Categories
Mac WTF

“Burn VIDEO_TS folder to DVD” nightmare

I had a VIDEO_TS folder with VOB files that I wanted to burn to a DVD in order to be able to play it on our DVD player.

The first step was to create an ISO image. This can be done with a tool that comes with MacOS. Open a terminal and enter the following:

hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name "<volume name>" -o /target/image.iso \
    /path/to/parent/folder/

Make sure you specify the folder that contains the VIDEO_TS folder as the source folder in the above command line. Parallel to the VIDEO_TS folder you should also have an (empty) AUDIO_TS folder. Also make sure that there is no .DS_Store file (remove from terminal if present.) And note that the above is one logical line (the \ is a line break).

So, how do you write the ISO file to a DVD?

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Categories
Computers deutsch WTF

Sinnfreie Geschäftsmails…

Während meines Urlaubs erhielt ich von einem großen und bekannten deutschen Domainanbieter folgende Mail (Auszug):

Wie Ihnen sicher bereits aufgefallen ist, haben wir die für den 14.07.2008 angekündigte Lastschrift der Rechnung <XY> bisher nicht durchgeführt. Durch die Umstellung auf eine neue Finanzbuchhaltungs-Software haben sich die Lastschriften im Monat Juli leider verzögert, so dass wir den Betrag von 0,00 Euro erst zum 08.08.2008 einziehen werden.

Diese Nachricht hätte man sich nun wirklich sparen können — ein kleiner Test, ob die Rechnungssumme größer Null ist, hätte den Zweck schon erfüllt.

Wer selber solche oder ähnliche Nachrichten erhalten hat ist herzlich eingeladen, sie hier (in anonymisierter Form) zu posten!

Categories
Mac WTF

Cisco’s VPN Client is crap…

I suddenly had a problem on my Mac that I couldn’t start the VPN client anymore — “Error 51” was the only thing I received.

Google pointed me to this site where I found some very helpful advice.

Thanks!

Categories
Mac WTF

How the Finder misbehaves on USB sticks…

As a new Mac user I find it very annoying that the Finder leaves its traces everywhere you go — even on USB sticks. 🙁

The finder will create hidden .DS_Store and .Trashes folders (used by SpotLight and the Trashcan) all over the place. 🙁

I’ve not yet found a way of disabling this unwanted behavior.

If you know of a way to do so, I definitely want to hear from you. So, please step ahead and leave a comment! 🙂

Categories
Mac Storage

Encrypted TimeMachine backups on network share

Mac OS normally doesn’t allow you to use network shares as targets for TimeMachine backups. This can be worked around, tho. 🙂

First you need to tweak Mac OS to accept network shares by entering the following command in a Terminal session:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

That would already allow you to store your backups on a network share. But do you really want to trust your valuable data to a network share that can potentially be accessed by untrusted users, such as your favorite bastard admin from hell?! :)

Here’s when the following comes in:

You will create an encrypted sparse bundle and use it as a target for the backup.

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Categories
Computers

Migrate saved passwords in Firefox

If you are like me and often use the “Save password” feature of Firefox because you can’t remember all the passwords you use for different web sites, and then suddenly have to setup a “fresh” Firefox on a new box, you need Password Exporter, an invaluable Firefox extension that plugs into the “Security” page of Firefox’ options dialog.

It allows you to export the saved passwords on one machine, then to re-import them on a target machine.

This unfortunately only worked in part for me. Login credentials that applied to the same server, but to different realms obviously failed to be imported. I don’t know exactly why this is, but it made the hole story pretty useless for me. I ended up copying key3.db and signons3.txt manually from the Windoze box to the Mac. 🙁

Categories
Computers Mac

ARDAgent exploitable locally

I was pointed by a colleague that ARDAgent can be exploited locally to gain “root” privileges under MacOS 10.4 and 10.5. A quick search on Google turned up this post on Macworld that gives some details about this issue.

To check whether you’re vulnerable type the following in a Terminal window:

osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"';

And if it says root you are vulnerable. To quickly protect you type the following:

sudo chmod u-s /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent
Categories
Mac

TrueCrypt for Mac

I was very happy to see that there’s TrueCrypt for the Mac, a disk encryption tool I really like and use since a long time on my Windoze PC.

Quickly I installed it. The installation went smoothly, and a quick test was successful. However, when I played some more with it, I found a strange oddity which I couldn’t clarify myself. I doubt that it’s because I’m a new Mac user, but I rather think it’s a quirk in TrueCrypt. Let’s see whether anyone can reproduce the issue, and whether it will be fixed (shortly). 🙂

Anyway, this is a tool that you should definitely use when you have confidential data on your laptop.

Categories
Mac

Hibernation on the Mac

As a Windoze user I was used to putting my notebook into hibernation. This has the following advantages over shutting the machine down or putting it into sleep:

  • Shutting the machine down means a long boot when I need it again, plus I have to open all apps and docs again which I was using when I shut it down.
  • Sleep mode eats up your battery quickly, because he machine is still running at a reduced power level.

However, I couldn’t find a menu item to put my Mac into hibernation, so I googled a bit and came across this Wikipedia entry.

Altho I agree that the way the Mac does it seems quite nifty (in fact IBM notebooks had this feature aeons ago…), I still wanted to be able to immediately put my Mac into hibernation. So I googled again and came across this nifty lil’ Apple script.

The tool works very well, I recommend it.

Update: My buddy Jochen just pointed me to a blog article he wrote recently. He discussed a preferences panel that allows you to configure how the Mac sleeps and/or hibernates. This is a nifty tool, but still doesn’t exactly do  what I need. I want to be able to immediately force the Mac into hibernation, and SmartSleep unfortunately cannot do that for me. 🙁

Categories
Computers Mac

GPG with IDEA on the Mac

One of the first things I did when I got my new Mac was install Mozilla Thunderbird, the invaluable EnigMail extension, which is a very easy-to-use frontend to GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), and of course GPG itself.

All went very smoothly, and to check whether the installation was fine I tried to opened an encrypted message which I had received some days ago. Unfortunetly GPG couldn’t decrypt the message. A quick look at EnigMail’s console window told me that the message was encrypted using IDEA, and that the version of GPG I had installed was lacking support of that encryption algorithm.

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