I’ve only just started playing with Dropbox, but it looks very cool.
It’s what iDisk should have been. Software for Windows, Linux and Mac will create a Dropbox folder on your machine. Anything you drop on that folder is efficiently and securely synchronised to all other machines connected to the same account. It keeps past versions of updated files for you. The storage behind the scenes is Amazon’s S3 service. And if you’re using less than 2GB, Dropbox is free.
What are the chances of getting your laptop back if it’s stolen? Pretty slim, probably. But you can at least improve the odds.
There are various utilities out there which, when installed on your machine, will call home from time to time. If somebody steals your machine and connects it to a network, you can then use information from these connections to help track it down.
I’ve created various home-brewed versions of these in the past but I guess a perfect utility would be:
Ah! That would be Adeona you’d be wantin’, so it would.
More info here.
Three years ago I compiled a version of the ‘wget’ utility so that it would run under Mac OS X and uploaded it to Status-Q. It’s had an amazing number of downloads, and I felt it was probably time to update it!
So here is a shiny new wget.zip, which contains the following:
The main changes from the original version are:
Hope it’s useful! Here’s some more of my Apple-related posts, or you could always just subscribe to the blog – here’s the RSS feed !
I think this is really quite important, though it sounds pretty technical and geeky at present. Google Calendars now support the CalDAV protocol. (So, incidentally, do Calgoo).
CalDAV is an open standard for synchronising and updating calendars, and I’ve been keeping an eye on it ever since Apple quietly announced, way, way back, that it would be supported in the Leopard version of iCal, their desktop calendar program. This meant that you could publish your calendar to a CalDAV server, and that other people could also subscribe to it and update it.
This is important because, for many people, calendar synchronisation (allowing things like meeting room booking as well) is the only reason they run the expensive abomination that is Microsoft Exchange. To have broader support for an open standard would be great! But my hopes of a brave new world were moderated somewhat when implementations of CalDAV servers, other than the one Apple shipped with its server OS, seemed to be few and far between.
Well, it’s still early days and there are limitations and some rough edges – like iCal not syncing such calendars to iPhone/iTouch – but it’s a good start: with people like Google and Calgoo now creating server implementations, and iCal, Calgoo and Mozilla Sunbird (at least) supporting CalDAV on the desktop, my hope is renewed…
Thanks to Garry for the link.
Mmm. A classic American public radio show – Car Talk – is making its way onto television, in a new series using animated versions of its hosts, the Magliozzi brothers. I’m quite a fan, though only an occasional listener, but I really wonder about its viability in that medium.
Still, I wish them all the best… after thirty years of making people laugh, they deserve all the success they can get.
CNN has the story. Those of us in other parts of the world can hear the radio show on the Car Talk site.
Here’s an exceedingly useful feature of SSH which I only discovered recently.
Imagine that you have a single ‘gateway’ machine on your network which you can connect to from outside using SSH; I do this all the time. You can then use that machine to connect to other machines inside your network in a variety of ways: using the port-forwarding abilities of SSH (the -L and -R options), for example, or simply by running another SSH command from the gateway machine once you’ve connected to it.
But there’s a much tidier way to do it, using the ProxyCommand option.
To connect to internalmachine.mynet.com, just add something like the following to your ~/.ssh/config:
Host internalmachine.mynet.com
ProxyCommand ssh gateway.mynet.com exec nc %h %p
then you can ssh directly to internalmachine.mynet.com from outside. SSH will connect to the gateway machine and run ‘nc’ to forward the SSH session to the internal machine.
And, of course, you can use it for things layered over SSH, like checkouts from Git or Subversion repositories. Very tidy! I also sometimes add -C to the ssh command so that any access done this way is automatically compressed, even in situations where it was hard to specify that explicitly.
If you’re unlucky enough to find yourself stuck behind a web proxy with no other outgoing access, one very nice-looking use of ProxyCommand is the Corkscrew utility by Pat Padgett.
Hope this is helpful to someone!
Update: there are a few useful extra tips in the comments.
A confession. I’ve gone over to the dark side.
No, I’m not using Windows again – it’s not that bad. But I have started doing something which, until fairly recently, I considered far from commendable.
Yes, you’ve guessed it. I’ve started sending HTML-formatted email.
I used to be a purist. Email was for textual communication, and didn’t need frivolous formatting, so all my email programs were told in no uncertain terms that outgoing email should be plain text only. There were all those nasty privacy and security issues, especially in early versions of Outlook and Outlook Express. Javascript and ActiveX could be embedded in messages, exploiting security holes in the receiving mail program. Senders could include an image in an email which would be loaded when the message was viewed, meaning they could detect whether you’ve looked at it or not! Shocking, eh?
Well, maybe, but the security holes have largely been fixed, spam filters take out most of the stuff I would have worried about, notification systems are decidedly fallible and most email clients let you switch all these features off if you’re still concerned.
I really have no desire to change my background colours or embed YouTube videos in my messages. But in the end I decided that in the 21st century it was just plain silly not to be able to write sub-headings in bold or emphasise things with italics.
I was being a luddite. I was effectively insisting that all letters should be word-processed in a monospaced font because that had been good enough for typewriters. That wasn’t the way to make progress. I was using more sophisticated formatting in my instant messaging than in my carefully-composed emails! Yes, there are some potential issues, but denying myself from using italics was not the way to get those issues fixed. Anyway, the rest of the world was ignoring people like me. I’ve been getting an awful lot of formatted emails for an awfully long time, and never had any problems.
Actually, I would have made the switch earlier, but it’s only with the latest (Leopard) version that Apple’s Mail app – which I rather like – has really adopted HTML as its standard formatting – before that it could happily display incoming HTML but used richtext for outgoing compositions; something that not all other programs could read very well. Fortunately, any well-behaved email program will send a plain-text version of any message alongside a formatted one, so the important text should still get through.
Which means that if you wish to read my emails as if they came off a typewriter, you can still do so. I’m afraid neither the presence nor the absence of formatting is likely to improve the content!
IMAP support, coming to a GMail account near you soon. It might take a few days.
OK, so despite telling a friend yesterday that I was trying to cut down on ‘social networks’, I’ve been persuaded that Facebook is now a socially acceptable forum even for people over 20. So here’s my shiny new profile.
As with LinkedIn, though, I’m going to restrict my list of contacts to people I’ve actually met. Or at least spoken to on the phone…
Let’s see how it goes.
Mmm. That’s interesting. Steve Jobs has just announced the imminent release of the Safari browser for Windows – there’ll be a beta release later today.
That’s very smart. iTunes is one of the most popular Windows apps. It’ll be interesting to see how Safari does… And anything which ups the market share of minority browsers is a good thing in my book.
Update: Safari 3 Beta is now available, from http://www.apple.com/safari/. This was posted with it. The Mac version, of course! It does seem rather snappier, and has a few nice features – the ability to rearrange tabs and tear them off to form separate pages is cool, and very nicely implemented. One thing I’ve often wanted is to be able to move a tabbed page from one window to another, so that windows are groups of pages on a particular topic. Now it’s easy….
Anyone who’s done any quantity of web design knows that there are often two phases to the process. The first involves creating your design using nice, clean, standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and the second involves inserting tweaks and hacks to get around the bugs and quirks of Internet Explorer.
Most web designers tend not to use IE. This is not just because of its failings; it’s often because other browsers offer designers facilities which make the development process easier; perhaps the best example is the excellent (and free) Firebug extension for Firefox.
In addition, most people of a creative or technical bent don’t use Windows; they use platforms such as Mac or Linux where IE isn’t available. But they do need to check what the sites will look like for people still using IE. So NetRenderer is a useful service – you type in a URL, pick your version of IE, and it promptly displays the image of your page under that browser.
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