This week’s mac techmail is Create your own SSL CA with the OS X Keychain. This talks about how you can use the Certificate Assistant on OS X, to create your own SSL Certificate Authority for a local network or internal organization. The tool is quite slick, if a little complicated for the uninitiated, but it does work quite well.
Category Archives: OS X
Convert CVS repositories to Git
This week’s techmail is Convert CVS repositories to Git which goes into the how, and possibly the why, of converting a CVS repository into a git repository, retaining all commit and history information.
Remotely wake a sleeping Mac
Last week’s mac techmail was Remotely wake a sleeping Mac which explains some tricks on how to wake up a local Mac that is asleep. Useful if you want to have a file or media server that is also energy efficient so it’s only on when it needs to be.
Using ExpanDrive to mount remote file systems
This week’s mac techmail was Using ExpanDrive to mount remote file systems which takes a look at the ExpanDrive tool, which sits in the menubar and allows you to connect to remote SFTP, SSH, FTP/FTPS, or Amazon S3 file systems and mount them on the computer as if they were local filesystems. It’s essentially a polished front-end for FUSE with sshfs support for the SFTP/SSH connections. It’s a really great tool and while not free, it’s relatively inexpensive and works wonders. With it I can remotely mount the filesystem of my VPS using SSH with keys, or connect to the home filesystem while on the road, etc. And instead of having to navigate the remote filesystem within one application like a traditional FTP client, I can access it using the terminal, Finder, PathFinder, or any other utility that operates on the local filesystem. It securely mounts the remote filesystems to be as available as a SMB or AFP share.
1Password for Mac OS X: One program to store them all
This week’s mac techmail was 1Password for Mac OS X: One program to store them all which is an introduction to the immensely useful 1Password program. If you have a mac and you don’t have 1Password, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. 1Password stores passwords (browsers, database, SSH logins, etc.), serial numbers, and notes in an encrypted keychain format. It has plugins for the mac browsers that let’s you autofill password information in sites meaning you have one place to store your passwords and they are accessible from all browsers (and you can add new login info from any browser). To make it even better, you can sync the 1Password keychain using Dropbox or whatever so the same keychain can be used on different systems.
This is probably the absolute best password management app I’ve ever laid eyes on. The companion iPhone/iPod Touch app is icing on the cake. Well worth checking out if you haven’t played with it before.
Enhance Safari with Glims plug-in
This week’s mac techmail is Enhance Safari with Glims plug-in which discusses the free Glims plugin for Safari. This plugin adds a bunch of features that should have been in Safari to begin with as far as I’m concerned: automatic re-opening of tabs when you start Safari, auto-closing the download window… it also adds some extras for searching; with Glims you can customize your search box to build pre-defined queries of other sites or create shortcuts to sites, etc. I used to use Saft for this, but every time there is a new version of Safari, it seems like Saft trails a few days holding you back from upgrading (or losing the functionality it provides), and Saft isn’t free. Glims is free and provides almost all of the functionality that Saft does. Definitely a worth-while addon for the Safari browser.
