WebDAV and Goliath

It's been a few years now since Dropbox ceased support for PowerPC and although there was a community workaround that worked for a while, that too fell by the wayside with ongoing developments at Dropbox.

Folder syncing has never been a specific requirement for myself but having convenient access to a central repository across various machines is always useful - for this I use the WebDAV protocol supported by various online storage providers either via Finder in OSX or with the excellent WebDAV client, Goliath (which I personally find delivers faster file transfers.)

So, after signing up to an online storage provider - one that includes WebDAV access - in OSX Finder go to Go/Connect to Server (or press CMD+k) and enter the provider's WebDAV URL and press Connect. Enter your username and password in the next dialogue and tick box to remember password.

All being well, the remote server will be mounted onto the Desktop and be available to all standard file operations just like any attached storage. For convenience, I make an alias of the mounted drive, move it to Documents and drag to the dock to provide instant access in future.
Note - to prevent .DS_Store files cluttering up your remote drive with this method, run the following in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

The procedure is similar when using Goliath - making a new connection, enter URL, username and password and once connected, go File/Save Connection As to save a WebDAV bookmark that can be launched from the dock if desired.

Of course, the advantage of Goliath is that it's available for OS9 too - it's quite remarkable at this late stage to still have the convenience of online connected storage on such an old OS.

In addition, all these online storage providers have a web interface accessible from anywhere and usually have purpose built mobile apps for Android and iOS - in addition, there's always mobile WebDAV clients too - even my beleaguered Windows Phone 10 powered Lumia 930 can get in on the action with it's WebDAV equipped Total Commander file manager!

WebDAV access is a refreshing change in these twilight days of PowerPC - an online service that spans legacy systems and doesn't tax the CPU in any way.

For those wishing for a more Dropbox like folder syncing facility, with a compatible provider, rsync can be utilised for effective backups but for now WebDAV suits me fine.

These are a few WebDAV compatible providers but there will be more - if anyone has any suggestions please ad in the comments:

Adrive

4Shared

SwissDisk

User Agents And The Art Of Online Camouflage

The user agent is a digital calling card presented by a web browser when it visits a website, identifying it and telling the website what content is best served to that particular web browser - the simplest example being the web browser on a mobile device will receive content more proportionally formatted for a smaller, portrait screen whereas when viewed from a laptop or desktop, the web browser will deliver the fully featured site.
This user agent can also inform the web site what features it should deploy - an old browser will perhaps be incapable of rendering certain content, so that content can be effectively cut out.

This all becomes relevant, especially to us PowerPC users, when it's possible to present an alternative user agent from the one your web browser natively employs - preferably to lessen CPU load and rendering times.

This has been a feature for a while with standard browser options or add-ons that facilitate selecting different user agents but what I shall discuss in this post is site specific user agents ie user agents that present themselves on a site by site basis automatically as you browse.

This legacy feature is present in the PPC spins of ArcticFox and IceWeasel but wasn't present in TenFourFox (which I'll utilise here) until I asked the developer to reintroduce it which he very generously did.

In the TenFourFox preferences, I leave the user agent at it's default setting and add site specific user agents with TextWrangler editing the TenFourFox prefs.js file that resides in

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/go96ey5b.default

the last part of that location string may look different on your machine but will always terminate with .default.

This is an example string added to prefs.js:

user_pref("general.useragent.override.youtube.com", "NokiaN90-1/3.0545.5.1 Series60/2.8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1");

In this instance, browsing to any youtube.com address will invoke the Nokia N90 user agent automatically - presenting a less busy page, free of Youtube's normal CPU hungry "features" and allowing access to the video in 3gp format (more of this in a future post.)

This process is repeated for all the sites you wish to include - a laborious task admittedly but one you'll only have to do once.

User agents can be copied from online sources or you can even use those included within TenFourFox as standard - select one in preferences, then navigate to whatsmyua and copy/paste the string.

Another method for adding site specific user agents is from within the browser itself - navigate to about:config and right click to add a new string. As per the example above, general.useragent.override.youtube.com is added as the preference name, then NokiaN90-1/3.0545.5.1 Series60/2.8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 is added as the string value.

Generally, I will use either the oldest browser I can reasonably get away with or a Nokia mobile user agent for sites where I don't need all the CPU sapping bells and whistles - not only does this show mercy to your ageing PPC Mac but also loads pages quicker and in some cases is refreshingly distraction free.

Some example screens of TenFourFox pretending to be otherwise....

Drones beware!

 After a two year hiatus, myself and fiftysixk are returning the blog to an active state.  And we hope the other authors will join us.  

 To help liven things up a bit around here, we have brought in the Dronecatcher himself from the MacRumors PowerPC forum.  That's right...  the guy who can make web video play on a toaster has joined the PowerPC Liberation fold, and I for one am thrilled to have him!  Welcome, Wayne!

I've been thinking of a few different ideas for new content, as I just tricked out my G4 mini.  Stay tuned for something to do with that in the near future.

 If any readers have any ideas for new content, then please share them in the comments.