It's taken a while, but someone has finally cracked it. I've been a Mac OS X launcher geek for a while now, having spent years with Quicksilver (at one point ranking it as my no. 1 Mac OS utility). I've also tried Alfred, and more recently, LaunchBar  from the talented folks at Objective Development (the makers of Little Snitch). To be honest, Spotlight search has always been close, in particular since it nearly always ranks the 'top hit' correctly - which is usually the app I'd like to launch. The only thing missing from Spotlight, and from Mac OS X in general, is the ability to easily create global, system-wide keyboard shortcuts. There 'are' ways to do this, but they're complicated, and not something you get 'out of the box' with Mac OS X (which is a little weird).

And so along comes Apptivate - an excellent and extremely easy to configure system-wide, keyboard shortcut manager. Great work from Cocoabeans Software - as it scratched the itch I had, and has meant I can drop the other launchers, relying on Spotlight for the rest. Apptivate is free - for the moment at least, although their newly designed homepage has all the 'hallmarks' of an app that may be headed to the App Store. Try out Apptivate today  ;-) UPDATE: In a tweet from the author, @apptivateapp - the app was in the App Store - but was removed due to sandboxing restrictions.

For a little while now I've wanted to be able to chroot both SFTP and SHH accounts on one of my multi-user VPSs. SFTP on its own is not so difficult. OpenSSH 4.9p1 and above includes the ChrootDirectory directive. And an SFTP chroot is a little more forgiving in so far as it doesn't actually require any supporting system or userpsace services (a shell, ls, cp, etc.), which is why you often see ChrootDirectory accompanied with `ForceCommand internal-sftp` which will prevent SSH access altogether.

What I'd like to do is create a restricted environment for both SSH and SFTP. I spent a little while looking at a very interesting project from Olivier Sessink called [Jailkit](http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/). Jailkit has most of what I was looking for but, it has quite a few moving parts, including the need to replace a users shell with a special Jailkit shim that hands over to Jailkit. This is okay but it means changes to passwd are required, and editing your `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` to use `Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server` and not `Subsystem sftp internal-sftp` if you want to chroot and jail both SFTP and SHH logins.

It turns out that OpenSSH gets us most of the way there with the ChrootDirectory directive. And so here are the steps required to create a minimal chroot jail on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Here's a recipe for encrypting an external drive with Mac OS X FileVault, and then creating an emergency bootable backup using SuperDuper.

You'll need an external drive - ideally USB 3 or Thunderbolt, if you're going to boot from it. I'm using the 1TB Buffalo Ministation

In the photo included in this post you can see my new Razor Orochi mouse. It's a pretty cool mouse, but I confess I'm not entirely sure if it actually belongs to me - or at least which parts of the mouse belong to me.

In the photo you can see that there's a light in the mouse wheel. It's on at the moment, but to turn it on I had to first download the Razor Synapse software, register with the company that made the mouse [Razor], 'log in', and then change the settings of the mouse so that the light would turn on.

I wasn't impressed. Nor were a lot of other people as you can see here, and here. Razer Creative Director Min-Liang Tan attempted to respond to the criticism in a Facebook post. Sorry Mr Min-Lian Tan, but I'm calling bullshit. The opportunity for Razar wasn't about giving gamers' an online profile and cloud-based settings. It was about the incredibly useful data they're able to collect for the retail sales of their products on a global scale.

Here's a recipe for adding (and formatting) captions to images in Drupal using Entity View Modes, File Entity, and Media 2.0

Bash is fun. It's a little weird, but it's fun. I've been reading the Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible which I highly recommend. I also wanted a script I could use to update the multiple WordPress installations I'm now hosting.

I recently suffered a UDP flood attack on my little virtual private server (VPS) and thought I'd describe the steps I went through to discover and fix the problem.

Symptoms

Periodically, my server would stall and become unresponsive. It was effectively dead, although not down. These 'stalling' events would last from 5-20 minutes, and then the server would come back up. Looking at my Munin charts told me that my public ethernet interface (eth0) was being flooded. Here's a particularly bad day:

It's Androids turn this time. Here's a list of must-have Android Apps for my Jelly Bean update:

1) It bugs the hell out of me that there isn't a decent and simple note taking app in Android. ColorNote makes up for it fine. ColorNote

2) The default Google Calendar also drives me nuts. I want a month view, with at least a few character preview for each item and a list below the month. Jorte is perfect for month and week views with gestures that make sense - although the data entry is a little ugly. Jorte Update: I actually tried Business Calendar before Jorte and for some reason my first attempt didn't stick. I've since tried it a few more times and I'm liking it a lot. Business Calendar.