I have managed to stay ahead of the game so far by being careful about what I install. Obviously, that didn’t help. So I guess… no more gay porn for me. (Hey, JUST KIDDING!)

Unfortunately, after many trials I discovered that MacScan didn’t do their job properly to remove the file. It only removed a file named plugins.settings, but there was a lot more than that happening. I started searching out more information about the problem and found a site containing analysis of what the trojan does. So, here is what one must do to remove it:

Crontab contained this line:
sudo crontab -l
* * * * * “/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/QuickTime.xpt”>/dev/null 2>&1

I removed it using this command (DELETES ALL CRONTABS FOR ROOT) : sudo crontab -r

Delete: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/plugins.settings
Then I deleted /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/QuickTime.xpt

After this session – No more popups for me !!! *Celebration*
Previous history:

Update: DAMN! That popup is still there !!! So what in the hell is it? Firefox is in “show no popup” mode.
So I tried this solution and set privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins = 3 (instead of 2). Hopefully that helps..

Update2: Apparantly, that didn’t help as well. Now I’m really baffled. And it makes no sense, because it pops up randomly on different sites.. *thinking hard*

Update3: My last desperate act is to search through all files on my harddrive looking for the ip adress in question (though time consuming). A tip is to delete all history files (clear browser history etc) where the ip adress might appear.
sudo find . -exec grep ‘216.255.186.11′ {} \; -print

I got a hit on these files:
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/7kojvnaz.default/places.sqlite
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/7kojvnaz.default/places.sqlite-journal
So I renamed the file too places.sqlite-journal.old.The files is used for preserving Firefox browsing history. In my case – will not be missed. That didn’t help – the popup is still there.

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/7kojvnaz.default/sessionstore.js
Firefox session data

Frustration solved! Finally !

I have had my mac for about 10 months, but I still hadn’t figured out where to find those programming keys like curly braces, square brackets, straight vertical (pipe) and tilde to name a few on my keyboard.

The solution was easy when I found it, but it wasn’t intuitive for me. After all, it took me 10 months.

These works for norwegian keyboard layout (and probably some more):
~ = Option + ^
| = Option + 7
[ = Option + 8
] = Option + 9
{ = Option + Shift + 8
} = Option + Shift + 9
\ = Option + Shift + 7