Beiträge getagged mit english
Pimp your Safari
For the very first days I used my Mac I didn’t like Safari, since some nice features in Firefox I got used to were missing. E.g. the great feature to start searches in Google by typing “g” followed by the search string in the address bar or the blocking of advertisements by the AdBlock Plugin. I felt a little like in IE6 times 
But: Safari is much faster compared to Firefox and is more nicely integrated to the Mac. Finally I decided “speed defeats functionality” and I started to use Safari.
The good news is: you can pimp Safari by plugins, too.From my point of view, you only need three plugins to get a better Safari:
- The general purpose plugin Glims that adds stuff like the Google search thingy described above, fullscreen mode, advanced navigation, and much more to Safari.
- The Safari AdBlock Plugin. Nomen est omen.
- And finally (if you like browsing pages like Flickr, Deviantart, etc for good photos) Cooliris. Cooliris is some kind of display mechanism for gallery content without the webpage around the photos. It extracts the pictures from the site and displays them on a clean black, somehow coverflow-like surface. Browsing pictures like this is more fun than clicking on thousand buttons on the webpages…
The Mac Master Shortcut
Sometimes you don’t know in which menu some function of an application is hidden. On Mac computers every app has a search function located in the “Help” menu.
If you type there the name of the function you’re seeking, some kind of pointer “jumps” to the function and you simply need to press “Return” to activate it. Nice.
Unfortunately there is no Shortcut that activates the search. At least I thought so up to now
Simply press Command + (= Command + Shift + 7)
K2 Theme broken after WP 2.7.1 installation
Yesterday I upgraded my wordpress to version 2.7.1 and quickly found out that the site layout was broken. Today I glanced over the K2 page but found no statements about this issue. But: I found a “Nightly Built” section with more up to date template versions than the officially released one. So I installed the newest Nighly from Februrary, 12th and … the issue was fixed.
You’ll find the newer templete here.
NTFS Support for Mac OS
The missing read/write NTFS support in Mac OS is a real pain, especially for “switchers” that maybe still have USB hard- or thumbdrives with NFTS partitions. Meanwhile I found out, that you can include “full” NTFS support for Mac OS easily:
First you need to install MacFuse, then install NTFS-3G. There are two builds of the latter software. I tried the “stable” built first, which is awfully slow. Copying a 5 Gig File to the NTFS partition takes 40 (!) minutes. There’s also an other version with caching enabled, that performs much better but is said to cause problems when the computer crashes while a file transfer is in progress. Meanwhile I use the caching enabled version – my Mac doesn’t crash *lol*
Btw.: The good thing about Fuse is, that there are some other file systems that can be mounted, e.g. SSH Filesystem (sshfs).
GPS logging for Symbian phones
It seems that when you’ve installed Python on your Symbian handset, you’ll get the best applications. Today I found a great piece of software that uses the internal GPS device of a mobile or an external GPS mouse to track your way: pygpslog.
The installation of the software is a real pain in the ass, because several components need to be downloaded, signed (with Symbian signed) and installed on the mobile. You’ll need 15 minutes for this procedure. After you’re done, you can track your way easily. The program stores GPX files on the device’s memory card which can be sent to a computer and finally imported to e.g. Google Earth. I just tried this and I’m pretty amazed 
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Wordmobi – Blogging with a mobile phone
I always wanted to have an application that allows me to blog from my mobile phone. Unfortunately Nokia doesn’t ship its handsets with such an application – other manufacturers do so (sometimes). Up to now I only knew an application called ShoZu. ShoZu isn’t only a software you install on your mobile, ShoZu is also an online service that acts as some sort of “proxy” between your mobile and your blog. So the ShoZu client doesn’t publish directly to the blog, but it sends the post to the online service and the service pushes the post to the blog. This might have some oppertunities as the support of a plethora of blogging engines and other social networking sites but also requires that you hand over the password to your blog to the ShoZu service. A pretty odd feeling…
Well, I tested ShoZu with a test blog hosted on wordpress.com and found out, that the software works well. But somehow it is also very bloated and not really easy to understand. It also adds some functionality to parts of the mobile as the camera. Sometimes – I couldn’t figure out exactly when- ShoZu comes to life and asks if you want the publish the picture taken a moment ago on your blog. Unfortunately you can’t control this, so I deinstalled Shozu pretty fast.
Some time ago I read about a Python based Wordpress client for Symbian. (Python is a programming langauge that is, like Java, more or less platform independant. Like for Java, Python runtime environments exist for multiple Symbian S60 based mobiles). I don’t know really why, but I didn’t test the software called Wordmobi up to now. Today I installed Python (click here to read more) and Wordmobi and I got a really good first impression.
After setting up the connection to my blog (btw: wordmobi only works for Wordpress blogs) I entered the “Posts” menu and was able to update the list of available posts on my blog:
This works pretty well. You can even edit and republish existing posts. Cool. The next step was to test if the creation of new posts works, too.
Well, it seems so. You can also add stuff like lists or images to a post. If you select “image” Wordmobi asks if an existing picture should be selected or if you want to take a new one. I took a new one and it worked! 
For me, Wordmobi is the first application that I really can use to write short posts using my mobile. I don’t know if this is really a thing you want (and need) to do, but I feel that this could be fun *g* Btw: you can see the test post I wrote here.
How to use a TPM with Ubuntu
For my work I (have to) use the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). This is a certain type of crypto chip located on a computer’s mainboard. Some people claim it’s a wicked piece of hardware, created by the government, Bill Gates, the music industry, etc. to overtake one’s computer (yepp, you can find stuff like this in the internet). I say it’s a technology you can use for good or for bad purposes. But I don’t want to argue about this here actually I simply need one to work with.
Up to now I have always built my own TPM-enabled kernel that also included the IBM IMA patch. Yesterday I found out that if you need the TPM only everything gets much easier. Simply load the kernel modules and start the tcsd (the trusted computing deamon that provides access to the TPM) and you’re done.
First login as root
> sudo -s
and install Trousers and the TPM Tools:
> apt-get install tpm-tools trousers
Head to the directory where the Kernel modules are located /lib/modules/2.x.y-z-generic/kernel/drivers/char/tpm, there you’ll find the modules you need:
> ls -la /lib/modules/2.x.y-z-generic/kernel/drivers/char/tpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 16240 2008-11-21 00:46 tpm_atmel.ko
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 18204 2008-11-21 00:46 tpm_bios.ko
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 23532 2008-11-21 00:46 tpm_infineon.ko
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 29440 2008-11-21 00:46 tpm.ko
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 17700 2008-11-21 00:46 tpm_nsc.ko
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 25452 2008-11-21 00:46 tpm_tis.ko
For my machine it was sufficient to load tpm_tis.ko.
> modprobe tpm_tis.ko
Now you should “see” the TPM (tpm0) in /sys/class/misc/ and be able to print the PCRs
> cat /sys/class/misc/tpm0/device/pcrs
PCR-00: xx 82 F8 37 D6 83 21 56 ff F7 FB 94 25 D8 7A 38 47 57 BF 83
PCR-01: yy 93 6D 55 81 BE 16 99 ff 88 DA D1 D9 B5 67 53 54 A7 41 71
PCR-02: zz DE 58 4D CE F0 3F 6A ff AC 1A 24 0A 83 58 93 89 6F 21 8D
PCR-03: aa 3F 78 0F 11 A4 B4 99 ff FC AA 80 CD 6E 39 57 C3 3B 22 75
PCR-04: bb 0B 67 73 D3 6F B5 AD ff 11 F5 43 C5 DA 92 C9 D4 69 E4 33
(and so on)
If tpm_tis doesn’t work on your machine, simply use trial and error for finding the right module. You can’t damage stuff. Btw: if you like to load the Kernel module automatically, edit /etc/modules and add “tpm_tis” to the list of modules.
If you’ve got the right module loaded, start the tcsd. Notice: unlike to other distributions you can’t invoke the tcsd in Ubuntu by
> /etc/init.d/tcsd start
You need to type
> tcsd
If you like some debugging info, add -f:
> tcsd -f
Now you’re ready to go:
> tpm_version
TPM 1.2 Version Info:
Chip Version: 1.2.11.5
Spec Level: 2
Errata Revision: 0
TPM Vendor ID: ATML
TPM Version: 01010000
Manufacturer Info: 41544d4c
Now you can take ownership of your TPM:
> tpm_takeownership
Enter owner password: OWNERPASS
Confirm password: OWNERPASS
Enter SRK password: SRKPASS
Confirm password: SRKPASS
Done.
__________
By the way: If you find typing or grammar errors, you can keep them.
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