Okay, you probably already know the ol’ Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want.

I purchased new JVC HDD camcorder over the weekend and took a couple test clips and found difficulties importing the videos over the firewire cable to my macbook in iMovie.  Plugging the video camera into the firewire port of my Macbook did nothing.  After some Googling I came to discover that the best way to import the videos is to actually use the USB port to do it.

The software needed is ffmpegX.  Download it, then copy the binary to your applications directory.  On your first launch, you will be prompted to get the encoders.  I downloaded the encoders into a newly created directory: /Library/Encoders.  Once you’ve downloaded and extracted the contents of the .zip file, click on the location buttons to tell the application where the encoders are.

Now lets look at the workflow:

1.  Plug camera into the usb port of your macbook, a new drive will appear on your desktop.

2.  copy the contents of the SD_Video folder to your mac excluding everything other than the *.MOD files.  (This means you want the .MOD files on your mac)

3.  Open ffmpegX

4.  Drag the video you want to import to ffmpegX

5.  Choose the video type you want to encode to (I like using DV, it makes bigger files, but is better quality IMO)

6.  Click the encode button.

7.  Repeat for all other video files you want to import.

8.  Open your video editing application (I use iMovie) and import the converted video file for editing.

That’s it!  Happy editing!

If you are running Cisco’s VPNClient on Mac OSX, you might be familiar with (or tormented by) “Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem”. The simple fix is to quit VPNClient, open a Terminal window, (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and type the following:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

and give your password when it asks. This will stop and start the “VPN Subsystem”, or in other words restart the CiscoVPN.kext extension. Cisco seems to have problems when network adapters disappear and reappear, something that happens commonly in Wireless or Dial-up scenerios. Sometimes putting a system to sleep, disconnecting an Ethernet cable or simply reconnecting your wireless will cause CiscoVPN to loose track of the network adapters on the system. Considering that CiscoVPN is typically used by telecommuters, this is an astonishing oversight on Cisco’s part. The above hack should side-step all of these issues by causing the CiscoVPN to re-initialize. It makes one ask, why couldn’t Cisco have just put the restart into their client? Or a better idea would be to not reinvent the wheel and use the existing IPSec VPN support in OSX! Am I missing something?

Well, it’s come to the Mac. One variant of the fake Codec, DNSChanger, is now being seen on Mac porn. From Intego:

A malicious Trojan Horse has been found on several pornography web sites, claiming to install a video codec necessary to view free pornographic videos on Macs. A great deal of spam has been posted to many Mac forums, in an attempt to lead users to these sites. When the users arrive on one of the web sites, they see still photos from reputed porn videos, and if they click on the stills, thinking they can view the videos, they arrive on a web page that says the following:

Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file.
Please click here to download new version of codec.

After the page loads, a disk image (.dmg) file automatically downloads to the user’s Mac. If the user has checked Open “Safe” Files After Downloading in Safari’s General preferences (or similar settings in other browsers), the disk image will mount, and the installer package it contains will launch Installer. If not, and the user wishes to install this codec, they double-click the disk image to mount it, then double-click the package file, named install.pkg.

If the user then proceeds with installation, the Trojan horse installs; installation requires an administrator’s password, which grants the Trojan horse full root privileges. No video codec is installed, and if the user returns to the web site, they will simply come to the same page and receive a new download.

Is this just childlike schadenfreude on my part? You tell me. For years, we’ve heard snorts of derision from Mac users about the poor security of PCs. Yet that supercilious attitude (as we know from our history books) is patently dangerous, because it creates a false sense of security. Now, Mac users will need to be a bit more careful out there (‘cause when Joey wants his pr0n, he wants it now!). On the heels of the poorly-secured release of Leopard, we now find that there is no perfect protection against human stupidity social engineering, even for a Mac user.