How to monitor for conflicted files in Dropbox on the Mac OS X Desktop :

The idea here is to create a warning system if any conflicted files appear by using Geektool to display them to your desktop screen. This is just for Mac OS X. Working at the time of writing on Mac OS X 10.5.6.
Geektool is a control panel that lets you display various system logs, etc., on your desktop. It is also available via Mac App Store, as a standalone app.

Over the last few months, I’ve seen a password strength meter on almost every signup form I’ve encountered. Password strength meters are on fire.



Here’s a question: does a meter actually help people secure their accounts? It’s less important than other areas of web security, a short sample of which include:

Preventing online cracking with throttling or CAPTCHAs.
Preventing offline cracking by selecting a suitably slow hash function with user-unique salts.
Securing said password hashes.
With that disclaimer — yes. I’m convinced these meters have the potential to help. According to Mark Burnett’s 2006 book, Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication, which counted frequencies from a few million passwords over a variety of leaks, one in nine people had a password in this top 500 list. These passwords include some real stumpers: password1, compaq, 7777777, merlin, rosebud. Burnett ran a more recent study last year, looking at 6 million passwords, and found an insane 99.8% occur in the top 10,000 list, with 91% in the top 1,000. The methodology and bias is an important qualifier — for example, since these passwords mostly come from cracked hashes, the list is biased towards crackable passwords to begin with.

These are only the really easy-to-guess passwords. For the rest, I’d wager a large percentage are still predictable enough to be susceptible to a modest online attack. So I do think these meters could help, by encouraging stronger password decisions through direct feedback. But right now, with a few closed-source exceptions, I believe they mostly hurt. Here’s why.

Blogger Vladik Rikhter recently outlined how he gained a bunch of Dropbox referrals by using Google AdWords, since paying for the ads cost a lot less than an upgrade. Many Lifehacker readers have already done the same, but some of you told us you didn’t want to spend any money at all. Well, here’s how to get an additional 8GB for free, using AdWords credits and smart keywords.

Font management is the nightmare of a lot of designers, and for good reasons. There are many different types of font formats for different uses, and it’s really difficult to keep up with updated versions of our fonts. PostScript Type 1, TrueType, OpenType PS, Font SuitCase, it never ends.

Although there are fantastic syncing services out there for all types of user data (contacts, email, calendar events, keychains, etc.), there doesn’t seem to be a user-friendly and easy solution to sync fonts between computers. Here is the solution I figured out that worked best for me so far.

Tools of the Trade:

More than one Mac;
A Dropbox account;
A Fontcase license;
A bunch of fonts;
An Internet connection (duh!);
Some time to spare.
For this article, I will assume that you downloaded and installed Fontcase and Dropbox on all the computers you wanna sync your fonts accross.

So with so much dependency on all this, I knew I needed to save this stuff. If Pinboard disappeared tomorrow, I need a way to access this stuff I’m saving. Maciej Ceglowski, developer of Pinboard, gives you the option at any time to export all your items as HTML, XML, or JSON. Data portability is good. However, there’s no automated option to do this.

So I came up with a way to automate everything. This is an idiot’s guide to do it, since I’m by no means a pro at this stuff - I just poke around until I can make it work.

I just fell in love with Calepin. It's a blogging tool that gives you an instant, minimal website using two of geeks' favorite little helpers: Dropbox and Markdown. It is nerdy, but only a little bit, and I'll talk you through the whole thing. By the end of this short tutorial, I bet you'll want one.

Serious writers. Essays, long form journalism, short stories or any kind of ambitious writing needs you to ditch MS Word for Markdown. Writing in plain text using Markdown to denote headlines, emphasis, footnotes and links is the sane way to write human friendly text that is still machine readable. Calepin converts your Markdown files into HTML.

Calepin reads files stored in your Dropbox, so you can edit them with any plain text editor you choose. Storing plain text in Dropbox is a future proof way to keep your best work around forever. Calepin is the easiest way to self publish online.

Learn Markdown right now, in your browser

Technical bloggers. Calepin is essentially a hosted static blog generator with a very simple template. Calepin solves two problems with static blog generators:

Complexity. You only need a Dropbox account and some knowledge of Markdown.
Authoring. Dropbox syncs all your devices together so you can write and edit posts anywhere.

Here’s that rare Steve Jobs story, one that’s never been told, about the company that got away. Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.

Dropbox injects code into the Finder in order to draw the green and blue badges atop your icons. I prefer to run a clean system, and it turns out that you can prevent your Finder from being patched by running these two commands in Terminal:

sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools
rm /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/DropboxHelperInstaller.tgz
I first heard about this last year, and indeed it does not seem to interfere with any non-cosmetic functionality.

What, you haven’t heard of Frenzy, a private social network for your Mac built atop Dropbox cloud storage? Now’s the time to give it a try as developer Aptonic Software announced the first public beta of Frenzy for Mac. You will need either a paid or free 2GB Dropbox account because Frenzy uses hidden Dropbox folders to let you share files, links and messages and track real-time updates via a Twitter-like stream of feed items. It’s a simple, elegant, lightweight and – above all – efficient way of collaborative sharing and commenting that works like a charm.


Your shared items and feeds get synced the next time you’re online, courtesy of the Dropbox backend that automatically updates all your authorized computers with fresh cloud content. This saves you from the hassles of logging in to a web site in order to check out what’s new. Unlike other social networks, Frenzy is focused on private sharing with your closest friend and you always have ownership of everything you share because the items never leave your Dropbox folders – there are no other servers involved.

Just pick your default sharing locations upon first run and you’re good to go. Whenever you feel like sharing a page in your browser, just hit a customizable key combination to invoke an extension that pops up a dialogue where you can type in your optional message. Hit Send and Frenzy gets the job done and immediately returns focus back to the application you were using.

Just created a little script for myself, to clean up all of the conflicted copies the 0.8.1 and 0.8.2 versions of Dropbox created for me. Decided to clean it up, make it a bit more user friendly and post it here, as I'm sure there are other people who'll enjoy it as well. ;-)

Note, this is a PHP script, which means you need PHP-CLI installed. This should be compatible with PHP 4, but I've only tested it with PHP 5.

Just add "?dl=1" at the end of the URL, and their browser will be forced to download it.