HOWTO securely delete files in OS X on the commandline
So I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a few months now, and since I have a 500 Gig harddrive, I haven’t bothered to empty my trash yet. Now I’m on a work trip in China, and it makes me think about the privacy (internet and otherwise) that I have in the US, that I don’t expect here. In fact, since we’re blocked from posting to either Facebook or Twitter, I know this post will only make it there because this site will post if for me after I post it to my site (again, not something you’d think about just living in most other parts of the world). So what a good time to learn how to securely emptying my trash! The first thing I did was use the ‘Secure delete’ feature of the OS X trash folder, but with over 190,000 files to remove, it sat there at 0% while the fan spun up for about 15 minutes. That was it for me, it was clear it was going to take years for this to happen, so canceled that and hit Google to learn the right way to do it via the commandline. One of the best pages talks about srm a secure file deletion for posix systems that is installed by default on OS X. I’ve crafted my srm command to use the nice command to reduce the amount of overhead the process causes (again, the GUI version was taking over the system and heating things up quickly) and the sudo command to ensure all files would be deleted regardless of permission/ownership. In the end in looks like this:
nice -19 srm -rfv ~/.Trash/*
Yeah, while the -v flag will slow things down slightly, I prefer to have ‘verbose’ output from the command to understand exactly what it’s doing. Does anyone have better/more secure way to do this? Leave a message in the comments if you do, I’d love to learn more about this.
HOWTO run Chromium OS on a Dell Mini 9 with wifi
UPDATE: I’m now running the latest build of Hexxeh’s Chrome OS named Flow – and everything just works out of the box. The release is much improved, and it’s getting very close to being the perfect day-to-day netbook OS as far as I’m concerned. Great work!
While I still really dig my Dell Mini 9, even with 2Gig of RAM it feels kinda sluggish when I have my normal 50 tabs open, and I’ve always known someone could do better (since I’m too lazy to recompile a kernel for it like I would have in the past). With all the focus on netbooks it was bound to be addressed, and while Android looks promising, it’s currently still more of a phone OS than something you’d be able to use on your netbook. I’ve run it off a USB drive on the Mini 9 just to check it out, it was cool, but again, not really usable enough for a ‘top – maybe that’s not the target. Another I want to check is Moblin, Intel’s effort using Ubuntu as a base, but I haven’t seen a Mini 9 HOWTO (maybe I’ll have to write my own…) for that. So, enter Google Chrome OS, Google’s idea of how to not only address this problem, but perhaps lay out how we will use these computers in the future. It’s always funny when I start talking about cloud and thin clients, it takes me back to dumb terminals talking to mainframes, but I digress. The point is, thanks to great posts at jasongriffey.net and Lifehacker, it’s really easy to install Google’s Chrome OS on a Dell Mini 9, the only thing I really have to add is that you have to use ChromeOS Zero from the hexxeh.net site. After all, this is an open source project, so folks are going to make changes/fix things and share with everyone. Looking at the site they had a new release, yesterday (gotta love it!) The last time I tried a build the wifi on my Mini just worked, so it looks like those problems are a thing of the past.
Google mp3blog search widget
YouTube
Found this mashup of a script that searches +5000 mp3blogs for tunes. Just type something in and see what you can find. I still contend that MP3s are the best way to discover new music – and having something so open like this allows you to hear any band you can think of. Put quotes around multi-word entries to narrow things down. (ie- “The Smoking Popes”)
This was a gadget/script someone wrote so you get directed to his page, I want to look into making my own search like this, but have it be a stand-alone, down loadable script, maybe in PHP.
Hi, I'm fak3r and I've been online for over 15 years, blogging for 10. I work with open source software, various hardware and whatever else that I can hack on. I enjoy learning by doing, painting infrequently and listening to more music than the law allows. Feel free to follow me and comment on my thoughts and ideas; we're all in it together kid.
