$ cd /directory/with/your/files
$ find . -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/\r\n?/\n/g' {} \;


The above works recursively. If you are a bit afraid of going recursive this is better:


$ cd /directory/with/your/files
$ perl -pi -e 's/\r\n?/\n/g' *


This above may through up some errors if it tries to convert directories, so you can be more specific if the file names have a pattern like : a.txt ; b.txt; c.txt; etc.


$ cd /directory/with/your/files
$ perl -pi -e 's/\r\n?/\n/g' *.txt


A good point to note that a command - period will interrupt a command if you go wrong. This is definitely one to put in your .profile file:


alias fle="perl -pi -e 's/\r\n?/\n/g'"
alias fler="find . -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/\r\n?/\n/g' {} \;"


Then you can just do

$ fle *
$ fler


[Fle = fix line endings ]

5. In the Finder, change the diskimage to have the .dmg extension.
6. In Toast, go to Utilities > Mount Disk Image, and mount the disk image.
7. It should now appear in iTunes and you can import the CD at an encoding of your choice (recommend at least, 192kbps VBR as noted here)

Windows users can probably do much the same with an earlier version of Nero. This works with Toast 6.0.1, but not 7 and not perhaps with later versions of Toast 6. This should be legal as you are doing exactly what you can with iTunes anyway, but if you do more than 7 times you may be breaking the license agreement. I’m no lawyer because that line in Shakespeare scared me shitless as a kid, and I decided to become an astronaut instead.

To do do this is fairly straightforward. You just need to make sure the ‘dummy names’ are added to the hosts file in /etc


127.0.0.1 j-cafe.lh
127.0.0.1 madross.lh


Then in your Apache config file, have this:


NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerName j-cafe.lh
### add the other stuff obviously!
</VirtualHost>


Then just restart the server:

$ sudo apachectl graceful

If you are having trouble with host names being cached you might try this:

$ sudo lookupd -flushcache


I use madross.lh for my testing server, and madross.com is obviously the real site. I keep the number of dots the same to prevent cookie problems. However, you may prefer to have your test server and the real server to have the same name. Obviously, this means you are not going to be able to access the real site. But that’s not really a problem. Just comment the names in /etc/hosts when you want to visit the real site (and vice-versa )


# 127.0.0.1 j-cafe.com
# 127.0.0.1 madross.com


And remember to do

$ sudo lookupd -flushcache

(Adding an alias in .profile is helpful for this)

Fundamentally, this should work on Windows, Unix, Linux etc. On Windows, the hosts file is probably somewhere else.

All you need to do is download either the zipped file or the gzipped file and pop it into the plugin folder, then activate the plugin.

TextWrangler

Rather than trying to faff around in Pico or vi, you can use the excellent and free Textwrangler from Barebones.

Want to edit an invisible file like .profile? Just drag a directory onto TextWrangler in the dock, and you can edit it from there. Alternatively, just type


$ edit foo.txt


and foo.txt will open.

The .profile file

In your home directory, there is an invisible file called .profile . You can edit this file to add shortcuts for common commands and various other customizations. So open up a new terminal window:


$ cd
$ cp .profile .profile.saved
$ edit .profile

We can now edit the file in TextWrangler, and we’ve also created a backup (which we can restore with: mv .profile .profile.broken && mv .profile.saved .profile)

Add these 2 lines to the .profile file and save it:

alias h='history 10'
alias reload="source /Users/YOU/.profile"


[ replace /Users/YOU with the path to your home directory . If you don’t know this, then in terminal type cd followed by pwd and it’ll appear]

Before you can use these changes you have to reload the .profile file by typing:

$ source ~/.profile
$ h


Do that now. But notice that we added that line as an alias, so from now we can just type reload instead.

Now type

$ h


You’ll get the history of the last 10 things you did numbered. You can repeat a previous action by just doing !527 (or whatever the appropriate number is). !! repeats the last command.

Command Path

When you run a command, how does the Terminal (more properly the shell) know where to look to execute it. Basically, there is a variable called PATH which tells the shell where to look? Try

$ which pico

It should output

/usr/bin/pico

which tells the computer to execute pico which is inside /usr/bin

But why /usr/bin? Type

$ echo $PATH

and you should see something like

/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

which tell the terminal where to look. (Never put stuff in /usr/bin by the way. That’s for the system, whereas /usr/local/bin is stuff that can added by admins for users to use.)

What happens if there is a pico inside /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin? Well, /usr/bin appears before /usr/local/bin so it will execute /usr/bin/pico. If you want to execute /usr/local/bin/pico then you’ll need to type out the whole path.

Now it’s often handy to be able to add executables to your own bin directory, and not have to type out the full path: /Users/YOU/bin/foobarit, but just foobarit instead. To do that add a directory in your home called bin, and add or modify your .profile file so it has a line like this:


PATH=$PATH:.:/Users/YOU/bin


Now when you type in a command, the shell will look in this order:


/usr/bin /usr/local/bin .(the present directory) /Users/YOU/bin


You want your bin to be last to prevent some nasty person dropping an cd (or something) file into your own bin modified to send private information about you. (Imagine typing cd and rather than executing /usr/bin/cd instead a modified ~/bin/cd got executed instead)

DRM? What’s not to hate. You buy a song, and then the DRM prevents you doing things that you are legally entitled to - like playing the song at its originally quality on another mp3 player that’s not an iPod. Apple and the record companies of course are thinking, DRM? What’s not to like? DRM prevents users from doing things they are not legally entitled to - copying the song and distributing it to other people.

The needs of the customer and those of the record companies are fundamentally at odds. The user has a right to use the product they paid for. The record companies have a right to turn a profit. They also have a right to market the crap they do, and screw over most of the bands they ‘represent’. It’s called market economics or something.

The 100% legal way to remove the DRM

The obvious way to remove the DRM is the one sanctioned by Apple.
1. Make a playlist
2. Burn your playlist to a CD (i.e. a wav/aiff file) *
3. Re-import your songs from the CD
(* you are limited to doing a particular playlist 7 times. If you still own Roxio Toast 6, you can burn to a disk image, mount the image into iTunes and save yourself a blank CD)

For many people, this is an acceptable approach. But let’s take a look at what happening here to see why it’s not ideal.

When you buy a song from iTunes it’s been compressed into an AAC file. In other words, the quality is not as good as an original CD you’d buy at the record store. For many people this loss of quality is unnoticeable or they simply don’t care - fair enough.

Now, when you burn these AAC files to a CD they are converted to standard CD files which are about about 10 times the size (so a 4MB AAC file will end up being a 40MB file on the CD). This does not recreate the original quality of a CD! The bigger file is simply what CD players understand. The quality will essentially be the same as your iTunes purchase.

So now, you can simply import the songs back into iTunes (or any other software that you like) from the CD. But, and its a big BUT:

You have to convert the CD back to an MP3 file or AAC file which means a further loss of quality. This is called transcoding.

Avoiding reduction in Quality

But there are still things you can do to make minimize this loss. First, let’s clear up a misunderstanding. If you convert a 128kbps file to a CD, it does NOT follow that you should reimport using 128kbps. The aim any time you import a song is to reduce the size of that approx. 40MB file to something much smaller without reducing the quality too much:

.m4p file —–(1)——> CD File —–(2)——> .m4a or .mp3 (minus DRM)

Step 1 maintains the quality, Step 2 will always reduce it. (ignoring FLAC)

This means that you choose an encoding that is not going to reduce quality too much. Remember, whatever you do the resultant file will have a (slightly) worse quality than the one you bought from iTunes. How much worse is the choice you make. My recommendation is to use at the very least:

192kbps and to use VBR.

Which encoding?

Should you use AAC or MP3? They both have good support (AAC is not proprietary). AAC theoretically has better quality, but modern MP3 encoders such as LAME are highly regarded. You may end up choosing whatever is convenient to you - but remembering to set the bit-rate high enough and to use VBR:

So what have you achieved?

You have removed the DRM, but the file is bigger and the quality is slightly reduced. You need to burn a CD and the process is hardly fast. If this is acceptable to you, then you’re done.

Part 2 will explain how you can remove the DRM without going through this process, and without a loss of quality.

Now, before we continue, this article is about removing the DRM of songs that you yourself bought. It won’t work for stuff you don’t own, and once you have removed the DRM, the usual legal restrictions apply (don’t distribute etc.)

Removing the iTunes DRM

You need to use the software myFairTunes. This is a Windows only application, so OS X users will have to use Bootcamp if they are on an Intel machine.

Then run that software to convert protected AAC (m4p) files to unprotected (m4a) AAC files. And you’re done. Note that in certain countries this may be illegal. See the discussion below.

But I want to convert them to MP3s

Frankly, why would you? An m4a AAC file is an unproprietary format, and is generally regarded as superior to mp3 especially at low-bitrates. If you convert to an MP3, you are just recompressing a file that has already been compressed. The whole point of using myFairTunes is to convert a protected m4p file into an unprotected mpa file.

Wait! AAC is proprietary, right?

No. AAC is not an Apple thing. It part of the MPEG-4 specification. It’s the fairplay DRM that is added to the iTunes AAC files that is proprietary. Once that is removed the file is similar to other compression systems like MP3. Apple chose AAC because it is better than MP3 at low-bitrates. They didn’t develop it. Hence, many other players support AAC such as Zune.

If your mp3-player doesn’t support AAC then you should consider getting a new player that does and most now do.

Why would I want to remove the DRM if I’m not a crook

Bear in mind that you can already easily buy non-DRM AAC files. Buy a CD and import it into iTunes, and you have your non-DRM AAC files.

It wasn’t long ago that Apple’s own Rip, Mix, Burn campaign was encouraging you do just that on non-DRM’d CDs. In other words, Apple themselves agree that copying songs that you already own for your own personal use is legal.

Remove the DRM, and you can play your songs on the player of your choice without reduction of quality. There is nothing unethical about that desire. I bought the song, I want to choose where I can play it (in my own home, say).

But is removing the DRM legal?

This is the tricky point. Apple already allows you to remove the DRM in a certain way, using their own software, so the removal of the DRM per se is probably not illegal. However, you are certainly breaking the End User License Agreement by using other software to simply strip out the DRM. Since these EULA’s themselves may not actually be legitimate especially outside of the USA, the whole legality of what you can and cannot do with DRMs is a legal grey area. Use your own judgement, and if your not happy use the method outlined in Part 1.

It’s definitely illegal to distribute copyrighted music to other people, so please respect the copyright of the material that you own.

After years of trying we can now use pure CSS to let users read text the size they want it. All, it takes is
body {
font-size: 76%; /*sets a standard base of 12pixel*/
}

and from then on use ems like this:

h1{
font-size: 1.34em /*set base header 1 to 16px*/

}


Intro

We all know the frustrations of websites with text that’s either too small, too large, not resizable, not compatible with a wide range of browsers. Illegible text is number 1 complaint of users, yet 10 years along it still remains the holy grail of web typography: how can the designer satisfy everyone?

A year ago, I’d have said it was impossible due to browser differences, OS incompabilities, DPI variations and so forth. (Commentators tended to blame designers without realizing the problem lay with the Browsers).

The Problem with Pixels

We cannot use pixels. Pixels would seem to be the perfect solution. A dot is a dot is a dot. So you go ahead and do this:
body{
font-size: 12px;
}
Unfortunately, IE for Windows cannot resize text set in pixels. This become a real problem if you have captions at size 10px for example. It may be unreadable for some - yet no designer wants to make a site limited to minimum size of 12px.

The Problem with Points

We cannot use points. On a Windows machine a point is about 1.2pixels high on a Mac it’s 1pixel high. You can imagine the effect of
.caption
{
font-size: 7pt; /* 9 pixels high in Windows, 7 pixels high on the Mac */

}
Your site was unreadable to many.

So we’re left with Percents / Ems and keywords. I’ve found that percents and ems work best so I’m going to go with that.

So what is an ‘em’?

Essentially, in CSS an em is a relative size in the same way as percent is. 1em is equal to the ‘present’ font-size (100% is effectively the same thing) or technically the font-size of the parent element. Of course, at this point (ha!) you are scratching your head thinking what is the ‘present’ font-size of a new document. The answer is that it is what is specified in the browser preferences:
Fortunately, finally all the browser manufacturers have ‘agreed’ to go with a default size that is effectively 16pixels high. Last year, this was not the case and ‘ems’ were unusable still but with the minority browsers such as Safari moving to a 16px default (and the majority already having such a default in the first place we can now go with this).

Of course, 16px is unnecessarily massive but there we go. So now we need to decide what is our base size for our site, and we are done. So suppose we decide that 12pixels is a good base for our users then we calculate that 12px is 75% of 16 pixels, so we start our CSS with this:

body
{
font: 76%/160% "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Geneva, Arial, sans-serif;
/*line-height is 1.6 times the font size*/
/* 76% rather than 75% counteracts an Opera bug */
}

So this means now we have set our site base to be 12px for a standard user. And from now on we can use ems to size things relative to this base.
p
{
font-size: 1em;
}
.caption
{
font-size: 0.834em; /*standard is 10px*/
}
h1
{
font-size: 1.335em; /* standard is 16px */
}

Conclusion

We’ve managed to set a decent base-size for the majority of our users. Windows IE users can resize the text if it’s too small. The size of the text will resize itself depending on the preferences of the individual user. Users who like smaller text and have set their browser default size to 14 or 15 will see smaller text. This system may not work with very old browsers, but I think it’s the best we can hope for.

Notes

• Ems Compound

  Be careful with embedding ems within themselves. They will compound! If you set for example
  li
{
font-size: 0.8em;
}
  and you have this a list in a list you’ll get 80% times 80% = 64%. Your text will rapidly become unreadable.

• Why use 76% percent rather than 0.76em in the body CSS.

  Unfortunately, some browsers don’t honour em sizes less than 1. This overcomes that. Also, I find it more intuitive to see the 76% as a levelling decision, and use ems from then on.

• Why use 76% rather than 75%

  Opera has/had a bug where if its an exact em based font-size it will remove one pixel.
  So 16 times 75% equals 12. Opera would make this 11, but
  16 times 76% = 12.2. So which is rounded to twelve and everyone’s happy.

• 0.834em. Why so ‘accurate’?

  Some browsers have a habit of rounding incorrectly. They may round the size ‘down’ from 8.7pixels to 8pixels. Also, some browsers apply the rounding to every stage. So for example in our stylesheet we have 76%. For a standard set browser, this means
  16px times 0.76 = 12.2pixels (which is rounded to 12pixels for display)
  Now, when we apply the
  0.835em is this applied to 12.2pixels or 12pixels?
  Correctly, it should be to the 12.2 pixels but it often isn’t. So by trial and error I get:
  12.2 times 0.834 = 10.17
  12 times 0.834 = 10.008
  The browser will always round it to 10pixels. In reality, you may just need to do by trial and error.

• Hey! You’re making your site 76% of my default. That’s not right

  In fact, although the browser preferences may say you are setting your default setting, due to historical reasons this is not really the case. Most users have their default at 16 and this is now the established standard, it much better to think in terms of 16 simply representing a baseline.