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Road Runner: Dial Access in OS X - How to

Posted at June 27, 2008 8:58 pm | In Research | By: Ben Woodruff

I’ve blogged twice before about my frustrations with Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner Dial Access (here and here).

Reading those posts I’ve found it’s not very clear on how exactly how to accomplish connecting to the Road Runner network via dial-up using an OS X system (namely 10.5 Leopard).

I decided that the best way to explain how to do this is with a video.

Video: Dial Access in OS X ZIP (25.6MB) [Compressed - Recommended]
Video: Dial Access in OS X MP4 (30.2MB)

(more…)

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TUAW Interviews 1Password Developers

Posted at June 18, 2008 11:47 pm | In Media | By: Ben Woodruff

The Unofficial Web LogYou knew I couldn’t get by without posting at least one thing about WWDC this year.

Brett at The Unofficial Apple Weblog interviewed Dave and Roustem from Agile Web Solutions about the future of 1Password (namely on the iPhone). See the interview here: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/18/wwdc-08-agile-web-solutions-1password/

I can’t wait until I can get an iTouch so I can actually start playing with this stuff. No iPhone for me, but an iTouch wouldn’t be out of the question.

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Lock the 1Password Keychain with a QuickSilver Trigger

Posted at June 4, 2008 12:58 pm | In Software | By: Ben Woodruff

QuickSilver IconEarlier today I was looking for a way to lock the 1Password keychain using a keyboard shortcut. The easiest way I could think of doing this is with QuickSilver (namely, a QuickSilver trigger). I found this forum post that describes a terminal command that can be used to lock keychains. I put together the attached script so that this can easily be setup as a QuickSilver trigger. It’s a really simple script, only one line of code:
security lock-keychain 1Password.keychain (more…)

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My Experience With Time Machine

Posted at May 28, 2008 3:56 pm | In Software | By: Ben Woodruff

Time Machine IconLast night I ended up having to do a full restore of my MacBook Pro using Time Machine. I was trying to uninstall libusb, SANE, and some other utilities that do not have proper uninstallers. I wrote a shell script that got a list of all the files added by the installer (using the lsbom command line utility) and deleted them. Unfortunately it somehow also deleted my entire /Applications folder, and who knows what else. My bad.

Luckily for me, Time Machine had just finished a backup before I started. I didn’t have much confidence / hope that it would do a good job of doing the restore, but it did much better than I expected.

I booted from the OS X Leopard install DVD and chose Restore System from Time Machine Backup from the Utilities menu. It found my My Book hard drive that is attached to my AirPort Extreme (and has my Time Machine backup on it). Logging into the drive and starting the restore was very easy and straight forward.

The restore took about 3 - 4 hours (over 100Mb ethernet). Everything looked good when I started the laptop. I logged in as usual and everything seemed to be OK. I only ran into a couple of issues. (more…)

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Why I’m Crazy: Part 1

Posted at April 16, 2008 12:50 am | In Personal | By: Ben Woodruff

Right, so my life currently in a nutshell.

Agile Web Solutions\' 1Password LogoI recently accepted an offer by Agile Web Solutions to start helping out with their support email. I’ve been doing that for about a week and a half and I love it. Their product, 1Password, is amazing. I use it all the time, and it saves me a lot of frustration and headache.
Basically the idea is you store all of your passwords in it (mainly website logins, but it also handles whatever other text data you want to secure) and it encrypts them all using OS X’s built-in keychain.
So I’ve been answering support emails for them, and continuing to help out on the support forums. I finally set myself up with a proper avatar, haha. (more…)

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So I missed the Stevenote

Posted at January 16, 2008 1:19 am | In Technology | By: Ben Woodruff

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs gave his annual keynote presentation in San Francisco today.
I was planning on watching it, but I thought  it was tomorrow. :(

He announced some really cool products.
There was the MacBook Air, which is an ultra portable notebook (but not the touch screen all the blogs were predicting), the new Apple TV (which wasn’t surprising), Time Capsule - which is basically just an AirPort Extreme Base Station with a hard drive stuck in it for Time Machine purposes (which is cool, I might consider it in the future, if it gets good reviews), updates to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and iTunes movie rentals.
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Dear Time Warner

Posted at January 12, 2008 5:15 pm | In Networking | By: Ben Woodruff

Hello,

You dial access dialer does not work with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). I’ve confirmed this with tech support. It hasn’t been updated in a very long time anyway, so it’s probably time for an update.
Or, better yet, release the PPP script so that we don’t have to use your horribly outdated proprietary dialer and you don’t have to support it. That way it’ll work with OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Note: This may need to be forwarded to someone in the company who actually understand what PPP is.

Ben

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Adobe CS3: ExtendScript Toolkit 2 Error on OS X

Posted at January 7, 2008 8:24 pm | In Software | By: Ben Woodruff

I was reinstalling part of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 (Web Premium) last night, and after it had reinstalled the shared components it asked me to “Please Insert Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit 2 to Continue Installation.” There isn’t any CD labeled anything like that with CS3.

I found the fix here: elaine montoya » Blog Archive » Workaround: Please Insert Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit 2 to Continue Installation.
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NoScript Provides Additional Security

Posted at December 16, 2007 12:16 am | In Software | By: Ben Woodruff

The popular NoScript addon for Firefox, which used to be primarily used for blocking Javascript (for security reasons) now allows easier blocking of Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, Sun Java, and Microsoft Silverlight content. This used to be possible using the Flashblock addon, but the catch 22 with that is that it only works on pages which you have javascript enabled for (which obviously defeats the point). (more…)

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Allow Non-admin Users to Update Firefox

Posted at December 15, 2007 12:06 pm | In Software | By: Ben Woodruff

We recently noticed a problem where Firefox would prompt users (who are not administrators on their workstations) to update to the latest version (ie, from 2.0.0.8 to 2.0.0.9). If they tried to complete the update however, it would fail, giving the error “Software Update Failed”.

We decided the best solution was to come up with a way to let users update Firefox themselves, without being made local admins. The reason we wanted them to be able to do this is that IT doesn’t get around to everyone’s workstation often enough to keep up with the latest version of Firefox, and we felt that it was important for them to have that (for security reasons). (more…)

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