It’s a bit of a pain to set this up each time the browser is reset, so here’s a handy tip for creating a bookmarklet which opens Gmail in an uncluttered window of its own:

javascript:window.open("http://gmail.com/","gmail","titlebar=0");

Save this bookmarklet to the first position in your personal bookmarks bar and you can also access it using the shortcut key Command+1.

So which is best?

On price alone you might be tempted by EvoCam as it costs just $30 (under £20) for an unlimited number of cameras, while SecuritySpy will set you back £30 for a single camera license and a whopping £500 for unlimited camera support.

I’ve had an opportunity to evaluate both products and have come to the conclusion that you really do get what you pay for.

EvoCam does the job well enough and has a more polished user interface, but it also suffers from a major problem that lets it down badly, almost to the point of being unusable. For reasons unknown it ties up the processor for even a simple one camera recording setup.

Activity Monitor output taken for identical recording sessions is below:

In these examples (from a Mac Mini 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM), EvoCam consumes 85% CPU and 90MB real memory, while in comparison SecuritySpy consumes a meagre 6% CPU and 21MB real memory. That’s quite a difference and it’s very noticeable when you try to use the same host machine for other work.

So if you have the luxury of a dedicated powerful server for your camera recording then EvoCam is probably the most cost effective option, but if you want something that works reliably and doesn’t take over your machine then SecuritySpy is well worth the extra investment.

Google Drive has finally launched, but privacy campaigners have already reviewed Google’s Privacy Policy and raised questions about the legal ownership of files you store on ‘your’ G Drive.

But what Google can’t see they can’t use right?

Using EncFS and some tools you can create a totally secure encrypted filesystem on top of the standard Google Drive in under 5 minutes.

Mac OS instructions only below.

First download and install Fuse4X and a version of EncFS which uses the Fuse4X APIs. Thanks to Simone Lehmann for providing an EncFS Mac installer at http://www.lisanet.de/?p=128 (also mirrored here).

To create a new encrypted volume (stored locally at first to prevent the EncFS key from being synchronised with Google Drive):

encfs ~/Desktop/_Encrypted ~/Documents/_GSecure

Answer ‘yes’ when prompted to create the new folders and choose ‘p’ for pre-configured paranoia mode (256-bit AES encryption). Enter a secure EncFS password when prompted and you’re done.

Now the filesystem has been created we can deal with securing the key.

umount ~/Documents/_GSecure
mkdir ~/.keys
mv ~/Desktop/_Encrypted/.encfs6.xml ~/.keys/gsecure.xml

The commands above move your key from the EncFS filesystem into a hidden folder in your (local) home directory

Now move the entire ~/Desktop/_Encrypted folder (minus your key) into your Google Drive:

mv ~/Desktop/_Encrypted ~/Google\ Drive/

Finally download my GSecure application and copy it to your Applications folder.

The first time you run GSecure it will prompt you for your EncFS password which it stores in your local login keychain. The password must match the secure password you set in a previous step.

To mount or unmount the encrypted filesystem simply run the GSecure app. For convenience copy it to your Mac OS Dock for quick access.

In the ten game spell since Fabio Capello quit as England football manager, Spurs have won just 2 games, drawn 3 and lost 5. We were also thrashed in the North London derby and humiliated in a 5-1 FA Cup semi-final defeat at Wembley against Chelsea.

That current league form ranks Spurs in 16th place, a point behind Blackburn and Bolton who coincidentally are the next two teams we face.

Table courtesy of weekendfootball.co.uk

On that form it’s going to be a real challenge to make 5th place, let alone 4th.

What does England manager-elect Redknapp have to say in his defence?

After losing 2-1 to Norwich:

“Well all credit to them. I thought they deserved it, they worked very hard today and made it difficult for us. They played excellent. We were disappointing. I changed the system, I played 4-4-2 today, we played with four forwards and I really felt we were too open. We’ve got five big games to go, we’ve got to really look to win all five games.”

You might think that as manager he was actually responsible for the formation and tactics and could perhaps make changes if it wasn’t working?

After losing 1-0 to QPR:

“There’s four games left, we’ve got to win the last four games now. I think you’re gonna need 12 points now, you’re going to have to pick up 12 points from the last four games. It’s going to be tight, it’s all to play for. Four games to go, we need four wins.”

“We need to win x games”. That seems to be a recurring quote from Harry.

You don’t need to be a master tactician or even a mathematician to work that one out.

Fortunately The FA are all set to come to the rescue and pay to ‘release’ Harry before he suffers the ignominy of a sacking. So it’s ’Harry for England’ and COME ON YOU SPURS!

Do you use an iPhone on the O2-UK network and find that you can no longer send or receive MMS since the last iPhone software update?

It seems that Apple’s carrier bundle settings for O2-UK don’t recognise that some O2 customers aren’t on official iPhone tariffs and so need different MMS settings to the default.

Below are the O2 MMS settings that you should use if you are not on an official iPhone tariff. For example you might be fortunate enough to still be on a Simplicity tariff with unlimited data.

Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network > MMS

APN wap.o2.co.uk
Username o2wap
Password password
MMSC http://mmsc.mms.o2.co.uk:8002
MMS Proxy 82.132.254.1:8080
MMS Max Message Size 307200
MMS UA Prof URL (leave blank)

Switch your iPhone off and on again after making these changes and MMS should be fully restored.

Since upgrading to Mac OS Lion I have been unable to persuade our ageing MacBook to go to sleep when it’s supposed to. The OS X Energy Saver preferences were set correctly, but it would not sleep of its own accord. Putting it to sleep manually worked, but the computer sleep idle timer was just ignored.

I put this down to a quirk of the older hardware and worked around it by defining a nightly sleep schedule, but when our shiny new iMac did exactly the same I knew there must be an application overriding the default behaviour.

Sure enough after a morning of trial and error and eliminating all the other options, I finally discovered the culprit to be Dropbox LAN sync.

If Dropbox LAN sync is enabled then the Mac won’t put itself to sleep. The mystery is finally solved!

If you’ve disabled Dropbox LAN sync and your Mac is still powering on periodically (like every hour), then make sure you have also unchecked ‘Wake for network access’ in the Energy Saver preferences.

(Note: Mac OS X 10.7.3 & Dropbox client v1.2.52)

The more observant among you may have noticed that there have not been any updates on this blog for a while. There is a good reason for this, I’ve had other battles to fight.

Today marks the two month anniversary of my being rid of the evil tumour that was making a pretty decent job of silently killing me from within.

I don’t want to dwell too much on what I’ve been through (other than this explanatory post), but such a life changing experience has inevitably changed my outlook and this will no doubt be reflected in my posts from now on.

Below are my top 10 musings on my cancer journey to date:

1. Listen to your body. If there are signs that something isn’t quite right inside, then get yourself checked out properly. Which brings me to my next point …
2. Don’t trust GPs. I went to a GP with my symptoms and they sent me away with a totally incorrect diagnosis. We only found the cancer after my wife’s persistence in insisting that I be referred to a specialist consultant. GPs are General Practitioners, an odd-jobs man for the human body. You wouldn’t ask a builder to service your boiler, so why trust a GP to know everything about your body? Seek a second opinion if you’re not satisfied with your GP’s diagnosis.
3. We are all unique. Just because you don’t fit the classic profile of a condition doesn’t mean you don’t have it. Lazy doctors use statistics to assist with their diagnoses. I didn’t fit the profile of a typical bowel cancer patient, so they dismissed it as a possibility.
4. Time is of the essence. My tumour had advanced to a critical stage and was about to wreak havoc on the rest of my body. Having surgery as quickly as I did potentially saved my life, another few weeks and the prognosis would not have been so positive. If you’ve had symptoms for a while and put off getting yourself checked out, do it today!
5. Positivity really does work. I have an incredibly supportive group of friends rooting for me and I was swelled with positive energy going into surgery. I strode into the operating theatre with a strength and determination that I still find hard to understand. But it worked, so why question it?
6. Don’t sweat the small stuff. I’ve written about this previously, but this was never more clear to me than when I thought I had just a few short years left to live. Suddenly all the petty worries and annoyances in my life were totally wiped out.
7. Less is more. Rid yourself of clutter and irritants in your life. I unsubscribed from dozens of web sites and email lists and even closed down a business. It was a cleansing experience and I don’t miss any of them. I now have less distractions in my life and more time to concentrate on what’s really important.
8. You can’t buy your health. The late Steve Jobs was sad proof of this. Look after yourself, enjoy a little of what’s bad for you and a lot of what’s good for you.
9. Wake up and smell the barbecue. Red meat and processed meat is killing us. Hardly a week goes by without another report on the dangers of red meat consumption. This isn’t fear-mongering from the veggie brigade, there is hard evidence that cannot be ignored. I confess that my diet was heavy with red and processed meat. Is this what triggered my cancer? I’ll never know for sure, but I won’t be eating red meat again.
10. Carpe diem. It’s a cliche, but don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. One day you might wake up to discover you don’t have a future, that’s when you really kick yourself for having wasted your opportunities.

Where am I now? My recovery has been excellent, I am feeling well and getting my life back to some sort of normality. I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the next few years but that’s all good since I have the right people looking out for me and my insides.

So it’s business as usual, I’m just in a different business now

One of the less well publicised features of Apple’s iCloud service is Back To My Mac.

This service provides a private IPv6 network which you can use to securely connect all your Mac hosts.

To use BTMM you will need to upgrade all your Macs to OS X Lion and sign them all into the same Apple iCloud account. You will also need your unique BTMM account number.

When you are signed into iCloud you can discover your BTMM account number as follows:

$ dns-sd -E
Looking for recommended registration domains:
Timestamp     Recommended Registration domain
12:07:46.550  Added     (More)               local
12:07:46.550  Added                          icloud.com
                                             - > btmm
                                             - - > members
                                             - - - > 123456789

The final line shows your individual BTMM account number.

For example, if you Computer Name (set in System Preferences > Sharing) is mymac and your BTMM account number is 123456789, then the fully qualified domain name of the host is mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com.

If you have spaces in your Computer Name then replace them with dashes, e.g. “My Mac” becomes the hostname my-mac.

To test connectivity to your remote host use ping6, e.g.

ping6 mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com

To list all the SSH enabled hosts on your domain:

dns-sd -B _ssh._tcp

You would SSH into your host using this command:

ssh -2 -6 username@mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com

Note that you will only be able to communicate with the other hosts on your iCloud private network if the Mac you are using is also signed into the same iCloud account.

You can also use an open SSH connection to access your non-Apple hosts on your internal network by using SSH port forwarding. This tunnels the destination traffic over the BTMM private network via your remote Mac.

For example, if you have a web server running on a host with the IP address 192.168.1.2 then you can use this SSH command to set-up a forwarded port:

ssh -2 -6 -L 8080:192.168.1.2:80 username@mymac.123456789.members.btmm.icloud.com

To access the remote host from your local machine you would go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Open a Terminal window and execute these commands:

launchctl unload -D user /Library/LaunchAgents/com.symantec.ev.daemon.plist
sudo killall -m  "Enterprise Vault .*"
sudo rm -f /Library/LaunchAgents/com.symantec.ev.daemon.plist
sudo rm -rf "/Library/PreferencePanes/Enterprise Vault.prefPane"
sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Symantec Enterprise Vault"
rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/Symantec Enterprise Vault"

Center Parcs marketed itself as the original “British holiday the weather can’t spoil”, but they are doing a pretty good job of spoiling holidays without the weather.

Consider the pricing matrix above. What could possibly cause the astronomical price hike in that one specific week? It’s the half-term school holidays.

I do expect to have to pay a premium because of the school holidays. 50% would seem acceptable to me, but a 300% price hike? Even Michael O’Leary would find that hard to defend!

I have studied Economics, I know all about supply and demand and differential pricing. The prices above do not seem to be not reflecting a shortage of supply however. There is no “only x remaining” in the middle week, so I can only deduce that the huge cost spike is a deliberate and cynical manipulation of the pricing model to take account of school holidays.

While some families might bite the bullet and succumb to the exorbitant price tag, their stay must be tinged with bitterness at being financially exploited in this way. If you are being ripped-off so badly before you even arrive, what more do they have in store for you while you’re there? It’s not the kind of business that I would like to spend my money with.

Center Parcs certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on this exploitative behaviour. It’s an industry-wide phenomenon which has been allowed to run wild.

The blatant profiteering at the expense of parents and teachers is discrimination on a massive scale. Isn’t it time the UK Government acted on these unfair business practices?

After upgrading to Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich‘ I found that some of my existing apps weren’t working as expected.

On deeper investigation I discovered the culprit. When installed on devices running ICS the apps made HTTP POST requests when they were programmed to be GET requests.

It appears that Google have subtly changed the working of the java.net.HttpURLConnection class – without telling anyone!

The Android package reference documentation has this little gem tucked away in the class overview notes:

HTTP Methods

HttpURLConnection uses the GET method by default. It will use POST if setDoOutput(true) has been called. Other HTTP methods (OPTIONS, HEAD, PUT, DELETE and TRACE) can be used with setRequestMethod(String).

My now non-functional Android apps did indeed call setDoOutput, but in Android releases prior to 4.0 this did not result in the HTTP method being changed from a GET to a POST.

Even explicitly setting setRequestMethod("GET") does not fix the problem. Basically if you don’t want your app to POST, you must not call setDoOutput.

The apps have not changed, there is nothing referencing this change in the API Differences Report, but the behaviour is definitely different in Android 4.0.

Could this be what’s behind the flurry of Android Market app updates for ICS-related fixes?

I previously wrote about a method for creating a super-secure filesystem using Dropbox’s cloud storage.

After updating to Mac OS Lion I struggled to get the MacFusion GUI to work and so I wrote an application to automate the mounting and unmounting of the EncFS filesystem.

I also took the opportunity to switch from the now abandoned MacFUSE to Fuse4X, which is a properly maintained fork of MacFUSE started in June 2011.

The install procedure is much simpler than before, you install Fuse4X and EncFS, but instead of using the MacFusion GUI you just call my script instead.

To the instructions!

First download and install Fuse4X and a version of EncFS which uses the Fuse4X APIs. Thanks to Simone Lehmann for providing an EncFS Mac installer at http://www.lisanet.de/?p=128 (also mirrored here).

To create a new encrypted volume (stored locally at first to prevent the EncFS key from being synchronised with Dropbox):

encfs ~/Desktop/_Encrypted ~/Documents/_DropSec

Answer ‘yes’ when prompted to create the new folders and choose ‘p’ for pre-configured paranoia mode (256-bit AES encryption). Enter a secure EncFS password when prompted and you’re done.

Now the filesystem has been created we can deal with securing the key.

umount ~/Documents/_DropSec
mkdir ~/.keys
mv ~/Desktop/_Encrypted/.encfs6.xml ~/.keys/dropsec.xml

The commands above move your key from the EncFS filesystem into a hidden folder in your (local) home directory

Now move the entire ~/Desktop/_Encrypted folder (minus your key) into your Dropbox:

mv ~/Desktop/_Encrypted ~/Dropbox/

Finally download my DropSec application and copy it to your Applications folder.

The first time you run DropSec it will prompt you for your EncFS password which it stores in your local login keychain. The password must match the secure password you set in a previous step.

To mount or unmount the encrypted filesystem simply run the DropSec app. For convenience copy it to your Mac OS Dock for quick access.