multifunctional webcam privacy tool

Apparently, hackers (or worse, government) can access your webcam without the notification LED switching on. The dutch ministry advised users to put a piece of tape on your webcam when not using it. But that's a sticky situation.. Some companies are now making their own removable "webcam privacy tools".

But why spend money on something when you already have the tools? For most laptops a clothes pin will work perfectly. Just place it over the little webcam lens and voila, no more sneaky peeking. And as an added bonus, you can use it to place your glasses or hang your earbuds!


Useful tip: change the location for the iOS device backups in iTunes

Yesterday I tried restoring a backup to my iPad (just installed iOS 5 beta) and all of a sudden my Mac started complaining that my diskspace was too low. Eventually, there was nothing left from the 128Gig SSD I have in my Macbook.
I was confused, what was the cause? After some thorough searching I found out it was due to the size of my backup folder in iTunes. 
This folder was about 50 GB in size! Not surprising since we own 2 iPads 64G, 2 iPhone 4s, 2 iPod touches and some old iPhone 3Gs.. (not all of them were backed up though)

My iTunes library is located on my 750GB HDD which I mounted instead of my SuperDrive. So I thought everything iTunes would be stored there. Wrong!

The backup is located in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup - right, on my space limited SSD. There is no way to change the location in iTunes itself, but thanks to Oliver Aaltonen I found a way to do so manually. On his site, you can find tips for both Mac and Windows, I will just repeat the Mac tip here:

  • Close iTunes
  • Move the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup folder to the destination 
  • The ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync folder should now be empty
  • Open up Terminal and type the following:
    ln - s /<path to destination>/Backup/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup
That's it! In my case I got 50Gigs extra space on my SSD! I think this is a great tip for those people who have a Macbook Air with only 64G SSD. But everyone with smaller disks can benefit, of course.

Just another hint, if you are running OS X Lion, you'll notice the ~/Library cannot be found. This is because it is hidden. Just open up Finder, in the menu bar select "Go" and then "Go to Folder" and enter ~/Library .. this will open up the hidden folder for you.
Extra, extra tip: Just holding down the <option> key when you click "Go" in the menu bar will reveal ~/Library as an option in the list.

Bibble 5 Pro RC released and a nice Preset for you to play with

Bibble Labs has released the RC version for Bibble 5 Pro


I have created a nice Preset to celebrate.

See what it does in the following before/after images:

Before:


After:


The Preset is based on a bleach bypass curve with added color editing (to get the brownish tint) and of course added vignetting.

Here is the preset:

(right-click, save-as)

Put the xmp into your Presets folder (on Mac this is ~/Library/Application Support/Bibble 5/Presets)

Two more samples below:

Before

After:

As with all Presets: Your Mileage May Vary