Murphy Mac

If you didn’t participate in Macheist you missed out on a great application called 1Password. With 1Password you can store your login credentials from multiple websites and log in with a couple clicks.

Do you have multiple Gmail accounts? 1Password makes it a snap to switch between them. (there are other applications for this purpose) Actually, if you have multiple usernames on ANY website 1Password will help you keep them straight. Watch the screencast to see how Murphy sets up sites for 1Password.

It seems like Murphy is creating new usernames and passwords all the time. Keeping them sorted can be taxing on the brain. The last thing you want to do is use the same password on multiple sites. Better still, 1Password can help you generate strong, unique passwords since you won’t have to remember them. (more…)

Your Mac makes it easy to browse the web using a secure connection to a proxy. There are a couple of reasons you might want to do something like this:

• You’re working at a company that has blocked access to certain sites
• You’re using a wifi hot-spot and you think the provider might be snooping
• You don’t want your work IT guys watching your traffic.
• You’re having unresolvable problems connecting to Internet resources from your current location.

Lifehacker posted complete instructions on how to configure Firefox to use an SSH session for all its activity. There are only two steps. One is to change a preference in Firefox. The other is to initiate the SSH session using the N and D options - which together listen for a specified port on your machine and send the corresponding traffic to the proxy - which is the machine at the other end of your SSH connection.

The proxy (maybe a machine at your house or your hosting provider) actually retrieves the web pages you want using its Internet connection, then sends them to you over the encrypted channel. The provider at your location can’t see what you’re browsing, they just see that you’re connected to a remote computer using SSH.

If you’ve got a Mac at home that you can leave on you can use it for this purpose. But it’s not ideal. Most residential ISPs don’t deliver good upstream speed. Everything you want to see will first be downloaded and then uploaded by the machine at your house.

Murphy’s hosting provider allows SSH access. That’s a valuable thing in a host for many reasons - and it allows you to use their machine(s) as your proxy. You’ll probably get much better bandwidth going that route. Nice pun.

In the screencast Murphy uses a domain name instead of the external IP of his home machine. This is accomplished through an entry in the hosts file. He also mentions using ssh, securely, without passwords. There’s a screencast on that too.

Sidenote: Murphy started creating this screencast at Panera and realized the G5 at home (which can accept an SSH connection) was asleep. But there’s a Windows machine that’s always on in the basement - and it can be contacted to wake up other machines on the home network. You could do something like this with Mail rules - or just use Chicken of the VNC.

How much longer are all those old MTV videos going to be parked on YouTube? Probably not much longer. It seems like more and more videos disappear from Murphy’s favorites every day. What can you do about it? Download some of your favorites and store them yourself.

There are plenty of tools for downloading the videos. And others that play them. There are probably even some that do both. For the screencast Murphy uses a really simple add-on he started with a while back, when there weren’t as many. It’s called VideoDownloader. If you’re just a casual downloader it’ll probably meet your needs. Other tools have more features, like the ability to queue pages for download. Check this post on TUAW for a rundown on the other tools.

In the screencast Murphy uses VLC to playback the downloaded video.

Who knows why the MTV video library isn’t online yet. But after Monday’s EMI news you never know what might happen. In the meantime, maybe you should grab some of your favorites from sites like YouTube.

Usually we save Monday for the really easy stuff. Murphy was a little late getting back from vacation, so this week it’s Tuesday.You can drag a URL from one window to another in Safari and Firefox.

You can create a new tab this way in Safari, or just drag a tab in Firefox. You can even drag a URL from Firefox to Safari.

In the screencast Murphy covers all the details. He’ll also show dropping a URL on the Desktop and dragging a background window - for a little bonus.

Among Murphy Mac readers, Safari is beating Firefox 36 to 32 percent. Believe it or not, 18 percent of the readers are using Windows. But only 5 percent are using IE. What do you think - work machines locked down so Firefox can’t be installed??

Regardless, it seems well worth taking a look at how Firefox handles RSS feeds. If you weren’t watching yesterday, we covered RSS for Safari. The two browsers take different approaches. Firefox leads you toward toolbar based feeds while Safari gets straight to showing you the feed’s content.

RSS week continues tomorrow, so check back for Murphy’s method for adding multiple feeds to one Safari tab.