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Paul's Time Sink

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Server hosting

Paul Westbrook | 31 December, 2005 19:56

We have put an offer on another house.  I am trying to figure out what to do about my server.  We currently host our mail server and web server at our house.  When we sell our house, and move in to the new house, I am thinking that there will be some time before we have the phone line and DSL installed.  So I am trying to think of what  to do about these servers.  I was thinking that there are three options.

  1. Turn off the servers for the duration of the transition.
  2. Move the server to a co-location facility
  3. Move only the mail and web server to a VPS

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Sereniti Home Networking

Paul Westbrook | 31 December, 2005 18:26

Product GatewayI saw a review of Sereniti Home Networking in the January 2006 Popular Mechanics.  From the brief review, it looks like it is a standard broadband router, but they also charge users a monthly or yearly fee to keep the rules up to date.

The description of many of the security features looks like it depends on some software running on the PCs on the local network.  Since it seems that all of this functionality is pretty standard, I wonder if they are just licensing some others companies software suite.
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BetterSearch

Paul Westbrook | 30 December, 2005 20:31

I just installed the BetterSearch Firefox pluginextension.  This is a pretty cool pluginextension, that enhances the results page from various search engines.  Some of the features are:

  1. Displaying a small preview image of the page in the search results page.
  2. Adding a "Open in new Window" link
  3. And a "Wayback Machine" link

The one feature that I think is most interesting is the "Quick Preview" feature.  This will show you the page in an iframe of the search results page.

[via Razvan Antonescu]

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Blog Mad

Paul Westbrook | 29 December, 2005 17:22

Blog Mad is a new way to get traffic to your blog.  It sounds like it will be similar to BlogExplosion where you can surf other blogs or play games to earn credits to increase the traffic for your blog.

Right now they are taking pre-launch signups for this, where they are giving credits for referrals and just signing up.

BlogMad!

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V Cast Video

Paul Westbrook | 29 December, 2005 10:56

VcastSince I enabled V Cast on my phone, so I don't have to pay for data access when I use my phone as a bluetooth modem, I wanted to check out what content was available with V Cast.  In their video selection, they have clips from several different news networks.  Also they have some clips from The Daily Show.  Our kids love the clips from Sesame Street.

I did find a "bug"  if you use a bluetooth headset, you can not get the audio played through the headset.  It will only play through the internal speaker.  I have not tried a wired headset.
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OGMT

Paul Westbrook | 27 December, 2005 17:16

In this post, I mentioned a java application that would create a audio profile of your iTunes.  OGMT (OmniGraffle Musical Taste) is an applescript that will create a OmniGraffle document that represnt your musical taste.

Here is the the image from my iTunes library

Ogmt

[via TUAW]

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Weblog API Primer

Paul Westbrook | 26 December, 2005 18:20

This post has a great description on the different XML-RPC APIs available for posting to blogging systems.

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Classic in .Mac

Paul Westbrook | 26 December, 2005 12:37

Installing the games on the kid's computer this weekend was the first time that I had to run Classic in a long time.  Since on all of other computers, I had deleted the Mac OS 9 system folder, I had to go and find one of my old Mac OS 9 CDs. 

This was a pain, as I hadn't used these CDs in several years, so it took me a while to find them.  Also when I did find them, it was a pain to install it as I had to reboot the computer while booted from the CD and do a clean install.

I think that Apple should make a disk image available to their .Mac subscribers.  This disk image would contain a Mac OS 9 system folder.  It would only need to contain enough to allow Classic to run, but wouldn't need to be able to boot a computer.  This could be another benefit of being a .Mac subscriber, and to justify the $99/year cost.

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Simple Finder

Paul Westbrook | 26 December, 2005 12:25

When I set up the iMac for our kids, I wanted to use Simple Finder, to make it easier for the kids to use the computer.  (And hopefully will prevent them from changing the configuration.)  I noticed some interesting behavior.

  1. In Simple Finder Mode, you can not add items to the Dock.  There is a Folder that is in the Dock named "My Applications" that contain aliases to the applications that the user has permission to run.
  2. I wasn't able to give the user access to more than one of these AppleScript applications.  I assume that this is caused because the application have the same creator code, and the preference screen is remember this, and not the location of the application.

I ended up just using a normal mode and added the AppleScripts to the Dock.  I then disabled modification of the Dock.

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Playing games without CDs

Paul Westbrook | 26 December, 2005 06:54

Our kids got a refurbished iMac for Christmas.  I also got them Didi & Ditto and a Reader Rabbit game. Both of these games require the CD to be mounted for them to be played.

I didn't want to have to deal with CDs, as it always seems that CDs that the kids have access to end up getting scratched.  So I created disk images from each of these CDs, and put them in a place where all users can have access to.  Then I wanted to make sure that when the applications are launched the disk images were mounted. 
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Address-O-Sync

Paul Westbrook | 25 December, 2005 21:01

I have noticed some interesting things in address-o-sync.

  1. Nowhere in their documentation does it list the port that needs to be added to the firewall to allow incoming connections.  (I believe that port number 9879 is used)
  2. Only up to 4 email address for a contact get synchronized between computers.  I wonder if this is caused because Apple's implementation of vcard only handles 4 email addresses.  It looks like the vcard spec itself, doesn't have that limitation

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Bug with Sharing Address Books

Paul Westbrook | 25 December, 2005 20:38

A couple of days ago, I noticed that in both my and my wife's address book, all of the groups in Address Book had disapeared.  It looks like this was caused by the Address Book sharing that I had enabled.

When I restored the data to a version that had the groups, as soon as the sharing process ran the groups got removed.  This probably happened because I had marked this sharing to accept changes from the invitees.
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Writely

Paul Westbrook | 23 December, 2005 18:57

Writely is a online web Word Processor.  It looks like it is a nice wrapper around a wiki system.

I do have concern about the security of these documents.  All of these documents are stored on their server.  I do wonder what their business plan is.  How are they going to make money from these documents?

[via TUAW]

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Performancing blog editor

Paul Westbrook | 23 December, 2005 18:30

I saw this post that mentions the Performancing for Firefox blog editor plugin.  With this plugin, you can post to your blog directly from Firefox.

I installed, this and like the idea, but I am currently going to stick with ecto to do my posting.  One problem is that their implementation of the metaWeblog API does not handle categories.

[via Om Malik on Broadband]

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Free iTunes TV show downloads

Paul Westbrook | 22 December, 2005 18:31

MacRumors.com has a post that links to two free iTunes TV show downloads.  One is a Saturday Night Live short, the other is a Sci Fi channel special on Battlestar Galactica.

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