Last night, just through random chance, I discovered that the channel up and channel down buttons perform the 30 second skip and it’s 8 second replay counterpart in Windows 7. Very pleasantly surprised, I dug a little deeper and found that Microsoft even added some customization options (Settings -> DVD -> Remote Control Options).

You can now customize the Skip, Replay, Channel Up, and Channel Down buttons of your remote! Skipping forward and backward with DVDs is not quite as snappy as with recorded TV, but it’s still great for skipping title sequences and replaying that last little bit of audio you couldn’t quite hear.

For me, one of the issues is that with Windows 7, my PC won’t stay asleep. It will go into power saving mode and then promptly wake up again. Tweaking various settings in the Power Options control panel had no effect. After some hunting, however, I was able to get to the root of the problem. What I needed to do was to adjust the power management settings for my network adapter. Once I did that, sleep mode worked as expected.

First, to figure out which device was waking the PC from sleep mode, I opened a command prompt and ran “powercfg -lastwake”. The output indicated that my network adapter was the cause.

Next, I opened the Device Manager control panel, right-clicked on my network adapter, and clicked on Properties. This opened my adapter properties. I selected the Power Management tab and got the following window:

Because I do want to be able to wake up my PC via the network, I checked the box to “Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer”. This means that the PC will still respond to Wake-On-Lan packets, but other network traffic should be ignored.

And voilà, my PC now stays asleep! One thing I’m not sure of is whether the PC will stay awake during really long downloads. This generally isn’t an issue for me, but it may turn into one.

The new *Learn Remote* option can be found in Settings >> General >> Remotes.

Once you start the learning process, the Apple TV presents you with a page showing the six buttons found in the miniature Apple Remote in a single row.

Learning an infrared code from a non-Apple remote is super simple. Just press and hold the button on the remote. The progress bar on the screen will quickly fill up and once it’s done, you get a brief confirmation message and the Apple TV automatically progresses to the next button.

After these six buttons are done, you are presented with an option to set up “Playback Buttons.”

There are a total of nine playback buttons. Play, pause, and stop seem out of place since they overlap with some of the buttons from the basic setup. However, I was happy to see that fast forward and next chapter could be mapped to different buttons. To activate fast forward with the Apple Remote, I had to hold down the next chapter button. But held buttons weren’t always reliably detected by the Apple TV. Often, the device would skip to the next chapter rather than fast forward. This becomes tiresome very quickly. Separating these controls makes fast forward much more reliable.

I was also happy to note that I could assign dedicated buttons to Skip Back and Skip Forward. With an Apple Remote, I had to [pause the video first][2], then hit fast-forward or rewind to skip around, and then hit play to resume playback.

Unfortunately, skipping still only occurs in 10-second increments, both forwards and backwards. I much prefer the Tivo and Windows Media Center increments of 30-seconds forward and 5-seconds back.

Also, Apple TV 2.3 kills XBMC and Boxee. As of this writing, there’s no fix or easy workaround, but [something may be coming soon][3].

All that aside, I find the Learning Remote interface in Apple TV 2.3 to be excellent. And it’s just a wish, but hopefully it will make its way into OS X. My mind runs wild with the possibilities…

Apple TV, 160GB Hard Drive (Amazon)

[1]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3187
[2]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3176
[3]: http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=2064

Yesterday morning, I launched Time Machine to undo some changes I had just made to a file. But when I tried to jump back an hour, I noticed that all backups since Nov. 10 were missing. That was pretty strange since I had seen the Time Machine icon spinning in my menu bar at regular intervals all throughout the week.

Looking into the Backups.backupdb folder on my Time Machine drive, I was surprised to see two folders. One was the name of my Mac (let’s call it “doubleparity”) and held all backups prior to Nov. 10. The other was named “doubleparity 254″ and contained all backups since Nov. 10. As you’ve probably guessed, the solution to restoring my missing backups was to merge these two folders. But whenever I tried to copy or move the contents of either folder, I got a “Operation not permitted” error.

After a bit of Googling, I discovered that I had to disable Access Control Lists. Here’s a list of all the steps taken to get things working properly again:

1. Disable Time Machine

2. Backup Time Machine volume.

Admittedly it’s rather ironic to have to backup a backup, but it’s a precaution that should be taken to keep your data safe. My Mac backs up to a ZFS filesystem on a DIY [OpenSolaris][1] server so backing up simply consists of creating a filesystem snapshot – [a single command in OpenSolaris][2]. Without ZFS, this is a considerably more complicated task.

3. Open Terminal

4. Disable ACLs

`sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes// -d`

5. Merge folder contents

`cd /Volumes//Backups.backupdb/`

`sudo mv doubleparity/* doubleparity\ 254/`

Here, I got an “Operation not permitted” error on the “Latest” symlink. I initially ignored it since I didn’t need the link anymore. However, I couldn’t delete the “doubleparity” folder since it wasn’t empty and all attempts to delete “Latest” gave me the same “Operation not permitted” error. I had to unmount the Time Machine volume and remount it. After that, I was able to delete the folder with no problems.

`sudo rm -rf doubleparity`

`sudo mv doubleparity\ 254/ doubleparity`

6. Re-enable ACLs

`sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes// -e`

7. Re-enable Time Machine

As far as I can tell, my missing backups are available and Time Machine is working normally. I still don’t know why backups suddenly started going into a second folder. If anyone out there has had a similar experience or any ideas, drop a line in comments.

[1]: “http://www.opensolaris.com”
[2]: “http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#Using_ZFS_Snapshots”

On PCs, my preferred test software is an open-source application called [Memtest86+][m]. It’s easy to put a copy of the application on a bootable flash drive or CD, restart the system, and let it run. On the Mac, it’s not quite as simple. Memtest86+ has been ported to OS X, but even though Memtest86+ is free, the [MemtestOSX][mx] developer charges US$1.39 per download.

[m]: http://www.memtest.org/
[mx]: http://memtestosx.org/

Now, I know that US$1.39 is pretty meager, but I still found it distasteful. Initially, I thought this was a violation of the GPL, but each download includes the MemtestOSX source code, so I believe the GPL is satisfied. Also, while I realize that bandwidth does cost money, there are plenty of places (Google Code, SourceForge, etc.) where the developer could host his project for free. Needless to say, I could not bring myself to fork over the cash.

Fortunately, there is another alternative. Kelley Computing has an application called [Rember][r] – a front-end GUI for the command-line based MemtestOSX. But it also includes MemtestOSX itself! It’s not quite the latest version, but it is fairly up-to-date. You have to dig a little to find it, but it’s there and freely available.

[r]: http://www.kelleycomputing.net/rember/

The trick with testing RAM is that you want to test as much of the RAM as possible. If you have OS X running and applications open, you are not going to be able to test a significant portion of your memory. The best option is to restart your computer into single-user mode by holding down command-s during startup. This brings the computer into a minimal console environment. It is so minimal that power management is not even enabled, so it’s likely that your system fans will be spinning pretty loudly. No worries…start MemtestOSX and let it test away.

$ ./Applications/Rember.app/Contents/Resources/memtest all 3

On my 4GB system, it took a little over 3 hours to run a 3-pass test.

Note: When I ran memtest, it grabbed most of, but not all of the available memory. So I just canceled the run, and restarted it in the background.

$ ./Applications/Rember.app/Contents/Resources/memtest all 3 &

Then I launched a second instance of memtest, which grabbed and tested the remaining memory.

1. The Case for SSH Proxies

The rise of [Web 2.0][web20] and the increasing availability of Wi-Fi access now means that you can do more than ever away from your home or office. But there is an associated risk. Using someone else’s network makes you highly vulnerable to information theft. You may not realize it, but the vast majority of data transmitted across the web (including email) is unencrypted. Sure, most websites protect your password and some may even protect your username; but once you’ve logged in, odds are that everything else is transmitted in the clear. Consequently, when you’re on an untrusted network, your personal data is at risk.

[web20]: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

This may not be an issue for many people. More and more, people are willing to post what once were considered private thoughts on public forums. But on an untrusted network, there are other greater dangers.

Many of you have probably received [phishing][phish] emails. They look like they’re from some popular website or financial institution; and unlike most spam, they try to get you to reveal your username, password, account number or other sensitive private data. The obvious ones ask you to reply to the email directly. The more devious efforts include links which at first glance may seem legitimate, but in reality transport you to forged websites. Yet despite this increase in sophistication, the solution is pretty simple. Never click on a link in suspicious email. If you truly suspect problems with an account, either contact customer support by phone or directly navigate to the institution’s website by manually typing in the proper URL.

[phish]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

When you’re on an untrusted network, however, even this last step is not safe. Networks can be configured relatively easily to send you to website forgeries even if you manually key in the proper URL. So is there any hope at all? Do we surf the internet in fear every time we are away from the home or office? Fortunately, along with exercising increased caution and suspicion, there are technologies you can employ to help you deal with untrusted networks.

Medium to large companies deploy [VPNs][vpn], secure ID cards, fingerprint scanners, authenticated certificates, and more to protect their confidential data. Most of these technologies are too complicated and/or too expensive for individuals, but SSH Proxies are a relatively simple and accessible solution for the tech-savvy.

[vpn]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Private_Network

A proxy is nothing more than a trusted computer. It can be your home computer, your web host, or a server provided by your ISP. The [SSH][ssh] utility allows you to form an encrypted connection, or tunnel, to the proxy. All network activity can then be routed through that tunnel to the proxy. So, for example, if you want to check your email, your proxy is the device that communicates directly with the email server and then sends the data back to your laptop over the SSH-encrypted tunnel. At no point does unencrypted data travel across the untrusted network.

[ssh]: http://www.openssh.com/

Furthermore, SSH verifies that you’re actually connected to your proxy and not some substitute or forgery. If it can’t verify the identity of the proxy, it informs you and lets you assess the situation.

2. SSH Setup

With that said, hopefully I’ve convinced you an SSH Proxy is a good idea, so let’s go about setting it up on your Mac. Lifehacker has an excellent article on using [SSH proxies to encrypt your web browsing][lh]. It’s the starting point for my Mac-specific tips, so if you haven’t read it already, please go read it now. And then remember to come back!

[lh]: http://lifehacker.com/software/ssh/geek-to-live–encrypt-your-web-browsing-session-with-an-ssh-socks-proxy-237227.php “Encrypt your web browsing session (with an SSH SOCKS proxy)”

3. Basic Mac Setup

Gina gave you a great how-to for creating an SSH tunnel and configuring Firefox to use that tunnel. But what if you use [Safari][saf]? Or [Camino][cam]? Or [OmniWeb][omn]? And what about all your other apps, like email and RSS? Nearly every desktop application today has some sort of network connectivity built in. How do you configure all of them to route their traffic through the SSH tunnel?

[saf]: http://www.apple.com/safari/
[cam]: http://caminobrowser.org/
[omn]: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/

The answer lies in System Preferences. First, go to the Network preference pane and create a new location. In my case, I’ve named the location “Untrusted”. Then, for both the Airport and Built-in Ethernet devices, click on **Proxies** and enable the **SOCKS Proxy** checkbox. Finally, fill in “localhost” for the server and “9999″ for the port and save the changes.

Now, whenever you are on an untrusted network, there are just two things to do:

1. Open Terminal and issue the ssh tunnel command (*ssh -ND 9999 user@example.com*)
2. Open the Network System Preference pane and change the location to Untrusted.

This will configure nearly every Cocoa/WebKit-based application to route their network traffic through your SSH proxy. However, you’re probably only 95% covered because not every application uses the System Preferences. Some applications have their own proxy settings. Firefox is probably the biggest one and the Lifehacker article shows you what you need to do. For me, iChat and Adium are the other two common apps. If you look into each app’s preferences, you’ll find options for configuring iChat and Adium to use proxies.

*Note: I have not successfully gotten iChat to work with proxies. There are a number of threads discussing this issue on the Apple Support forums but I didn’t find any definitive answers.*

4. Adding Automation

Now that you’ve reconfigured all the applications that don’t rely on System Preferences to use proxies, you’re probably thinking how painful it will be to do this every time you hop onto an unknown network. I definitely share your sentiments. Fortunately, there are ways to automate the process. I use an inexpensive application called [rooSwitch][roo] to help out.

[roo]: http://www.roobasoft.com/rooSwitch/

A great little utility, rooSwitch allows you to easily create and manage multiple profiles for each application. You may know that Firefox allows you to create multiple identities, each with different settings and configuration options. RooSwitch gives you the ability to create multiple identities for every application on your system.

What I’ve done on my system is I’ve created “untrusted” profiles for both Firefox and Adium. In these profiles, I’ve configured the application settings to use a SOCKS proxy on port 9999.

Technically, you don’t need rooSwitch to create these profiles. You could manually generate and manage multiple identities by duplicating and shuffling the appropriate files and folders in *~/Library/Application Support/*, *~/Library/Caches/*, and *~/Library/Preferences/*. This is what rooSwitch does underneath the hood, but it’s interface makes the whole process so much easier, so it’s what I prefer. Plus, rooSwitch has [AppleScript][as] support, so it’s easy to automate.

[as]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/applescript/

Here’s my AppleScript for switching to the “untrusted” profile:

tell application “rooSwitch”
tell document “Firefox.rooSwitch”
tell profile “untrusted” to make active with allow quit
end tell
tell document “Adium.rooSwitch”
tell profile “untrusted” to make active with allow quit
end tell
end tell
tell application “rooSwitch” to quit

If raw AppleScript is not your cup of tea, rooSwitch also provides a “Switch Profile” [Automator][am] action. Check out the [screencast][s] for more details.

[am]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/
[s]: http://www.roobasoft.com/rooSwitch/view_movie.php?movie=whatsNew.mov

This simplifies the SSH proxy process down to (1) switching rooSwitch profiles, (2) switching to the Untrusted location, and (3) creating the SSH tunnel. We can combine these steps with a little shell script and the help of **scselect** and **osascript**. The **scselect** program allows you to switch locations from the command-line. Similarly, **osascript** allows you to execute AppleScript from the command-line.

Here’s what the end result looks like:

#!/bin/bash
scselect Untrusted
osascript switch_to_untrusted.scpt
ssh -ND 9999 user@example.com

If you save this script with a *.command* extension, then you can run it by double-clicking on the icon in the Finder like a regular application. When it runs, it will change the location, switch your profile, and start up the SSH tunnel. Enter your password and off you go!

It’s also a good idea to create a script for switching your location and profiles back to the default. I’ll leave it for you to do. Enjoy and safe surfing!

*Parting tip*: This is mentioned in the Lifehacker article, but it’s worth reiterating. If you happen to be on a very slow untrusted network, adding the -C option to the ssh command may speed things up. The -C option compresses all data send through the SSH tunnel, in effect trading CPU cycles for increased bandwidth. The speedup isn’t really noticeable on faster connections, but can be quite significant on slower networks.

**UPDATE:** *I crossed out the portion where I claim that iChat and Adium cannot use the proxy settings specified through System Preferences. Sorry about that…not sure what I was thinking. Also, I fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Hopefully the article reads better than a 3rd grade level now.*

The same behavior exists on a Mac as well, but with a slight twist:

Notice in the image above how both buttons are highlighted – one in complete blue and the other in a blue halo. The completely blue button responds to the Enter key as Windows users would expect. What’s more interesting, though, is that the haloed button responds to the Spacebar.

The two types of button highlights may not be something you notice; I went months without even realizing the haloed form existed. But now that I now what it’s for, I love it (I really dig keyboard shortcuts…what can I say?). Both forms don’t always show up in every dialog box, but when they do, they can save you some typing. The best is when you can avoid the dreaded Shift+Tab hand contortion for cycling the button focus to the previous UI element.

This may seem a bit trivial, but in the fight against [RSI][rsi], every little bit counts.

[rsi]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury

[im]: http://pidgin.im

Anyway, with the upper half of the window missing, I couldn’t drag the window back into view. After being frustrated for a bit, I stumbled onto the rather obvious solution. Simply right-click on the program’s tab in the taskbar and select *Move*. Now, you can use the keyboard’s arrow keys to move the window. Furthermore, after the first keypress, the mouse cursor automatically binds itself to the application’s title bar. So you can switch back to the mouse to drag, rather than holding down the arrow keys. Clicking a mouse button releases the window.

Though I’ve never had this happen to me on a Mac, both Windows and OS X limit window dragging to the title bar, so it’s a potential issue in both environments. Using the taskbar, the Windows solution is simple and, in retrospect, obvious. I looked around for a way to move windows via the keyboard in OS X, but didn’t find one. Google did provide an alternative solution – an AppleScript snippet by [Marc Abramowitz][ma] that relocates the window to the top-left corner of the screen. If anyone discovers a simpler solution, please let me know. Otherwise, we’ll have to chalk this up as one of the rare instances where Windows bests OS X.

[ma]: http://marc-abramowitz.com/archives/2007/04/16/applescript-to-get-control-over-off-screen-windows/

Many Mac users prefer Safari to Firefox and I don’t blame them. Even after the switch to Intel, Firefox runs more sluggishly on a Mac relative to Windows. But while Safari is pretty fast, it is also pretty bare-bones – no extensions, no keywords. Thank goodness for Input Managers.

Input Managers are a feature of OS X that allows users to extend the features of applications at runtime. Because Safari lacks a plug-in architecture, many developers instead use Input Managers to add features to the Apple browser.

Of particular significance for us is [Sogudi][so] by Kitzel Hoover. Sogudi adds keywords to Safari, allowing you to construct Recent Search shortcuts like the one described in my [previous post][pp]. The only difference is that the “%s” in the url is replaced by “@@@”.

[so]: http://www.kitzkikz.com/Sogudi
[pp]: http://doubleparity.net/2007/09/googling-the-recent-web

Sogudi comes with a number of pre-installed shortcuts, including ones for Google Image Search, Wikipedia, and IMDB. It’s a fantastic utility. Sadly, there are strong rumors that Input Managers will be disabled in Leopard, potentially orphaning a number of useful tools.

##2. Quicksilver

While Sogudi saves you a couple of steps, you need to have Safari open. If it’s not, you must first launch Safari before entering your search terms. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way to open Safari and run a search all in one step? Well, with [Quicksilver][qs] there is!

[qs]: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

For this shortcut to work, you need to first enable the *Safari Module* and the *Web Search Module* plug-ins in Quicksilver. Then, in Safari, bookmark the Recent Search URL, but replace “%s” with “\*\*\*” (3 asterisks).

Give the bookmark a short name and now it’s available from Quicksilver. Just activate Quicksilver, type the bookmark name, hit tab twice, and enter in your search terms:

Enjoy!

[as]: http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Unfortunately, unlike Google’s [advanced search operators][so], the date filter cannot be specified in the search string. Having to manually click and choose the date from the pull-down menu each time is a real pain. Thankfully, because the search options are encoded into the URL, we can use Firefox’s keyword feature to set up a nice “Search Recent” shortcut.

[so]: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

If you run an advanced search and look at the resulting URL, you’ll see that there are a bunch of options you can specify. For limiting the date range, the option we want is *as_qdr* (query date range?). So I go to my Firefox Bookmarks Manager and create a new bookmark, open its properties, and fill in the various fields.

The image above shows my bookmark for searches limited to the last week. Here’s the full URL of the bookmark:

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=%s&hl=en&num=50&as_qdr=w&safe=off

Through Firefox’s keyword feature, I can access this search by typing “gw search-terms” in the browser’s address bar. So to find out the latest BioShock news, for example, I simply enter “gw BioShock” into the address bar. All text following the keyword (“gw”) replaces the %s in the bookmark URL.

To change the date range to the last day, month, or year, replace the argument of as_qdr with “d”, “m”, or “y” respectively. To get results from the last 3 months, use “m3″. For the last 3 days, use “d3″. I think you get the idea.

Note that I’ve included two extra options in the bookmark. The “num=50″ option specifies that I want 50 results per page. The “safe=off” bit disables any filtering of the search results.

Note that you have to do this on the executable itself. Enabling compatibility mode via the desktop shortcut did not work for me.

As a sidenote – what’s the deal with the corporate logos that can’t be bypassed? By my watch, there are 23 seconds worth of logos that *I can’t skip* each time I start the game. Maybe it’s not such a big deal, but it sure was annoying when I was trying to figure out how to get sound going.