Macintoshhowto.com has been averaging 150,000 visits a month lately. It sits on a server with 5 or 6 other web sites but I thought it deserved a server of it’s own. I moved it across it today. You can read more about it here.

It’s like a clever version of the built in keychain. It’s $59 – so might be prudent to wait till it’s in some kind of bundle deal, but I have over 400 passwords stored in my 1Password – that’s a lot easier than writing them all down on post-it notes, and a lot safer than using the same password for all my logins which is what I used to do.

Even if you don’t use 1Password, you should use a different password for every site you visit. If you enter a password for Bob’s blog, you don’t want Bob to have access to the password you use for your bank accounts, which is what can happen if you use the same password for different sites.

It now has an iPhone app so all your passwords can be with you everywhere.

I recently was sent a link to a movie file in someone’s dropbox via email. No matter what I did I couldn’t get it to download. Safari wanted to play it. To download the movie I needed to click in the safari address bar, paste the link, and then press option-return which downloaded the movie instead of playing it.

I was sent a link in my email like this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/blah/blah/filename.m4v

When I clicked on the link, it just opened the movie in Safari.

If I tried  ’Save As’ from Safari I got an error saying “The document could not be exported. ”

When I right clicked on the link in my email and selected ‘Download Linked File’ nothing happens.

Finally I clicked in the safari Address bar after the link address and pressed ‘option-return’ and the movie downloaded to my safari downloads folder. A little strange -this should be simpler – but a google search revealed others are having similar problems:

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=15330

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=15560

Once you are receiving spam it’s hard if not impossible to stop it coming to you, all you can do is ignore it (block it). But there are ways to reduce the amount of spam you get before it starts coming in.

It’s best to keep your email address off the internet, (eg off any web pages) as there are web crawlers searching every website for email addresses to put on lists and sell to spammers.

Once your email is out there and on someone’s spam list there’s no way to stop it spreading, so you will probably get an ever increasing amount of spam.

I would suggest if you have a spam problem:

1. Change your email addresses.

2. If you must have a ‘contact email’ on a webpage then get two email addresss, one that you keep very private that you give to your friends and family, and then public webpage one one that you can have forwarded to your private one, but try to change the web page one every year or so when it collects spam. (eg info@dpc.org.au, dpc@dpc.org.au, contactus@dpc.org.au etc.)

3. Get your ISP to turn on spam filtering. (This is better than the email filtering within apple mail because all the spam emails are blocked BEFORE they are downloaded to your computer.) There are various levels of spam filtering, some very aggressive and will block most spam, but also the occasional real email. Ask you ISP about spam filtering.

4. Gmail has the best spam filtering I have found.

Apple have built in website filtering into OS X under the ‘System Preferences’ – ‘Parental Controls’ but Parental Control cannot be enabled for administrator accounts (which is probably the account you are running from) and  Parental Controls also becomes hard to manage if you have multiple users because you need to set it up for each one.  Here’s how to set up internet filtering on your whole home network at once using a free service called OpenDNS. Once it’s set up this can help block unsuitable content from reaching any computer, iphone, ipad etc connected to your internet. This approach can be used at home, school, or the workplace.

DNS Stands for domain name server. A DNS  is like a big phonebook and every time your computer or iPad or iPhone goes to a webpage (e.g. apple.com) it looks up the name you have given it (apple.com)  and converts it to a number  (e.g. 192.124.1.2) which it then uses to find the webpage.

This what you do when you phone someone.  You look up their name in a phone book to get their phone number  and then you ring their phone number.  A simple way  of limiting the people who you could ring would be to not give you their phone number. That’s how web filtering with Open DNS works.

A DNS is like a big internet phonebook where your computer looks up webpage addresses.

When you signed up for Internet access with your local Internet Provider  they gave you a DNS number to put into your computer – something like 192.231.203.132.  This number is the place your computer goes to look up the address of every page you visit.

Open DNS is a free DNS service, but it has settings to restrict what sites you can access. It’s like a phonebook with all the ‘unwanted’ phone numbers missing.  To use open DNS you replace  the DNS numbers on your computer with the  Open DNS numbers.   Your computer will be unable to find  some websites because open DNS  won’t give your computer the address when it asks for it.

I’ve tried to explain the concepts clearly, but getting it running can be tricky, so read on and you may need to get a computer friend to help you out!

Here’s how to set it up.
1. Have a look at this image. It should say “Use Open DNS”. After you switch to Open DNS the image will change and it will say “You’re using Open DNS”!

2. Go to opendns.com and set up a free account.  Go to the open DNS dashboard and select Internet filtering, and the level of filtering you require. Here are what some of the options look like (click to enlarge):

3. Open your Router settings (the Router is the device that plugs into your internet connection and shares it with all your computers). We are setting this up on your router so that  it will affect all your computers. Find the setting that says DNS Servers and put in the Open DNS server numbers.  (Before you do this make a note of the old DNS settings, you will need them later when you are testing.) The Open DNS numbers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

Here are the DNS settings on my wireless router.

4. Restart  your computer and your router, and come back to this page and a little button in step one should have changed to show you that you are now using OpenDNS.

5. Go to www.internetbadguys.com (a test site) and you should get a blocked message something like this:

6.  Securing it.

What we had just done is we have made the default DNS  server  the server that your computer goes to.  The problem is that if you manually type in DNS settings in your computer network settings it will bypass the Open DNS settings.  So what we need to do now is to help your router not to allow any other DNS  settings through.  To do this go to the firewall settings on your router (not your computer)  and block all outgoing TCP  and UDP  requests on port 53  that are not going to Open DNS.  This can be a little bit tricky, but here’s how I did it on my router,  which is a Draytek Vigor 2700.

I had to add three rules.

1.  allow DNS lookups that are going to open DNS 208.67.222.222

2.  allow DNS lookups that are going to open DNS 208.67.220.220

3.  block any other  DNS lookups.

Here’s where I added the rules:

Here’s where I added the Rules:

On the Draytek modem the firewall settings are set up under default data filter

Here are the three rules I added:

I added rules two, three, and four.

Rule 1 & 2 (called rule 1 and 2 because there was already a rule in there)

Rule 2 allows any traffic going to the Open DNS server. Rule 3 was the same as rule to accept it used the second DNS number.

Rule 3 (called rule 4).

Rule 4 comes after rule 1 and 2 and it blocks any remaining DNS requests.

Testing.

Type in your old DNS settings into your Macintosh system preferences, ( system preferences –  network settings- DNS Server) and press apply.

Open Safari and type in an address (eg apple.com) – you should not be able to go to any websites at all.

Delete the DNS address  from your Macintosh system preferences, the open DNS settings should reappear, and you should be able to browse the web, but not restricted sites.

The only way I can think of getting round this without the router password is to reset the router to the default factory settings, but then OpenDNS will stop altogether, and you’ll notice someone is playing with things!

iDisk is Apple’s online disk space that you get automatically if you sign up for MobileMe. iDisk is an easy was to share files that are too large to email. The limit for most email providers is 10MB, here you can upload files as large as your iDisk – 10GB. Here’s how.

 

1. To upload the file, in Safari go to https://www.me.com/idisk/ Put the file you want to share in the public folder. (If you are not logged in to MobileMe it will ask you to login.)

To upload a file, click on the upload icon.

2. To see the shared file, logout of mobile me and go to https://public.me.com/mobilemeid
(where mobilemeid is your mobile me ID)
Here anyone can see and download all the files in your public folder.
Simply click on the file to download it.

1. First enable the developer menu in safari. To do this QUIT SAFARI, open the terminal and type in the following and hit return:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
OR
Download Onyx and under ‘Parameters’ ‘Safari’ select the ‘Enable Debug Menu’ option.

2. Load your page in Safari, and under Develop select ‘Show Web Inspector’

3. This will open a new window down the bottom. Click the Resources Tab, then the Size Tab.

You will now see a graph of all the files on your webpage and how big they are. It will look something like this:

You can see in this example (wpcc.org.au) that the entire webpage is 1.028 MB – reasonably large, most of it images. The best way to reduce it would be to go back and find the original images on your computer and compress them to make them smaller. Lots of these images are quite small and yet are 70KB – they could be reduced to 10 or 20KB probably without muck loss of image quality.

As a comparison:
Apple.com uses about 600K, notice it’s reasonably graphic rich and yet only 250Kb of images.
macintoshhowto.com uses 963Kb – a bit big.
google.com uses 177Kb – very slim!

If you click on ‘time’ instead of size you can see a graph of how long the various parts take to load on your computer.

1. create your page using iWeb.
2. you’ll need to know the address of your page once you’ve published it.
3. go to a web page that offers free counters… eg. http://www.e-zeeinternet.com/
4. enter your details on this page including the final address of the published page
5. this page will provide you with some html code. copy this code.
6. return to your iweb page.
7. click on Web Widgets & choose HTML Snippet
8. Inside the text box created paste the HTML code from the free counter page. Click Apply
9. You can drag the snippet anywhere on your page.
10. Done!

1. Go to http://blogger.com

Advantages: Very easy: Sign in. Start a blog. A true blog. Invite others to post if you want them to. People can make comments. Add pictures.
Disadvantages: Probably the only disadvantage is that you can’t dramatically change the layout of the blog or integfrate it into an existing website. It sits on it’s own. You can choose different themes.

See an example here.

2. Get a .mac account and use iweb.

Advantages: Very easy. You can have it as part of your website. Easy to change the appearance. Easy to add photos. Just as easy to add podcasts.

Disadvantages: Only 1 author. No comments, (except with a hack – icomment). It is actually a web page makign program that looks liek it makes a blog, not a real traditional blog in the sense that a blog resides totally on a server, you can post from anywhere, it generates the pages on the fly as people ask for them. Hence the ability to have multiple authors, comments etc.

See an example here.

3. Use WordPress.

Get a program like WordPress but to do this you need a server. ie you need to be paying for a website to be hosted somewhere that has php and mysql. It takes 5 min to set up if you know what you are doing, (I set one up last week in 5 min). It takes about 5-10 hours if it’s your first time (I know from experience!).

Advantages: Flexible. Anything you want it to do, it can do. Thousands of add-ons. Fully customisable. Multiple authors. Can even embed in existing websites.

Disadvantages. Hard work to set up.
See an example here.

Get Blogging!!!

To submit your site to google go to:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add your web address, then wait a couple of days.

do the same for yahoo, msn etc

To see if google already knows about your site type site:http://www.yoursitename in google search

If you want your page to go up in the search results, you need to have other people link to your site from their site.

To see how many sites link to your site type link:http://www.yoursitename in google search.

The more entries here, the higher you will be in the search result, basically that’s a simplified version of how it works.