Monday, January 11, 2010

Twitter error



One of the many times twitter has barfed on me.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Home internet protection

We have a few macs at home and the kids are all in primary school. As they grow up they need to learn about computing and utilise the benefits of the internet. There is also the dark side that comes with internet access. I will continue to educate them about that, but at this early stage they also need protection and as they mature, I can reduce that.

OpenDNS
Content filtering requires registering our public IP address with OpenDNS. Our WAN router IP is dynamic and so I would need to update OpenDNS whenever we are assigned a different IP by our ISP. They have a windows and mac client to do this, but it should really be done on the router. My router doesn't support it, so OpenDNS is not suitable.

Mac parental controls
Apple has built in an option to try and restrict access to "adult" content automatically. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this worked with both Firefox and Safari.

I would have preferred a centralised option such as OpenDNS so I didn't have to configure each machine. However, I will try the inbuilt mac parental controls to start with and will investigateDansGuardian should it fail.