Tor for Your PowerPC Mac

*UPDATE BELOW*

Awhile ago I wrote a post on Tor for Tiger, but since it's outdated it's time to update. In fact, I plan to follow this post with more privacy tips, including how to encrypt your email in Mail.app and TenFourBird. But for this post the focus will be on Tor.

Unless you've been under a rock, you know the NSA is collecting it all and seeking to keep permanent records of all your internet activity (cringe). While not alarming to most individuals in an immediate sense, just the awareness of all this cataloguing can have a chilling effect on how we think and act and can stifle a lot of the creativity and risk-taking that make a free society thrive. Unless you think East Germany was a model of creativity and innovation. Okay, they did use creative methods to win Olympic gold medals, but my larger point stands.

And it's not just the NSA. Many governments take a stalker's interest in what you're doing on the internet, and there are times when we need to protect ourselves. Case in point: bloggers. If you have something to say but are afraid of getting arrested (or sued), Tor will help you stay anonymous by running your traffic through proxies and masking your real identity, i.e. your IP address.

Normally the Tor Project recommends users download their browser bundle, which is the current Firefox ESR specially configured with Tor, but since they're no longer compiled for PowerPC, that puts us in a bit of a jam. Fortunately you don't need the bundle. You can just install Tor and configure your browser manually. On OS X you can install Tor with Tigerbrew or MacPorts. On Linux, just use apt-get or aptitude to install it.

For OS X, you start up Tor by entering tor in the terminal (you can also set it as a launch daemon on startup, though I've read tor has trouble regaining connections after OS X wakes from sleep). It'll give you a bunch of output messages as it establishes a connection, and once that's done, you can go to TenFourFox's Preferences-->Advanced-->Network and click the Settings button next to "Configure how TenFourFox connects to the internet". Select "Manual proxy configuration" (remember, to switch back click "Use system proxy settings") and for "SOCKS Host" enter 127.0.0.1 and 9050 for the port. Also, where it says "No Proxy for:" enter "localhost, 127.0.0.1".

Now you should be ready to browse anonymously, so go to https://check.torproject.org and it should say in bright green, "Congratulations. Your browser is configured to use Tor."

Good news, but it doesn't mean you're necessarily safe (see update below for additional information). There are certain precautions to take when using Tor, like running NoScript, which blocks all javascript by default. It was recently discovered that someone, presumably with the FBI or NSA, used a javascript hack to obtain Tor users' real IP addresses because they didn't have javascript disabled. That's fine for breaking up kiddie porn rings, but not so fine for the rest of us. So run NoScript. Also, do change your User Agent string. If it has Tiger or PPC in it, it'll make you stick out like a sore thumb. The default user agent for Tor Browser Bundle is currently "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0" and you can find how to change it in various browsers including Firefox here (or, more conveniently, there's the User Agent Switcher add-on). And one more thing, make sure Tor and your browser are updated.

On Linux, Tor automatically runs as a daemon after install, so you don't need to start it up in a terminal, but the TenFourFox instructions above apply to Iceweasel.

Also, you can set up OS X's Network Preferences to use Tor as a system-wide proxy for other applications by following steps 3 & 4 here, but I'm not sure how secure that is if the software we're talking about is no longer supported. You can torify TenFourBird by using the TorBirdy add-on instead.

Last thing I'll mention, if you don't want to use Tor all the time but want all your searches anonymous, one option is DuckDuckGo, but if you like Google better, there's Startpage. It gives you the same search results as Google, but it's done through a proxy so Google has no idea who you are. The plugin for your TenFourFox search bar is here, and many more search plugins are found here.

UPDATE: Apparently with the above TenFourFox/Iceweasel configuration, there is the threat of DNS leaks. The warning message is this:

[warn] Your application (using socks5 to port 443) is giving Tor only an IP address. Applications that do DNS resolves themselves may leak information. Consider using Socks4A (e.g. via privoxy or socat) instead. For more information, please see https://wiki.torproject.org/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#SOCKSAndDNS.

This can be corrected in TenFourFox and Iceweasel by going into about:config and changing network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to "true." This will force dns requests through the proxy and the warning will disappear. You could alternately install Privoxy and set it to use Socks4A like the warning recommends. This will protect you in applications other than your browser as well.

Incidentally, to avoid having to change all these preferences between Tor and non-Tor sessions, you can create a second profile in TenFourFox for just your Tor preferences/add-ons. I experienced a bug in the GUI Profile Manager, so I created a new profile in the command line with this:

/Applications/TenFourFox7450.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -CreateProfile Tor

where Tor is the name of my new profile, and TenFourFox7450.app is the name of the app in my Applications folder (yours may be different depending on your processor type). Now I have two profiles to choose from, default and Tor. To choose which one at startup, enter in the command line:

/Applications/TenFourFox7450.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -p

to bring up the Profile Manager window. Uncheck the "Don't ask at startup" box and the Profile Manager will appear every time you startup TenFourFox allowing you to choose.

There weren't any bugs in Iceweasel's Profile Manager, which you can simply invoke with iceweasel -p.

Make Animated Gifs on PowerPC

Since animated gifs are the weapon of choice in spreading internet memes around the world and aren't going away anytime soon, there's no reason for us PowerPC users to be left out in the cold. There are several applications that make animated gifs on Windows and Intel-only versions of OS X, but finding applications that do the job on PowerPC, particularly making gifs from video clips, is more daunting. Thankfully there are a couple of open source, cross-platform tools that we can combine to grab the video and then export as gifs, namely avidemux and GIMP.

First, download and install avidemux. On Debian, it's available in the deb-multimedia repositories. On OS X, you can download version 2.4.4 which works on Tiger from SourceForge (your choice of QT4 or GTK versions). Then follow the instructions on HOW-TO: Make an animated gif for using avidemux to extract a clip from a video file, specifically using the "A" and "B" buttons and then saving the selection as jpeg images. Hopefully you created a folder for them because it'll output dozens or even hundreds of jpegs.

Next step is to install GIMP if you haven't. On Debian it's in the official repositories, and Tiger and Leopard versions can be downloaded from this site. Then follow the instructions again from the above HOW-TO, using Open As Layers, maybe opening one out of every three or four frames, then do all the cropping and resizing you want, and export as an animated gif.

Done!

And for viewing gifs outside a web browser, there's Xee on OS X and GPicView on Linux.

Here's a quick sample I made. Feel free to re-purpose:

Oh My God

Now Google's banishing my comments to the spam folder on my own blog.

Seriously Internet?

Cool Legacy Apps for OS X

Some apps out there never seem to die. Their developers subsist on a near-lethal cocktail of cigarettes and Red Bull to keep burning the midnight oil so they can deliver new version after new, year after year. How long has Audacity been around? Or GraphicConverter?

However, some developers want off that train and they drop out. Understandable, but that doesn't mean their software has to die with their masochism, I mean, ambition. With that in mind, I thought I'd give a run-down of several software titles whose development has ceased but are still useful and very much not available in the App Store. Let's do this list style:

Bean - An extended version of TextEdit with added features such as live word count, full screen editing, inline graphics, and more. A great, fast alternative to Microsoft Word.

CocoViewX - An iPhoto replacement without the bloat and bizarre file management, CocoViewX offers photo browsing, meta data editing, camera import, and html export.

Cog - This was a music player that I tried out a few years ago in my never-ending quest to replace iTunes. I didn't stick with it because it lacked an equalizer, but now that I have a global equalizer it's no longer an issue and I'm iTunes-free. Cog also properly supports ogg and flac files and handles large libraries with ease.

Desktop Manager - Spaces alternative for Tiger. It just works.

FormulatePro - Want to edit pdf files but don't want Adobe products clogging up your computer? FormulatePro is a good lightweight tool for this. You can insert text, check marks, and also make use of simple drawing tools.

HimmelBar (link updated) - This is an application launcher that sits in your menubar. It looks for applications in common folders like Applications (duh!), Utilities, and Developer and puts them all in one menu for easy access.

Perian - Not an application, but a plugin for Quicktime Player, it lets you play many many many different video formats.

Play - Very similar to Cog, and people on their user forums observed that Play just sounded better than the competition.

Seashore - Photo editor inspired by GIMP but much more lightweight (and more modest in features). Supports layers and you can also save in GIMP's native xcf format, among others.

I'm sure there are many more for the graveyard, but just because the projects are dead doesn't mean we can't still put them to good use. And we can remember fondly when there was a vibrant freeware/shareware community for OS X before it was destroyed by the App Store. Cheers!

What To Do With Your Old PowerPC Mac

In various forum threads and chest thrusting rituals, often the subject comes up, "What do I do with my old Mac?" There are the common answers like fileserver, iTunes server, even Bit Coin miner, but for this post I want to recommend an option I don't often see--Linux testing machine. As open source community projects, Linux distributions rely on the community (you) to test and file bug reports to ensure the optimum reliability of the project. And to be rewarded with a delectable spread of famous meats and cheeses (OK, maybe not).

For this we want to focus on development releases. In Debian, there's Testing and also Sid for advanced users. Ubuntu has development releases, too, but for this How-To we'll concentrate on Debian since Ubuntu is based on it anyway.

If you decide on Testing (Jessie as of this writing), you can install from a Wheezy disc and then upgrade, or you can directly install from a Jessie installer (found on this page). Debian Sid cannot be installed directly from a disc. You must either install Wheezy or Jessie first and then upgrade.

Installing Jessie directly is simple enough, so let's illustrate how to upgrade from Wheezy. Once any kind of Wheezy is installed, it could be just a base system without a GUI, you need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file. You'll see several download mirrors with either "stable" or "wheezy" in them. To upgrade to Testing, replace every instance of "stable" or "wheezy" with either "testing" or "jessie". If you want your system to stick with Jessie after it turns stable, use "jessie", but if you want to stay permanently on a Testing rolling release, use "testing".

Note here, Wheezy installs should list an additional wheezy-updates repository (not to be confused with the security "wheezy/updates" one), but there's no such thing as jessie-updates. Instead, as of right now, it's jessie-proposed-updates, so replace with that. To see which repositories are actually available for your release, enter your mirror's url in a browser (http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian in my case) and click on dists. Peter S. reported problems with this, so I think it's wrong. Just comment out the "wheezy-updates" lines (not "wheezy/updates" in the security urls) and leave it at that.

Once you got all that worked out, save and exit and run the following command to update your repositories:

sudo aptitude update

Then to actually upgrade your system, run:

sudo aptitude full-upgrade

and your kernel and all packages will be upgraded to Testing.

The procedure to upgrade to Sid is basically the same, but Sid doesn't get any security updates or sid-updates, so comment out those lines (if you don't know what "comment out" means without googling, you probably shouldn't be running Sid). Then replace "wheezy" or "jessie", whichever you installed from, with "sid" or "unstable". Then run the two commands above and your computer will explode, I mean, you'll be all set.

From then on, you can install software and report any bugs you find with Debian's reportbug program. It comes in both command line and GUI versions and includes onscreen instructions to walk you through the process. So say if you upgrade to Jessie and suddenly your sound won't work, you can report a bug against alsa-base and say "My system isn't loading the snd-powermac module. What the eff?" Or something like that.

So put those old 'Books and Power Macs to work and make those packages maintainers roll their eyes at looking up Big Endian/Little Endian problems.

MacPorts vs. Tigerbrew

So it's time for another one of those Spy vs. Spy death match posts where I pit two competing software titles against each other, put them through their respective ringers, and conclude with, "Eh, they're both good. It depends on your needs."

Some of you may already have heard of Homebrew. It bills itself as "the missing package manager for OS X" that "installs the stuff you need that Apple didn't." In other words, it enables you to install a lot of Linux tools that aren't otherwise available on OS X. Just like MacPorts, only supposedly simpler and with less headaches. The only glitch is Homebrew has been Intel-only.

This is where Tigerbrew comes in. It's a new fork that runs on PowerPC and Tiger & Leopard. Installation is easy (instructions on the homepage) and it requires Xcode. Now we're ready to put it through its paces.

First, though, let's go back to MacPorts. Initial installation is also easy enough. Just download the installer and run (Xcode required as well). Now in order to test these two package managers out, we need a package to install. The one I have in mind is pianobar. It's a very cool console app for Pandora Radio that I'm stoked to find. Pandora has an official desktop client, but it requires Adobe Air, so screw that. Here's what I get when I install pianobar with MacPorts:

---> Computing dependencies for pianobar
---> Dependencies to be installed: faad2 autoconf m4 perl5 perl5.12 gdbm gettext expat libiconv gperf ncurses xz automake libtool gnutls gmp libtasn1 nettle pkgconfig texinfo json-c libao libgcrypt libgpg-error libmad

As you can see, 25 dependencies. After compiling all that and installing pianobar, it comes to a cool 385 MB of disk space used. Quite a lot.

Here are the dependencies when I install pianobar with Tigerbrew:

Powerbook:~ dan$ brew deps pianobar
faad2
gmp
gnutls
json-c
libao
libgcrypt
libgpg-error
libtasn1
mad
nettle
p11-kit
pkg-config
xz

That's 13 dependencies, and after all the compiling and installing it comes to about 50 MB used. This is where Tigerbrew reveals itself very different from MacPorts. Instead of installing all its own dependencies in /opt/local, independent of your system, Tigerbrew uses OS X's built-in tools, like Python, etc., whenever possible. It also installs everything to your /usr/local.

Does that mean Tigerbrew is superior? Not necessarily. Having a package manager utilize /usr/local has been met with some contention and many people feel MacPorts' way is ultimately better, but with this little demonstration I think we can say Tigerbrew is superior if you're just looking to install a random utility or console app and don't want the massive overhead of MacPorts. MacPorts, on the other hand, may be better if you want to install a ton of packages where the initial overhead would be minimized. There seems to be debate about these issues, though.

Can you use them both side-by-side? Yes, but only if you know what you're doing. You have to be aware of your $PATH and whether you have duplicate tools in /usr/local and /opt/local. Also, when compiling with Tigerbrew, it's probably smart to temporarily move /opt/local to your home folder so there are no conflicts.

A note on pianobar. You can set it to auto-login on startup by creating ~/.config/pianobar/config and adding:

user = youremail
password = yourpassword

along with any other options you want. And there's shell.fm for a console Last.fm client.

pianobar screenshot:

Mounting Linux Partitions in OS X

So I'm dual booting Tiger and Debian on a Powerbook, and miserly me, I didn't set up an extra sharing partition to transfer files between the two. I didn't want that extra hard drive space to go mostly to waste, so I just decided not to deal with it. So where does that leave me now? I could SFTP to another computer and then back again. I could mount the OS X volume in Linux and read from its ~/Public folder. But what if I'm in OS X and want to mount my Linux partition and copy files over from there? I'm SOL, right? Not so fast.

With the install of a couple of tools, MacFUSE and fuse-ext2, you can mount ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystems in OS X. First caveat: I haven't had the guts to write to my Linux partition from OS X. I'm not sure how stable it is and I had no pressing need to experiment. But feel free to be your own guinea pig! That being said, I've had no problems mounting as read-only and copying files from Linux to OS X. So here's a quick how-to.

After you've installed MacFUSE and fuse-ext2, reboot unless you're one of those smartypants who knows you don't have to. I didn't want to find out if I was wrong, so I wimped out and rebooted. This is already going off on a tangeant. I'm also being distracted by pianobar running on Tiger (more on that later). I'll try to be better.

Anyway, once all that's done, fire up Terminal.app and create a new directory in your /Volumes folder with this command:

mkdir /Volumes/your_folder_name

(UPDATE: For some reason the folder disappears on me after reboot. I can just create it again as needed, but I don't know why it does this.)

I named mine /Volumes/Linux, but you can choose your own. Then you want to find out the identifier of your Linux partition. So run diskutil list and you should see your Linux partition among the output. The right column gives the identifier, in my case disk0s5. Now with that handy info you can mount your Linux partition with:

sudo fuse-ext2 /dev/disk0s5 /Volumes/Linux

Obviously replace disk0s5 and Linux with your own particulars. Only there's a bit of a problem here. In Tiger, and I think this is only an issue in Tiger, when you open /Volumes/Linux in the Finder, the folder disappears. Rather vicious bug, but you can still access it in the Terminal with standard commands like ls, cd, and cp, etc.

Also, the above mount command is read-only. If you want to try read/write and see how that goes, add "-o force" to the command.

Unmounting is a simple sudo umount /Volumes/Linux.

If you want the reverse, say total access to your OS X volume while booted in Linux, that involves a couple of issues. First, it'll be read-only unless you disable journaling in OS X. You also won't have access to OS X's home folder (except ~/Public) due to permissions issues. You can read all about how to get around that here and here. I haven't gotten around to experiencing this firsthand, so I'll farm it out to those links. Have fun!

Getting a Usable Trackpad on an Aluminum Powerbook in Debian

(UPDATE: In Debian Jessie, my trackpad performs much better.)

I got an aluminum Powerbook off eBay since I decided using a Sawtooth manufactured 13 years ago as my everyday computer was sad, and that a Powerbook from 2006 would be slightly less sad. Actually, all the other choices were even less palpable. Maybe I'll write a post about why decided to stick with PowerPC, but for now I wanted to focus on one thing. After putting Debian on my Linux partition and booting into it, wow did this trackpad suck. Like slow as molasses. And it wasn't a hardware problem. It worked perfectly in OS X. After doing a bit of googling, I found out it's a common problem among Powerbooks from 2005-2006 and the solution is in configuring the synaptics driver.

So here's what you do. First, you should already have the driver, xserver-xorg-input-synaptics, installed as part of the Xorg meta package. Next, you want to open Leafpad or whatever text editor you have and paste the following in a new file:

Section "InputClass"
   Identifier   "Touchpad"
   MatchIsTouchpad   "yes"
   Driver   "synaptics"
   Option   "SHMConfig"              "true"
   Option   "MinSpeed"               "0.3"
   Option   "MaxSpeed"               "1.0"
   Option   "AccelFactor"            "0.25"
   Option   "LeftEdge"               "0"
   Option   "RightEdge"              "950"
   Option   "TopEdge"                "0"
   Option   "BottomEdge"             "645"
   Option   "FingerLow"              "3"
   Option   "FingerHigh"             "7"
   Option   "TapButton1"             "1"
   Option   "TapButton2"             "0"
   Option   "TapButton3"             "0"
   Option   "VertTwoFingerScroll"    "1"
   Option   "HorizTwoFingerScroll"   "0"
   Option   "LockedDrags"            "1"
EndSection

These settings give you left-click tapping, vertical two-finger scrolling, and locked dragging where you have to click again to release the drag. The FingerLow and FingerHigh values are very low to compensate for the initial (non) sensitivity of my trackpad. If this is too sensitive for you, you can up the values to 10 and 30, respectively, or higher. You can also look up man synaptics for all the options and also synclient -l for a list of your defaults.

Next, save the file as synaptics.conf and create a new folder with:

sudo mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

Finally, copy the synaptics.conf file into the newly created folder with:

sudo cp /path/to/your/synaptics.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf

Now when you restart your X session your new settings should be in effect. In my case it's made for much smoother scrolling, though still not as good as on OS X. Occasionally the trackpad is non-responsive and I have to wake it up with an extra swipe or two.

Another issue specific to these Powerbooks is the keyboard backlight. Via the MintPPC forum, you need to put i2c-dev into /etc/modules and after reboot your keyboard backlight keys should work. Easy.