ESET NOD32 Antivirus for Mac OS X Review

(Note: An updated review post is now online)

So, this is one of the last things I thought I’d ever do on my mac. But I installed the beta of ESET antivirus on my laptop this last week after it was available.

It’s seems to be just as good as the Windows version, in fact if I could say so I think it’s even better than the Windows version GUI wise. But in fact it’s really much the same.

There’s only one improvement I could suggest, and that’s a way to disable the icon on the apple menu bar. The dock icon is plenty enough.

Wait! There’s more.

It seems that Truecrypt is not able to mount a volume with ESET running, even if the real-time auto protection is disabled. You see an error message that reads “hdiutil: attach failed – Permission denied”
The only solution that I’ve found is to uninstall ESET NOD32, which I’ve done. And I’m running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Finally one more thing that I believe could be improved upon, is the real-time protection disablement. In order to disable real-time protection you should be prompted for administrator authentication. Currently that is not the case.

EPSON Scan Cannot be Started!

I purchased an Epson Artisan 800 and set it up today. It’s a great printer. It has a document scanner, flat bed scanner. Built-in fax. And a awesome CD/DVD disk printer which has Mac and Windows software. Best of all it has built-in Wifi which I believe is 802.11n compatible.

So I’m running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and install the Artisan software on my Macbook Pro laptop. Printing works great, no problems. But when I try to launch Epson Scan, I get the following error message:

EPSON Scan cannot be started.

Please use the Troubleshooting Assistant to solve the problem.
Do you want to open the Troubleshooting Assistant?

[ No ]      [ Yes]

Here’s what you want to do. Click on No because the troubleshooting assistant is useless. Then here’s what I had to find out the hard way. Its not documented by Epson and realistically you should automatically be prompted to run this in the first place. But here you go.

Under your Applications folder you will find another folder called Utilites. Under Utilies you’ll find an application called “EPSON Scan Settings”. If you open that and setup the network scanner in there, you’ll be fine. This works for ethernet (cabled) networks and wireless network scanning. And here’s a little video to demonstrate it.

(Same for both the Artisan 700 and 800)

Login to Your Mac Using Yubikey

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the Yubikey yet on this blog. It’s an amazing little device that generates an OTP (One Time Password) each time you have it plugged into a computer and touch a little button on the USB key. It’s a great method for authentication as it’s impossible for anyone to brute force attack or crack the password, because it’s never the same.
Also it’s great because you never have to remember the password, or type in an RSA key. Just insert the key into your computer, and touch a button to login.

Revolutionary. Now I want to use it to login to my Macbook Pro running Apple’s Mac OS X. Now logging into the Mac uses PAM the same as regular Linux/UNIX, but the modules I tried to use wouldn’t compile on my system without modify the source code, which I did but did not like the results.

I knew about Rohos and they had just released a Mac version of their product, so I downloaded and installed the trial version. It’s been running on my laptop a few days and here’s a little video showing you how easy it is, and how it works:

Angry IP Scanner Crashing with Mac OS X 10.5.5

I just downloaded and attempted to run the Angry IP Scanner on my Mac running OS X 10.5.5 and Java 1.5.0_16 or Java For Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2.

Came across a little problem, it crashes on launch. Just bounces a few times and quits. No crash report or anything.

Well here are two commands that you have to run from the Terminal to fix it:

$ rm /Applications/Angry\ IP\ Scanner.app/Contents/MacOS/ipscan
$ cp /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/\
Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub ipscan

Do that and it’ll work like a charm!

Gimp 2.6.1 for Mac OS X

There were some issues with the Gimp porting project by wilber, mostly lack of team spirit and collaboration.

So somebody has finally taken up the slack. Gimp 2.6 is now available for Mac OS X by Simone.

For those of you who might not know what the Gimp is, it’s the GNU Image Manipulation Program. So kind of like Adobe Photoshop, except the Gimp in an open source free project. Here’s a screenshot of 2.6.1 on my laptop.

OpenVPN on Mac OS X 10.5

I admit, my last post wasn’t really interesting at all, but this one’s going to be a lot better!

After many months of looking every once in awhile for a good easy to use OpenVPN client for Mac OS X, my search has finally come to an end!

I present to you Viscosity.

It’s easy to use, imports and export configuration files, works on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard.

Make sure you give it a try along with something like Untangle with it’s OpenVPN server.

If you don’t know what OpenVPN is, check this article on Wikipedia.

Disgusting Technology Writers

Apple a Bigger Open Source Enemy than Microsoft? I can almost guarantee that you did not click on that link. Nor are you interested in doing so.

Stuff like that is absolutely disgusting. It is true that Apple is very protective of their IP, but please name one open source project from Microsoft that is of substance. Now take a look at Mac OS Forge. Directly from Apple we have Webkit, directly used by the KDE project, Google’s Android platform, and other light-weight browsers. How about the Darwin Streaming Server? A very easy to use and intuitive, full featured audio and video streaming server for RTP and RTSP. It can be used in tandem with their commercial QuickTime Streaming Server product. Then there’s ZFS, launchd, XQuartz, CalendarServer, not to mention Darwin (the core OS layer for Apple’s Mac OS X) itself.

Sure, the iPhone is not what we hoped for, and iTunes is still laden with DRM, but the proof is in the pudding, and using a Mac is unbelievably better than any completely open source OS available today, no matter what any zealous fanatics say.

Free VNC Client Inside Mac OS X 10.5 from Apple

Inside Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)  there is a new feature called screen sharing. Basically the way it works is if another computer is connected to the local network with remote desktop (VNC) or screen sharing enabled it shows up in the Shared section of the Finder like this:

Clicking on “Share Screen” asks for a password and then you can remotely take control of the other computer.

Now it starts to get interesting. I enabled Remote Desktop on a Ubuntu 7.10 box and OSX saw it immediately. So basically it’s completely cross platform compatible. So I thought maybe I could use this application as a general purpose VNC client, and yes you can!

The “Screen Sharing” application is stored in file:///System/Library/CoreServices/.

So basically I dragged it into the Dock and now it’s there for me to connect to your box whenever I want. All it asks is for the host and password if needed so it doesn’t have any advanced features at all. But it works.