I’ve just starred a new item in Google Reader

Wacom’s Inkling is a pen that draws both on paper and on-screen, tracking the artist’s linework with 1024 levels of sensitivity. At $200, it’s barely even expensive! The Inkling will be in stores by mid-September.

Inkling [Wacom]

from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net http://boingboing.net/2011/08/30/wacom-inkling.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

I’ve just starred a new item in Google Reader

Microsoft has created some customized Windows VHDs with the purpose of allowing web designers to test websites in Internet Explorer 9, 8 and 7, for free. To make it easier to set up, xdissent has created a Mac OSX / Linux script that will download the required files, extract them, install the latest VirtualBox guest additions and so on.

So why use it? Here are a few reasons (besides the obvious reason: testing websites in multiple Internet Explorer versions under Linux / Mac OSX):

• no Windows license required
• it’s legal and free
• you don’t have to install Windows in VirtualBox for yourself
• sometimes a website behaves differently in IE9′s IE7 or IE8 compatibility mode compared to the actual Internet Explorer 7 or 8.
• a snapshot is automatically taken upon install so you can revert to the original machine state at any time

Disadvantages:

• the biggest disadvantage is the disk space required by these VHDs (as well as a large download size: 2,6 GB for IE7 and 4,1 GB for IE8 and IE9). If you want to run all 3 Internet Explorer versions supported (7, 8, 9), you’ll need almost 45 GB of disk space. But you can install just one version: for Internet Explorer 7 you’ll need 13 GB, for IE8: 8,4 GB and for IE9: 13 GB.
• the script cannot resume from failed downloads yet

Note: the machines will prompt you to activate Windows. This is not required and you can cancel this request. You can extend the trial for another 30 days by running the following command at the command prompt: “slmgr –rearm” or you can simply reset the machine to its original state.

Usage

1. Before proceeding, make sure you have the latest VirtualBox installed – you can find Ubuntu installation instructions HERE. You’ll also need “curl” (for both Linux and OSX) and “unrar” (Linux only). In Ubuntu, install them using the command below:

sudo apt-get install curl unrar

2. To download and run the script, use the following command in a terminal:

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

If you want to check out the script source before running it, you can find it @ GitHub.

The above command will download Windows WHDs for IE7, IE8 and IE9. If you only need one Internet Explorer version, you can run:

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9" bash

Where “9″ is the IE version you want (you can also add two versions here, like “7 9″).

At this point, the download should start and it will take a while so be patient.

After the download finishes and the archives are extracted, a new machine should show up in VirtualBox, called “IE 7″, “IE 8″ and/or “IE 9″, depending on which versions you’ve selected to install. At this point, you can delete the downloaded archives if you want to free up some space – you can find them under ~/.ievms/vhd/ (make sure you only delete the .exe and .rar files and keep the .vhd and .vmc files).

Now you can start testing your website in IE9, IE8 and IE7 under Linux or Mac OSX. Oh, and the password for all the VMs is “Password1″.

via HN

from Web Upd8 – Ubuntu / Linux blog http://www.webupd8.org/ http://www.webupd8.org/2011/09/test-websites-in-internet-explorer-9-8.html

I’ve just starred a new item in Google Reader

Updated tools are here, or if you’ve cloned the Git repo, do a `git pull` to get the changes.

When the “Install Mac OS X Lion” application runs, it queries Apple’s Software Update servers and downloads a package named “MacOS_10_7_IncompatibleAppList.pkg” and copies it and an “index.sproduct” file that lists this package to the “Mac OS X Install Data” directory as part of the preparation for installing Lion.

This package updates a list of software that is incompatible with Lion by updating “English.lproj/IncompatibleApplicationsStrings.strings” and “MigrationIncompatibleApplicationsList.plist”
inside /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SystemMigration.framework/Versions/A/Resources/.

Updating this list of incompatible software does not seem to be vital to the installation of Lion. The index.sproduct file must exist, however, or the automated install is aborted. If you do not include the MacOS_10_7_IncompatibleAppList.pkg and index.sproduct files inside the InstallLion.pkg, the postflight script will create an “index.sproduct” file containing an empty “Packages” array.

Still, it’s probably a good idea to include the current version of the MacOS_10_7_IncompatibleAppList.pkg in your InstallLion.pkg if possible.

I’ve provided a tool to help you download the current version of the incompatible app list package. It’s named “getIncompatibleAppListPkg”. It will download the MacOS_10_7_IncompatibleAppList.pkg and create an index.sproduct file, saving both in the current directory. They must be copied to the InstallLion.pkg/Contents/Resources/Mac OS X Install Data/ directory.

Here’s a sample execution of the tool:

% ./getIncompatibleAppListPkg
Downloading http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/02/12/041-1997/jPTmxRrfybSnP8NTRfwggvDn4F9byWBgvd/MacOS_10_7_IncompatibleAppList.pkg...
Writing index.sproduct...
Done.


You’d find MacOS_10_7_IncompatibleAppList.pkg and index.sproduct in your current working directory; you would then copy them to InstallLion.pkg/Contents/Resources/Mac OS X Install Data/

(Note: I found also that I could not add arbitrary packages to the Packages array of index.sproduct; the OS X Installer skipped any packages that were unsigned. Therefore the index.sproduct file is not easily used to install additional arbitrary packages. I was unwilling to go through the effort to convert my additional packages to “flat” packages and sign them to do further testing.)

from Managing OS X http://managingosx.wordpress.com http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/update-to-automated-installs-of-mac-os-x-lion/

This new-to-me website — officially known as “ifttt” (how do you pronounce that?) — is brilliant. I signed up yesterday (it looks like it’s currently in public beta), and it only took about a minute to realize ifttt’s potential handiness.

The whole basis of ifttt is that it puts the internet to work for you. You can create tasks based on the structure “if this then that”, and the site has dozens of triggers and actions to populate that equation with.

An example action (ifttt calls them recipes) would be: “If it’s going to rain tomorrow then text message me.”

I set up a recipe so that I get an email with the link to any item I star in Google Reader. It used to be that when I was reading feeds on my iPad and I came across an item I wanted to link to here on the site, I would email myself that article. Now I simply star it and it’ll still show up in my email inbox.

? Permalink

from Shawn Blanc http://ifttt.com/

Two thumbs up. These tiny desktop speakers punch well above their weight. They are amazingly well built for the price, have a more than powerful enough stereo amp built into the left speaker and feature a kevlar coned driver and a silk tweeter. Available in a gloss black or gloss white finish, I’ve got a pair in white on my desk now and they sound fantastic.

I’ve often used telnet to connect to random ports to make sure a service is working (eg: telnet somehost.example.com smtp to see if it’s accepting connections on port 25) but have been stuck with a suitable alternative to test connections that are secured with ssl.

Of course openssl is capable of doing this. Simply type:

openssl s_client -connect somehost.example.com:465

This will test an ssl secured connection to the secure smtp (smtps) port on a mail server. Change port number as required.

Quick one-liner for bash:
for user in `ls /Users/`; do if [ $user == "Shared" ]; then continue; fi; echo $user; done