Firewalls for OS X, Mac

Had a recent pang of worry about blocking unwanted intrusions from the net. It's a periodic thing; so I had a quick search:

Found this on Macworld

Which lists such goodies as:

Little Snitch, very good value for money.
NoobProof, for adjusting the settings on the Mac's own built in [Unix like] firewall software.
WaterRoof, as above.

Android Aeroplane mode

As you may know, Aeroplane mode shuts down all wireless communications for safe[r] air travel.
But there are times when you may wish to only shut down the phone component yet keep the other features (wireless and bluetooth) running.

For example when in another country/location where your phone doesn't work and/or to avoid the excessive battery drain.

I'm currently using a Samsung Galaxy SII with Gingerbread OS. If I go to Settings > About Phone > Battery Usage, I can see that "Cell standby" is the biggest drain on my battery.

To turn off just this feature you can dial "*#*#INFO#*#*" (info being 4636 so - "*#*#4636#*#*" to access a small menu. clicking/tapping on "Phone information" and you'll get a screen which has a "Turn radio off" button. This is the cellular transmission component. Once it's off, you're off the airways, as far as the dialling public are concerned, and saving on all that battery power used trying to talk to phone towers.

You can also install an app called "Any Cut" which will let you make a shortcut to "Phone information" in case you can't remember the dialling sequence above.

hth

G+ Instant Upload, not quite...

Google+ Instant Upload, less than completely Instantly useful. But that's kewl, these things take iterations of fine tuning.

As I find that most of my photos need cropping at least, if not more elaborate editing having my photos put online immediately doesn't help me much. The online editors are getting better but they leave something to be desired.

The battery and net usage saving features/settings of Instant Upload are nice enough, but what would really nail it, for me, is being able to apply that to a folder that I can then drop in my finished, edited, tweaked, chosen shots to be uploaded either at that instant or when the filter settings allow.

That's my wish list anyhow. O_o

OSX, Applescript - show hidden files in Finder

A little applescript to toggle the Show Hidden Files setting for Finder.


-- Toggle Show Hidden Folders On Off

set showHiddenStatus to last word of (do shell script "defaults read com.apple.finder | grep AppleShowAllFiles")

if showHiddenStatus is "False" then
do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles True"
else
do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles False"
end if

-- kill Finder to make the changes active
do shell script "killall Finder"

Skooby renamer for OS X

OS X file renamer: Skooby renamer

Quite versatile, also renames mp3s using tags and images using metadata =)

Burning WMV files to DVD movies

This link at Online Tech helped me out.

Essentially, make the movie (WMV file) then convert to DVD format with DVDFlick then use Image burn to put the Audio_ts and Video_ts files onto a DVD.

FTP Software for OSX Mac, Free

FileZilla
Installing and trialling today, if it's good this post will stay here...

Found it on http://mac-free.com/

頑張れ日本！

Image from Blank Studio

Managing updates in Google Software Update - OSX

Don't know how old this page is but the issue comes up a bit and this is Google's response, at some point in time:
Managing updates in Google Software Update

Show Full Path in Finder, OSX

Too handy, so simple.
Open up Terminal, enter this line
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES