A long long way from home

Two days ago I picked up a brand new MacBook Pro 15-inch with a Intel core i7 CPU from my local hardware pusher. I have to admit it’s a DAMN fast machine, especially after fitting it with a Corsair SSD disk. However, it has one major grievance in my opinion – the button-less multitouch trackpad. My old 2007 model MBP has a physical button located below the trackpad, and I have gotten accustomed to resting my right hand thumb there when using the trackpad.

The new multitouch trackpad does not come with a physical button, but it can detect “idle” fingers on the trackpad so when resting my thumb I can still use the trackpad as if the thumb was not in contact with the pad. Most of the time. If I am to move my thumb only the slightest – which I typically do when I try to tap-to-click with my index finger – it will start interpreting my movements as multitouch gestures and very diffrent things than I intended will start to happen. Most annoying.

After searching for a software solution to disable the lover one third of the trackpad I got pissed of and typed “I hate the macbook multitouch trackpad” and guess what, I am not the only one. First hit in the result list is Kustaa Nyholms site over at sparetimelabs.com, which on his Multitouch page explains why he hates the trackpad and what he did to fool it into behaving properly. I have to admit, It’s a sexy solution

Now my thumb rests nicely on a piece of former DVD case, and my erranous click rate has gone down to zero. It even looks good, although I will try to get some thinner double sided tape and do a better job with my scissors to get it perfect. Thanks Kusti!

EDIT: Oh well, I had to give up the DIY button, after some time it started misbehaving again. Could be that the double sided tape wasn’t really useful for this particular application..

Apple recently released Safari 4 beta for the Mac, and I think it’s actually pretty good. What especially trigged my interest was it’s new tab system, and most of all the sheer speed of this thing. Loading and rendering pages is suspiciously fast. The Norwegian online IT magazine seems to agree with me on this. (originally from Maximum PC)

However, there is always some wrinkles.

Wrinkle number one was the “Top sites” functionality. It is really slow, and bogs down the browser experience. Luckily, it’s mendable. I found a great list of tips for disabling/re-enabling functionality over at Macosxtips.co.uk. To say goodbye to Top Sites just enter the following in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool FALSE

The other thing was a decent flash block. I usually don’t mind sensible ads on web pages, I even find good deals that way some times. But flash ads are way to annoying, so I want to block them. Firefox has a nice plugin called Flashblock, which I have been using for quite a few years now. It blocks all flash, and gives a clickable flash symbol that will display the flash animation/video. Very useful.

I have been looking for something similar to Flashblock for Safari, but only found SafariStand which is based on blocking/allowing for specific sites… Not very useful, really – or I didn’t figure out how to set it up properly. But after some more googling I finally found ClickToFlash which does the same thing as flashblock and to top it all off is free as in freedom. Me like!

As a little reminder to self, here is how you do it – from macosoxhints.com via Bytex. If you don’t limit the size of the DMG you will apparently run into problems with Time Machine (TM) killing off your entire backup. I currently use a smallish USB disk for backup, but I would much rather have TM back up over the network, preferrably via SSH. Unfortunately, ExpanDrive does not support this officially. I am planning on giving it a try over ordinary sshfs in Fuse. I’ll be back with more.

I have to excuse the poor quality of these shots, the Nokia 6300′s camera isn’t all that.

First, the MacBook Pro:

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WARNING – following any instructions here will have a severe impact on your system and may possibly cause a host of unknown problems. If you follow any instructions in this post and you have any problems PLEASE do NOT expect me to help you out, you are on your own. Following my instructions below are just plain stupid, do not do it!

So, you want the Mac OS X menu bar to automatically hide itself? So did I. One would think that this was a typical thing that you could enable by right-clicking the menu bar and then click the  “Autohide” option? Think again – this is Apple, and their Human Interface Guidelines probably says any such action is WRONG – as is a lot of other features I desire. Then, how to do it? A friend of mine suggested Menufela. This does not currently work with Leopard, AND it costs money. So I googled around a bit, and found out that one is able to disable the menu bar per application by tweaking the applications Info.plist.

Having to tweak every application on the system just to make the menu bar hide itself is really, really stupid. But whatever, I like to muck about with my system (which most probably is why it is soon ready for a reinstall) , so I thought I’d give it a shot. I edited the Info.plist of iTerm, and behold, the menu bar was gone. I moved the mouse to the upper edge of the screen – and voilá, there it was again! Fantastic, just what I wanted. Now what? Make a script that does this to all the applications in /Applications, of course!

Brilliant idea. This is very easy to do with a little mix of the cli programs find and defaults. So I started up iTerm – with no menu bar – and typed this command that will edit every Info.plist for all applications in /Applications:

find /Applications -type d -name “*.app” -exec defaults write “{}/Contents/Info” LSUIPresentationMode -int 4 \;

Away it went – it gave a lot of errors and took quite a while to complete, but when it was done all applications except Finder had no menu bar! I was happy as a kid eating his first ice cream cone.

Until I restarted Safari and went to a web page that required login. My password was gone! Suddenly being a little bit nervous I started up Keychain Access, only to discover that I was getting a “Access to this item is restricted” every time I tried revealing a password. Time to panic. I tried all the tricks I could find via google, including verifying and repairing my keychain from within Keychain Access. Nothing worked. Then I suddenly happened to find a thread on macnn.com describing how to re-sign modified applications….  I suddenly relized I had been an idiot, and started reading..

True enough, codesign -v  reported “code or signature modified.” – modifying the Info.plist file will break the programs signature, hence disallowing access to your keychain items! I then followed the howto and generated a new certificate for code signing, and re-signed Keychain Access. After resigning I had access to my passwords again!  So I tried the same for Safari, and lo – passwords started showing up for websites again. Really fantastic. So in order to “repair” all the broken applications in /Applications I did this:

find /Applications -type d -name “*.app” -exec codesign -f -s privateCertificate “{}” \;

Now all the applications using Keychains were able to get access to their password, albeit I have to press the “Always allow” button all the time, at least I do not have to start remembering passwords all over again All in all a fun little poke into the shadows behind the Apple.

And just to repeat myself: Don’t do this, it may have all kinds of weird side effects. Play with fire and you will get burned.