Nathan Bullock - Technology

Is anyone still listening?

2020-07-15T07:08:00.001-07:00

Just found this really old blog of mine...

Wondering how well this still works.

Tweaking a new MacOS X Install

2011-10-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

Here is the basic configuration I do when I get a new Mac. Sorry for not giving a lot of detail, I am assuming these instructions are mostly for me, but possibly others can learn something from them as well.

Download Chrome, setup Google sync.
Default terminal font is ugly, use Bitstream Vera Mono, 12 pt, configure terminal to close if shell exits cleanly, save a nice default window group.
Preferences: fix dock size, auto hide, setup spaces, keyboard - faster repeat rate, sharing - turn on ssh and fix machine name, remove time machine and blue tooth from menu bar, modify the sleep time.
Download menumeters, setup.
Setup bash: git clone git://github.com/nathanbullock/bin.git; ln -s bin/bashrc.ln .bashrc; ln -s bin/bashrc.ln .bash_profile; ln -s bin/vimrc.ln .vimrc

7 Reasons I Love My Android

2011-10-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

When I tell people I love my Android and have stopped using my iPhone. I usually get a lot of questions as to why. So I decided to compile the reasons so I don't have to keep repeating myself.

Navigation - even without a data connection. I live in Canada but I often travel to the U.S. for work. As a result while traveling I either don't have access to data on my phone, or it is very expensive. So instead I have many times used the wifi in the airport, or at work, or somewhere else to plan my route on my phone, and then let my phone navigate me, turn by turn, to my destination even though it no longer has a data connection. It works beautifully and I happily get to my destination.
Power Control - controlling battery usage. There are always a number of things using up your battery and possibly using up your data limits. The great things about the power control widget is that it gives you control over most of those things right on your home screen, you don't have to dig through various settings menus to turn things off if you aren't using them. So for example I usually just turn bluetooth off since I only need it when I am in the truck, but when I get in the truck it is only one tap of the finger to turn it on so I can use my phone hands free. Also if I am out camping for a couple of days it is easy to turn off everything such as wifi, bluetooth, gps, and screen brightness to make sure my phone will have the juice it needs to survive without being plugged in. I have a couple of other widgets on my home screen that also give me access to airplane mode, data, and portable hotspot so I can turn those things on and off easily as well.
Talk - text and video chat. Normally when I am at work or elsewhere Google Chat is how I communicate with my wife, and with a number of other people around me. Android allows me to easily move between using a laptop when one is close by or use my Android when that is what is available. The non-disruptive notification system on Android makes it even nicer. The only thing that I would like to see is to force voice only chat, if it can do video it currently doesn't give you an option between voice or video.
Contacts - syncing my Gmail contacts. It is very nice to easily have access to my regular gmail contacts right on my phone, it also makes it so you can edit your contacts in Gmail or on the phone, which ever I prefer, or method I have available. The one improvement that I would love to see here is to have a shared set of contacts, for example there are a number of contacts that both my wife and I use, and it would be nice if we could cooperatively keep them up to date. There may be a workaround of having a shared gmail account that we both use and our individual accounts but this seems like a poor method to solve this.
Organization of Apps - no searching through every folder. This is one thing I always struggle with whenever I go back to using an iPhone, finding an elusive app that I know is on the phone somewhere. It always turns into a game of opening one folder, nope, open another folder, nope, etc until you finally find it. On Android you can always just go to the app directory and scroll through all your apps alphabetically until you find what you are looking for, it also means that lesser used apps don't have to take up any space on your home screen.
Widgets - information at a glance. I love how on Android your applications have the ability to show you information right on the home screen. On my main home screen I have an Astrid widget to remind me what I should be doing, a calendar widget reminding me where I should be, and a weather widget telling me the current weather, and then a couple of app icons for my most commonly used applications. This means that as soon as I unlock my phone my most commonly used information is staring me right in the face.
Browser - reading actual websites. Finally the Android browser. Whenever I mention that I love the Android browser I always hear how the iPhone browser is so much better. It probably is in many ways but the Android browser is heads and tails above when it comes to the one use case I care about, reading text on a webpage. Here is a simple test that I always get people to run. Open an iPhone and an Android to Wikipedia, not the mobile version but the normal desktop version and try to read the text. On an iPhone it is either too small, or involves scrolling back and forth constantly. On an Android you just double tap the text and it re-flows it perfectly, want it a little bigger, just zoom in a little more and it reflows it again. This works perfectly on almost every site I have been to. iPhone almost requires text heavy sites to create a mobile version in order to be usable.

Removing the Newsstand App

2011-10-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

My daughter just upgraded her iPhone to iOS 5, and was confused at how to either get rid of the new Newsstand app or to at least move it into her "Useless" folder. After a little Googling we managed to find the secret incantation. The method used to do this is almost certainly a bug in iOS and so may be removed in the next update, but here is how you do it.

You take two regular apps, drop one on top of the other, this will create a new folder. While this new folder is being created you quickly, really, really quickly, grab the newsstand app and drop it also into this new folder. This will put the newstand app into this new folder, it is a little tricky to do so it may take a few tries. Note that you can't actually use it when it is in this folder, if you actually want to use this app you will need to move it back to your homescreen.

Password Security

2011-10-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

One of the most painful things I find about life in the digital age is trying to keep track of information that I need to know, but that I don't want anyone else to know. For example the pin number for my bank card, the password for my financial accounts, the passwords for work, the secret question answers that all sorts of web sites now use to "improve security", and the list goes on and on.

Obviously the easiest way to deal with all of this is just to write them all down and stuff them in your wallet, or hide it somewhere at home. This is actually not that bad of a method. It has a fairly limited attack vector, basically someone who is in your home could get a hold of them (most of which you probably trust) or someone has to break into your house and find where you hid it (most peoples houses are never broken into and when someone does they aren't looking for a piece of paper hidden in your sock drawer). This does have the problem of it only being available to you when you are home, but for most people this would probably be my recommendation.

The rest of the solutions almost all have more significant vulnerabilities (because they are software based), but have extra convenience and abilities that the first solution doesn't (because they are software based). There is a range of them from storing your passwords in an email to yourself, to using a encrypted file on your laptop or cellphone, to using an encryption solution that stores the passwords in the cloud somewhere.

The method of sending yourself an email with all of your paswords is one that I would never recommend anyone use. There is just too many problems, your email account could be compromised, someone at your email service provider could access your email, you could leave your phone or computer unlocked which may allow someone to access your email, etc. So this solution has a lot of convenience, it is available to you almost anywhere, but has a huge amount of risk.

Almost all of the second level solutions are okay, basically using a security product that stores your passwords for you, this product could be something on your local machine, or something that you use through the web. The main problem with these solutions comes down to trust. Do you trust that the company that made the product did a good job and paid extra close attention to security the whole way through the product, do they do a good job of protecting their servers from getting hacked, do they make sure that a limited number of staff have access to the data stored on their servers. I find it very difficult to completely trust any company, no matter how good their intentions, you never know when they will hire a bad employee, get bought out by a company than no longer cares, or just make a mistake. For the products that just run on your local machine this may require less trust and so be more agreeable to me, but they don't have the convenience of being available anytime, anywhere.

In my opinion the sweet spot is somewhere in between. Use a product that creates an encrypted file with your passwords, possibly an encrypted word file, an encrypted open office document, or some other companies encryption tool of which there are many. And then store the encrypted file to a regular web service possibly gmail, yahoo mail, dropbox, or some other service. This gives you the convenience of being able to access this file almost anywhere, and not having to completely trust any company to leak your information. There is still lots of possible weaknesses to this type of a system, for example if your computer is compromised, but it is reasonably good and reasonably convenient for most people.

Obviously all of the information in this article is just my opinion and shouldn't be relied upon, you should use your own judgement about the risks and rewards of any password solution. The method I use is a hybrid approach similar to what I talked about in the previous paragraph. This method gives me a reasonable amount of convenience while being secure enough for my uses.

Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) - Pandoc Included

2010-05-05T03:25:00.000-07:00

You no longer have to manually build Pandoc in order to get a reasonably up-to-date version on Ubuntu. Pandoc 1.5.1.1 is now in the Ubuntu software repositories. :-)

I know there have been numerous other improvements to Ubuntu for Lucid Lynx but this was actually the best Ubuntu setup improvement for me. It probably cut 10 minutes off of a new Ubuntu install.

No Batteries Available - MacBook Pro

2010-04-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

Today while we were using our MacBook Pro, it just shut off, even though it still had lots of battery left. It would only turn back on once we plugged it in, and at that point it showed a black "X" over the battery icon, and when we clicked on the battery icon it told us "No Batteries Available". Annoying, it was only around 6 months old.

Searching around on Apple's website was useless, phoning their tech support got us an answer something like: "Yes, we know what the problem is but we won't tell you unless you pay us $50." Oops, bad Apple, major fail right there.

The one good thing about their answer was that it told us that their was an answer, up until that point I figured it was a hardware issue (time for a new battery). A couple of Google searches later we got an answer for a MacBook Air, we tried it, and it worked. Here is the answer:

Turn off the Mac, make sure it is plugged in. While holding down the shift, control, and option buttons on the left side of the keyboard press the power button once. Wait 5 seconds and press the power button again to start the Mac. This is supposed to reset the SMC or power manager. It worked like a charm.

There was also information on how to reset the PRAM, although I don't know when or why you would need to do that.

Installing Pandoc on Ubuntu

2010-04-10T22:54:00.000-07:00

Pandoc is wonderful. I love it both because of how nice of a job it does in converting HTML to Markdown, and it makes converting Markdown to HTML very nice and simple.

The problem with Pandoc is that it is one of the few programs that I use that I can't simply run something like sudo apt-get install pandoc. Why not? The version of Pandoc that is in the Ubuntu repositories is ancient. As a result I have to jump through a few hoops to install Pandoc each time I install Ubuntu on a computer.

The best instructions for installing Pandoc on Ubuntu that I have found were written by John Gabrielle.

file:// URLs on Android

2010-03-05T02:45:00.000-08:00

I have been following issue 2454 for Android's browser for close to a year now and I am very excited to see that it has now been resolved.

One of the things that I loved about the PSP was that it had a decent sized screen and an okay browser (for plain text webpages). As a result I used my PSP for reading ebooks, notes that I had written, and other sorts of text. The iPhone is completely useless for this task from what I have seen, and Android devices made it painful.

I have been trying this out on my Android phone and it works quite well, all you need to do is dump your html files on to the SD card (lets say you put index.html in the root folder) and then point your browser to file:///sdcard/index.html.

Note that if you just have a simple html file the text will appear tiny and unreadable and you will have to zoom in to each page you switch to, which is annoying to say the least. In order to fix this you can add the following tags to each page:

<meta name='viewport' content='initial-scale=1.0, width=device-width, user-scalable=no' />

You can learn more about these viewport settings at the Safari developer center.

Zeroconf/Bonjour

2010-03-02T04:22:00.000-08:00

I absolutely love Zeroconf/Bonjour, except when it doesn't work properly. (I am looking at you Mac OSX 10.5.)

Sometimes when I reboot one of the machines on my network Bonjour won't update the ip address for that machine. Previously I would just switch over to using the ip address or reboot the mac that I was using. Today I learned how to just reboot the Bonjour service.

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Multiple Filesystems on a USB key

2010-02-19T04:19:00.000-08:00

Annoying Windows machines. It isn't often that I have to even touch a Windows computer (I normally am using either Linux or a Mac) but whenever I do it makes me sad for those millions of people that do use them. Anyway I was trying to move some files off someone else's Windows machine onto my nice little USB key, the only problem is that it has two filesystems, a Linux filesystem and a FAT32. Mac happily uses the FAT32 and ignores the Linux one, Linux can use both, and the Windows machine... just can't get past their being two and so won't use either and asks if I would like to format my USB key. Grrr, I really like having a native linux filesystem on my USB key.

Well I guess I will have to outsmart Windows. I will format the whole USB drive with FAT32 and then hide a ext4 filesystem in one of the files on the FAT32 filesystem. Hopefully that should make Windows happy and my computers will have to live with the extra couple of steps.

Basic steps:
dd if=/dev/zero of= bs=1048576 count=20
mkfs.ext4
Add something like the following to your /etc/fstab file:
/mountpoint ext4 user,noatime,loop 0 0

Or for a more detailed explanation, http://nst.sourceforge.net/nst/docs/user/ch04s04.html

Mac Terminal's Font

2010-02-16T04:15:00.000-08:00

Why does Mac OSX have such a hideous default font for their terminal? Luckily someone else already went through the trouble of showing us how to fix it. http://www.silassewell.com/blog/2007/11/18/better-terminal-font-os-x-gnome/

Security and Privacy in the Cloud

2010-02-13T04:08:00.000-08:00

Spending some time learning more about security of information and privacy. A good, yet reasonable simple, tutorial for GnuPG can be found at http://aplawrence.com/Basics/gpg.html. Using encryption can make it far more secure to store various semi-private things in gmail or github or dropbox.