On my iDisk (in the Software folder), I found a program called Mac Slides Publisher. Turns out you can drag images onto it, and it will build an automatic slideshow to share on the web!

To test it out, go into Screen Effects, check the .Mac screensaver, and point towards the "jragon" iDisk. You'll see a slideshow I put together.

[Editor's note: If you decide to share your images in this manner, note that each user who uses your screensaver will end up with a copy of each picture displayed on their local machine ... at least, I did after testing this! Additionally, you (obviously) need a mac.com subscription to create slide shows.]

I searched over the past two days and found some items of interest regarding my Alcatel USB Speedtouch modem and BellSouth ADSL service. BTW, Bellsouth was much less than accomodating and of the four people I talked to, not one knew a thing about Mac OS in general, so I hope this helps someone. Let me know if it does.

To get your modem working, first download the OS X Drivers from the SpeedTouch site. Then read pages 31 to 45 of the online manual here on how to set it up here (note that the page numbers may have changed; just find the Mac OS X section). Enjoy!

Ever since updating to Mac OS 10.1.5 I had problems sending out emails through Verizon who now requires SMTP authentication when sending out mail. For days I couldn't send out anything larger than around 33k before the everything would just stop and I would get an error message. Entourage and Mail.app would both react the same way.

I called Verizon's Tech support and they incorrectly told me to update my Airport software - "My colleagues are telling me its version 2.0.4." I later found out that Verizon is using an MTU setting of 1492 instead of the standard MTU 1500. You can set the MTU manually in the terminal by typing:

 % sudo ifconfig en1 mtu 1492

Doing this is only good until you reboot your Mac then it defaults back to 1500. Here's my solution.

Log in as root and launch the terminal. I used pico but vi and emacs will work, too. Open the network file located at /System -> Library -> StartupItems -> Network -> Network and find the references to setting up your network interface. Add a line and enter ifconfig en1 mtu 1492 for airport or ifconfig en0 mtu 1492 for ethernet.

This needs to be done on ALL computers connected to the internet and sending email using Verizon.net. Restart your computer and you should now automatically be setup with an MTU of 1492 and emails should send correctly. Life is good.

I know that this should be easy in 10.2/Jaguar, but in the meantime ... I have a cable connection to the Internet and wanted to share my connection with another Mac on my network. I spent ages searching the net but couldn't find a clear description of how to get it going. I managed to figure it out with the help of the shareware program Brickhouse.

Read the rest of the article for the how-to...

For those using Apple's iTools to host web pages, this might be useful if you are coding your own web pages (instead of using the iTools "Homepage" feature).

When using Apple's iTools for web site hosting, there is an application that will automatically generate a thumbnail image from a full-size image file. The image(s) you want to make a thumbnail of must reside on your iDisk. A properly coded URL will create these thumbnail's on the fly. I discovered this by inspecting a file created by Homepage and then playing around with the URLs. There may be more thumbnail sizes, but these are the only ones that work as far as I know (width x height):

• 119 x 88 pixels, 122 x 91 pixels, 260 x 195 pixels, 273 x 195 pixels

To use any one of these thumbnail sizes, you need to code the URL like this:

<IMG src="/user/.cv/user/Sites/picture.jpg-thumb_wide_high.jpg">

Note: Make sure you replace 'wide' and 'high' with the width and height of the respective thumbnail, as shown in the table above. Replace 'user' with your iTools username and 'picture.jpg' with the path to and name of the picture you want a thumbnail of. For the other iTools folders (Public, Pictures, Movies), the path statement would look like:

/user/.cv/user/Sites/.dir_name

Replace 'dir_name' with 'Public', 'Pictures', or 'Movies' to access each respective folder. The "public" URL of these paths would look like:

http://homepage.mac.com/user/.dir_name

As a working example, to create a 260x195 thumbnail image for "kitchen.jpg" on an iTools page owned by "macguy", the URL would be:

<IMG src="/macguy/.cv/macguy/Sites/kitchen.jpg-thumb_260_195.jpg">

[Editor's note: I have not tested this hint myself...]

I found this very cool free app called CarraFix. This app is designed to allow you to control the bandwidth that uploads use when you run a Carracho or Hotline server. It uses the built-in "ipfw" command on OSX to do this.

The problem that it solves is that when you are uploading something utilizing all your upload bandwidth, surfing or downloading comes to a grinding halt because the acknowledgment packets can't be sent in a timely manner since your upload pipe is saturated. Carrafix allows you to set a delay between packets that are being sent on a specific port. This basically allows you to control how fast data is sent on that port which leaves time/bandwidth for other things.

I thought that was cool, but I do most of my file transfers using FTP. When I'm uploading stuff to my servers, all other network traffic bogs down to the point where it's pretty useless. I came up with a way to use this same program to throttle back ftp transfers.

Read the rest of the article for the how-to...

I'm a subscriber to the premium edition of Salon.com, and I like to skim through it every weekday morning while I'm having my breakfast. Thanks to AppleScript, cUrl, and cron, I can have it ready for me by the time the coffee's finished.

Read the rest of the article for the how-to...

Found this after seeing the article mentioning junkbuster. Privoxy is (according to their website):

... a proxy that is solely focused on privacy protection and junk elimination. Sitting between your browser(s) and the Internet, it is in a perfect position to filter outbound personal information that your browser is leaking, as well as inbound junk. It uses a variety of techniques to do this, all of which are under your control via the various configuration files and options.

Privoxy is based on the junkbuster source, has features like browser-based configuration and intelligent filtering, and they have an OS X package available for download. The only problem I had with it was that /Library -> StartupItems -> Privoxy -> Privoxy needed the execute bit set (chmod 755 Privoxy).

[Editor's note: I have not used this package myself.]

Lately, my dialup connection gets wedged, and I cannot disconnect and reconnect, because the GUI seems to be stuck. I found a quick fix. If you send a HUP signal to the pppd process, it unwedges everything, and disconnects.

"Sending a signal" is a UNIX thing, and it requires you to use the Terminal. First, type ps ax to list all the processes and numbers. The numbers are the first digits in each line of results, and they're important for the next step. Find the pppd process, and then issue a kill command: kill -HUP 1234, where 1234 is replaced by the id for pppd process you found in the previous step.

Some java applets on secure sites (online banking for example) won't work on OS X. This affects both Internet Explorer and Mozilla (with MRJ Plugin). Other browsers using the Java implementation on OS X are probably similarly affected.

The browser's status bar will show an "applet not initialized" message, and the Java console will tell you that a javax.net.ssl.SSLException is thrown. This may be caused by a bug known to Apple - the Java implementation has trouble with certain SSL certificates. Until Apple fixes this problem, they suggest a fairly simple workaround (unfortunately, you will need a Windows version of Internet Explorer for this):

1. Access the problematic site with Internet Explorer on Windows. Click on the padlock item and export the certificate to a file.
   
   
2. Copy the certificate to your Mac.
   
   
3. Use the command

   sudo keytool -import -trustcacerts -keystore[space]
     /Library/Java/Home/lib/security/cacerts -file mycert.cer

   to import the certificate file to your keystore (substitute mycert.cer with the name of the file containing the certificate). Note that the above command is shown on two lines; replace [space] with an actual space character and enter the command as one line. The keystore is password protected - the default password is "changeit".
   
   
4. Restart your browser and enjoy!

[Editor's note: Anyone out there have a Java site they have trouble accessing? Does this fix work? I don't have any sites that I can use here to test it with.]