Computing
And two years go by...
16/01/16 17:37
It's not that I haven't had much to do, just that I haven't had the time or inclination to blog. Read More...
Quenya Keyboard
01/10/13 19:16
I have a running tradition that when I move to a new job, I get a new keyboard. Sadly, that day has passed. It was clear it was time for me to move on, so I found a new place to work that suits me really well. In keeping with my tradition, I decided to get a new keyboard for my office computer. This time, I wanted something different. The all-blank keyboards have been done quite a bit, but I did want to have a mechanical keyboard - the mechanical switches feel a lot better, and they last longer too. So, what to do, what to do… then the thought popped into my head about making a keyboard in Quenya - Tolkien’s “High Elfish” language of Valinor. Read More...
I'm Sensing Something
24/02/12 20:39
I’ve been interested in having small weather station for my house - so I know exactly what the weather at my house would be. At first, the big turnoff was the cost of the pre-packaged solutions, which are an uneconomical “all-or-nothing” approach. After digging into it a bit more, I found something cool - I found 1-Wire weather stations. Read More...
Asterisk & VoIP
29/01/12 19:42
I’ve recently moved to a new home; one of the consequences is the shift of utilities such as power, gas, water, and the topic of this post: phone. Being a Linux using geek, I’ve long been aware of Asterisk, but never really looked into it until lately. What I found was fun, useful, and economical. Read More...
Linux Virtualization
28/01/12 22:15
I’ve been using virtualization on Linux for the better part of a decade now. I’ve tried about everything available too - VMware, Xen, KVM, UML, VirtuaBox, and more. I’ve got some preferences, and I’ve learned that a lot of the decision process depends on how you’re going to be using it. Read More...
Cloud Syncing Tricks
28/01/12 14:41
Given the many cloud-sync services available, I wanted something I could sync over the cloud, but be secure - not “secure” if you decide to trust the service provider, but “secure” as in “good luck, NSA.” Read More...
Mandatory Access Control
31/03/11 18:25
I’ve been using Objective Development’s Little Snitch for almost as long as I’ve been using a Mac; it lets me selectively deny outgoing internet connections based on a number of criteria, which lets me lock down what apps are allowed to talk to places on the network - local or internet.
Intego’s VirusBarrier X6 can also do this to a lesser extent, but it’s not as refined as Little Snitch, nor does it allow much in the way of ‘this program can only connect to this host, using this protocol and this port’.
I’ve recently become aware of a different app: Hands Off!, which appears to do everything Little Snitch does, but it adds a couple of new things. Read More...
Intego’s VirusBarrier X6 can also do this to a lesser extent, but it’s not as refined as Little Snitch, nor does it allow much in the way of ‘this program can only connect to this host, using this protocol and this port’.
I’ve recently become aware of a different app: Hands Off!, which appears to do everything Little Snitch does, but it adds a couple of new things. Read More...
Openswan vs strongSwan
27/09/10 15:23
From the beginning of my VPN project, I knew about strongSwan... but I stuck to Openswan because that’s what is covered in the Openswan book I bought and read.
After perusing the strongSwan website for a few minutes, one thing became apparent: strongSwan is documented much better. After some research, I’ve switched from openSwan to strongSwan. Read More...
After perusing the strongSwan website for a few minutes, one thing became apparent: strongSwan is documented much better. After some research, I’ve switched from openSwan to strongSwan. Read More...
Success in the land of the VPN
16/09/10 23:10
I can finally report success with my recent obsession with getting a functional VPN for my home network. Actually, I can report two... Read More...
More VPN
09/09/10 19:48
I haven’t made any progress with an IPsec L2TP VPN - mainly because I’ve discovered that my ‘secondary’ internet connection (ie. the office) blocks IPsec. This makes it hard to test and verify anything. I’ll give it a go Tomorrow when I go and see my brother. Read More...
VPN Madness
06/09/10 20:22
The past few days (Labor Day Weekend), I’ve been learning about VPN’s - specifically, about IPsec VPNs using Openswan. A couple of years back, I bought a book by the Openswan developers about how to install, configure, setup, and use modern VPNs. Read More...
ntop
25/08/10 22:10
I’ve been playing with ntop, a rather neat way to monitor network traffic. I’ve got it connected to my personal machine at home, and it’s able to monitor all network traffic (of any kind - TCP/IP, raw ethernet, whatever). It’s slick and powerful. Read More...
Google's New Toys
19/05/10 13:01
This week is Google I/O, and Google is releasing a slew of new technologies. I’m excited about a couple of ‘em:
- Google Font Directory (and the Google Font API)
- WebM: A new video codec, open-source, and a successor to Ogg Theora
MythTV Follow-Up
19/04/10 16:49
After having tweaked my MythTV setup some, I can say it’s starting to actually work. I found another HDMI cable, and a joiner that let me join two fairly long HDMI cables into one cable long enough for the run. I then found I had to replace my nVIDIA GeForce 6200 with a newer card, preferably one that supported nVIDIA’s VDPAU extensions for X11 (VDPAU is a GPU/video decoder library). So with a cheap $40 GeForce GT 220, I can now play full 1080i HD video, with 5.1 surround sound. Read More...
MythTV
13/03/10 13:40
A short tale of my experience with MythTV - probably the most popular Linux DVR software package. Read More...
Apple Mail: Triumph and Tragedy
18/02/10 19:03
I generally only discover new things when something isn’t working for me... and I couldn’t use Apple’s Mail.app to access my Gmail account. (And suddenly, at that -- it worked a few days ago...) Read More...
The Big Enema
01/02/10 15:18
Well, I finally caved: After about three years with the same installation, I nuked my hard drive and re-installed from scratch. Read More...
Holy crap, Google!
22/01/10 17:05
Google crawls some places at the speed of light, apparently... Read More...
Google Public DNS
03/12/09 13:30
Google announced Google Public DNS today; why I think it’s a good thing. Read More...
Hallelujah!
27/10/07 22:47
My copy of OS X 10.5 “Leopard” came in the mail today. My impressions. Read More...