notetoself.net » tech

My bandwidth test on the BoltBus

John Dill — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:42:47 +0000

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.

USB Bootable Linux + Dropbox FTW

John Dill — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:09:22 +0000

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.

mr. wind was always misunderstood

dillweed — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:57:22 +0000

i’m trying to cut back on the reposting, but this is good enough.

I’m trying Windows 7

dillweed — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:27:44 +0000

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.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

iPhone users, sync automatically and wirelessly

dillweed — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:20:45 +0000

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

the iPhone is magick

dillweed — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:22:24 +0000

black silicon is exciting

dillweed — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:28:27 +0000

i’ve been following this for a while. i just hope the patent gets used and not covered up.

http://spie.org/x31676.xml?pf=true&ArticleID=x31676

mac screen sharing black hole

dillweed — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:38:23 +0000

file under “cheap geek tricks”.

Verizon’s DSL billing system is horrible

dillweed — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:43:32 +0000

i won’t go into the details of many instances where their system breaks down, but i feel like ranting about how many frustrating hours i spent TRYING TO PAY for my internet service. you would think that they would look into multiple calls and emails notifying them of their completely broken payment site. you might also think that someone there would respond to maybe at least one of several numbered incident reports other than the automatically generated “Your-help-request-xxxxxxxxx-has-been-received” emails. it could even be possible that less than half my calls to the billing department might not get disconnected after waiting collective hours on hold.

nope.

after having finally finding someone coherent on the phone to set up automatic billing with my credit card, i got a creditor notice. they had entered the wrong account number. awesome.

i can see from other rants like this that Verizon as an ISP may be falling apart. it’s too bad they are the only option for internet service in my area.

/rant

use your ubuntu machine as an apple server that supports Time Machine

dillweed — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 09:45:46 +0000

I don’t have a Mac server.
I wanted to use Mac’s Time Machine to backup my laptop without buying Time Capsule or manually connecting an external drive every time.
I have an extra PC that is running Ubuntu as my file server.

… ::searches Google:: …

oh hai, this lets me do backups automatically. woop!

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/