Apple Newbie

Apple’s iBook and iMac ranges do not support screen spanning by default although it comes with a graphics chipset (ATI Radeon Mobility) that supports the feature. What’s screen spanning? It’s something like an extended desktop where your desktop area stretches across two monitors instead of both monitors displaying the same thing. They say once you’re used to dual displays you won’t go back. iBook and iMac users can actually experience this, with a tool called the Screen Spanning Doctor.

It involves hacking the Open Firmware to enable screen spanning support, a feature available on PowerMacs and PowerBooks.

BTW please don’t try this on notebooks that run other chipsets like the older ATI Rage, as it will screw up your hardware! The list of officially supported machines and machines that are not supported are available here.

Download the Screen Spanning Doctor by Rute Moeller

Google released Google Secure Access, which is basically a VPN service aimed at Wi-Fi users that allows the encryption of over-the-air data to protect it from sniffers. Your data is encrypted between your system and Google’s VPN server, where Google will route your data to the original destination.

However, Google has not released a client for Mac OS X yet. No worries. The Google Secure Access VPN is actually a 128bit PPTP connection. Instead of logging in with your Google userid and password (Gmail?), the username and password is randomly generated and returned to the client via an XML file.

Once you know how it works, you can easily write an Applescript to connect to it as Mac OS X already has all the necessary software to connect to Google Secure Access’s VPN. Basically you need to download the auto-generated XML file containing the username and password to use, parse the file, then tell Internet Connect to dial a PPTP VPN connection to vpn.google.com with that username and password.

Kevin Stock has already written such an Applescript.

Update: Kevin’s site seems to be down, so here’s the AppleScript.

Google caps your speed to about 512kbps when you are connected to their VPN server, but if you need the extra security, I’d recommend you connect to it! I’ve just tried HTTP browsing, POP3 and IMAP access and they all work. SMTP seems to be blocked. I suppose Google does not want spammers to take advantage of masking their own IP through the Google Secure Access VPN which translates the source IP to Google’s own block of IPs.

For more information on how to run your Applescripts, read on Apple’s Script Menu. All you have to do is put the script into your Scripts folder and run it from the Script Menu in Finder.