Technology
Hack The Date Created and Date Modified Time Stamps in Any File (Mac OSX)
I recently learned a new Unix command which allows one to spoof the time stamp on any file. This instructional is designed for Mac OS X users, but will work for all *nix OS’s.
Note: All file names are cAse sensitiVe.
1. Pick a file of your choice (one with a simple name is easiest to play around with for the first time you try this. Access the current “created” and “last modified” values by right-clicking it and selecting “get info”.
2. Open up the “terminal” and navigate to the directory in which your file is located.
For those not acquainted with unix:
ls -a displays the contents of the directory you’re in,
pwd displays the path of the directory you’re in,
cd .. goes down a directory and
cd directoryname opens a directory inside the current directory with the name “directoryname”
Additional instructions can be found here.
3. Now that you’re in the directory that your file is in, type in touch -t MMDDhhmm filename.ext
Replace the MMDDhhmm with the month, day, hour and minute of the creation date. So for my file phone.m4a, typing touch -t 01010000 phone.m4a will reset both the date modified and the date created to New Year’s (January the first at 00:00).
4. Now, repeat the process, with a more recent date to change the “date modified” without affecting “date created”. In my case, touch -t 04010000 phone.m4a changes the modified time stamp to April 1st at 00:00.
Explanation: In unix, only the last accessed and last modified dates are stored (not the created), so in order to manipulate the creation date, the date modified is rewinded the first time, which, in turn, pushes back the creation date. Setting a more recent date the second time only affects the date modified.
Note 1: To set a full date (including the year and second), use the format: YYYYMMDDhhmm.ss within the touch command.
Note 2: Rather than navigating to a directory, the full path can be used right in the touch command. I included the navigation for the sake of ease-of-explanation.
Happy spoofing!
0Freeconomy: The Future of the Digital Marketplace and Free Goods
We come across a number of free goods and services on the web today. They’re really free and they work great! Ever wondered how this works fiscally? If so, hit play.
This is a Pechu Kuchu style presentation. It consists of ten slides, 20 seconds in length each.
0The 4 Keys of Presenting or Pitching Your Web Product to Important Humans
How would you present your web product to a venture capitalist or journalist in 60 seconds?
As I watched through the London-based Future of Web Apps (FoWA) conference, I took from it something unexpected: a plethora of absolute must-kep-in-mind guidelines when pitching a product, particularly a web product.
FoWA, internet entrepreneurs have an initial 60 second pitch to explain their product to a panel of impressive experts including TechCrunch’s representative, Mike Butcher and LastMinute founder Brent Hoberman.
When pitching a product,
1. Show the interface.
There’s probably a lot of detail that goes in to your product. So much so that you may actually omit a demo (at least a screenshot) of it in action from a pitch.
Leave your company philosophy at home or condense it in to a single sentence that you mention in passing. If you have a good product, effective explanation greatly outweighs sales tactics.
Don’t beat around the bush.
If you can’t do that then perhaps it’s time to consider purchasing a thirty minute late night TV slot for an infomercial?
2. Explain it and it will sell itself (if it’s good!).
Leave your company philosophy at home or condense it into a single sentence that you mention in passing. If you have a good product it’ll sell itself- effective explanation is often the best sales tactic in this industry.
Chances are that whoever you’re pitching to has seen a product pitch or two in their time. Don’t beat around the bush. Be direct. If you can’t do that then perhaps you ought to consider a late night TV slot for an infomercial.
3. Pretty (traffic) charts help.
I mean analytics. The second most important item- aside from the product demo and explanation- is user activity. Mike Butcher was very direct in his insisting that this is a key component, saying
“If you show a VC that graph, they will literally throw money at you.”
“That graph” refers to an upward analytics curve that proves traffic increase. The more exponential it looks, the better.
4. Don’t be afraid to exhibit passion.
“Don’t be shy with letting passion come through. If you’re in love with your product and we’re not, we’ll think we’re missing something” – Hoberman aptly explains.
This entire article would make make a lot more sense if you watched the video of what I’m referring to, by the way.
Easily Make Awesome JavaScript with jsfiddle
jsfiddle’s split screen interface makes it pretty convenient to try out little pieces of pretty JavaScript and CSS. Especially when you like to play around with the potential of various libraries such as JQuery and Mootools.
Below is a quick demo of the interface jsfiddle allows one to embed in to an external page via iFrame. When run, this particular example shows my latest tweets.
jsfiddle.net0
Keywurl For Safari 5 (Download)
Note: This doesn’t work for the new Safari 6 on OSX Lion.
Search Google and Wikipedia Right from the Safari address bar.
Just like in Chrome and Firefox (if not better).
Most Leopard and Snow Leopard users get all excited about Keywurl, only to discover that it doesn’t actually work in the latest versions of Safari 5.
Download this hacked version below, unpack it and install the package.
Once you restart Safari you’ll be able to set your search engines.
*Whimper* but it’s still not working!
Manual Hack:
➥ Download Keywurl from the official website.
➥ Quit Safari
➥ Navigate to “/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins”
➥ Right click on “keywurl.bundle” to “show package contents”
➥ Open “info.plist” in textedit
➥ Edit the line under “MaxBundleVersion”, changing the string to something like 6999.99 (allowing compatibility of future versions), save.
➥ Open Safari
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Cynicologist aims to provide a wide array of news by funnelling the myriad of peculiarities that this oh-so-wondrous super consciousness which we call the internet constantly generates..