Federico Pistono

Tip: you might be interested in my DVD ripping guide ^_^

Upgrading to Leopard has not been an audacious move to me. I'm typically a little bit skeptical of new OSs, the best thing to do is usually to wait until it's been properly tested, check that all your components are supported, that all the major issues are solved and then proceed with the so long desired upgrade.

With Leopard my choice was very different though. I just upgraded. Unlike many others I did not encounter major problems, on the contrary, I've solved most of the issues I had with Tiger, so overall I consider the move quite beneficial. There is, however, one big problem that most of Leopard users seem to have stumbled upon. Apparently any external hard drive or device connected through firewire stopped working after a Leopard installation. To be precise, the drives still work with other machines, but they have a big issue with Leopard.

I stumbled across this very interesting greasemonkey script: Folders4Gmail.

It's a smart way to organise your Gmail labels. Gmail user interface and usability have always been quite satisfactory, not even comparable to any other service I've ever tried. With this extensions your labels will be quickly organised in a folder-like collapsible hierarchy.

This is just one example of how Open Source can make your life a lot easier. Greasemonkey works with Firefox, and the basic idea of any OSS project is: "You want something? You can do it. You can have it."

Excellent. This truly improves the already outstanding Gmail experience.

If you happen to be a voracious torrent user you may have found yourself in the situation where instead of a film your video player displays a still text inviting you to download their stupid trojan-horse infected video proprietary video player.

Basically the video file is there, but it's been encrypted so that only that particular crappy video player allows you to see it. Or is it? Apparently 3wplayer are not very bright, all they did was using standard exclusive or (XOR) with a short string, which makes sense. It's really easy to implement, saves space since the function for encoding and decoding is the same and most importantly it's fast, wich it has to be when dealing with video. What those morons who created that stupid player forgot, was that if you have a lot of the same bytes in the file you want to encrypt, the XOR key shines through. (hacking code below!)