The Mac Pirate’s Toolbox, aka “Essential Apps For The Digital Junkie”.

MacPAR deLuxe is a very good free utility (donations welcome) for verifying, repairing and decompressing rar archives with par (parity) files, commonly downloaded from usenet newsgroups.

It has been updated for Snow Leopard.

Download MacPAR deLuxe for 10.6
Visit MacPAR deLuxe Site for other versions

“Licensing for this product has expired”
“The serial number you used to activate this product has expired”
“Invalid serial number. The serial number appears to be invalid”

- Adobe CS5, 2010

To stop Adobe CS5 calling home to Mother Ship on your mac in OS X you need to edit the hosts file as described in ‘Stop Adobe CS4 calling home to Mother Ship in OS X’.

Simply follow the instructions in the ‘Stop Adobe CS4 calling home to Mother Ship in OS X’ tutorial and use the list of hosts below for CS5:

# Block Adobe Activation
127.0.0.1 hl2rcv.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 t3dns.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sea.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sjc0.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 crl.verisign.net
127.0.0.1 CRL.VERISIGN.NET
127.0.0.1 ood.opsource.net
127.0.0.1 209-34-83-73.ood.opsource.net
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 tpractivate.adobe.newoa
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.ntp
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.ipp
127.0.0.1 ereg.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip1.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 www.wip4.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wwis-dubc1-vip60.adobe.com

The Mac Pirate’s Toolbox, aka “Essential Apps For The Digital Junkie”.


Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system which in recent years has been used increasingly for file sharing. Users read and post public messages and files to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. So a newsgroup called alt.binaries.mp3.jazz would probably have jazz mp3 files for download.

Unison is a Usenet client for OS X which allows access to these newsgroups. Unison must be configured with the details of a Usenet server. While free Usenet server access is sometimes available through your ISP, access to certain file sharing newsgroups is often blocked. Moreover the amount of time an ISP newsgroup server caches the data for is small compared to a premium Usenet server like Giganews, and the download speeds are typically slower.

DOWNLOAD UNISON