Fnord.

 

 

I’ve been considering a different firewall router for the home network, and am looking at the Linksys/Cisco RV042.

The unit ships with decent Windows software, but they’re silent on the issue of Mac support. From this excellent article come the instructions and three key tidbits:

1. It won’t work if your Mac is behind a NAT router.
2. You configure the router under ‘PPTP server’ and not VPN server.
3. Enter the username/password into ‘Internet Connect’ and you’re good to go.

If you’re lucky enough to have OSX server, a VPN server is built in. I’m not.

Hmm, looks like the RV042 is ~$170 as of 6/07. Not bad. It can do 5 PPTP connections at once, which’d be fine for me. It’d be nice to be able to print from offsite sometimes, and SSH tunnels are a PITA.

I’m Buttercup?!!?

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

Yeesh.

I was shooting some pictures for WatchReport, and the cat decided to investigate. She seems to approve of the Marinemaster.

Yep.

Also, my Quicksilver text trigger worked! Cool. Faster posting!

“CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.”http://cord.sourceforge.net/

…and it works better than anything else, including the MS client. An essential Mac tool.

The Druid Report, one of those interesting blogs that’s well-educated and thought provoking. An example from this post:

Yet it’s also worth watching the fringes, and keeping an eye out for wild cards. Christianity was a legally proscribed minority faith only a few generations before it seized control of the Roman world. In a world of contingencies, where slight causes can drive vast effects, some religious movement barely large enough to be noticed today might turn into the dominant religion of North America a few centuries down the road. Arnold Toynbee noted in his massive A Study of History that the downslope of civilizations seem to be the incubators of universal religions, and rarely so dramatically as in times when the most basic assumptions of a civilization are visibly disproving themselves. This is such a time, in case you haven’t noticed.
It’s probably wise to mention here that I would be more flabbergasted than anyone else if my own Druid faith were to become any sort of major force in the religious landscape of the future. Born in the 18th century out of a three-way pileup between mystical Anglicanism, fragmentary Celtic traditions, and the first stirrings of what we now call environmental awareness, modern Druidry is distinguished more by its wry sense of humor than by any sort of missionary fervor or mass appeal. Many of us in the contemporary Druid movement are aware of peak oil and the other dimensions of the predicament of industrial society, and are taking action in response, but all things considered, the Church of Elvis probably has a better chance of becoming the universal religion of the future than we do.

Still, whatever religion or combination of religions rises to prominence as industrial society slides down the far side of Hubbert’s peak, the religious dimension will very likely play a massive role in the way today’s society’s adapt to tomorrow’s world of harsh limits and harsher choices. As the aspect of human life that deals with ultimate concerns, religion is among the most potent of all motivating factors, and it seems to me that any serious attempt to make something positive out of the approaching mess will have to draw on religious motivations, in one way or another, if it is to have any chance of meeting the challenges of our future. Thus attempts to imagine the next economy, the next society, or even the next energy system might be well advised to take at least a passing glance in the direction of the next spirituality as well.

Heck, he even mentions A Canticle for Liebowitz a few times. Add some random to your reading!

Got a new mouse yesterday, the Logitech MX revolution. I’m using it today to code, email, and such, the usual stuff.

This mouse rocks. The scroll wheel has inertia, so you can scroll fast and easily (it spins freely when you want it to), and the one-button-search (aka ‘google button’) is very useful. You just highlight a word and press the button, and a new tab opens with a google search. You can also use spotlight or other net-based engines if you prefer. Damned useful for obscure OpenSSL API calls and such.

The side wheel does really well for application switching, and the tracking is smooth and precise.

It comes with a very small USB transceiver, it’d be nice if it were Bluetooth. Oh well.

The on/off switch on the bottom is really nice, means that you can toss it in your bag and not arrive with a dead mouse.

Highly recommended.

I got my very first solication to sell ads on this blog today. Oddly enough, it was for this post on building a cat tree. For some google reason, I get a lot of hits on that. Why me, and not the original?

Not even my content, just a short paragraph linking to lifehacker. Bizarre.

S/he offered $35, not sure if was that a one-time or repeating. If that’s per month, I’d be tempted.

“pH Factor, brought to you by $SPONSOR.”

Speaking of selling out, my post on the new Rolex Milgauss is up. The research on that one was pretty interesting.

…the new-to-me Neil Diamond album 12 Songs (2005) is pretty damned good.

Wow. Either I’m old or he put out a decent album. Maybe both, yeah.

It might also be due to the fact that, as Amazon observes

… “What’s It Gonna Be” sounds like something snatched in a pre-dawn lark from a Leonard Cohen disc.

…he sounds rather like Cohen, one of my all-time favorites.

1. Review on Allmusic
2. Album on Amazon
3. (Short)LaLa review

Personal favorites after a dozen or so listens: “I’m on to you”, “Hell Yeah”, “Delirious Love”, “Man of God” and “Oh Mary”. The only one I regularly skip is “Save Me a Saturday Night”, which is weak compared to the rest.

I blame Jason for this - he loaned me his ipod shuffle on the train back from Vernezza to Milan, and it had the album on it. Shuffles lack a display, and Jason is a Hip Young Dude, so I just assumed that Neil Diamond was too uncool for him. Getting off the train, I said something like “Dude, you have some band on there that sounds exactly like Neil Diamond!”

He was amused. I now have the album. Join me in my shame, won’t you?

Mac OSX is very adept at PDF files; the OS can generate ‘em, search ‘em, etc, etc. And of course they’re everywhere on the Net for any application that requires formatting greater than HTML/CSS.

One consequence of this is that my hard drive now has an enormous pile of PDF files. It’s getting to the point where its a pain to locate the one(s) I need, even with Spotlight and Quicksilver. This is similar to the situation prior to iPhoto, in a lot of ways, but Apple doesn’t have a solution out for PDFs.

Enter a third-party program called Yep. Commercial, alas, but really cool. Tagging, searching, previews, all sorts of cool features. Incremental search really does it for me.

It’s 34 bucks, free trial download. I might have to buy this one.