I have been meaning for a long time to set some configuration parameters for specific file types including which applications open them by default. I deal with a lot of different file types and I am typically having to scroll through a long list of Mac applications to select the one that I want to open the file. Since its not easy to do this in one spot on Mac OSX Mountain Lion without adding a third party application I started looking around to see what was available and ended up with Default Apps by Rubicode. Below I describe installing Default Apps and how it works.

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The goofile Backtrack menu item ( Backtrack > Information Gathering > Web Application Analysis > Open Source Analysis ) is a great little Python script that provides easy access and results from one of Google’s Advanced Searches. During the information gathering phase of a penetration test it provides a great method to collect data about your target by searching a domain for specific file types. Below we describe goofile in more detail and provide an example of how goofile works.

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The pdfid script in Backtrack Linux is a PDF forensics tool that will quickly provide you an overview of a PDF files potential threats and pdfid provides a way to disarm those threats. PDFid is written in Python and is located in /pentest/forensics/pdfid/. The current version of pdfid is 0.0.11 and was released April 28th, 2010. Below we describe the basic functionality of pdfid and also explain some of the PDF terminology that will help those not as familiar with a PDF files structure the ability to find value with the pdfid.py Python script.

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When I got my Macbook about 9 months ago one of the first things I did was change the default OSX screenshot format type from PNG to GIF. I edit a lot of images in Photoshop to post in technical articles and for the GIF’s I have been having to change the Photoshop Image Mode from Indexed Color to RGB to apply most filters during the process of editing the image. Photoshop loses a lot of functionality when an image’s Image Mode is set to Indexed so each time I modified an screenshot image and say wanted to apply a filter I would first have to modify the Photoshop Image Mode from Indexed Color to RGB. I recently got fed up with having to do that so I was looking for a solution when I realized if I just change the default screencapture format back to PNG the images open in Photoshop with the Image Mode set to RGB or Red/Green/Blue Color Model. Anyhow when doing so I started to wonder what image formats were available to set as the default screencapture format. Below I describe the details of what screencapture image formats are available in Mac OSX Lion and also what Image Mode that Adobe Photoshop opens each format from the Mac in.

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Another OSX screenshot setting that many people may want to change is the file format that screenshot saves images in. The default file format for screenshots in OSX is PNG however I personally prefer GIF’s to PNG’s so below is information on how to modify the default PNG file format for screenshots to GIF.

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