.. but we all know our Pres is a Reformed Pastafarian and knows the true way is that of the ninja.
- Touched by His Noodly Appendage
Tim Minchin is my current favorite musician. … or comedian. cultural commentator?? He understands how insignificant we are and at the same time how important it is that we use our reasoning powers to figure this all out instead of creating a fantasy explanation and then judging others for not having the “faith” you do. /veryshortrant
just youtube him.
At work, we have shiny new laptops. Yeah! …. except that they’re locked down and audited. Lame. Even if I carry my laptop with me and use it off-hours, all my surfing and installations are still restricted and subject to company policy and review. Bummer.
Using the instructions at pendrivelinux.com, I quickly set up a persistent Ubuntu installation. It lives on my 8gig pico drive and just uses the laptop resources to run without writing anything to the laptop harddrive. It found all the drivers and was online and usable immediately after booting. It even has built-in drivers for my new Wacom tablet that works perfectly with GIMP. The default LiveCD setup is not secure, so I disabled the default no-login user and created my own account and added remote login and a few other customizations like auto-mounting to my home file server via SSH. Now, I can just put this tiny USB drive into any PC and boot into my own interface.
I went a step further to protect my browsing security and set up Squid proxy using my home Ubuntu server so that all my web traffic will be directly between my machines as far as any local firewall can tell. Using that, I can access anything that my personal server can access and do so without being restricted by local network blacklisting.
My latest addition to this setup was to use the Dropbox service to give me direct, local access to all my recent or frequently used files AND give me a persistent Firefox profile across all my machines (PC, Mac, and Ubuntu). That part is pretty cool. This synchronizes my plugins, cookies, passwords and sessions. I close Firefox at home, then I open it to the same tabs at work, preserving session logins.
Aight, I should either be doing homework or doing something about my geek addiction.
i’m trying to cut back on the reposting, but this is good enough.
