Open a terminal, and type in:

defaults write com.microsoft.Excel AppleLanguages ‘(“en-US”)’
defaults write com.microsoft.Word AppleLanguages ‘(“en-US”)’
defaults write com.microsoft.Powerpoint AppleLanguages ‘(“en-US”)’

en-US stands for English – USA.

Restart Excel, Powerpoint or Word. DONE

This is fairly simple. Open a Terminal type:

defaults write org.gpgtools.gpgmail DefaultSecurityMethod -int 2

Close Mail, open it again and you are set.

No matter what you prefer either GPG/PGP encryption over S/MIME – it is always a good thing to encrypt your email.
Setting up S/Mime on a Mac is simpler then you think.

Go for example to Comodo, get a free certificate by filling out the simple form (name + email), wait for the email, click on the link, download the certificate, double click, restart Mail – DONE!

As in my previous post, sometimes it is necessary to have “full” internet access instead of limited access. Even that Tor is initially done to anonymize you, it also does a great job in such occasions.

To redirect all traffic on Mac OS X thru Tor, follow these steps.

Step 1 – Choose “System Preferences” from the Apple  menu.
Step 2 – Choose “Network” from the menu.
Step 3 – Choose “Edit Locations” from the Location menu.
Step 4 – Click the “+” icon to add an additional location.
Step 5 – Type in a new name for your location (I used Tor), then click “Done”.
Step 6 – Select “Airport” from the list on the left side.
Step 7 – Click “Advanced”
Step 8 – Click on “Proxies” in the list.
Step 9 – Activate “SOCKS Proxy” by ticking the checkbox
Step 10 – In the SOCKS Proxy Server box, type localhost and 9050.
Step 11 – Click “OK” and then click “Apply”.

Now you can easily switch the environments in the upper center menu of the system preferences.

I travel a lot and sometimes I end up in hotels that claim to have internet, but after a couple of minutes I realize they mean HTTP and HTTPS, maybe Skype.

I am not sure why some hotels are super paranoid about outgoing protocols, but the second you want to upload something (e.g. GIT over SSH) or administrate your server you need a lot more ports than a usual user.

My way of “tricking” the hotel firewall is using Tor for such things.

Step 1 – Install Tor on the Mac
I am using the Command Line tools for Tor and load them using MacPorts (you will need to download and install MacPorts).

Step 2 – Install the tor components
$ sudo port install tor torsocks

Step 3 – Run tor (could take a couple of seconds)
$ tor &

Step 4 – Connect using torify
$ torify ssh user@spamcollect.com

This will not anonymize your traffic, this is just a way around firewalls etc..

When the rumor came up that Apple is working on a smart watch, a lot of people got pretty excited. More interesting, a lot of big hardware vendors started working on smart watches, which some just got announced. E.g. Sony and Samsung.

The main question still is, how could a smart watch change your life? I doubt there is a big benefit in having your phone hooked to your watch constantly. Especially as your phone is just 30 centimeters away.

But more important, a watch is something very special to most man (sorry ladies, but I think they are the main audience for a smart watch) wearing one. It is the only peace of jewelry a man is wearing in the usual case. And in addition to that, it is usually a pretty expensive, but classical watch like a Rolex, Patek Philippe or Panerai.

Can you imagine business man running around with a display on there hands just to see the latest Tweet or Facebook update from his mates?

Brings me to the conclusion that such a thing would just be a niche product.
If Apple is really hopping on this wagon they are really lost and out of ideas!

I described a problem related to Samba shared drives on Windows and connecting them with Mac OS X Lion here.

After three months and two more versions of Lion there is still no solution. The guy from Apple never called back and never replied to my email.

I see this problem on all Macs running Lion in my company. So this is not my machine.

Apple support was one of the best in the industry for many years. Today it is just like the rest of the support hotlines. It takes hours to explain and it gets never solved.

Thanks! I liked Snow Leopard better because it actually worked!
Do I have to move back to a PC? After all these years?

What an interesting experience!
I found a bug in OS X Lion related to Finder and connecting to SMB / windows shared drives. Basically whenever I try to access a company wide shared drive on a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise 64bit via SMB thru the Finder, I get a message saying like “You don’t have permission to access this object”. Interesting thing, trying to mount the drive via Terminal on the Unix Shell and accessing the drive, opening files, saving files etc. work just fine. So it is related to the Finder.

I wanted to submit my bug to Apple, but didn’t find anything on the webpage. So I called the hotline.
The guy in the first level support told me that words like “Terminal”, “mount” and “smb” don’t mean anything to him, but I could not compare mounting a drive on a unix shell with the Finder. He said this is something completely else and I have to talk to my local windows administrator. THIS GUY HAD NO IDEA! He first refused to forward me to someone from second level support first and tried to solve it by himself. Good idea, but he absolutely had no idea about OS X and shell commands.

After a while I got forwarded to the second level support. I am waiting for feedback now, but it looks like Apple is only opening bugs thru the hotline.

For everyone who has the same issue, you could open a Terminal and access your drive by going to /Volumes/NAMEOFSHARED .