I’m riding to NYC for the JoCo show and taking the BoltBus which has wifi access. It technically does connect, but I also tried using my iPhone 3G tethering through PDANet. Here are the speedtest.net results.
BoltBus
iPhone 3G tethering
There’s a college girl behind me who has been going on for at least an hour on her cell with a friend about how she doesn’t like the way the jeans she bought last year look anymore, so she needs new ones. She’s not taking clues from the people around that we really don’t care. … ahh, someone just said it directly. Thank you.
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 persistentUbuntu 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 installed the beta to an older AMD 64 desktop with several added devices, and it found all of the drivers without any help, and it connected wirelessly on the first boot with the correct native resolution, and …. I like it.
The new window management features are intuitive and VERY helpful. I would like to see them on my OSX 10.5.6 machine. (catch up, Apple!) It is definitely running faster than Vista at this point (on the same hardware), but I haven’t installed many apps yet. The newly simplified security management controls are much easier to understand and work through. More sections of the desktop have informative right-clickable menus and are more directly customizable than before.
I won’t say yet than I’m a fanboy, but it really does feel solid and looks pretty attractive. (giving Aqua a run) It’s obvious that they took some interface concepts from Apple while giving users more options to customize.
Google released a free (and much needed) service to allow iPhone users to sync Google contacts and calendar through MS Exchange protocols. http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html It works great except that the iPhone only allows one Exchange account at a time, so those that have already set up an account can’t use ActiveSync. The only workaround I’ve found is to connect to their previous Exchange account using IMAP if their admin will turn on IMAP access.
Thank you, Google. That was not evil.
Apple. please let us connect to more than one Exchange server. Anyone who would also like this ability, please let Apple know here. http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
