Where it All Happens
This is where the magic happens, people. It’s the MacBook iSight version of my Schrute-space.
Telephony, Running Servers, & Other Hackery
If you folks out there are interested in running servers out of your house, be it mail servers, web servers, streaming media, VoIP, what-have-you, or you’re interested in home-brew telephony projects, I highly recommend a blog called Nerd Vittles. Clever name, if you ask me. The site, run by a guy named Ward Mundy, contains countless full-blown, step-by-step guides to setting up all kinds of homemade systems such as Asterisk, the open-source PBX. I’ve read most, if not all, of the guides he’s got on his site and they never fail to impress. I mention this because lately I’ve been really looking forward to getting more into the whole PBX/telephony/Trixbox scene so that I may then sell my services to whomever would like them. You could easily save any small business about $10,000 per year on telephone lines, problems, and service and support from your telecom vendor. All these godforsaken proprietary PBX systems have to be the bane of every overworked engineer-cum-IT support specialist on the planet. I know every time we need ANYTHING done on our system at my office, we’re required by contract to have the lazy guy from the telecom company take his sweet 2 to 3 weeks to come out and fix it. That fat check he gets must be well worth it! Anyways, I can’t wait to turn some 2 year old machine we’ve got sitting around the office into a VoIP telephony powerhouse… and all for the cost of a few hours of research and study. I will soon supplant Johnny Repairaphone as the goto telephone master!
Google Reader
I think I may have just made the switch to Google Reader yesterday… for good. I’d been using the combination of NetNewsWire (on my MacBook) and Newsgator Online, primarily for the synching features. However, I was playing around with the revamped Google Reader last night and I’ll have to say, it’s the best I’ve used. The downside to all the other online readers I’ve used (i.e. Rojo, Newsgator, Attensa, FeedLounge, et cetera) was first and foremost speed. Google Reader is fast, easy to use, and one of my favorite features is the simplicity of browsing for feeds. Another neat feature is the ability to “share” links inside the Reader and add this data via a widget-like box to your own website. Also, other readers seem to have a hard time indexing popular RSS sources… at least for my taste. I tend to keep my reader limited to real publications (blogs and news sites) and a few other sources, I don’t like cluttering it up with data feeds from random other places, such as Digg, Flickr, and others.
Another standout feature of the new Google Reader is the introduction of keyboard shortcuts. The more it seems like a desktop application, the more I like it. Automatically. One negative point to most web-apps, however, is the ever-growing need for internet connectivity everywhere. Most web-app substitutes for desktop apps fall short when you’d like to work on a document offline, like Zoho and Writely. But in the case of a feed reader (short of having a zillion feeds you haven’t read in a while), synching and taking that feed data with you offline really isn’t that important. Bottom line, this new reader is great and hopefully it gets even better.
Guide to Hamachi
I’ve recently started using Hamachi (as in, 3 days ago), and I’m now addicted. I haven’t seen such a useful app in years. Hamachi is essentially a personal VPN solution for putting any computers on a sort of VLAN configuration across the internet. You would install Hamachi on any computers you want to have access to one another, create a network with a password, and join the computers to that network. The magic of Hamachi really comes from the fact that it’s a UDP-based peer-to-peer system in which the connections are secured via the main Hamachi server(s). However, the third-party server is only used to secure the connection; no data passes through the Hamachi servers. Dead simple.
Here’s a complete guide on the basics of Hamachi.
Read more