Get your burglar with your Mac!

Well, i have been living in a hotel rooms for the past years…. And along with those, security issues are always involved. Of course, most of the hotel policies will say that their staff is absolutely to be trusted and that there is no way that a certain item disappeared from your room because of their staff. 

…Well, not according to me….

And this is where your mac computer can help you out (It did help me). If you are not sure about hotel security and if you worry that someone might have an overlook into your stuff and possibly take something that belongs to you (Money, Jewelry, etc), here is what you can do (And its for free, not it terms of free as “freedom” like open source but free as in “free beer”). 

Point your browser to: 

http://www.klieme.com/EyeSight.html

… and download this cute peace of software. 

Now you can run it and immediately see that you can have snapshots taken from your inbuilt webcam periodically. Put your laptop somewhere in the room and just wait for the result. 

And here is my result: 

Now, you might be surprised to what the ‘cleaning’ stuff does in your room and to your stuff. It goes from checking everything out; pockets, envelopes, little boxes. Some took money i left on the table as a “lure”. Some played my guitars. In one occasion a guy took my tennis balls. One woman stole some Jack Daniel’s from a bottle i had in my room. One guy actually stole a DVD i have rented and replaced it by another DVD disk. And so on….

So, i do believe that personal security is a high priority and definitely a risk in hotel rooms. But i must be honest and say it does not happen in Dubai (UAE) hotels (as till now).

Voice mails from Israel warn residents of southern Lebanon not to cooperate with Palestinians

Yes, it’s true. The zionists call lebanese people on their land lines and play a message warning them ‘not cooperate with Palestinians’, recalling the disasters from 1982.

Thank you, ‘israel’, for such a call. You just made my day. I really don’t know how i could live without you (and i could, pretty well trust me…and i will…) 

So, bye for now.

Notify Me!

There is a very cute tool called Growl, written for OSX. The tool basically serves as a notifier for different applications. For example, you can set it up for iTunes and whenever the songs shuffle, you get a cute little window appearing on the screen and informing you about it. Of course, there are better ways of use it…

One extension of this program is called growlnotify. It’s a “shell” tool that invokes growl and allows you to send notifications to the screen directly from a shell. 

You can find the program here. 

But briefly, open a shell window and type: 

$> growlnotify -m “test”

Now, for me this become pretty useful because i use the shell scripts a lot (for batch and cron).

The funniest one about ‘israel’

Ok, this one is the funniest one; 

This small bit comes from an article i read somewhere: 

….

“Let’s look at the conditions in Gaza: these increasingly resemble a big concentration camp,” the cardinal said.

In reposnse, Israel on Wednesday slammed the senior Vatican official for comparing the Gaza Strip to a “concentration camp,” saying the comments were “based on Hamas propaganda.”

….

He Apparently Hamas has ties at the Vatican now, according to the ‘zionists’. 

Come on!!!!!!

Macbook 13″ (Black) – overview after the battle!

It’s interesting, i use my laptop(which yea yea yea i know i know, it’s a macbook 13″) only for personal stuff, like, watching videos, music, browsing internet, email. It’s very hard that you will find me doing `computational heavy` tasks or `professional work` on a Mac computer. (Mostly because it heats a lot and i hate the ventilator sound). 

Yet, this is my uptime: 

2:15  up 18 days, 18:01, 3 users, load averages: 0.57 0.87 0.95

0.57  over 0.87 0.95 ? Isn’t that a bit high ?

And yeah, i don’t reboot (or shutdown) it quite often. Come to think about it, the system is quite reactive and i put it to sleep quite often during the day. And one more thing to notice, the less i shutdown, the better it works. 

So, i have decided to do a kind of a round up list of all the good things this mac brought me. (And don’t worry, i am not per-partes, nor i am doing a mac-propaganda). The only propaganda you will ever hear from me is about Silicon Graphics (Sgi), Sun, UNIX, Linux, etc. 

Now, 

Let us see the software version. Mac OS X Version 10.5.5; Very nice. 

I personally like the software update features and how the whole thing works. I think it’s neat and nice. And mostly, it works. I must say that i never had *any* problem regarding software upgrades and such. So let Us hope it’s going to be like this in the next future. 

Next, my personal point of view on laptops is “The laptop i own is not my first born child”; Meaning i treat it how it should be treated. It’s a portable device that you expose to shock and vibration taking it around every day. And also dirt. I carried it from Dubai’s heat to Milano rain. Therefore of course, it will be dirty, but in the end, it works. The display is still perfect and i haven’t noticed any problems (And believe me, i have a very rough hand on my laptop). So, as far as it goes for operational value, i am very happy with it. Very nice!

IMPORTANT: Keyboard! 13’s keyboards are the best keyboards i’v ever tried. Personally i can not type anything (and i’v tried for a year) on a Powerbook 15″ (or 17″). If you look closely, there are huge `gaps` between keys and along with key’s shape it make is very comfortable. 

Apple software; It simply works. I use Pages and Numbers every day. I do believe they are a very nice pieces of software. iWeb = trash bin. Quicktime, i personally like, and it also allow me to view a wide range of media (i happen to work in post production). Preview i think it’s a very useful program, yet i find myself to use ImageMagick a lot, therefore i rely more on the `display` program than Preview. 

Mail, yes i like. I think it has great capabilities of organization and overall i like it a lot. It’s a very simple yet useful tool. 

Automator; I don’t like it at all. I think it’s confusing and i can’t really use it. I do believe that you have to be a below average us-citizen (Yes, the very wide spread urban legend that identifies american citizens as “not really smart”) to use that particular peace of *&^%..i mean software. 

Dashboard. I was very against this things, but over the time, i find myself using it very often. There are some useful widgets out there, and if will decide to stick with a mac laptop in the future i will probably write some of my own widgets. Bravo!

Safari; I don’t give a …. about browsers. But for now Safari is fine. Yet i have to admit that i use lynx a lot and wget (which happes to be that i think it’s an excellent tool). You must figured out now that i am not a big fan of flash/shockwave or whatever websites. 

iTunes; Yes, nice, but quite frankly, you can find other (open source) software out that equals (if not even surpasses) iTunes. Not impressive, but it works. 

Spotlight; Amazing. Bravo! The cmd+space shortcut makes everything very fast! 

Backup, i use TimeMachine for now, but i have to say i don’t like it a lot, because especially if you have to deal with large amount of data (meaning a lot of files, not the disk space) it becomes really annoying. I do believe that TimeMachine is made for home use to backup one picture of your girlfriend that you happen to have in your Documents folder. No, TimeMachine is out. (I already have a bunch of backup scripts written, i need to reorganize the whole thing and apply it to the laptop). 

Other software; I like the MacPorts project. I find it very stable and very good. I used it to install ImageMagic package, and from that point on i use it very very often. There is a lot of software out there and mostly everything works without too much hassle. (Actually till now everything worked out perfectly). 

So, in conclusion. I find the Mac 13″ a very nice peace of hardware. It runs nicely and smooth (My version mounts 2GB of RAM).

Xplanet wallpaper.

Dear All, 

The xplanet based script that automaticly gathers data from the internet and creates a wallpaper is done. It has been tested and it works. Now we go to stage 2, meaning: 

1) The script will be available for download very soon.

2) The script will contain an installation program and instructions. 

3) The script will also collect and store a history footprint of some data. The idea is to create a huge distrubuted database of this data. Anyhow, during installation you will be able to choose to use this option or not(I recommend it).

Here is a quick preview:

 

 

Sebb.

Desktop Wallpapers 2 – Open Software and ~/xplanet

Since i was posting Desktop Wallpapers – Open Software and ~/Fun_Tools, i remembered another trick. This time the problem was time and day/night issues. 

If you point your browser to http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/ you can get yourself a very interesting piece of software named Xplanet. Now, to make a long story short, there was xearth and then xplanet.  What this program does, is a bit ludic but i find it very very interesting and fun.

Now, if you install the program and play with it, you might try this: 

$shell:> xplanet -window -latitude X -longitude Y -radius 35 -rotate 23 -geometry IxJ -output ~/map.jpg

You will get a nice little picture you can *again* use as your desktop Wallpaper. 

Why ? Try to work long hours in a suite without windows (underground) and check the updated image as your wallpaper and you will see the phycological effect of the time on you; Meaning, it’s very interesting to perceive time in terms of planet rotation instead of a conceptual interpretation of numbers (9:47pm). 

Sebb

Desktop Wallpapers – Open Software and ~/Fun_Tools

For a short period of time i had the necessity to control some resources (both local and remote) and display the information on a computer screen. Since i am *always* busy doing other things, i wanted this information to be updated automatically and easy to keep my eye on. While i was thinking of an easy way and *time_not_consuming_way*  to implement a structure that would bring me this information i remembered my *old* love, the all mighty ImageMagic!

Basically, my solution (UNIX) is definitelynot the most elegant one, yet it works for me and it’s really easy to implement; So let us start.

I gathered the information needed into a file and put it in /tmp directory via bash script; Namely use some unix commands and concatenate the output to a file. 

Example:
$shell:> df -h | grep /dev/xxx | awk '{print $3}' > /tmp/foo.txt

Then use the `draw` option of convert, which is a part of the ImageMagick image processing package to *print* the text that you have in /tmp/foo.txt over an image that you choose to be your desktop wallpaper. 

Example:
$shell:> convert wallpaper_image.jpg -draw 'text +X+Y $text_from_file' wallpaper.jpg

At this point you have your picture ready to be used as wallpaper. You now need to use crontab to repeat this operation at regular intervals ($shell:> crontab -e) and change the desktop wallpaper accordingly (Platform dependent; On OSX just select the automatic picture shuffle option).

And the trick is done.

Sebb