blog.foosion.org

Now THAT feels ever more like home…

Posted by Nils - 18/06/08 at 06:06:22 am

Firefox 3 is finally ready to download (though all servers are at the moment more or less overwhelmed, due to the worldrecord attempt).

Since it’s first release it integrates very well into the various systems because someone at Mozilla (after all) had the look & feel in mind. I think thats a big achievement though I stilled wished a support for the various password managers like the keychain or the kde wallet would have made it into the final release.

To top it all off, the UI gets even more “mac” with Aroonax’s GrApple Theme from takebacktheweb.org. (Which is an awesome domainname by the way )

So folks, have a nice day and light a candle, hoping for people around the world to finally abandon this so called “internet explorer” and get their copy of web-freedom.

word!

Songbird

Posted by micele - 17/06/08 at 11:06:21 am

Did anyone try Songbird? As a Linux user I’m always in search of a good audio player. Of course there is Amarok and of course there is Audacious but in my eyes there is not much in between. Amarok is quite large and didn’t really work out at all on my 600MHz P3. On the other hand Audacious is quite tiny but not made for handling large music archives like, .. let’s say.. mine
More accidentally I discovered a new audio player called Songbird. It somehow uses mozillas xul and seems to be a good compromise. To be honest, I didn’t test it too much so far. This might relate to my love-hate relationship to some other media player. Obviously the design is somehow inspired by this specific product
The current version 0.6 is still alpha, so please be patient. Maybe at some day it becomes a real alternative to the mentioned audio players. At least I already love it for it’s logo

Mr. Macintosh, say hello to Mr. Beolingus

Posted by Nils - 11/03/08 at 08:03:22 am

Many many thanks to Wolfgang Reszel!

He’s the one who packaged the whole Beolingus-Database in one Dictionary for Mac OS. Now one can spotlight search trough the thesaurus, wikipedia and beolingus at the same time, to find the word or phrase you’re looking for.

And: trough this ~100 mb download, you get whole thing on your mac and can search offline, whenever you like!

And and: these’s also a package for Daniel Naber’s openthesaurus.de - an open german thesaurus.

UPDATE: Pretty funny - mainly the same article popped up exactly at the same time at apfelquak.de

ViDock gfx is …

Posted by Nils - 09/03/08 at 07:03:58 pm

… a dockable Graphiccard extension for your Expresscard enabled Notebook.

For everyone out there with a Powerbook or a MacBook Pro: your chances for over 5 megapixels just got a whole lot better!

ViDock gfx

Keywurl

Posted by Nils - 06/03/08 at 12:03:42 pm

I’ve always been a fan of Safari, because of the speed and more im important the uncluttered, clean interface. The only thing i always missed, was the ability to punch a search string directly into the addressbar.

Well the waiting is over - thanks to keywurl.

Easily configurable in safari’s prefenrences, it’ll soon become your closest friend when it comes to fast, excessive searching in multiple services.

And yes, I’m aware of the fact that this feature is de-facto standard in all the other browsers - but this one doenst look like §$%&

- Nils

Webkit Nightshift

Posted by Nils - 25/02/08 at 09:02:30 am

Apple’s Webkit a.k.a. KHTML render engine is open-source since 2005 and is packed in a nightly build every day, giving you the ability to see and test the cutting edge developments done in the past days.

Pretty cool is the new HTML and Javascript Inspector “Drosera” which lets you do similar things as, for instance “Firebug”, just with os x glamour and shinyness

anyhow, as heading over to webkit.org every day, downloading the newest nightly and unpacking that thing into your Applications-Folder would be annoying, you can write a nice script or use this one, called Nightshift, which also gives you some nice features, like reverting to an earlier nightly build, if for some reason the recent one is cr*p

- Nils

Blurminal

Posted by Nils - 13/02/08 at 01:02:00 am

Just tripped over this nice Terminal.app (10.5) plugin (via SIMBL) which does nothing else but blur the background of your windows, to let you have transparency in a way that doesn’t confuse you

Grab your copy here - thanks Ciarán!

FireGPG: web-based email en-, decrypting & signing

Posted by micele - 06/02/08 at 04:02:43 pm

I often run into the problem of receiving encrypted mails but not be able to read it because I only have webmail access at this moment. Installing PGP plugins for webmailer like SquirrelMail always looked like a bad idea to me. Especially SquirrelMail hasn’t been the most secure peace of software out there and a place surrounded by all this php-web-foobar security leaks isn’t the best place for a private key. However there is another possibility of *crypting, signing and verifiying emails using webmail interfaces.
The FireFox extension FireGPG is a simple way to do all this pretty things. FireGPG just extends the FireFox context menu so that you can easily mark text inside textboxes and de- or encrypt it by mouseclick. Unfortunately GnuPG has to be installed.

It’s still a beta release but I suggest it’s stable enough to give it a try in secure enviroments. So get it!

Furthermore maybe this is a good choice for the Mac OS X 10.5 user. Somewhere I read that GPGMail doesn’t work with the toothless Leopard so far?!

Dec 9, 2007 - GPGMail & 10.5 (Leopard)
GPGMail doesn’t work yet on 10.5, and can’t work as-is. I’m currently working on the port, and published a beta version.

- micele

KDE4 native on Mac OS X

Posted by Nils - 30/01/08 at 03:01:04 pm

For all the K people out there loving their shiny macbook* whatever, there’s KDE 4 available native for mac OS.
I didn’t try it myself, but it seems to be pretty easy to use, with the installer disk image, packaged by RangerRick (of opennms).

So grab the torrent, get the .dmg and have fun-time new K-Apps running native in your copy of mac OS.

- Nils

TrueCrypt for Mac OS X

Posted by micele - 29/01/08 at 01:01:15 am

Yeah - this is the first post about OS X. And I really didn’t know, that I would be supposed to write it *hint@nils*

So far the volume encryption software formerly known as TrueCrypt was only available for Linux and Windows. Now it becomes available for OS X as well.
I really appreciate having this nice piece of software implemented on the Mac OS as well. But let the authors tell on their own:

Ok guys, you accused us of cheating, scamming, phishing, terrorism and even stolen candies but at the end of it we’re OUT with the First OpenSource Platform for Volume Encryption on MacOs X (aka ‘Look, mom! Truecrypt on my Macbook!’).
Having the opportunity to not trust FileVault has never been so sweet…

It’s still an alpha release and maybe it’s not a good idea to already use it for productive operation. But hey - once there is a alpha release usually a beta release follows. And so on…

Even if this is supposed to be an alpha (may we say pre-beta?), considering the several hundreds of downloads and the complete lack of problem reporting please consider this to be a safe enough to use it, as long as you keep regular backups (but you ALWAYS do it, don’t you?).

So mac folks: get it, try it, report and help improving the interoperability of TrueCrypt volumes all over the world
For the conclusion I hand over again to the OSXCrypt guys:

Happy Porn Secrets again, now with even more confidence!

via aptgetupdate.de

- micele