Dell Starts Selling Machines with Linux Pre-Installed Today
At 2 PM PST, Dell will start selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. I never actually thought I'd see this day to be honest. Sure, Linux is more than ready for the desktop, but not quite ready for me to install it for Mom. Still, this is huge and must have caused some serious riffs with the folks in Redmond. 
Though I've used Linux on servers since late 1998, I've only been using it on my desktop for the past couple of years and never once thought of putting it on a laptop because if the lack of quality open source drivers for wireless cards. That all changed with the release of Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn. Prior to relocating to Colorado Springs, I purchased a laptop with Windows Vista Premium on it for the road trip and found that the laptop was not ready for Vista. The drivers for the screen, keyboard and wireless card never worked properly and it was only out of a troubleshooting session that I decided to install Linux to see if the blank screen was the fault of the OS.
Not only did Ubuntu install beautifully, but it recognized my wireless card and I only had to put in my WPA key to make it work. Hibernation also works incredibly well whereas if I did that in Vista, I'd have to start in safe mode and reboot. 
I'm incredibly excited about Dell's move and it kills me to not buy one today to support the cause and reward a company for finally getting it. But I don't think the boss (Amy) really cares about the FOSS movement so it will have to wait for a few days. Ok, weeks. You're right honey, years.
FlickrSLiDR
Tonight I found FlickrSliDR, a very simple, on page web based application that allows you to create slideshows that can be inserted into your blog by simply pasting the URL of your Flickr set into the FlickrSLiDR interface. In about 10 seconds, you'll get XHTML 1.0 compliant code to paste into your browser. Pretty cool. Here is an example I made using the pictures from the car trip I took with Ellie from Seattle to Colorado Springs:
Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.
Freedom From The Tyranny of Voicemail
Time is money. When communicating costs me a lot of time, I tend not to do it, regardless of the consequences. Of all the communication methods we have in today's high tech society, the one I loathe the most is voice mail. How many of you reading this have left me a voice mail and never heard back for weeks if ever? Ok, don't all write me at the same time, this server can only handle so much load...
Think about it, how long does it take to retrieve a voice mail? First you often have to dial a 10 digit number, wait 5-7 seconds for it to ring, go through ridiculously slow voice prompts and hit a series of digits to actually listen to it. If you're lucky, the person spoke slowly and clearly enough for you to write down their phone number, that is if you have a pen and a piece of paper handy. I don't have two minutes to get a single voice mail.
Anyway, I often figured that if it was really important enough, the person would just call me back or send me an e-mail. Don't feel bad though, I'm far worse at work. When I left my last company, I listened to my voice mail on the last day and found stuff from our Oracle rep 9 months prior. So I don't like voice mail but I didn't want to inconvenience my friends and family to force them to send me an e-mail so I had to think of a different way. The different way found me.
A company called Simulscribe has delivered a life changing product that transcribes your voice mail into text and e-mails to whatever address you prefer. It can also send them via SMS. Getting voice mail in this way has seven distinct advantages:
1) You can read message transcripts in a fraction of the time you’d spend listening to them and easily delete them with just a half second scan.
2) You now have random access to your messages. You will never again have to sit through five chit-chatty messages, unaware that Message 6 is a time-critical bit of urgency from your boss, your girlfriend or Lauren Graham who won't take no for an answer.
3) You don’t have to take notes as you listen, writing down people’s names and numbers. The notes have already been taken for you. Poor penmanship or audio quality won't result in a wrong number to an adult dating service.
4) Text is indexable, searchable, sortable, copyable, pastable, printable and forwardable. What an awesome thing, to have a Find command for your entire backlog of voice messages. Want to pull up that message about the billion dollar deposit into your brokerage account? Just hit Find in your e-mail program, type “billion,” and do what you need to with it.
5) You can check your messages even if you’re deaf — or temporarily so, because you’re on a downtown street, at the mall or at a Michael Bolton concert (ok, if you're there, you have more serious problems than listening to your voice mail).
6) SimulScribe lets you save the momentous messages of your life — the marriage proposal (a voice mail proposal- how romantic!, the “she wants to have your baby” call, the “we'd like to offer you substantially more money” call — in a super handy audio archive of your life. That’s because each SimulScribe e-mail message arrives with an audio-file attachment. Its primary purpose is to provide you with a backup, to check against the transcription. You'll quickly discover how nice it is to be able to save that file separately for future reference, just the way you might save important e-mail.
7) If a voice mail transcript arrives on your Windows Mobile Smartphone or Blackberry, you can call the person back just by tapping on the phone number with your stylus where it appears in the message (super handy).
Simulscribe is available now (with a one week free trial) for $10 a month for 40 transcriptions with each additional message billed at 25 cents. This can become very expensive for those who get a lot of voicemail but the company plans to offer better deals for frequent voice mail receivers — including an unlimited plan but there were no details on those plans as I wrote this post.
I highly recommend trying it out if you hate voicemail as much as I do. And go ahead and leave me a message, I'll get back to you. Seriously, I will. No really. I promise.
A sample Simulscribe transcription in my e-mail
Wi-Fi On The Water!
Right now, I'm about 300 yards out into Puget Sound on the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry but have high speed internet access for free. How cool! I think I remember reading something about internet access on the ferries but have only used a ferry once in the six years I've been here. I opened up my MacBook Pro and saw an available wireless network. How Cool!!
SSH Tunnels for Fun And Profit
There will come a time where you are at an office or public place that blocks access to certain websites or ports. For example, at my current place of employment, they use a Websense caching proxy to block access to all sorts of sites, mainly webmail. This posed a problem on my first day because I needed some documents sent to me by my consulting firm. But a few minutes later, it wasn't a problem. This article will show you how to set up a proxy of your own using ssh to get past any firewall out there.
Prerequisites:
1) The Firefox web browser
2) Putty SSH Client (free from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)
3) An Open SSH server outside the corporate local area network
4) A connection to the internet
Assumptions:
1) Your company or public hot spot allows outgoing TCP connections on port 22 (likely).
I'm going to assume that you are running an ssh server at home or have access to one with a web hosting account. If not, they are easy to find and obtain or you can e-mail me and I might be able to hook you up.
1. Create a new PuTTY session
Run PuTTY and create a new session in PuTTY to connect to the remote host that is running OpenSSH. Fill in the hostname, the port (usually 22), make sure SSH is checked, give it a session name and hit Save:
2. Configure a secure tunnel
Click on “Tunnels? on the left and set up dynamic fowarding for a local port (e.g. 8080). Under “Add new forwarded port? type in 8080 for the source port, leave the destination blank, and check Auto and Dynamic. Then it the Add button. If you did it correctly, you’ll see D8080 listed in the Forwarded Ports box:
That’s it for tunnels, as there is no need to create more than one. Remember to save your session profile in PuTTY so you don’t have to set up the tunnel next time.
3. Connect to the remote SSH server
Double click on the connection profile and type in your username and password when prompted.
4. Configure Firefox
Go to Tools, Options, General, and then click on Connection Settings. Check Manual Proxy Configuration, leave most of the fields blank, but fill in 127.0.0.1 for the SOCKS v5 host with a port of 8080 (or whatever portyou used in Step 2):
6. There is one little problem with this. Although your communications are completely secure from your machine to the ssh host on the internet, your company or proxy operator will still be able to see the domain names you are visiting. This is because TCP/IP can be forwarded but UDP (what DNS runs on top of) cannot. So DNS lookups will be visible by your network administrator. That may not be a problem but you should be aware of this. But if are running the current version of Firefox and would like to protect that information, you can open the about:config page, and change network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.
7. Enjoy! Though your communications are completely secure, please use responsibly. Don't look at stuff you know you shouldn't be looking at while on the job. I mainly use it to secure my connections to my bank (yes, your company can easily find out your bank passwords and information) and webmail but sparingly.
To prove that the your proxy is working, use ipchicken.com before and after:
Before:
And after with my new ssh tunnel:
Pretty cool huh? Traffic is totally encrypted end to end! This can also be accomplished with Linux and Mac OS X but I'm guessing that most of you are using Windows. This technique can also be used to secure your connection at a public wi-fi Hotspot like T-Mobile/Starbucks or hotels.
