Tag Archive for 'osx'

Happy Birthday, Elite!

Published on Monday, September 21, 2009 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The BBC website assures me that Elite was released 25 years ago today (more or less).

There have been loads of ports/re-imaginings since then and one of my favourites is Oolite. It was originally developed for Mac OS X, but I’m led to believe that it has been added to the Ubuntu repositories too.

The learning curve is a bit steep, but it’s well worth a look if you want to play at being Han Solo!

Installing GPG on Mac OS X

Published on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

GPG is an open-source implementation of the PGP encryption standard, useful for encrypting and signing digital communications. Think sending a letter in a sealed envelope rather than a postcard.

I’m currently using MacGPG 1.4.9 along with the GPGMail extension to the Apple Mail application on OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard). At present, GPGMail is incompatible with OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The installation is fairly simple, but can be confusing for those unfamiliar with PGP/GPG. I’ve outlined the process below.

  1. Download and install MacGPG. The disk image opens a graphical installer.
  2. Import your keypair, or create a new one. (If you don’t like the command line, GPG Keychain Access provides a nice GUI to do this)
  3. Download GPGMail. This adds GPG functionality to Mail.
  4. Quit Mail
  5. Launch the GPGMail installation script.
  6. Restart Mail. There should be a PGP screen in Mail > Preferences.

Your public key is relatively useless if nobody else knows what it is. I suggest making it available using a system like the MIT Public Key Server.

A practical use for the OS X ’say’ command

Published on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Glad to see I’m not the only person to do this!