Command Shift Q

If you’re using a computer, as opposed to Windows, try visiting mailol.net

Thanks to nickpick for putting me onto this.

I’m a big fan of Harry Shearer’s Le Show on KCRW Public Radio, which also goes out as a podcast. You might remember Harry as the voice of numerous characters on The Simpsons and as the luke-warm bass player from spoof rock band, Spinal Tap.

Harry’s show regularly features a segment on the joys of switching from analogue TV to digital terrestrial or DVB, using government subsidised converter boxes. A great number of his listeners have written into his show with tales from the digital wonderland—with mixed opinions on the advantages and disadvantages.

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Glimmer Blocker, from glimmerblocker.org stops ads before they reach your browser.

By intercepting traffic from a known block list, Glimmer Blocker can learn about new sites to avoid as it goes along.

Best of all because it doesn’t require you to hack Safari or install and add-on for Firefox, you can use the latest version of your browser of choice without having to wait for a compatible release of Glimmer Blocker to come out.

So, if you want, you can replace Safari altogether with the nightly build of its open source cousin, WebKit and still enjoy an interruption free surfing experience.

Glimmer Blocker contains six tabs in a System Preferences pane.

The first is a boiler plate with a “check for latest version” button and an activation check box.

The second shows a list, with descriptions, of each of the five default filters. Known ad networks, like RealMedia and adservinghost.com, are automatically inserted into Glimmer Blockers rules.

Many ad blockers include a list of similar features. What’s interesting about Glimmer Blocker is that, because it is a proxy server, you can program rules of your own into how certain sites are handled.

The default enhancement rules include adding a ‘Download Link’ and an ‘Auto switch to high quality’ viewing mode to YouTube.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

Created by fader.co.uk, iPlayer Grabber is a neat little tool for downloading the iPhone version of BBC iPlayer content, which—unlike the browser based flash and MPEG videos for desktop computers, isn’t encrypted and locked down with DRM.

To view BBC content legally you need to hold a UK licence fee. To access BBC iPlayer you need to be within the UK—and the BBC do a good job of constantly updating the way in which they detect your IP address, to ensure this is the case.

Unfortunately this often means that for Brits living and working overseas, who’ve already paid their yearly subscription, much of the content they’ve paid for is unavailable.

Thankfully, iPlayer Grabber includes settings for HTTP proxy—so if you can find a UK based proxy, you should be able to catch up with Top Gear and Eastenders, no matter where in the world you are.

Indeed the whole array of BBC content is available on iPlayer, to a certain extent—which makes the lack of a queue in iPlayer Grabber all the more frustrating, although the author adds that this function may become available at some point and there is a work-around to this as described on the fader.co.uk blog, here.

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There are hundreds of free file hosting sites, which will offer free bandwidth up front, with the offer of more if you pay. badongo.com is but one very popular site of this kind, which I’ve used as an example, here, because of a bug in the way their servers check IP addresses which locks legitimate users out of accessing content, even before the free trial has expired.

The error message, suggesting that “your IP address has exceeded free account limits” (or words to that effect) is a familiar one to many of us who seek out rare music recordings and bootleg concert performances, who find them on these free hosting services only to be denied access because of poorly configured Java on the server side.

While generous with their storage allowances, free hosting sites are often overzealous with their free user limits. If you’re seeing these error messages because you really have exceeded your free allowance, you should sign-up for a paid account and stop moaning about it. If, on the other hand you simply want to retrieve one or two files, which should be within your free use limits, but are in fact being wrongly identified as having used your allowances, this guide is for you.

Since these false positives, statistically, must affect many thousands of users, I decided to find a way to ‘trick’ one site which was being particularly stubborn, badongo, into allowing me to download the file I wanted—with a view to sharing the information I gathered here. If anyone from badongo would like to contact me once this bug is fixed, I’d be happy to amend this article at a later date, pointing this out.

I knew, from my experience of trying to connect to the BBC iPlayer, from outside the UK, that I needed to start by investigating ways to connect to the site from behind a proxy server, with an IP range which has yet to exceed the free bandwidth limit.

There are hundreds of guides on-line with instructions on how to implement proxy connections. They range from being so technically worded they’re downright impossible to understand, to web-based interfaces that, while simple to use, are in reality tragically slow and inflexible.

Somewhere in-between these two extremes is Tor, “a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet”

Tor is split up into four main panes. For the purpose of this guide I’m not going to cover the whole of Tor’s functionality, except to say that if you follow the instructions for how to install Tor, with the Vidalia front end controller and the Torbutton Firefox plug-in, the only thing you’ll need to change to enable Firefox to save incoming file transfers, is the Java settings in the Torbutton preferences panel of Firefox.

Warning! DO NOT use Tor to download hundreds of megabytes of data to which you are not entitled to retrieve. One of Tor’s intended uses is as a lifeline to political dissidents and journalists in countries with oppressive regimes, where the free exchange of information is a crime punishable by death. If you misuse this guide, someone, somewhere is suffering for your greed. This information is intended to be used responsibly as a work-around to a simple programming bug and should only be used as a last resort.

• Choose the Mac, Linux or Windows version of the Tor install bundle, from https://www.torproject.org/download.html.en. Install it and follow the on-screen instructions. Vidalia must always be running for Firefox to use Tor proxy servers when the Torbutton add-on is enabled, but you can quit it when Torbutton is set to ‘off’.
• Right-click on the enable / disable Torbutton, in the bottom left-hand corner or Firefox and choose ‘Preferences’
• In the ‘Dynamic Content’ tab under ‘Security Settings’, you need to un-check ‘Disable plug-ins during Tor usage. This is because, unless your free hosting site supports right-click “Save As..” download links, the Java code used to ensure you don’t hot-link to a file’s location on the server will be prevented from running
• You should now be able to work-around the false positives thrown up by the free hosting server and retrieve the files

If the free file hosting site still identifies your IP address as having exceeded bandwidth allowances, and you are sure this is a mistake click the ‘Use a new identity’ button in the Vidalia control panel and Tor will re-route your connection to a different IP range—allowing you to appear as if connected to the site from a different address which has not been incorrectly banned. Once the files you require are successfully retrieved, you should consider “giving back” some of your bandwidth to the Tor project by enabling Vidalia client to work as a relay.

If you found this guide useful, please promote it using the social bookmarking buttons below. I am a freelance tech blogger and appreciate constructive feedback.

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• Highlight the images you want in your PDF and Right Click > Open in Preview.
• If it isn’t already visible, open the ‘Sidebar’ thumbnails with the button in the top left hand corner of the Preview window and ‘Select All’ (⌘+A).
• In the Pop Down menu at the bottom left of the Preview pane, choose ‘Save Selected…’ and choose ‘PDF’ from the Save As… dialogue box.

*N.B., You should choose ‘None’ from the Quartz Filter box for compatibility with Windows versions of Adobe Acrobat.

Slideshow selection in fullscreen
⌘+⌥+Y – Hit the Spacebar to Pause and Continue.

Open Terminal.app from the Applications > Utilities folder.

Paste the path of the directory you want to erase after the src command. If you insert the switch ‘r’, before the directory path, srm will remove the contents of directories. Add the switch ’s’ if you only require a single sweep of over-write data.

srm -rs path/to/top/directory/to/delete

You can type
srm --help
to list the srm help screen

Thanks to googoo

The idea is simple, you create the content, they handle everything else. Printing, credit card processing and world-wide delivery. Everything from personalised calendars, to T-Shirts, DVDs and paperback books.

But in reality, on-demand print services, like lulu.com and cafepress.com, can be quite picky about which kinds of document they’re able to process and, more importantly, recreate exactly in print, as they appear on your screen.

This is because PDF, the Portable Document Format of choice for books and artwork, was originally designed to be an on-screen draft document viewer, but has become almost ubiquitous in the professional print industry as a lightweight way for producers of off-line print media, like the beleaguered JPGmag to send WYSIWYG magazine layouts to printer-distributors.

To accommodate this growth in what is actually an unintended use of PDF, Adobe have had to bolt certain functions on top of the original PDF standard. Rather typically this has resulted in lots of different standards, which leaves ordinary users, who simply want to use a word processor to make books and portfolios, somewhat lost in a world of Quark and In-design jargon.

A PDF exported from Microsoft Word isn’t guaranteed to look the same from one machine to another. Similarly, a document exported from Apple’s iWork Pages, has certain data embedded within it which is only readable by OS X’s Quartz Core Graphic layer. This is because each application has slightly different ways of marking out which line of text, for example, is supposed to be in bold and which is supposed to be a chapter heading, at the start of a paragraph, in italics or tabulated with bullet points, and so on.

Stripping this data out, without affecting the look of your presentation, can be done rather simply, if you use Adobe’s Acrobat Pro to cross-convert your finished document.

These examples of how to do this and the screen-shots below use Apple’s Pages and lulu.com, but you might just as easily have used MS Word, Open Office or Google’s Docs.
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