When I was a kid I attended a high school assembly in observation of the Holocaust.   The other kids and I met an elderly couple in the local library.  The older gentleman was a concentration camp survivor who showed us his tattoo.  He was a little difficult to understand but his wife did most of the talking.  The man told a story of how when he first entered the camp they gave him rotten potatoes to eat.  He refused to eat them and instead gave them away to other prisoners.  After a couple of days he said he was so hungry that he went back to the prisoners to whom he had given the potatoes and told them that they each owed him a potato.  He cried and I remember thinking how many times he had told this story and still he was moved to tears.

We were made to read Anne Frank Diaries after.

I think that that was the first time ever that I was projected out of myself and started thinking about the things that other people go through.  I was made bigger by that assembly and smaller at the same time.  That was many years ago and I still feel compelled to visit Amsterdam and the Anne Frank House.

I haven’t made it so far but it’s still on my list of things to do.  Score one point for high school assemblies.

The above video is the only existing moving images of Anne Frank.

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John Harwood’s take on Obama’s stay in school speech.

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Really love the dictionary feature on NYtimes.com.  Highlight any text and a small icon appears over the word.  Click the icon and it brings up an Answers.com speaking dictionary .  Useful and saves time.  Cool.

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Well you can bet if both browsers aren’t working in the same way it’s some component that’s affecting both browsers.  I’m smart like that.  Turns out that I had installed Speed Download found it to be overkill and uninstalled it with  AppCleaner .  Although AppCleaner usually does a good job this time the install was incomplete and left Library/Internet Plugins/SpeedDownload Browser Plugin.plugin to cause problems.  Since it sat there until I  upgraded my browser it wasn’t easy connecting the problem to an app I deleted months ago.  Long story short.  Problem found.  Problem solved.

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First of all, don’t install Saft [aaargh!] to your Safari browser.  Classic piece of annoyance-ware that won’t leave you alone until you buy it and won’t uninstall without several hours of internet research.  Here are the relevant files to delete that don’t require you to gain root access to your computer which might end up causing you more grief than Saft.  (1) Delete Saft.app from your applications folder; (2) Delete ‘com.li.hao.saft.plist’ from your user preferences folder; ~/Library/Preferences/com.li.hao.saft.plist; (3) Delete Saft from your user applications support folder, ~library/Application Support/Saft; and (4) Delete Saft from your root (not user) folder, /Library/InputManagers/Saft.  None of these files should be hidden but in case you can’t find you can use this utility dotfiles or revealhiddenfiles to reveal and hide hidden mac .files without having to fool with the Terminal yourself.

update: Google lists Saft site as attack site.  Probably due to user complaints.

update: If you want to trick out safari then try glims.  It’s free.

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Peter Stark’s article for Outside Magazine, The Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death, not only pushes this post to the maximum allowed number of puns in a post it is awfully good writing.  I’m going to give you the opportunity to encounter the story in the way that I did, with a paucity of introduction.  Visit Amazon for more books by this author.

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I’m told that these are pictures of the first all female all black flight crew.  They operated flight 5202 from Atlanta to Nashville and flight 5106 from Nashville back to Atlanta for Atlantic Southeast Airlines on Thursday, Ferbraury 12, 2009. The crew included CPT Rachelle Jones, FO Stephanie Grant, FA’s Robin Rogers and Diana Galloway.  Youtube interview here.

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TransformMovie rotates and resizes quicktime movies and performs one other trick that I’ve been looking for forever.  It allows you to set the speed at which a Quicktime movie plays, faster or slower.  With TransformMovie your visitors won’t have to sit through a tutorial that renders at the same speed that it was recorded.

TransformMovie is more of a utility than a full featured application.  It is not complicated and the ’scale duration’ feature will have you up and running in under ten minutes.

Limit Point Software lists TransformMovie as donationware.  The demo is fully functional for 10 days before requiring a registration in order to obtain a permanent password.  Of course, you should consider sending the developer some cash via Paypal.

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Spector is a keylogger for the MAC.  If you find the spyware on your computer then someone with access to it has trust issues.  Spector is supposed to be invisible to the user but it is a resource hog.  In addition to spying on your activities it will begin to slow your computer.  You may notice this during startup.

Here’s how to locate and * permanently kill the program on your Macintosh.

Download evaluation copy of ** Peek-a-Boo.  You’ll also need a text editor.  Any will work but I like the free Smultron.

Open Peek-a-Boo.  Under ‘File’, select ‘Process List’.  Search for a process named ‘DriverSPd’.  This is the Spector monitoring code.  Highlight this file by clicking on it.  Under ‘Manage’ click ‘Kill’.  This will temporarily disable Spector until you restart your computer.

To permanently disable Spector, use Spotlight to find where DriverSPd is located.  It should be in /library/StartupItems/SystemStart/DriverSPd.  You cannot delete items from the SystemStart folder but you can replace DriverSPd with an empty file named DriverSPd.

If you are interested in looking at the DriverSPd code, use Smultron to open the file and copy the code to another file.

*You won’t be able to fully uninstall Spector without the password so be careful, as you can re-enable it by replacing the empty DriverSPd file with a functioning DriverSPd file.

** You should be able to replicate Peek-a-Boo functions with MAC’s own ‘Activity Monitor‘.

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