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Month June 2008

Entries 4 Total

Home is where all my stuff is.

Jun 23, 2008 12:08 AM

Tomorrow morning, I will finally be moving into my first apartment and I’m sure it will be interesting to say the least (read: everything that can go wrong will go wrong). I sent in my application for the property back in March and signed the lease in April. It’s a bit under a mile away from campus which is less than ideal but it’s far enough out in the small college town of Isla Vista that it will at least be quiet; something that was my greatest concern. Over the first week of summer that I spent back at home, I’ve done a bit of planning to make the move-in process go smoothly as well as the first few weeks of living there.

Most of the items for apartment have been ordered from Amazon.com (thank God for Prime) since it’s tax-free in California and there was a vast selection of items. The furniture is coming from people I find on Craigslist (thus far, I’ve secured a kitchen table with charis, a couch and a coffee table); I don’t expect to find all the items I need on day one – I’m fine with sleeping on a couch until I find a nice bed for sale. One of the biggest benefits for me, however, is that I’ll no longer be using the awful ResNet service offered in the residence halls at UCSB. I’ve signed up for a 15Mb down, 1Mb up connection from the local cable company and I hope that works out.

My biggest concern is how I’ll make it ‘home’ since I expect to live there for at least a year, most likely two. I asked about the whole move-in process and personalizing an apartment on MetaFilter and received a variety of great responses. The general consensus seems to dictate that lighting, scents, wall decorations, plants, and colors make the biggest impact. I’m limited in how much I can really change about it; I’m prohibited from painting it which is a bit of a let-down. I’m sure that making this place something that resmebles home will be the most difficult and the most time consuming. Living in the residence halls didn’t afford much room for personalization and as such, my room looked sterile and bland – something I’d like to change this time around.

In a rare trend, I believe this is one of the few things personal endeavors I will publish on the site. I’ll be updating this and posting further with pictures and updates.

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WiFi theft and the "linksys" question.

Jun 22, 2008 3:40 AM

The ubiquitous SSID that has been delivering free internet access since 802.11b, but many have argued whether or not this is theft of service or criminal behavior. Unsecured internet access points like a fresh out-of-the-box Linsys router will share your internet connection for anywhere from 50 to 300 feet, likely extending beyond the walls of your home. Without encryption and a password, something rather easy to configure, anyone with a WiFi enabled device is able to hop onto the network and use your internet connection. Most open access points are open inadvertently as a result of those not savvy enough to see multiple risk of an unencrypted wireless router running – a few are open because of generosity and invite users, but let’s be realistic.

Two questions are raised with this issue – whether it is legal to use an open wireless network without explicit permission of the owner, and whether it is morally ethical to use an open network. The former is simple and difficult to answer depending on how you look at it. The development cycles of technology have far outpaced the legislative cycle – this coupled with the ineptitude of elected officials with respect to the issue makes for an unclear legal standing for many activities such as this and file sharing. It’s not an illegal practice for one primary reason: there is no circumvention of a protection scheme or barrier to entry. When one looks for a network to connect to, an attempt to connect to an open access point is met with an acceptance of the request for an IP address by the router’s DHCP server. In cases where encryption technologies are present and a pre-shared key are required to connect, attempts to circumvent this security scheme are most definitely illegal as the operator of the network has done their due diligence to protect their internet service from theft. In this scenario, theft of service is occurring, in the former, not so much.

Is it ethical? Absolutely not. This is where I differ from most technology enthusiasts (read: nerdoids) insofar as I believe accessing an open home network is wrong because you are in some capacity depriving the operator of the bandwidth they pay for. The common analogy is that you’d think of a WiFi access point as a lamp in the outside someone’s home. Is it wrong to sit under the lamp to help you read? Absolutely not. But it’s a completely flawed idea because it failed to take into account usage patterns. Using an open network is consuming a portion of the avaialble bandwidth, for the analogy to work, you’d have to say the lamp grows dimmer as another user sits under it. Remember, most of the open APs you come across in a residential area are open out of ignorance to the security risks and/or because the user just doesn’t have the knowledge to enable an encryption scheme. The other argument is that anyone is entitled to use the network because the network is being trasmitted through their walls into their property or onto public property. Again, this doesn’t put the nature of the issue into perspective – and to get technical about it, the government owns and licenses the radio airwaves.

Simply put, using an open network is not illegal. It is not theft of service since a request for access is met with acceptance rather than rejection. However, it is unethical. Have I done it? Rarely, but yes. Does that make me a hypocrite? Probably, but it’s food for thought anyway.

Rather than driving around looking for open APs or leeching off a neighbors connection, just subscribe to mobile broadband. It’s really not that expensive…

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Howto: Using OS X keyboard shortcuts

Jun 14, 2008 6:19 PM

Keyboard shortcuts make everything easier, although some newer users don’t know how to start or see it as too arduous a task and just stuck to the trusty ‘ol Commnad+C and Command+V. This is a short tutorial to help you get started with some shortcuts that will make using OS X faster and more efficient. The first batch are universal and do not apply to any one application.

You’ve most likely used Commnand+Tab to switch between applications on your computer, but a similar shortcut, Command+` (the key next the ’1′ key) will switch between application windows. This is quicker than using Expose if you just want to keep flipping back and forth between two large spreadsheets. Continuing with the window management theme, perhaps the most powerful shortcut is Command+H – hiding an application. OS X allows you to hide all and application’s windows until you call bring it back from the dock or by switching to it via Command+Tab. The main use of this is to keep your workspace clear and so that you don’t have to worry about how much you have open at any one time – for me, I have about ten to fourteen applications open at one time, some with multiple windows. Without using Command+H to hide some apps, using Expose would be unwieldly. Another related shortcut is Command+M which minimizes the foremost window. This is convenient if you want to leave some documents open but are otherwise distracting to your current work.

When you have multiple windows associated with an application open, you can close the current one by typing Command+W. This works in the Finder or just about anywhere else. This shortcut, combined with the four others previously mentioned tackles most of the common tasks related to window management in OS X and once you get used to them, will make you more efficient and quicker. The point of using keyboard-based shortcuts is to reduce your reliance on the mouse which in almost all cases is disruptive to your concentration and workflow.

In the next howto, I’ll take on the most useful and powerful application for OS X ever made – Quicksilver.

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Howto: Create PDFs that scroll like butter

Jun 7, 2008 2:41 PM

I’m very into the whole idea of digitizing every paper document I receive in the hopes of achieving some sort of paperless nirvana. As such, I scan nearly everything into my computer using Adobe Acrobat Professional onto my computer and then either throw it on the server for archiving or store it on my laptop in Papers if it’s academic or frequently used. However, no matter what I do, these scans are outputted as PDFs which scroll terribly in OS X’s Quartz engine. I’m sure some of you notice that on OS X, some PDF documents scroll in choppy manner while others work perfectly. Rather than find the true root of the problem in Acrobat, I’ve resorted to using Automator to run the Acrobat output through OS X.

To do this, create an Automator workflow that starts with “Get Selected Items” so that you can simply highlight a few PDFs in Finder and execute the Automator action on it. Next, choose the “Set PDF Metadata” action and find some field to manipulate. I chose to do “Content Creator” since that doesn’t impact the document at all. Now, save the workflow as a plug-in for Finder. This action achieves the same result as opening the document in Preview and using “Save to PDF” from the Print dialog box.

Now when you want to ‘optimize’ these sluggish PDF documents, you can just select them, right-click and run your Automator action which will overwrite the existing file. It does lead to a file that is 1.5x the file size though.

I’ve included my Automator workflow script to the post for reference. Enjoy.

Automator Workflow – Optimize PDFs (place in /Users/<you>/Library/Workflow/Applications/Finder)

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