zen.org Communal Weblog

If you need ways to connect to your system remotely, but in a secure way and only when you want it to be available, check out Paul Keck’s really creative use of SSH keys. With a cron job using curl or wget, you could create a file on a particular web server that would cause an ssh tunnel (by way of that cron job) to be created from the inside of your system. That tunnel would listen on a port on the remote end, which you can then use to ssh in. Really handy sometimes. (Assuming my description is clear enough that if you have experience with this stuff you know what I mean, of course.)

With a little tweaking you can make KDE look like a Mac with the menu properly planted up at the top of the screen. I’ve never considered myself in the closet about honestly liking Macs even if my day-to-day box has been Linux for nearly 10 years. Yet this still feels like I’m exposing something about my inner self that has been put away safely for no one to see.

While we’re on the topic, MacOS should be available to the public for the x86, not just the powerpc. With the FreeBSD guts to it, I’d have a blast trying it out. I can see problems with the array of hardware that could be put onto the system in comparison to Apple’s very finite and clearly defined set they’re willing to support. But why should all hardware vendors accomodate Microsoft, maybe a bit of Unix, but never MacOS? Yeah, market share. Maybe that’s why they’re moving onto the GNU/Linux bandwagon. But it’ll take a fleet of GUI experts kidnapped from Apple for the interface of KDE or Gnome to ever touch the Mac despite everyone’s great efforts.

The Cassini space craft is supposed to get some nice pictures of Titan tonight. Images should start showing up after 21:30 EDT.