Is Someone Snitching On You?

Most people are familiar with the concept of a firewall. In theory, it will block all unwanted or “bad” traffic from connecting to your machine. What you may not know is many firewalls have relaxed or non-existent rules for “outbound” connections. That is, connections from your programs to servers on the internet. In fact, you may not even realize that many applications are “calling home”. This can be for a number of reasons: checking for software upgrades, downloading the latest news, or even sending Software registration forms.

But what about the latest freeware game you downloaded? Perhaps the software developer is sending information regarding your specific version of OS X, or how your hardware is configured. This information may be useful for improving the quality of their software. But it also may potentially expose information that you aren’t particularly comfortable in sharing.
Enter Little Snitch. Think of this as a really nosy firewall, but it’s solely interested in the traffic going out of your computer. Little Snitch can be downloaded free from http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html. The only limitation of the free version is that it stops after three hours, at which time you must restart it. You can restart it as often as you like. If you find it useful, registration is $24.95 USD (around AED92).

After installing Little Snitch, you will be required to restart your computer. When your computer restarts, you will begin wading through a series of dialog boxes asking permission to connect various programs (many you may have never heard of) to a variety of servers. Notice the server address? This is where the program wants to connect. For example, if you use the .Mac iDisk, you will see something like this screenshot.

I recognize the address idisk.mac.com, and I would like to allow it to connect. Moreover, I would like it to connect automatically without asking me in the future. However, I want to ensure that no other malicious programs take advantage of the “dotmacsyncclient” application, so I want to limit exactly where it can connect. The solution? - I will click the “Forever” tab, and choose the (already selected) ‘idisk.mac.com & Port 443 TCP (https)’, and then “Allow”. You should see this entry added to the Little Snitch configuration window.

It may not always be practical to limit access to a single server address. For example, a web browser needs to connect to a wide variety of sites. If you look in the Little Snitch configuration graphic, you will notice that I allow “Flock” any connection. This doesn’t mean that I am in the dark about Flock though. Little Snitch continues to monitor where your applications are sending data. You will notice a translucent grey box will appear when new connections are established by trusted applications. If you would like to keep an eye on this, simply check the “stay visible” box. Notice that Flock is currently connecting to www.freezerpants.com? Well, that’s fine. But what if I saw Flock making a connection to a server I didn’t trust.
For the sake of example, let’s pretend Freezerpants.com was a server that was harvesting email addresses for Spam (it isn’t really, I promise). What then? In the Little Snitch configuration screen, click on the application you want to add rules for (in this case, Flock). At the top, change “Allow Connections” to “Deny Connections”, and add the appropriate information. Click “OK”, and now you’ve blocked Flock’s access to www.freezerpants.com. NOTE: Freezerpants.com is NOT the same as www.freezerpants.com.

There is a quicker way to do this though: In the floating Little Snitch window, click on the application you want to change the rules for, then in the expanded view, right click on the server and choose “Deny Connections to…” and that’s it. From now on, Freezerpants.com is blacklisted (“denied”). If you ever want to change this, simply go in to the Little Snitch Configuration window and change the setting.

Now that you have power over your applications’ network connections, what next? It’s possible, if you are trying to squeeze every last bit of network performance out of your machine, to go through and explicitly deny ALL connections except for those that you choose. Arguably many background daemons (such as ntpd) use very little bandwidth, they use bandwidth nonetheless.
A final note: If you try Little Snitch and decide it isn’t right for you, uninstalling does require the original installer program, so don’t trash it! To Uninstall, simply start the Uninstaller and choose “Uninstall”. If you’ve already removed the original file, don’t worry. Just download it again and run the installer.

by Christian Sullivan

Adobe Tutorial: Animating Handwriting

For beginners in Adobe Flash, this will be a gentle introduction to some of what is possible. We’re using Flash CS3 but the same basic technique works in older versions as well, so don’t worry if you don’t have the latest. This technique results in a much more realistic result for animating handwriting text than can be achieved through using an animated mask. You can see the final result at http://www.emiratesmac.com/newsletter/resources/feb2008/index.html.

Brian is an Educationl Technologist trying his best to learn as much Adobe software as possible.

Step 1
Type the text - a handwritten style font works best.

Step 2
Break the text apart into vectors: Modify > Break Apart. Repeat this twice until break apart is no longer an option. The vectors of the letters are now editable.

Step 3
The most efficient way to animate something that gradually appears is to start backwards. Select frame two of the timeline, right-click and select Insert Keyframe.

Step 4
Starting at the very end point of the last letter of the word, erase a short segment using the eraser tool. Be careful you don’t erase too much at one time.

Step 5
Add another keyframe and erase another segment of a letter, working in a backwards direction to the way the letter would have been written by hand.

Step 6
Continue erasing segments of each letter and adding new keyframes as you do so, until the whole word has been completely erased.

Step 7
You now have an animation of a text that erases itself. However, we want it to do the opposite and write itself. To accomplish this we must reverse the frames. First left-click on frame one, hold down the Shift-key, and click on the last frame in the animation. All frames should now be selected.

Step 8
Right-click over the selected frames and select Reverse Frames from the menu that appears. Your text should now animate in the right direction.

Step 9
You may wish to adjust the frame rate for your animation to give it a smoother animation effect. Select Modify > Document and specify the frame rate in the dialogue box that appears. Test your movie and make adjustments accordingly.

by Brian

Peel the Apple

Q: I am about to sell my Mac and I don’t want to leave my stuff around on the hard drive for others to read. What would you suggest I do to really clean it out before selling it?
A: Disk Utility (in Applications>Utilities) will do just fine. Select the hard drive you want to erase in the list on the left, click the Erase tab, and then the Security Options button. Here you have the option of setting how many times data will be erased and the principle is: the more times data is erased the less likely it is that someone can later restore the original data. You can just zero out data once, do a 7-pass erase or a 35-pass erase. The 7-pass erase is enough for the Department of Defense in the USA, so it’s most likely also enough for you. Remember that the more passes you select, the longer the erase is going to take. If you select the 35-pass option, be prepared to wait for a long time - especially if you have a large drive. For more information, see this TechNote (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303462).

Q: My friends and I have some cool ideas about podcasting. We want to record when we hang out and talk and then podcast it so others can listen. I have a MacBook Pro which I thought about using. How can we do this in the easiest possible way?
A: If you really want to do it on a budget, you stick with what you have: the internal mic in the MacBook Pro and Garageband which is part of iLife. That may work if it’s not a noisy environment. However, if you want better quality and there is even a little bit of background noise, you’re better of buying an external mic. What produces really good quality recordings are USB mics. I’ve used a USB microphone from Logitech, which is only about $20 (http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/webcam_communications/microphones/devices/258&cl=us,en), and it has consistently produced very nice quality recordings. If you want something more mobile, consider an iPod with mic-attachment, or something like the iRiver IFP800 with external mic (http://www.iriver.com/product/p_detail.asp?pidx=34). If you want better quality and don’t mind spending a bit of money, consider the M-Audio Microtrak II (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MicroTrackII-main.html), which records two-channels onto a Compact Flash card.

Q: I have an old iBook (the first one that came out I think) which is 300MHz, 6GB drive, and 96MB RAM. Is it possible to run Mac OS X on it? If so, what do I have to do to it - like bump the RAM?
A: This is an excellent question, and one that I get quite often from people about different old Mac models. We know that Apple hardware typically lasts a long time so it can productively be used for many years. The problem then becomes can you run the latest version of the operating system. And actually in many cases you can. With regards to this early iBook, some detective work reveals that it should be possible to run earlier versions of Mac OS X on it. Apple-History.com is a good site to find out information about old Macs. In this case your iBook is listed: http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=ibook&performa=off&sort=date&order=ASC. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is out of the question, unfortunately, and so is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. I’m unsure at this stage whether Mac OS X 10.3 Panther would run, but seems like Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar should be fine. For a long time I was running Jaguar on a PowerMac 8600 upgraded to a G3, 350Mhz processor with 512Mb RAM and it worked fine. So you should be able to run that fine on your iBook. Something to consider also is the hard drive. 6GB should be enough, but a standard installation of Jaguar should be around 2GB - which doesn’t leave much space to play around with. If you have experience of something similar to this, please share it online at http://www.emiratesmac.com.

Profile of a Mac Seller

Name: Ana Margarita Baltazar
Title: Sales Promotor
Store: iStyle Festival City, Dubai

Q: When did you start working for iStyle?
A: July 2007.

Q: What did you do before working at iStyle?
A: I was working at Grand Cinema.

Q: When was the first time you used a Mac and what was your first impression?
A: That was in 2007. I thought it was much easier to use than Windows.

Q: What’s the best part of your job?
A: Talking to customers, because I can share my knowledge about the products with them, and at the same time it helps me get better at my job.

Q: What is your favorite Apple product and why?
A: It has to be iPod Touch, because it’s an iPod and I can browse the internet with it, check email, and much more.

Q: What is the most challenging part of your job?
A: Because I don’t have a technical background, it’s sometimes hard to answer customers’ questions. In those situations I try to get help from my colleagues and listen so I can learn for the future.

Q: Do you have a funny story about something that has happened in your job?
A: It’s not a particular story, but it’s always funny when people think the name of the company is “iPod”. They don’t realize the company is Apple and the product is iPod.

Q: Is there any particular product you wish Apple would release?
A: Before last week I would have said something like the MacBook Air, but now I would want to see a touch-screen notebook.

by Magnus Nystedt

Emirati Racing Team Completes 24hr Race

The Emirates Racing Team (http://uae24hrs.com) completed the 24hr endurance race at the Dubai Autodrome on January 11-12, 2008. The drivers were Mohammad Al-Abdooli, Khaled Al-Muttawaa, Mohammad Al-Falasi, and Omran Al-Owais. Omran (http://www.alowaismotorsport.com), a member of the EmiratesMac Apple User Group, said about his experience, “This was amazing. A group of us coming together like this to represent our country, and actually making it through all twenty four hours.” The team finished the 24hr race, completing 375 laps, and ending up in position 55 out of 84 finishing teams. That’s an improvement of around 30 positions compared to where they started on the grid.

The plan was to get EmiratesMac logo stickers onto the car, but unfortunately the team ran out of time and had technical difficulties which did not allow this to happen. But I’m sure EmiratesMac members were with Omran in spirit to cheer him on. If the team decides to do this again next year, and we hope they will, preparations will start earlier and hopefully it will make the team more competitive. It was a great first experience and the team did better than I think anyone expected. Congratulations to the team!

by Magnus Nystedt

ClamXAV: Free Anti Virus

Whether you really need antivirus software on your Mac or not is a hotly debated issue. The antivirus software that most people know about is Norton Antivirus, which also happens to be the antivirus software that most Mac users would say you should stay away from. Norton AV may be good at removing viruses, I don’t know, but in my experience it’s not very good software. It takes up a lot of system resources and causes all kinds of problems. To me it seems it’s more trouble than it’s worth. But we’re fortunate that there are alternatives. VirusBarrier from Intego is a better choice than Norton AV in my opinion (see review of NetBarrier in this issue of Shuffle). ClamXAV is another option and it’s a great application which is available for free. ClamXAV (http://clamxav.com/) is a Mac OS X version of the Clam Antivirus (AV) software (http://www.clamav.net/).

by Magnus Nystedt

Review: Intego NetBarrier x4

Intego says that NetBarrier “protects your computer from intrusions by constantly filtering all the activity that enters and leaves through the Internet or network”. Basically it’s an application that works in the background that monitors network traffic and activities to see what’s suspicious or not, and can take appropriate action if something strange occurs. This goes beyond just the anti-virus protection offered by VirusBarrier, for example. Personally the feature I like the best is the easy to use interface for specifying how the firewall should work: what it should or shouldn’t allow, from where and what services. The interface makes it a lot easier to keep a finely-tuned firewall on your Mac compared to the built-in firewall controls.
The Antivandal function watches over your Mac and tries to identify if someone is trying to break into to it by automated means or otherwise, and will alert you to any suspicious activity. With Privacy Protection you can do things like monitor cookies in web browsers, block banner ads, and clean out history, etc. You can also hide information about you and your computer from sites you visit. The interface isn’t exactly Mac OS X standard, but it looks cool and that may be an advantage for this type of application.

Let’s be honest and recognize that most of what NetBarrier provides, you can do yourself with what comes built-in to Mac OS X and with various free or shareware utilities. With NetBarrier you get a bunch of functionality collected in one place, and it’s automatically kept up to date. If you want to only spend money on one product, get VirusBarrier. However, if you want to sleep a bit easier at night knowing your Mac and your information is protected, take a look at NetBarrier.

by Magnus Nystedt

Price: $69.95
From: Intego
Distributor: Intego
Web: http://www.intego.com/netbarrier/

Review: Intego VirusBarrier X4

You may think that $70 is expensive for antivirus software, especially since the viruses in the wild for Mac OS X is hardly heard of - and you may be right. But if you want virus protection and you don’t mind paying, VirusBarrier is the best choice available. Installation was very straightforward. A few clicks and a restart, and that was it. Starting up the first time, VirusBarrier wanted to scan the whole hard drive on my MacBook, which took a long time. In fact I left it overnight, so I’m not exactly sure how long it took. After this initial scan it seems that subsequent scans are much quicker, and not noticeable at all on everyday performance of my Mac. A quick little check with the Activity Monitor reveals that VirusBarrier takes up hardly any CPU resources during normal use, and peaks only marginally when some more intense file activity takes place. I must say that, being used to Norton products, VirusBarrier is a joy to see in terms of resource usage.

Testing antivirus software is a bit strange because most of us don’t sit on a collection of malware we can just throw at our Mac and see what happens. So in a way you just have to trust that it finds what it says it will find. You can specify special folders that VirusBarrier should always check for changes; for example folders related to what you download. You can also set it to scan on a schedule, like doing a complete scan every night. It’s full of useful functions that work effortlessly in the background without you having to pay attention to them all the time, only alerting you if something is wrong. On the negative side, personally I think VirusBarrier’s interface is a bit too unusual and I’d much rather see a more standard Mac OS X interface - but I guess it looks cool. If you insist on having antivirus protection for your Mac, and you don’t mind paying for it, VirusBarrier is your best choice.

by Magnus Nystedt

Price: $69.95
From: Intego
Distributor: Intego
Web: http://www.intego.com/virusbarrier/

Review: Canon G9

Although the Canon G9 is a point-and-shoot camera, it is not a camera suitable for the average weekend photographer. Despite its small package, and even though it has fully automated modes, the G9 is a camera targeting advanced photographers who like to have manual control over their photography.

It has a range of controls, from its fully automatic Auto mode to the completely manual settings where you control everything yourself. There are two custom modes which you can basically program to your liking and quickly switch to. For example, I have one custom mode set to high ISO and black and white, which gives me a sort of old-time Tri-X feel which I like. These advanced functions, both automatic as well as manual, combined with support for RAW make this camera a good choice for anyone who likes to experiment.

It might be a small camera but it’s 12 megapixel, which means you get 4000×3000 pixel exposures from the G9. This fills up a memory card rather quickly so be sure to buy as big a card as you can afford. With even 4GB cards costing very little there’s no reason why you should be cheap when it comes to storage. The G9 takes standard SD cards. Some other unusual features of the G9 is that it has a hotshoe for mounting an external flash - and the ability to buy lens-converters, both wide angle and tele, and mount them in front of the lens.

Perhaps it’s because I have rather large hands, but I wish they’d make it a bit more comfortable to hold and the battery life could be better. The viewfinder is all but useless but is compensated by its large 3” display, which is bright and clear. But these are minor gripes really and, all in all, the Canon G9 is an excellent camera suitable for more advanced photographers. With its great features, excellent build quality and it’s a great choice.

by Magnus Nystedt

Price: Around AED1950
From: Canon
Distributor: Canon Middle East
Web: http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=144&modelid=1566

Wide Open Leopard Spaces

When Leopard was released I was one of the few Mac fanatics who kept it at arm’s length. Seeing how disappointing Vista was to the rest of the world, I was worried that the much hyped Mac OS X 10.5 would somehow find itself in the same basket.
Those doubts were put to rest though when my new iMac arrived as the New Year was starting and I fell in love with both Leopard as a whole, and its specific but powerful and important, little features.

Spaces is one such feature; the others being Stacks and Time Machine.

The idea of multiple desktops on a single machine is nothing new; I remember having four desktops on my Linux box ages ago in Mephis and Ubuntu. It is also a staple of Red Hat and SuSe Linux. What sets Spaces apart from the rest is its interface and its cool sister application, Expose.

Let’s get into why I believe this is a feature you can’t live without, and how to make it even more amazing. Starting at your desktop choose “System Preferences” then “Expose and Spaces”. Choose the “Spaces” tab and you can pick any amount of desktops, from 2 to 16 spaces. This is of course dependent on how much clutter actually fills up your desktop. Mine is set to four, partly because I am an average computer user and partly because I think having four large rectangles, rather than say eight smaller ones, is a really cool effect for what comes next.

Now click on the “Expose” tab and notice the “Hot Screen Corners” section. I have mine set as it shows in the image. I like having both Spaces and Dashboard available with a single “swish” of my mouse, and having the sleep function handy is good for when you need to run away from your Mac when life starts calling. Choose what works best for you.

Close up the windows and start using your Mac as you usually would. The way mine is set up, all you have to do to change from desktops is perform a cool and fluid movement of your Mighty Mouse to the lower right corner.

Try it, especially with non-Mac users watching! The movement to switch to Spaces and choose the specific one needed takes all about one second, maybe less. It is a revolutionary take on an old and widely used idea; having many computers in one, and being able to separate business and personal work. And having a lot of fun doing so is a must in today’s demanding world, especially if you’re a neat freak like me who hates having multiple windows and applications open all at once.

Leave it to Apple Inc., the father of creative computer design, to come up with an amazing design for this as well. I’m confident that you will find using Spaces in this manner (or any other really) so impressive that not only will you start using Spaces on a constant basis, but your friends who see these changes take place - these switches on the fly - will flat out agree that if nothing else, it is the coolest thing ever. Or at least far cooler than anything their new malfunctioning Vista boxes can dish out.

by Christian Sullivan

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