Brontesaurus Blog

When I found Magic Prefs which is a Magic Mouse preference and configuration utility for OSX. Without this program, the mouse only comes with 2 touch sensitive gestures. I have no idea why Apple wouldn’t want to capitalize on more features with this fully functional multi touch surface. But the good news is, with Magic Prefs you can configure a very broad range of clicks, touches, swipes, and pinches to actions with your mouse making it a true multi touch surface.

I have had my Magic Mouse for a couple weeks now and my biggest pet peeve with is was the physical click. It’s not like other mice where its easy to press down on left and right click, the Magic Mouse is very noticeably harder and you really tend to notice it after couple hours of use. With each click I seem to be more and more conscious of my physical ability to left and right click. Lucky for me with Magic Prefs you can configure tap left and right tap clicks just like the multi-touch pad on the Macbook Pro. It’s a very little and simple feature, but has made me a much happier Magic Mouse user.

I highly suggest checking out Magic Prefs if you own a Magic Mouse.

Only about an hour ago it was announced that the droid has been rooted.

Alldroid.org post with download + instructions etc.

Authors Post:

md5sum of initial exploit zip: 94a0c30ea9104c2776d042e760bfd716

URL: http://rapidshare.com/files/318204448/d … t.zip.html (Down now?)
URL2: http://www.4shared.com/file/168496608/8 … -root.html (thanks, blunden)
URL3: http://www.mediafire.com/?ydaqjmditjh (thanks, blunden)
URL4: http://www.multiupload.com/XYPZLK4K22
Also attached in a thread post.

The exploit provides a /system/bin/su from AOSP (that is, you can only use it from adb shell).
Other payloads can be arranged, but I’m too lazy to make them myself.

Provide a decent payload and I will turn it in to an update.zip that the Droid will apply.
Restrictions: The payload zip must be <63k
I can add files already in the official update to it (update-binary).

Some possible install instructions (unconfirmed):

md5sum of the boot partition:
3e49d99b320cf5c20bedf09343c1155c /dev/mtd/mtd2

HOWTO

Download the zip file (see mirrors in posts below)
Rename to “update.zip” and copy to the sdcard

Power off the DROID and power back on while holding the X key
When you see a “/!\” symbol, press both vol+ and camera
Use the onscreen menu to install update.zip

Once installed you will be able to run “su” from your adb shell.

Thursday Chrome OS, Google’s new web only OS, was just released. Basically Google is seeing that 90% of our time on the computer is being spent on the internet. All our email, pictures, music, videos social network, etc are all on the web. In this sense everything else on your computer is bloatware.

Heres a quick video from Google explaining their new lightweight os.

Immediately with the release of a the code, copies began flying around the net. Specifically a virtual disk with the OS built (download) that you can just pop into a new VM on VMWare or Virtualbox and you are up and running. When it boots up you are prompted for your Google account login, after logging in its basically just like chrome. The tabs are a little more customized, and
the rest is just a browser. And thats the thing, its just a browser, its very far from an OS. Chrome “OS” is chrome, on top of a very stripped down ubuntu. In fact thats how you build it, take a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 or later, get all the pre-requisites, build chrome and you are done. It still feels a lot like linux, and you can easily tell it uses GTK for all the gui stuff.

I know this is just a dev build and its the very first source open to the public, but how exactly is Google’s vision going to pan out for this? There are some key things missing here such as being able to change the display resolution. Is the OS going to be useless if you can’t connect to the internet? If you are at all anything like me, you don’t like having all your eggs in one basket, having an offline copy is a must. I think Google gears is going to be a key player into making a local copy of the “cloud”. Though with all these features that a lot of people see that are lacking from chromium, does Google really have any intention of putting these sorta things in? I think a fine line is being walked right here between being simple, and being too simple. Being simple is good, yes. Keep things lightweight, fast, and too the point, but neglecting adding in more features, nobody is going to use it.

Soon The Pirate Bay will be handed off to its new owners and who knows what exactly is going to happen to the site. Torrent Freak has reported that they plan to turn it into a 100% legal pay site. With that in mind it means The Pirate Bay as we know it will be dead in a few days, but one fan has taken the time to index over 800,000 torrents and packaged all the tools he made and used into one massive 20gb torrent.

Included in the torrent:

• tpb.db – The database (22 855 875 584 bytes).
• tpbspider.7z – Author’s spider program.
• htdocs.7z – The mockup website.
• lighttpd.conf – Some rewrite rules you need to use the mockup website.
• pubring.key – Author’s public key

So what do you actually do with all this data? Well, if you would like to download any of these torrents simply change the torrent’s announce url to Open Bittorrent and you should be set.

In an attempt to give back to the torrenting community and to keep The Pirate Bay alive, and more importantly the principles behind it, I am currently downloading and seeding this on my 100mbit seedbox. There are very few seeders so the download is a bit slow, but since I have started this last night, there has been a constant 3-5 mb/s upload. As of writing this I have 6gb downloaded, 154gb of upload with a ratio of 25.

Update

Its been 6 days since I started seeding, actually 5 days with the current box it has been seeding on (story and another guide to come) and so far I have uploaded 3.3 TB with a ratio of 159. It was going a constant 8-10 mb/s upload for the first 4 days, it sort of drops off everyonce in a while now. I will probably seed a little bit more, then put it on pause to see what happens to TPB and possibly start seeding again after that.

There has been a huge upset recently with Apple, the iPhone, and AT&T. A lot of finger pointing has been going on because people don’t know who to blame. At first people were blaming AT&T because apparently Sean Kovacs, developer of Google Voice Mobile, said the app was approved by Apple’s senior Vice President of Worldwide Product marketing. Now apparently AT&T says it is all Apple’s doing and that AT&T has no say in what apps make it or don’t make it into the app store.

Finger-pointing aside, you can still install Google Voice Mobile to jailbroken iPhone’s through Cydia. Search “GV” or “GV Mobile” and the app should pop up. Just install it and you are ready to go.

If you are like me and want to make your mobile device be all that you can be I highly recommend jailbreaking your iphone.

S3 is Amazon web service’s cloud storage solution offering very cheap price-per-gb storage and bandwidth which makes this a very cost effective backup solution. Currently I use JungleDisk for mounting S3 buckets as drives and to schedule backups, and s3sync to backup my files in various unix enviroments but I dont have anything in between to where I can easily manage my S3 files. That is where Cloudberry Explorer for Amazon S3 comes in. I have been using this for the past couple of hours or so and to say the least I am impressed. 

Here is what I’ve noticed while using Cloudberry.

• First off, this software is completely free. That is a huge plus because what I was using before, CrossFTP, you had to pay 25$ for the pro version to get S3 support and I had a whole slew of gripes about it.
• The UI is very clean and responsive. 
• Tabbed! Everything is better with tabs, especially if you are dealing with multiple uploads and/or multiple S3 accounts
• Very easy to upload and manage files with the intent of serving them on the web
• Cloudfront integration
• The ability to bill the requestor for a file for the S3 usage. I messed around with this for a bit and I think its just a flag that is set on the file? Not sure how to implement it.
• Plugins to Microsoft Powershell

Though through using this there are a couple things that could be added that would be nice.

• In the “MyComputer” pane, shortcuts to Desktop, My Documents, etc would be nice.
• Also labels for each of the drives I have. I have so many drive labels I often forget which one is a HDD, network drive, or DVD drive.
• Refresh the S3 pane after I copy a file to a bucket so I can see that file there after it is finished copying.

Overall, this is a pretty solid S3 client and I plan to keep on using it. 

Cloudberry Explorer for Amazon S3

Wordpress 2.7 dubbed “Coltrane” was released today with some major changes incorporated. This is a major version change requiring a database upgrade upon installation of the new version as well as core files needing updating. The 2.7 verison of the very popular open source blogging platform has brought many uses a whole bucket of new features, most of them regarding the administration interface. 

The adminstartion interface has 100% been completely re-done top to bottom. Some of the most noteable changes being the dashboard a lot more configurable and navigation through the different admin pages is a lot faster now. Now there is a column on the left with all the differnet administrator pages with all categories being drop downs where the full set of pages can easily be accessed with one click. Where as before you had to navigate away from your current page to see sub pages. 

Probably one of the coolest features in 2.7 is plugin installation straight from the web. No more downloading, unzipping, uploading, andsometimes even configuring plugins. The wordpress team added all that straight to the plugin administration page. Simply click on the “Plugins” drop down and click on “Add New” and it will bring you to a new page where you can either search for a plugin through various methods (such as popular tags, featured plugins, popular, newest, recently updated) or you can directly upload a zipped plugin and install it right there.

[Blog Post] [Download]

Except its on a closed source framework… Microsoft recently came out with their own open-source blogging platform called Oxite. Oxite is written on the ASP 2.0 framework and it’s microsofts version of WYSIWYG blogging software. After reading through their promo/information and project sites, the whole emphasis on free and open source is a total joke. If you wanted something to be open and free, then do it on an open and free platform and framework. In Oxite’s current state, it can only be run on window, how convienent is that? To release something to the community that only supports your product. Pulling stupid stunts like this just seems like a lame way for Microsoft to seem “cool” and “hip” and in with current technology trends at an easy attempt to gain markent share. MS doesn’t give two flying fucks about the web or bloggers, or anybody, they just want you to use their product. The more you saturate the interwebs with your shit, the more likely it will be used. Too bad windows isn’t free or else this actually might have some merit. Almost every host on the planet is a linux host, and if they do ofter windows hosting it is always more expensive.

Unless you are a super huge windows fanboy or have some suber uber free windows hosting of doom that you can’t get anywhere else, why go with this blogging solution where are are so many other blogging alternatives? Wordpress, Moveable Type, B2Evolution etc..

I swear, every single web host that ever existed provides the same old basic webmail platforms, either SquirrelMail, Horde, or both. Now don’t get me wrong, these two webmail platforms are very reliable and secure and have been around for a long time now, but they just feel really outdated and only come with standard features.

But if you are like me, you don’t want your eyeballs to bleed every time you need to read you webmail and a slick interface and some AJAX thrown in definitely wouldn’t hurt.

Roundcube – http://roundcube.net/

Pros:

• Slick, fast, easy to use interface
• Drag and drop messages
• Built in HTML editor
• Draft autosave feature with configurable settings
• Custom skin support
• Local cache of emails

Cons:

• Required magic_quotes_gpc php setting to be turned off. Not all shared hosts allow custom php.ini’s and this setting cant be set at runtime.
• For some reason a bunch of standard folders weren’t created by default (sent, junk, trash etc). I tried to save a draft without having the drafts folder created so I couldn’t save the draft.

Atmail Open – http://www.atmail.org/

Pros:

• At installation there is the option to import mail from other webmail clients. Support includes squirrelmail, roundcube
• Good email search feature. You can be pretty specific on what you want to search and where
• You can import contacts in from a csv file.
• Nice interface, including drag and drop feature.
• Pretty cool video attachment option, you can record a video straight from the browser.

Cons:

• When logging in and doing anything that required a connection seemed to take a long time compared to the other clients
• No HTML editor, plain text only
• Deleting/moving messages to different folders didn’t seem to work. When I refreshed the page, they would just show up in their original location.
• This is a free version of atmail and it seems they left out some things that would be a great help.

MailBee Lite – http://www.afterlogic.com/products/webmail-lite

Pros

• Very minimal and lightweight
• Available in php and asp
• No backend database required

Cons:

• All you can do is send and receive email. It is only an inbox
• No folder support

I noticed there something that all these clients including SquirrelMail don’t include that Horde does, and that is a calendar. Which to me, is really no big whoop, but it might be for others. If there there is important date or appointment I need to remember, I prefer to use Google Calendar, or I can put it in my phone, or my work calendar.

After trying out all these clients, I decided to go with roundcube for my brontesaurus email.