-Diasruptor

Hey folks, how is your Mac feeling after that last tutorial? Better, no? Yeah, thought so.

Well, let’s make him feel a whole lot better, shall we?

10 - Use an app such as Speed Downloader from yazsoft to accelerate your downloads;

9 - Keep open applications to a minimum in order to eke out every last megahertz out of your Mac;

But, unfortunately software mods can only take so far, so to really get the most out of your Mac you need to mingle around with hardware (which sometimes definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted). Again it is never too late to remind you all that we cannot be held be responsible for any damage done to your Mac.

Hardware:

Note: good places to look for hardware for your Mac would be iFixit and MacUpgrade;

8 - Overclock your graphics card by using Graphiccelerator or ATIccelerator, but be careful and verify that you have a compatible graphics card and a compatible ROM.

Note: If you are more technically minded you can dump your graphics card ROM, change it and then re-flash it (you have got to be seriously nuts to do something like that, because it’s simply easier to send the ROM to the developer of the utilities above and await or simply replace the card; besides it is ridiculously easy to damage your system).

7 - Overclock your Intel Mac Pro using ZDnet’s Clock Tool 1.0, but do be careful, this is very risky as it can quite easily render your Mac useless (to be more specific the memory correction will not be able to cope up with the new processor speeds and cause Mac OS X’s kernel to panic every time you boot)!;

6 - If you are not a big fan of fiddling around with your hardware you can always buy an Elgato Turbo.264. It is a simple device which, if plugged to a USB port, will automatically accelerate your hardware encoding demands (so long for the “spinning pizza of death” in iMovie or iDVD);

5 - Adding an external hard-drive: while this might not seem uterly important it can help you in numerous ways, for example if you move your “ginormous” iPhoto/iTunes library to an external hard-drive, you free up space in your internal hard-drive which leads to better performance (a good place to buy an external hard-drive is lacie);

4 - Replacing the internal hard-drive: More space and more speed. What Else? Remember that sometimes disk replacement isn’t supported by Apple (iBooks for instance), so it can be quite difficult to choose the right kind of drive for your computer (especially due to size constraints). You must also remember to choose a disk that matches your motherboard’s interface (SATA, EIDE, etc.);

3 - Replace your graphics card : Although not every Mac (Mac Books and iMacs won’t) will allow to do this you can still replace the graphics card in a Mac Pro or Power Mac can significantly boost performance (Maya will benefit like hell from it). There are however, some things to consider, such as the interface used to connect your Mac’s motherboard to your graphics card (AGP or PCI or even PCI-express);

2 - Add more RAM (Ramdom Access Memory) : this can speed up your Mac like hell, but obviously there are a few things you need to have in mind, such as, “Do I really need this more RAM?” (open Activity Monitor and if a lot of that little pie chart is coloured red, you do), or even the speed of the new RAM sticks (which should match your current ones, that is if your keeping the old ones; by the way, to check the speed of your RAM and the memory banks available you can always select “About This Mac” from the Apple Menu and click the “More Info” button and select “Memory” under “Hardware”), or for example if you need to pair them in order to get better performance. A few good places to buy RAM sticks are Apple itself and Crucial;

1 - Replace the processor: Not every Mac will do, may I warn you (MacBook’s won’t obviously, since the processor is soldered to the motherboard), but if you have a Mac Pro or a Mac Mini, there is no reason not do so (still, you need balance out the price of a new processor with the price of a new Mac);

May the code be with you,

k12yp70n

Is your Mac getting slow?? Are you feeling tired of the “spinning pizza of death” ??? But you don’t want buy a new one????

Then fear not, dear reader, after our short list, your mac will be faster than ever.

WARNING: We cannot be held responsible if you invalidate your system in any way, allright?

Note: you should measure the performance increases using an Application such as Activity Monitor (located in Applications->Utilities) when applying software tweaks, and Xbench or Geekbench or even 3D games for Hardware.

Yet Another Note: No animals have been used in the making of this list (LOL).

Software Tweaks:

20 - Start uninstalling unnecessary apps using AppTrap (it’s quite simple just drag unto the Trash and wait for the confirmation pop-up). This much better than the conventional method of unninstalling applications because it also deletes any files left behind by the app itself (meaning you free more disk space which is obviously good);

19 - Install Monolingual: what it does is to remove unnecessary language files and binaries (the main disadvantage of universal binaries is that they contain both Intel and PPC binaries, which may not be needed);

18 - Install Onyx: believe me when I say that no Mac user should even use Mac OS X without it! Onyx simply deletes and cleans the crap out of your system, so that it can stay holy freakin’ fast;

17 - Switch to a 2D dock by typing the following command on Terminal:

      defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

16 - Kill Dashboard once and for all!! Use a nice little widget called Dashquit to do the job;

15 - If you are running Tiger you can always use Unsanity’s ShadowKiller to remove menu and window shadows. this considerably speeds up the OS in slower Mac’s;

14 - If you are using an older Mac you can download Process Wizard and choose to allocate given resources to an application that is running slow;

13 - Speed up iPhoto by keeping your photo libraries small, turning off Outline and Drop Shadow (in the Apperance Tab in iPhoto->Preferences), and by forcing iPhoto not to resize thumbnails as you browse through your library by pressing 0, 1, 2 to choose a standard size in Browse Mode;

12 - In the Energy Saver settings (System Preferences) deselect the check box to have your hard disk to sleep whenever possible;

11 - Go to the System Preferences Accounts Pane and deselect applications that you do not want to start running whenever you login (Skype and Twitterefic are merely nuissances…). To temporarily disable everuthing hold the Shift button on startup.

To be Continued…

Warning: This may go against the data policies of your carrier, so use with care and only in certain emergencies. In other words, don’t push it, or your carrier may apply a few hefty fines.

Have you ever been in a place where you wanted to access the Internet on your laptop, but there was no Wireless network? Still your iPhone has 3G, but you hate viewing webpages in that tiny screen? Then this tutorial is for you. Let me explain. Tethering is the art of using a mobile device to “supply” internet access to a non-mobile device such as a laptop.

This is extremely easy on the iPhone and was made possible by the 3proxy team. Before we begin, let me just give an idea of the what you will need:

- A laptop that can create wireless ad-hoc networks (in this case we shall use a MacBookPro);

- An iPhone 3G (jailbroken);

- Mobile Terminal (on the iPhone, obtainable through Cydia);

- 3proxy (on the iPhone, obtainable through Cydia);

- Firefox (on the laptop);

Right then, shall we begin?

Create an ad-hoc network with your laptop (create network in Airport menu);

Connect the iPhone to that network;

Write down the iPhone’s IP address (believe me you will need it later);

Open Mobile Terminal on the iPhone and type in “socks”. To leave it running in the background but still go back to the home screen, press the home button (but not for too long, or you will terminate it!!);

Open Safari and browse to a given webpage (any will do, but you would be very kind if you were to use H4rdwired).  Note: This step is seriously important. Without it the proxy server connect do its job (primarily because this forces the iPhone to switch back to 3G);

Then, open Firefox on your laptop and hit Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings. In the SOCKS host field enter the iPhone’s IP address and then enter the port number 1080.

Before you can start browsing the Internet there is one little thing you still need to do. In the URL bar enter “about:config”. In the filter enter proxy and then double-click “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns” to make its value “true”, and you’re ready to go!

Happy Tethering

May the code be with you,

K12yp70n

Technorati Profile

The researchers at Independent Security Evaluators have recently discovered a major flaw in iPhone, more specifically on the Safari App.

Apparently this flaw allows to take control of the iPhone and, has even enabled the researchers to transfer files from the user’s iPhone to the remote attacker.

This flaw also affects both Windows and Macintosh version of Safari.

The iPhone exploit works as quoted below:

“The exploit is delivered via a malicious web page opened in the Safari browser on the iPhone. There are several delivery vectors that an attacker might utilize to get a victim to open such a web page. For example:

1. An attacker controlled wireless access point: Because the iPhone learns access points by name (SSID), if a user ever gets near an attacker-controlled access point with the same name (and encryption type) as an access point previously trusted by the user, the iPhone will automatically use the malicious access point. This allows the attacker to add the exploit to any web page browsed by the user by replacing the requested page with a page containing the exploit.
2. A mis-configured forum website: If a web forum’s software is not configured to prevent users from including potentially dangerous data in their posts, an attacker could cause the exploit to run in any iPhone browser that viewed the thread. (This would require some slight changes in our proof of concept exploit, however.)
3. A link delivered via e-mail or SMS: If an attacker can trick a user into opening a website that the attacker controls, the attacker can easily embed the exploit into the main page of the website.

When the iPhone’s version of Safari opens the malicious web page, arbitrary code embedded in the exploit is run with administrative privileges. In our proof of concept, this code reads the log of SMS messages, the address book, the call history, and the voicemail data. It then transmits all this information to the attacker. However, this code could be replaced with code that does anything that the iPhone can do. It could send the user’s mail passwords to the attacker, send text messages that sign the user up for pay services, or record audio that could be relayed to the attacker.”

If you are an iPhone user and you are concerned about this, but still wish to browse the Internet with your device, I would advise you to:

- Not to open weblinks from e-mails (there is also another flaw in Mail that makes phishing quite an easy task);

- Browse only trusted sites;

- Not to use WiFi networks which you do not know (remember, if they control your Internet, they control what you see).

I surely hope that Apple can find a fix for this problem before it’s too late…

May the code be with you,

k12yp70n

VirtualBox is a free application that lets you run an OS virtualized on top of the main one you have instaled in your computer. This application was originally created by Germansoftware company Innotek and now being developed by Sun Microsystems as part of its Sun xVM virtualization platform.

It works like any other application have of sourts you have ever seen. With similar performance. This is a powerfull application that allows users to have the best multi platform experience ever, withought giving you hard raised money to some faceless coorporation, just to later on find you can put it to work properly.

VirtualBox has a easy instalation procedure but still leaving the advanced options and technology behind. When considering virtualization, make VirtualBox the to choice in you mind. You wont regret it.

Supported HOST operating systems include: Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp, Windows, and Solaris.

Supported GUEST operating systems include: FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp, Windows and Solaris.

Download (free)

Diasruptor