We were in need of a few fans the other day for our smell dispenser prototypes. Colin kindly donated an old MacBook Pro to the cause and I meticulously tore it to pieces.
It was an incredibly humbling experience. Beyond the smooth sheen of its outer casing, lays one of the most beautifully…
There is a lot of talk out there right now about the supposed 15-inch MacBook Air. I haven’t heard anything specific besides the usual whispers of new product numbers floating around out there. It seems pretty likely that something is coming.
What’s a bit odd about this talk is Apple’s …
Simple 2D Dock Modification
I’ve been using this dock modificaton for a couple of years1 now and I thought I’d share it. The default 2D dock2 has a horrible fat white stroke on it. I modified the images so they’re all just 55% transparent black. I also made the separator a simple line instead of the zebra crossing.
It changes the bottom, left and right 2D docks.
How to
Download the modified .png’s.
In Finder, navigate to: HD → System → Library → CoreServices → Dock.app3 → Contents → Resources
Backup all the .png’s in the Resources folder that match the file names in the download.
Delete them out of the Resources folder.
Copy the .png’s from the download into the Resources folder.
Open Terminal and type:
killall Dock
To the best of my knowledge, these same .png’s work in Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. But backup the originals. ↩
If you currently have the 3D dock enabled you’ll need to switch to 2D. Open Terminal and type this:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock↩You’ll need to right click and Show Package Contents. ↩
Maybe I’m missing something here. Reading this over, Scott Hanselman’s password was clearly hacked. He doesn’t seem to think that’s the case because he’s cautious, but I’m going to go with Occam’s Razor here.
Apple prompts you for your password when buying apps and when doing in-app purchases. Someone would have had to both know your Apple ID and enter that password, unless there’s some in-app exploit, but he doesn’t seem to be suggesting that.
But what Hanselman, who happens to work for Microsoft, seems most upset about is that Apple sent him a email warning him of strange activity on his account, but worded it in a way he didn’t like. And then they locked down his account with wording he didn’t like. And they made him go through iTunes to double-check his activity.
And he doesn’t like that Apple knows what device he has, but let the download happen anyway. I mean, people buy new devices all the time. What’s the proposed solution here? The perpetrators clearly had the correct Apple ID and password. I’m not sure what you can do to protect against that. Kill the cloud?
Update: Matt Galligan brings up a great point below. Apple also prompts you for your credit card’s security code on new devices.
Update 2: John Gruber notes that since Hanselmen was using a PayPal account, the credit card security code wasn’t in play.
Microfilming in the Digital Age
Multi-Pay Vouchers (MPV) are important records. As we said in an earlier post, pay vouchers are in some cases the only surviving documents that can verify service for benefit-seeking veterans whose OMPFs (Office of Military Personnel Files) were destroyed in the 1973 fire. These records are also increasingly important for historical and genealogical researchers.
Although scanning MPVs in high-resolution color would provide a higher level of graphic reproduction, NARA’s primary goal is the long-term preservation of the essential information contained in these documents. Silver halide film stored in appropriate conditions is a preservation standard with a life expectancy beyond 500 years. In the first photo above, you can see the difference between a scanned copy (left), and microfilmed copy (right).
Microfilm is an excellent intermediate format that you may easily digitize at any point in the future at minimal expense and effort. A reel of 1200-plus images can be digitized in a matter of minutes.
Filming is productive, averaging 250 document pages per hour at NARA-St. Louis. This rate is unattainable with digitization without utilizing automated document feeders on scanners, a practice that is not recommended for archival holdings.The next microfilm reformatting project in St. Louis will involve discharge cards, which, like military pay vouchers, are used to establish evidence of military service. These cards contain information such as duty stations and chronological career details that are not contained on pay vouchers.
Fault Lines: On the Pulse of the Pentagon
The US announced a new military strategy today at a Pentagon briefing. Much of the discussion concerned what could be read as predictable—and cyclic—budget cuts of a post-war drawdown. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also took pains to mention what wouldn’t feel the fiscal pinch: offensive and defensive cyber security and unmanned systems.
We at Fault Lines have covered and predicted both of these trends.
First with an episode called Cyberwar.
A growing fear of computer hackers—a term encompassing a broad range of entities from digital spy rings to information thieves to cyberarmies of kids, criminals and terrorists (some backed by nation states)—and their potentially massive threat to national security has Washington maneuvering into position to defend its assets from a new style of warfare: one without foot soldiers, guns or missiles. Crucial national infrastructure, high value commercial secrets, tens of billions of dollars in defense contracts—as well as values like privacy and freedom of expression—are at stake.
In this episode of Fault Lines, I enter the domain of “cyber” and speak to a former US national security official turned cybersecurity consultant, a Silicon Valley CEO, a hacker, and those who warn of a growing arms race in cyberspace.
Is the US contributing to the militarisation of cyberspace? Are the reports of cyber threats being distorted by a burgeoning security industry? And are the battles being waged in cyberspace interfering with the Internet as we know it?
Then last week we filed a report titled Robot Wars.
Over the past decade, the US military has shifted the way it fights its wars, deploying more unmanned systems in the battlefield than ever before.
Today there are more than 7,000 drones and 12,000 ground robots in use by all branches of the military.
These systems mean less American deaths and also less political risk for the US when it takes acts of lethal force – often outside of official war zones.
But US lethal drone strikes in countries like Pakistan have brought up serious questions about the legal and political implications of using these systems.Fault Lines looks at how these new weapons of choice are allowing the US to stretch the international laws of war and what it could mean when more and more autonomy is developed for these lethal machines.
