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!

  A: Fordi det er heilt motsett av den måten menneske vanlegvis les tekst.
  Q: Kvifor det?
  A: Topp-posting.
  Q: Kva er det mest slitsame i epost og på news?

  A: Fordi det er helt motsatt av den måten mennesker vanligvis leser tekst.
  Q: Hvorfor det?
  A: Topp-posting.
  Q: Hva er det mest slitsomme i epost og på news?

  A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
  Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
  A: Top-posting.
  Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

Meir om det same:

http://audun.norblogg.net/2007/01/10/sitering-av-epost/
http://home.online.no/~vidaandr/news/OBSquoting.html
http://antibiomatika.net/usenet/quoting.html

Then came Leopard bringing not gifts, but Spaces. Spaces is one of the worse implementations of virtual desktops I have seen.

1. Impossible to turn off the animations when switching desktop. Theese animations tend to get slower during the day also.
2. Impossible to have more than 4 columns of desktops
3. When you Cmd-Tab around in your applications you also switch desktop. With the whole animation and all this is horrible. Just ask Nick Santilli over at theAppleBlog.
4. You may not set up your own keyboard shortcuts for direct access to each desktop. You must live with <Modifier>+<Number>

The first three annoyances are something I cannot remedy that easily. But number four is something you may actually do something about! Or at least, there is a workaround.

Enter Butler.

Butler is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. Like launching applications. It’s much like QuickSilver in many ways. The Butler website has some challenges as I write this, so I enclose the install DMG here.

Download Butler:  butler.dmg.zip

Now, for the setup. I want to have a grid of 4×2 desktops. I want the upper row to be accessible with Cmd-Esc to Cmd-F3, and the lower row with Cmd-1 to Cmd-4.

So, what to do?

* Start Butler.

* Modify your spaces settings. Set the “Switch directly to a space” key to be Option, as you want Cmd as your future hot
key, and Control is convenient for having as the real spaces shortcut. See illustration below.

* Configure/Customize Butler. Add a new Keystroke Smart Item.

* Then add a name to it, like “Workspace 1″. Also give the keystroke that you want Butler to generate.

* Now select the “Triggers” tab, and give the hotkey wanted for switching to that workspace. I prefer my first workspace to be on Cmd-Escape:

* Repeat the process for all your desktops/workspaces, then go back to System Preferences and make the hot key for “Switch directly to a space” to be Control (^).

Voilá. You now have your own hotkeys for navigating directly to a desktop in spaces.

You see, I am one of those paranoid geezers that like to keep their files encrypted in case someone steals their laptop. So I use Apple’s built in encryption, FileVault, for my home folder. And it seems Time Machine does not play as nice with FileVaults as it does with non-protected data. Time Machine itself states, albeit not in that exact wording, that it sucks with FileVault:

Another thing that annoys me with Time Machine is that you cannot make bootable backup disks with it. When your laptop gets stolen or your disk crashes and the customers are calling you every ten minutes the luxury of just plugging your USB/Firewire disk in, boot from it and have your complete work environment ready is pretty priceless. I’ve been there. Spending time reinstalling may not always be an option.

My current backup scheme that allows for this consists of two parts:

• Using RsyncX for backing up my entire system. This approach has the same caveat as Time Machine – I prefer to log out and back in as a second Admin user in order to successfully unmount the sparsebundle (sparseimage in Tiger) that holds my home folder, so that I am sure that it gets backed up properly. There is one “problem” with this – I only get the latest snapshot of my complete system. I can live with that, as I can boot from it. This method is not new, I used this howto from 2005 to get it rolling.
• Using plain rsync over ssh to get incremental backups of my home folder. I used a slightly modified version of the “backup to a central backup server with 7 day incremental” from the rsync examples page. Since this runs over ssh to a server at home I may take backups while on the run with my laptop, so I do not have to lug around the extra USB drive in order to get backups done.

The combination of theese two methods makes restoring my system in case of a disk replacement as easy as two rsync commands after I boot from my USB drive:

1. Rsync the entire contents of the USB drive into the new disk after partitioning it. The backup USB disk is, needless to say, also the perfect rescue tool.
2. Log in as my FileVaulted user and update my home folder from the server via ssh.

However, if bootable backups is not a priority and you are OK with carrying the extra Time Machine backup disk with you and risk getting BOTH your laptop and your backups stolen – then Time Machine is for you. Also, if you are a home user with a desktop Mac Time Machine is also probably perfect for you. But as a laptop user with security needs Time Machine is not an ideal solution. The rsync setup is also more of a hack, and could be more seamless.  Any hints towards a seamless, fast restore, backup regime for security-minded laptop users is greatly welcome

With Leopard the environment variable $SSH_AUTH_SOCK is set automatically, and the ssh-agent is managed by launchd (I think). SSHKeyChain may still prove useful for setting up tunnels, but I see no point in waiting for yet another application to start at login.

If you have been using SSHKeyChain you must remember to go into it’s Preferences and Uncheck the “Manage (and modify) global environment variables” ticker, otherwise SSHKeyChain will override the OS settings – even if it’s not running.

The actual adding of ssh keys is a bit non-intuitive for people used to doing ssh-add. Just using ssh-add <keyfile>  will only add the keyfile to the current session. If you want to never type your passphrase again, but let ssh-agent get your passphrase from Keychain every time you try to use the ssh key/identoty file you need to have a few things in place:

* Your <identity>.pub must be present in the remote accounts $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys file

* You may use this syntax from the command line to add the key: ssh -i <identity file> user@host . I guess you may do this from the Keychain Access application in some way too, but I was not able to find out how. There must be a slicker way.

So, I used this command in my terminal to add my “lolcats” private key/identity to my Keychain:

ssh -i lolcats lolcat@hostname.tld

And up came this dialog window, voilá:

RJ45 alignment

To utilize these color codes correctly you should hold your RJ45 connector
with the locking thingy away from yourself, and with the little
metal contacts facing towards you.

Pairs

Most CAT5 cable comes with 4 pairs (otherwise, would it be a CAT5
cable?). On the standard, el-cheapo CAT5 from Biltema those pairs have certain color
codes. I use them as an example here.

PC to hub Cable

This is the most common cable, often referred to as a “patch cable”. One
end goes into your RJ45 compatible network interface, and the other one
fits smugly into your switch, HUB, broadband router or your least
favourite pets ass^H^H^H favourite toy.

Two computers over one CAT5?

Yes, this is indeed possible. Just remember that the plug utilizing pairs
3 and 4 should be plugged into the computer which transfers
the least data of the two.

This setup is most commonly used between a hub and a dual connector walljack.

Semi-VPN through a ssh SOCKS4 proxy

VPN setup in Linux is, depending on your distro, a time-consuming
and technically challenging task often involving kernel patching and
a whole lot of setup-file-editing. With ssh and
tsocks much of the same
functionality may be achieved.

Overview

What basically happens is that you open an encrypted tunnel to a
Linux/UNIX machine connected to the remote network where the
services you wish to use are available. All network traffic
requested by your programs are routed through that encrypted
channel so that programs on your local desktop network-wise
appears to be running at the remote Linux/UNIX machine.

Requirements

You will need:

• A *nix server which allows remote logins with ssh on some port
  (usually port 22)
• The firewall must allow traffic to the ssh port on the *nix
  machine
• ssh client-side software. In Debian all you have to write is, as
  root:

  apt-get install ssh

• the tsocks library and user software. Again, in Debian, as root:

  apt-get install tsocks

Topology

Our network setup looks like this.

Setup tsocks

Edit the file /etc/tsocks.conf. The minimum content may look
like this:

      # Our local network
      local = 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0
      local = 127.0.0.0/255.255.255.0
      # The SOCKS4 proxy servers IP address - the desktop box.
      server = 127.0.0.1
      # The SOCKS4 server will be running on port 7667
      server_port = 7667
      # We use SOCKS4, not 5
      server_type = 4

Usage

Ok, we have installed everything and set up tsocks. Next we need
to make ssh behave like a SOCKS4 proxy. Your username on server
is user, by the way

Now, in a terminal window write the following:

ssh -D 7667 user@server

Typicaly, this is what will happen:

     user@desktop% ssh -D 7667 user@server
     user@server's password:
     Last login: Sat Jan 17 16:59:51 2004
     [ user@server ~ ]%

You are now logged in as normal to server. However, in addition
to just logging in your ssh session acts as an SOCKS4 proxy. Neat?

To test the setup open a new terminal window. In this example I
use Mozilla as web browser, but any other one will do. Make sure
no instances of mozilla is running. We will try accessing the web
page on the web server webserver, which is not reachable from
the Internet, only from the Remote network where server also
resides:

      user@desktop% mozilla

Try accessing the url http://webserver. This should fail. Now
try this:

      user@desktop% tsocks mozilla

And what do you know! You may now view an internal webpage,
http://webserver, from the Remote network! Congratulations, it
worked

Automatic startup and semi-vpn

In order to make all your applications use the proxy for network
traffic going to non-local sites we need to edit your X-server
login file, most commonly ~/.xsession, a bit so that all
settings are loaded at startup. Here we need a helper application
called ssh-askpass:

      % su -
      $ apt-get install ssh-askpass

ssh-askpass enables ssh to pop up an graphical window to ask for
our password.

Now make your .xsession file look like this:

      #!/bin/sh

      # Where SSH may find ssh-askpass
      export SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/lib/ssh/x11-ssh-askpass

      # Start the ssh SOCKS4 proxy - but do not open an login shell.
      ssh -N -D 7667 user@server &

      # Make all applications use the tsocks library
      # It is important to do this _after_ we open the ssh connection..
      export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libtsocks.so

      # Start your window manager - I use gnome sometimes
      gnome-session