OS X dashboardadvisory locationd phoning home

having noticed my machine 'phoning home' (dashboardadvisory) I thought I'd take a look and see if I should be concerned about it.

It would seem no. It's merely keeping the widgets updated and not sending anything particularly personal to home.

But in the interests of documenting code snippets for my own failing memory here's how to unload the dashboardadvisory service:

I found two references, not sure which should (maybe) be scrubbed)

sudo launchctl unload -w \
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dashboard.advisory.fetch.plist

sudo launchctl unload -w com.apple.dashboard.advisory.fetch

found these references on Digg

locationd: similar scenario only now we're talking about the clock keeping itself updated and it can *try* to assess your location in order to do that.

Found some discussion at Superuser

Again, it would seem not to be a big [privacy] issue.

Unloading mDNSResponder from OS X

If mDNSResponder is getting out of hand you can unload it,

noting that mDNSResponder is part of OSX's DNS resolution, and therefor network discovery (LAN, WAN etc) requires it (at least to some degree - I need to research more - so, not knowing, I've not unloaded it);

ie. no mDNSResponder, no resolving host names.

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

To turn it back on, just do the opposite:

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

Chrome-Design, yes =) ... no =(

Chrome-Design, originally uploaded by Deezplace.

Well I've been using Chrome as much as possible (on PC/Windows) for the last 6 months, and loving it, but all is not roses, or at least so I've discovered since I got back to my Mac.

1st the pluses (for me at least, and therefor in my order of importance =)

Translation: very handy for when dealing with homepages in another language, Chrome offers to translate the page you are viewing. Saves a lot of cut 'n' pasting or redirection via translation sites.

Without a doubt Chrome has the nicest Tab handling. Moving, separating, merging all done effortlessly and (mostly) intuitive. And judging by the (lack of lag - response) speed these processes occur at, the code behind is much improved. Better use of computer (CPU/memory) resources.

The range of plugins for Chrome (which makes Firefox so enabled) is growing rapidly, although I tend to agree with a friend's comment that this is causing FF to become bloatware-ish/sluggish.

The combination of the address and search bar seems a (long overdue) natural evolution.

The options menu is much easier to navigate than the other browsers I usually use (Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera).

Now, again for me, the negatives.

I can no longer grab the Bookmark button (the star to the left of the address field) to drag that bookmark to my Bookmarks Toolbar. This was an incredibly quick/handy/idiot proof way to grab a bookmark.
Now I can only click that star which invokes the Bookmark dialogue which saves the bookmark to the bottom of the list of entries in the Bookmark Toolbar. #fail
I was able to do this in Windows but now no more =(

No border; whilst I love good eye candy and especially enjoy borderless video playback, Chrome looks great but I seem to have no handles to move the window about.
The title bar having been compressed down to incorporate the Tab area means that if I have tabs across the full width of the window mean I have no (or very minimal) area that I can click-drag the window if I wish to move it.

edit: I've installed Afloat to alleviate this annoyance, all is pretty good so far.

A pet peeve of mine is that OSX windows can only be resized from the bottom right corner, unlike the "grab any side" of MS Windows. The pro that makes up for that is the way I can grab the bottom border to move the window whereas in the MS scenario I can only have the title (or the Move option in the top left corner menu - means more clicks)

If I've missed a workaround for this I'd be happy to hear about it, I've been alt/command/ctrl and right clicking all over the place looking for other means of moving the window but so far no go.

cheers, I'm sure Google will improve past these issues, it's why I vote for them.

D

Video conversion - Mac, PC, Linux

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. available here

Big Brother trying hard to squash freedoms

"He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/cyber-war-hype/

Stress - who needs it?

Watched a great doco the other night, Stress: Portrait of a Killer, which discussed how much stress humans (try) to cope with now, compared to 100s of years ago.

That your position on the job ladder is enough to give you different health issues to those above you (who will have less issues than you); Folks higher up the job hierarchy (in more dominant positions) have more dopamine in their pleasure centers then folk in more subordinate positions, life just looks better to them.

Stress even seems to effect how (where) fat is deposited on the body, so the typical spreading hips is possibly stress related as well as diet/exercise.

Chronic and acute stress both effect memory.

And an interesting study of baboons, very similar creatures to humans when it comes to stress and it's study, showed a period when a certain troop, due to fatal infection from human's dumed food, lost half their male population. The aggressive Alpha males.

The resultant population actually became more balanced as the norm now was to not be aggressive and possessive. The whole troop as a whole became happier.
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Some stuff on youtube

Misplaced disdain

Antogonism toward other countries, in the shape of holier-than-thou feelings regarding war(s) and the way the perpetrators behave is often misplaced, the result of propaganda and short memories.

I'm reading Colin Wilson's "A Criminal History of Mankind and his details on humankind's history of rage and warmongering is pretty awakening.

See some quotes here regarding European (and American & British) influences on why countries became communist, where the opium trade started (the reason the British *wanted* Hong Kong in the first place) etc.
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Give the Law back to the People

Many years back if one transgressed the local laws one was dealt with locally and swiftly.
Maybe stoned to death or having body parts amputated/cut out.

We've [supposedly] come a long way from such days now that we have courts with a "jury of our peers" and the like, but we've also removed the Law a long way from the people it's meant to protect/serve.

The current binding of the law is resulting in teachers having their authority restricted, being threatened by students with law suits, the medical profession, as well, being too wary of malpractice suits such that they daren't risk an unconventional opinion, and many other situations where threat of law suits or over regulation are reducing our freedoms.

It's not just the shear number of laws that have been made to regulate and supposedly serve us, it's the language they're written in.

Why is it that the laws which should define and protect our society are essentially unintelligible to all but a trained few? A trained few who take huge sums of money of us to lead us through such a minefield!

It all makes me think of what's written on the side of the Bad Transformer in his Police car guise: "To Punish and Enslave."

That's what the law currently does for us.

Well I'd thought this for some time and today I saw a great TED talk: Philip K. Howard: Four ways to fix a broken legal system.

Do yourself a favour, don't just watch this talk, watch TED!

Rural Exodus Metropolis Influx

Now it's long been a noted item that humans have been moving into the cities, more and more every year. 130 a minute apparently. 70 million a year.

Now I've always thought this was a pretty sad thing, much as I have enjoyed living in the city a lot myself for various "good" reasons listed in the video, I've felt that it's done at huge expense to the land those people live on.

Good healthy productive land gets concreted over so people can live together en mass, needing huge amounts of supplies to be shipped into them and creating huge amounts of waste to be removed, usually to a place that becomes something like a cancer on the face of the Earth.

Then I saw Stewart Brand's little piece on Squatter Cities.
This TED video pointed out some interesting things for me, my favourite being that population growth slows (birthrate drops) for those in these Squatter Cities.

Food for thought... I thought.
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Australian Government shows it Big Brother colours

The Australian Government is going to hamstring our internet access.
We already have an internet system that is far from #1 in the world, what with download caps and lack of rural infrastructure - do YOU want to have your rights to information curtailed as well? Do you agree with the kind of censorship and dictatorial control as being shown in places like China? Then go to this site and LEARN what the government is DOING as opposed to what it THINKS/SAYS it's doing.

http://www.internetblackout.com.au/
Technicians built the internet, why is it Politicians are pretending to know how it works????

The government's "solution" will COST us money, will COST us internet speed, will COST us freedom to information.

Concerned about what your kids see online? Then why do you leave that parental responsibility to someone else?

[quote]
What’s the problem?

The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste millions of dollars and won’t make anyone safer.

1.

It won’t protect children: The filter isn’t a “cyber safety” measure to stop kids seeing inappropriate content such as R and X rated websites. It is not even designed to prevent the spread of illegal material where it is most often found (chat rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing).
2.

We will all pay for this ineffective solution: Under this policy, ISPs will be forced to charge more for consumer and business broadband. Several hundred thousand dollars has already been spent to test the filter – without considering high-speed services such as the National Broadband Network!
3.

A dangerous precedent: We stand to join a small club of countries which impose centralised Internet censorship such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The secret blacklist may be limited to “Refused Classification” content for now, but what might a future Australian Government choose to block?