Poor man's cpu temp watcher

It's getting hot in our small country! Temperatures above 37 degrees Celcius (99 deg. F) are expected tomorrow. Will the servers in our compound stand the heat? No need for alarming applications which only produce more heat, just a few bash lines using the unix 'sensors' command will do!

First make sure your sensors are set up right. Run the command 'sensors-detect' to automatically generate a suitable config file for your cpu board. Answer default on all questions. Then try to run the 'sensors' command and find out if your cpu temperature is reported.

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Runkeeper is spyware free now

The last few months I followed the discussion on the Runkeeper(tm FitnessKeeper inc.) forum concerning spyware in their iPhone app. Runkeeper is a fabulous application for iPhone users who like to log their running, hiking, skiing, cycling and other sporting activities. It's far better than the better known Nike+ solution, which only counts your steps. Runkeeper is far better than Nike+. Runkeeper also logs your exact location by the built in GPS in the iPhone. Also speed, distance and many other things are logged and shared on a dashboard on the web. Streetteams of multiple friends also using Runkeeper motivate each other to keep doing their sports.

Spyware in an iPhone app? The discussion went hot about a library from Pinchmedia used by Runkeeper (both the free and the paid version). Is Pinchmedia spyware? I don't think that is true, Pinchmedia is a statistic tool for iPhone application developers to get information about the usage of their app. But when the Pinchmedia library is used in an iPhone app, data is sent to that 3rd party. Info such as usage time, gps location, type of phone and... your ip address. In The Netherlands the dutch provider T-Mobile, the only provider to sell the iPhone, gives every user his own ip address. Now that ip address is also known by Pinchmedia. So a 3rd party knows all about you and can locate your ip address to a exact location where you live. Scary!

On the forum I read the latest comments that Runkeeper stopped using the Pinchmedia library so your private info isn't sent anymore to a 3rd party. I compared the IP data of a old version of Runkeeper Free with a recent update and I can confirm that there is no more spyware in Runkeeper. Now I'll buy the paid version and start running!

Snow Alert!

Snow Leopard was released last week. After upgrading the OS X machines in our DutchTechies compound to Snow Leopard some of our applications stopped working.

What was the reason for this mayor update from Apple? At the keynote they shouted "Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you" - yeah right! They removed the support for the Motorola processor machines, all system files and all programs were dual installed before, until the Snow arrived. So freeing 7GB is easy, but please be honest about the reason, Apple!

We got stuck with several programs which are not working anymore with Snow Leopard. Please check if you are depending on these before installing 10.6:

Cyberduck    Crashes in Snow Leopard. The author immediately released a new beta. This Beta works again!

TrueCrypt    Not working. Some people advise to force the application to run in Rosetta-mode. But Rosette didn't help us. NOT WORKING!

gpgMail        Not working. The application was using 'forbidden Api's', which are now blocked by Apple. Apple's Mail automatically moves the plugin out of the plugin folder to have it disabled. No secure mail at this moment for us... NOT WORKING!

 
GroupDav        iCal 4.0 won't connect anymore to GroupDav.php   Unclear wat was changed. NOT WORKING!

MacPorts        Macports stopped working, but there is a update available already. Just 'sudo ports -v selfupdate' .

Image attribution: Angeloscesare at Flickr.com

A magnificent in sheep's clothing

Have you ever been working at a linux prompt and needed a serial terminal emulator? For connecting to the serial port of your mobile phone, or a modem? No need to install a terminal emulator or any Darwin tool! Say bye to minicom! The tool you need is right there in your repository, and already installed at your OSX or linux! Screen! But screen is known to be used for accessing more than one shell at a time? Yes, but it's also a serial terminal...

In my example below I paired my Nokia via Bluetooth to my Mac. In /dev/ there's now a serial device present: /dev/tty.Captain-COM1-1

At the osx-prompt I issue the command screen /dev/tty.Captain-COM1-1 You can optionally add the baudrate as second parameter. And there you go!

Exit the terminal by the sequence ctrl-a and k.

Prowl and Growl

This one is going to be an iPhone related post, but not in anyway as l33t as Shizzle's iPhone ping of death. if you haven't got an iPhone yet, go get one. Sure you can buy a HTC Hero, but why throw away the money if you can get yourself an iPhone and run cool scripts instead (right Tux?) ;). On the iPhone you're used to paying for cool apps. And be honest some apps are just worth paying for. This one, Prowl, will set you back $3.

Prowl is intended to be a growl client for the iPhone. Prowl is made byZachary West, who is also a lead developer of Adium.If you have a Mac, you will probably have tried Growl already. Growl shows unintrusive popups from apps like Aduim, aMsn and Skype. Handy to see what's going on, without opening the actual application.

You can connect Growl to your prowl application on your iPhone and receive notification there. You don't have to be running the app itself, as it also comes with push service. So when you're traveling or just away from home, you can still be notified of what is happening on your home computer.

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