Installing OS X 10.11 El Capitan inside Parallels Desktop

This is actually surprisingly straightforward, once you know the hoops to jump through. Essentially there are 4 main things we need to do: Download El Capitan from the App Store Prepare an install image Create a virtual machine Install El Capitan So let’s take a look at those, one by one… Step 1: Download El Capitan […]

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The “Snooper’s Charter” is back, despite being illegal

Despite the European Court of Justice telling the UK it’s illegal, the Snooper’s Charter is back, and they’re scaremongering to justify it. What part of “it’s illegal” because it “interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data” does our government not […]

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Sharing entropy between computers with entropyservice

Suffering with low entropy on Xen/KVM/VMware VMs? Get help from another computer with better entropy sources. Check out entropyservice. It allows low entropy machines (eg virtual machines) to collect data from another host with high entropy (eg a real computer) via SSH, then stir it in to the kernel’s entropy pool using rngd. Find out […]

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iOS 7 status bar fix for Sencha Touch apps

Sencha Touch hasn’t been updated for iOS 7’s new fullscreen views yet. This causes the status bar to overlap your app’s content, which looks rather messy. Luckily it’s really easy to get things working again if all your views use title bars / navigation bars. Just drop this code into app.js (after your last Ext.Viewport.add […]

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shareit: Simple FTP-based file sharing from the command line

File sharing websites tend to have ads everywhere, and long running HTTP uploads of large files can be a pain in the backside, so I stopped using them a while back. Whenever I needed to share a file with someone, I’d figure out the file’s MD5 sum (to avoid naming collisions), fire up Transmit (the nicest Mac […]

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