Dave's Wibblinks

• Climate Change | LearnStuff

  tags: climate climate change change infographic

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I was sent this in email recently. Interesting infographic. How Climate Change is Destroying the Earth

Problem: My new ISP blocks outgoing port 25 (SMTP) and I want to run a mail server from home.

Solution: I need to set up sendmail so that it uses gmail (or my ISP) as the outgoing smart host.

You'll need SASL running, so yum or apt-get that. Then add the following to your sendmail.mc file:

TRUST_AUTH_MECH(`LOGIN PLAIN GSSAPI DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5')dnl
define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS', 
       `EXTERNAL LOGIN PLAIN GSSAPI DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5')dnl
define(`SMART_HOST',`relay:smtp.gmail.com')dnl
define(`RELAY_MAILER', `esmtp')dnl
define(`RELAY_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 587')dnl
define(`ESMTP_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 587')dnl
FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash /etc/mail/auth/authinfo.db')dnl

Make an authinfo: /etc/mail/auth/authinfo, chmod it to 0600, and have the following lines in it:

AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com "U:root" 
                        "I:username@gmail.com" 
                        "P:password" 
                        "M:PLAIN"
AuthInfo:smtp.gmail.com:587 "U:root" 
                            "I:username@gmail.com" 
                            "P:password" 
                            "M:PLAIN"

(Note: these should actually be all on one line per entry, so two lines for the above.)

As always when dealing with sendmail.mc, you'll need to run the m4 processor over the file and make the hash maps. Do yourself a favour and have a Makefile to do it for you. Restart sendmail, and you should be good to go!

# makemap hash authinfo.db < auth/authinfo
# m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf
# service sendmail restart

And note that if you use Application Specific passwords (i.e. 2 step authentication), you'll need to generate a password for this.

Helpful info from:

• http://www.phinesolutions.com/sendmail-gmail-smtp-relay-howto.html

UPDATE: While the above is fine and works, Google's mail servers rewrite the From: address to the gmail account you use to authenticate. This is not the best solution if you want to not appear to only be able to send from gmail.com. Here are some other changes to use the ISP's mail server. (In this case I'm using netvigator.com, others should be similar.)

/etc/mail/auth/authinfo (Note that I don't need to specify the higher ports, as the ISP only accepts on port 25. The Method ("M:PLAIN") doesn't seem to be required either.

AuthInfo:smtp.netvigator.com "U:username" "P:password"

/etc/mail/sendmail.mc

define(`SMART_HOST',`relay:smtp.netvigator.com')dnl
define(`RELAY_MAILER', `esmtp')dnl
define(`RELAY_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 25')dnl
define(`ESMTP_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 25')dnl
FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash /etc/mail/auth/authinfo.db')dnl

And to enable all this:

# makemap hash authinfo.db < auth/authinfo
# m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf
# service sendmail restart

• Whatever

  "If at this point in Internet history you think you’re really anonymous/pseudonymous on the Internet, or that you have a right to anonymity/pseudonymity on the Internet, you’re kind of stupid. "

  tags: blog writing scalzi books anonymity

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

"You have updates available for other accounts..." - Grrr. Arrgh. Googlegooglegoogle...

The first thing I found was:

rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.storeagent.plist*
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.appstore.plist*

That didn't really work, so further Google brand searching found the solution at NGPixel:

1) Open System Preferences > Spotlight
2) Under the Privacy tab. Add your Macintosh HD (or whatever your main hard disk is called) to the list.
3) Close the window. Wait a few seconds. Then go back to Spotlight settings and remove the entry you just added.
4) The spotlight index should now begin to re-index completely. (A dot will fade-in/out inside the Spotlight icon in the taskbar)
5) Wait for it to finish and then launch the Mac App Store. You should now see updates in the Updates tab.

It Works!

Spotlight was showing fewer and fewer results until one day it stopped even showing results from /Applications. As this is how I launch apps, something had to be done!

Opening up Terminal.app:

$ sudo mdutil -i on -E /
/:
Error: unable to perform operation.  (-400)
	No index.

OK, so I need to delete the index, kill all the associated processes and hopefully things will restart.

$ sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/
$ sudo killall -9 mdworker
$ sudo killall -9 mds
$ sudo mdutil -i on -E /
/:
	Indexing enabled. 

Presto! Everything working again as normal!

• best of craigslist: my morning ritual

  I have a morning ritual that I need to share. I call it "the terminator". First I crouch down in the shower in the classic "naked terminator traveling through time" pose. With my eyes closed I crouch there for a minute, visualizing either Arnold or the guy from the second movie (not the chick in the third one because that one sucked) and I start to hum the terminator theme. Then I slowly rise to a standing position and open my eyes. It helps me to proceed through my day as an emotionless, cyborg badass. The only problem is if the shower curtain sticks to my terminator leg. It ruins the fantasy. I think maybe I read too many comic books when I was a kid...

  tags: craigslist morning ritual

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I had to do a software restore on one of my original iPhones today and it came back from restore unlocked and activated! I restored from the original Apple 3.1.3 7E18 firmware (not the jailbroken one), and it came back up with 'iPhone is activated'!

I'll have to do it with the other iPhone to see if it's a pattern or just some holdover from being jailbroken, but if true, it means that Apple is rolling out stealth activations for older devices.

OK, tested with Her Indoor's old phone. I had to put a valid SIM into it, but it unlocked and activated after doing network traffic. (I presume with Apple, but maybe it had a look at 3HK too, to see if they're an authorised provider.) My old iPhone went straight to the "iPhone is activated" screen.

This is certainly of academic interest to most people, for those with older iPhones reliant on Jailbreaks, it seems like you can now do a straightforward factory restore and have a functioning iPhone!

Activating iPhone on my Flickr.

Introducing a new blog: Dave's Apps. My first App is live in the App Store: MyLibraryList.

• Latest News Columns & Insight from Hong Kong & China | SCMP.com

  Alder doesn't work for the bankers. The SFC's job is to protect the public, and the public needs protection. He should be Clint Eastwood, to cite a famous lawman in American popular culture.
  It's pretty hard to take an article seriously, when the authors are unaware than Clint Eastwood is an Actor and Director, not a Sherrif.

  tags: whiskey_tango_foxtrot

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Ten Signs of a Fear-Based Workplace - BusinessWeek

  1. Appearances are everything. When employees are preoccupied with staying in the office later in the evening than the boss does, fear is king. When people worry less about the quality of their work than about how they're perceived by managers higher up the chain, you've got fear.

  tags: honking work culture

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• How Investing Turns Nice People Into Psychopaths - Lynn Stout - Business - The Atlantic

  The problem with the homo economicus theory is that the purely rational, purely selfish person is a functional psychopath. If Economic Man cares nothing for ethics or others' welfare, he will lie, cheat, steal, even murder, whenever it serves his material interests. Not surprisingly, although homo economicus is alive and well in many economics departments, many experts today prefer to embrace behavioral economics, which relies on data from experiments to see how real people really behave. Behavioral economics confirms something both important and reassuring. Most of us are not conscienceless psychopaths.

  tags: People Psychopaths Investing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Glyphish – Great icons for great iPhone & iPad apps

  tags: icons design graphics resources

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Robert Reich (The Difference Between Private and Public Morality)

  Republicans have staked out the moral low ground. It’s time for Democrats and progressives to stake out the moral high ground, condemning the abuses of economic power and privilege that characterize this new Gilded Age – business deals that are technically legal but wrong because they exploit the trust that investors or employees have place in those businesses, pay packages that are ludicrously high compared with the pay of average workers, political donations so large as to breed cynicism about the ability of their recipients to represent the public as a whole.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Folk & Traditional Song Lyrics - Mad Dogs and Englishmen

  In Hong Kong, they strike a gong, and fire off a noonday gun. To reprimand each inmate, who's in late.

  tags: folk song lyrics hongkong

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.