Mounting OSX Time Capsule shared drive on Linux

If you've been trying to mount an OS X Time Capsule disk over the network using Samba/CIFS/SMB and you've recently run into the problem: "mount error(13): Permission denied", and you KNOW the password is right then this may help. Basically you now need to inform Linux CIFS of the specific security mechanism to use (sec=ntlm). E.g. To mount the drive as root (where share_pwd is the password required to access the drive):

# mount -t cifs //server_ip/Data /mnt/Data -opasswd=share_pwd,sec=ntlm

As an alternative it is also possible to use the Netatalk package under Linux to mount the Time Capsule drive using Apple Filesharing Protocol (AFP).

PS: If you were hoping to mount the Time capsule drive that you either had plugged in or removed from inside your Time Capsule see my earlier post.

[28jun14: Updated to clarify that this regarding network mounting]

Cure unresponsive iPhone voicemail (and gain some space)

It seems that Apple's 'Visual Voicemail' is all very well but when you delete a message it doesn't actually get deleted - it gets put in a "recycle bin" taking up space and slowing the phone down or 'freezing' it (and hanging around when you though they had gone). This seems to be a particular problem on iPhone 4's running iOS7, though can also affect newer iPhones such as the 4S, 5, and 5S.

To fix this open the Phone app and select voicemail, then scroll right to the bottom of the list of voicemails where it says 'Deleted Messages'. Tap on that and you'll see all your old voicemails - to get rid of them tap on 'Clear All' at the top right and they're finally wiped away. You might also want to delete some of you existing voicemail messages to gain some additional space, and generally speed up voicemail and the Phone app  a bit more.

If you're having trouble with iPhone freezes, or it going slow, when attempting to delete all those voicemail messages then try switching on Airplane Mode and deleting them all, then switching it back off again when you're done.

Viewing Preview's PDF annotations on iOS

If someone sends you a PDF document that has been annotated on a Mac using OSX Preview the default PDF viewer in iOS (Iphone/iPad) does not show the annotations (which is a bore). A search doesn't reveal an immediately useful answer so I thought I'd create one. So far I've found two free apps to view Preview's PDF annotations:

• PDFMate by realazy
• Documents Free by Savy Soda

Ghostery app's new WiFi Protection feature

I'm a fan of the Ghostery apps and plugins - they allow one to keep an eye on just how many other people are trying to snoop over my shoulder when I'm on the web.

The latest version of the iOS Ghostery app (v1.4) mentions a new feature called 'Wifi Protection via proxy automatic file (aka PAC file)', but with little explanation as to what it is... I took a look at this new version at it seems they've come up with a way to add tracker blocking for ALL apps when connected to WiFi. They have done this by creating a custom PAC file which you need to copy and paste into your WiFi setup which then provides for filtering (in Javascript) of trackers for all connections when on that WiFi network (you will need to copy and paste the PAC file for each WiFi network you connect to for it work on all WiFI networks you connect to). To enable it you click on the WiFi button in Ghostery and follow their instructions.

If you're paranoid you can download their Javascript PAC file and host it on your own server (and modify the PROXY entries so it uses your own server to return 'HTTP/1.1 204 No Content').
This looks like a pretty nice feature, though they caution that one should use Chrome or Ghostery as Mobile Safari may be a bit slow.

One thing that comes to mind is that us of PAC files could provide for a nasty security hole as you can basically fill them with an arbitrary JavaScript function that could do all sorts of fun stuff like redirect your more sensitive web visits elsewhere. This is not to say Ghostery is doing this but it just brought to mind the possibilities - so beware of random PAC files.

VLAN's on linux

A quick search for VLAN setup on Linux brings up a few old docs which suggest the use of the 'vconfig' utility. But these days one can use the very versatile 'ip' command as explained here. For example one can create a VLAN interface on the eth0 hardware interface with VLAN ID 2 like this:

sudo ip link add link eth0 name eth0.2 type vlan id 2

One can assign an address to the interface like a normal interface:

sudo ip addr add 192.168.2.2/24 dev eth0.2

And to delete the address:

sudo ip link del dev vlan0  type vlan id 2

To show list full details of the interfaces (including VLAN id):

ip -d link

iOS7 uses IPv6 privacy address extensions

I got a curious warning from Google about a 'Suspicious sign in prevented' which turned out to be a connection over IPv6 from my iPhone to Gmail. I'm aware that I've been using IPv6 for a while now - it's been in iOS since iOS4 I think - so either Google has recently started warning people about changing IPv6 logins, or iOS7 has updated their implementation to include IPv6 privacy extensions (Specified in RFC4941). Either way it seems iOS7 is definitely using IPv6 privacy addressing (and possibly older versions of iOS also) which means that the IPv6 address of your iPhone/iPad will change over time and will not reflect the underlying Ethernet hardware MAC address (as it does for the basic stateless autoconfiguration).

It seems that privacy addressing is becoming the default as a number of OSes have adopted them (Linux, OSX, Windows) a while ago. Overall I think it's a good thing as I'm not sure I want my device to potentially be tracked by its hardware address (which is largely contained in a normal autoconfigured IPv6 address).

Compressing videos quickly

I was compressing some videos today using the venerable ffmpeg and noticed things going rather slowly. Then I spotted that the H.264 library libx264 was saying: "using cpu capabilities: none!" - Ah that might explain it...

I'm on a Mac OSX machine using a version of libx264 from MacPorts. It turns out that the default install does not enable any CPU optimisations. So I just needed to rebuild it with asm variant to enable it's assembly code based optimisations:

sudo port -u install x264 +asm

I reran ffmpeg and libx264 logged that it was using a whole string of it's CPU specific optimisations and running a whole lot faster!

If you're on Linux/Windows/Raspberry-Pi you're probably running the same problem. This is because the people who ship software need to compile it in a way that runs on most machines - which means it's not going be tailored to run best on your particular machine. So the helpful folks at ffmpeg have put together a compilation guide on how to do it yourself.

iPhone Call blocking available on iOS 7

Following my previous post on how to block callers on iOS6. With iOS7 it is now finally built into the system - you just go to Settings->Phone->Blocked and add whoever you [don't] like! You can also add to the Blocked list from Settings->Messages->Blocked or Settings->Facetime->Blocked. Note: Once you've blocked them they won't be able to Call, Message, or Facetime you.