Tag Archives: google

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. I’m currently 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:

HOWTO run Chromium OS on a Dell Mini 9 with wifi

chrome-icon-200x200UPDATE: 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!

Google mp3blog search widget

YouTube

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.

(Paranoid) Android demo

Here’s a working demo of Google’s Android operating system in action.  It’s got some pretty fly features, with a few bits that remind me a bit too much of the iPhone, but hey.  Now if they put it on a decent phone (OpenMoko anyone?) with a data plan that doesn’t require the use of AT&T, we’ll talk…

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg]