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.

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!

Yesterday Telstra turned on internet tethering for the iphone! (I think they are the only carrier in Australia to do this.)

Tethering is where you use your iPhone as a wireless modem to connect your computer to the web. It’s useful if you are out with your laptop and you don’t have access to the web. Just plug your iPhone into your laptop via USB and it acts as a wireless modem! Here’s how to get it going. NOTE: Apple have now changed this to be called ‘Personal Hotspot’ instead of ‘Internet Tethering’. It works the same though.

1. On your iphone go to Settings General Network and if tethering is available with your mobile carrier there will be a pane called internet tethering (or ‘Personal Hotspot’  that looks like this:

Turn it on. Tethering is now enabled on your iphone.

If you don’t see this – go to iTunes when your iPhone is connected and click on the ‘Check for update’ Button to download the new Carrier settings from Telstra.

2. Plug your iPhone into your computer via the USB cable. When tethering is on  you’ll get a message like this:

Click on network preferences and iphone will become your modem like this:

You should now be able to surf the web on your laptop. Your iphone will light up like this to show you are tethering.

Speed is great, ping a bit slow… (Make sure you are on a big data plan!)

NOTE: For other carriers (Optus, Vodaphone etc) you can do this too, click here to get the configuration file. (THis is not yet working for iPhone software 3.1 though.)

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.

NOTE: This article is for iWeb 08 and earlier.  Click here for how to do this in iWeb 09.

SUMMARY: iweb normally publishes your website to your .mac account on the apple server. But it also has an option in the file menu called ‘publish to folder’ which means it saves the entire website onto your computer. (It puts it in your user directory in a folder called ‘sites’)  You can then manually copy this folder to your own web account using a method called  ftp.

That information may be all you were after, but if you need step by step instructions on how to do it, read on!

Before you go any further, can I say the apple way of doing things is good and simple, so get a .mac account if you can.

It’s a lot simpler!

Still want to upload your iweb pages manually using ftp?

here goes…

1. You need to find out some technical sounding things from you ISP or web provider before you progress. Don’t be scared off by the funny names. They are actually quite simple. These are the details of where your webpage will be stored.

You will need 4 things.

FIRSTLY, the address of the ‘ftp server’ for where you want to put your website. If your website is ‘dubbo.org’ then it will be something like ftp.dubbo.org.

SECONDLY you will have a username and password with it.

FINALLY will also have what we call a ‘directory‘ which is simply the place your files will be stored on the website and it will be something like this: ‘/public_html’

You will need to know all these 4 things before you proceed. It’s no use guessing them. If you don’t know them you need to ring ask your web provider who you are paying for your web hosting what these details are. In summary you need (1) ftp server address, (2) username, (3) password and (4) remote directory (or remote folder).

2. Download w2w. This seems to be the easiest way to do it. It’s here: http://www.wallner.nu/fredrik/software/w2w/ With instructions.

3. Make and edit your website in iweb. In iweb select ‘publish to folder’ and it will save your iweb site into your user/sites directory on your computer.

4. Run w2w and it will copy the website from your user/sites directory on your own computer to you website on the internet. When you run w2w you will see a window like this:

Name can be anything.

Folder is the folder on your home computer. Hit Browse and go to your Macintosh HD/Users/Yourname/Sites/iwebsitetopublish and click on open.

The last 4 settings are the settings we talked about above from your ISP.

Fill them all in and press upload. From then on it remembers your settings for next time.

5. Each time you want to update your webpage, just repeat steps 3 and 4.

That’s it!

http://howto.diveintomark.org/remote-mac/

1. Get a telstra bigpond external wireless USB modem.
2. Download the installation software from bigpond.com downloads. You actually need to have internet access to do this! Otherwise you can download it from another computer and copy it to your computer using a USB drive.

3. Follow the instructions to install.

4. When you are using the modem, make sure you plug in and turn on the modem after you boot up or wake up your computer, and turn of the modem before going to sleep. Don’t put your computer to sleep without unplugging the modem or it will crash. This is a bug with the Bigpond software.

So you’ve made an mp3 file, and you want to turn it into a podcast. Here’s how.

A podcast is simply a small file called an ‘RSS feed’ that points to the audio (mp3) file that you want to podcast.

You can then go one step further and submit it to itunes to make it an official Apple podcast. The  RSS feed file can be registered with any podcast site, but this post describes how to do it with the Apple iTunes site..

How it works
When someone clicks on the podcast icon in itunes, it takes them to the Apple itunes podcast site. The Apple site then points their iTunes to the RSS file, which then points to the mp3 file that contains the audio. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a series of little signposts that eventually point to the mp3 file.

So as you can see, we need to do this in reverse order to make a podcast. Firstly put the mp3 file up, then create an RSS feed that points to the mp3 file, and then register this RSS feed with Apple.

So really the audio file alone is not the podcast, the rss file is not the podcast, the itunes store is not the podcast. The podcast is really the whole set of signposts that allows your ipod to find the mp3 file automatically.
The advantage of a podcast is that all the audio files are easy to find because even though they are scattered over the web,  their descriptions are centralised into the iTunes store. Also the process of downloading them once you are subscribed is automatic.

Let’s look at how to do it step by step.

1. Put up the mp3 file

The first set is to make an mp3 file (eg via ‘itunes’) and then place it on the internet somewhere using an ftp program (‘cyberduck’ is a good ftp program). You will need an account on a webserver to do this. This is dealt with elsewhere on ‘How to put a file on the internet’). The file will be called something like ‘talk1.mp3′ and it will be at a location somethign like ‘http://mywebsite.com.au/talks/talk1.mp3′. For our example we used the real file called ’20060212.mp3′ which we put on the web at at http://sermons.dpc.org.au/1john/20060212.mp3

2. Make an RSS file that points to the mp3 file

Now we need to make an RSS file that will point the the mp3 file to tell the podcast directory (in this case, the apple itunes podcast directory) where to find the mp3 file. There are hundreds of programs to make an RSS feed (eg ‘feedforall’) , but it’s hard finding a free one! Vodcaster looks good but it’s only for tiger. One good free one is at http://www.phelios.net/rss-writer.html it’s easy to use. The program will ask for information like the name of the mp3 file, artist, title of webcast etc, and it will put all this information into a file called an RSS file, which it will save to your hard drive. The program will give the file an extension of .xml So we called ours dpc and it was saved as ‘dpc.xml’

3. Put the RSS file somewhere on the web

It doesn’t matter where. We uploaded ours to http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml

4. Register the podcast with itunes

The last step is to let itunes know where the rss file is kept. Open up itunes, and click on the ‘podcasts’ icon. Down the bottom click on ‘podcasts directory’. This will take you to apple’s podcast page on the itunes music store. There is a link called ‘Submit a Podcast’ which you can click on. It will ask you for the podcast feed url. This is the address of the rss fiel you just created. (Eg http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml) Paste the address and click continue. Unfortunately you need to then enter your apple ID, you’ll need to register with apple to get one, it doesn’t cost anything, it’s not a .mac membership, just an apple id. Apple will send an email telling you when the podcast has been approved. It may take an hour or two.

5. Subscribe to the podcast

You should now be able to find your podcast on the ituens webpage. Go to itunes, podcasts, podcasts directory. There is a box to search for a podcast. Type in part of the name of your podcast (eg I might type in ‘Dubbo’) and click ‘search all podcasts’. It will display all the matches, in our case, 1 match – ‘DPC BibleTalks’. Click on subscribe to subscribe ot the podcast. You are now subscribed to the podcast!

6. Link to the podcast

Now the final step is to link to your new podcast from a webpage. Open itunes podcasts and next to your subscibed podcast title is a little right arrow. Click on this and it wil take you to the itunes homepage for your podcast.

If you right click on the podcast entry down the bottom, there is an option called ‘Copy itunes Music Store URL’. Click this and then it will copy the URL to the clipboard. You can then paste this into your homepage or email it to your friends. Ours was http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=121967957&s=143460&i=2214949

If you click on this it will open itunes and take you to our newly created podcast!

1. Record the speech using audacity. (Don’t use an mp3 player unless it records in aiff or you will lose quality when you re-compress to a lower bitrate mp3)
2. In Audacity, edit the bits out that you don’t want (like blank bits at the start or end of the recording)
3. In Audacity, I like to add some compression (this makes the louder sections quieter and the quieter sections louder to make the listening level more constant within the track and also normalise (this amplifies the whole track to the loudest it can be without being so loud it distorts. You should compress first (as this reduces the highest levels, then normalise. The following settings are a good start:
   Compression
   threshold -12dB
   ratio 2:1
   attack 0.2 secsNormalisation
   Normalise using default. (centre on 0 and normalise to -3db)
4. Next you need to edit the ID tags, which contain the information that is displayed in itunes. For our sermons at Church we do it like this:
   Song title = passage, (“1 Thess 1″)
   Artisit = preacher, (“Bryson Smith”)
   album = DPC (“DPC”)
   genre = speech
5. Finally, export. Firstly I would save as an Audacity file to keep, or as an AIFF, so you have a full quality version on hand, then export to mp3 for the internet.
   It’s a toss up between file size and quality. Anything below 40kbps, you start to notice ‘ringing’ (called aliasing) around the high frequencies. We used to record our sermons at 32kbps, but this has enough compression noise to be annoying. 40kbps is tolerable, just noticeable. You don’t need stereo for speech, so mono is fine. If you set itunes to 80kbps, mono, it will output a 40kbs file. I like to export from audacity to aiff, then compress with the itunes encoder. I don’t remember why I do this, perhaps the audacity mp3 encoder is lower quality at lower bitrates than the itunes one.

That’s it! Check the quality, upload it to your webpage, or download to your mp3. If you are just taking a file from the web, and just want to make it smaller for you ipod, you can skip all the audacity bits and just encode it with itunes at the lower bitrate.