I’d looked at GUI SSH tunnel management on OSX before but was never really happy with it. CocTunnel is a brand new project though and super solid¹. I am a bit paranoid about opening ports on my router so the first thing I did was turn off password SSH access. sshd will drop anything that isn’t public key now. I also associated it with a non-standard port on my router. When CocTunnel connects to my home machine it forwards the ports from the three services I regularly use: 3689 for iTunes library sharing (daap), 548 for Apple File Protocol (afp), and 5900 for Screen Sharing (remote frame buffer, rfb).

The final piece to make the experience seamless is Network Beacon. Network Beacon lets you advertise any arbitrary Bonjour service. I created a beacon for each of the three services and their ports named the same way they appear on my home network (pictured above). Now if I open Finder, my server appears just like it does at home. I can mount filesystems, share screens, or stream the iTunes library.

In the future I’ll probably investigate iVPN and ShareTool, the latter of which sounds like absolute magic.

Keep in mind: the amount of fun you have with any of these solutions is entirely dependent on your home connection’s upload speed.

Footnote 1: The developer says it’s pronounced “Ci Oh Ci Tunnel”. It gets it’s name because it’s built Cocoa, so you could say “Coke Tunnel”. I’m a sporting man myself and say “Cock Tunnel” like an adult.

This weekend @SanMo (original post) started freaking out and reposting the same tweets over and over again. Code superstar Chris Finke wasn’t available to help me track down the issue so I reanimated Chris Nelson for assistance. My initial thought was that Twitter had changed the way it served mentions. retweet.py stores the status_id of each status it retweets in a sqlite database so it doesn’t repeat itself. Browsing the database, I noticed that the two tweets it was repeating were the first with ids above 10 billion (a recent milestone). Chris pointed out that running sqlite> SELECT MAX(status_id) FROM retweets; Returned the id ’9663742534′ and not the true maximum. The table that retweet.py creates has two text columns, one for status_id and one for the timestamp. Changing the status_id column to integer causes MAX() to work properly (I’m not sure what the technical reason behind this failure is). To get retweet.py running again, I did the following (via Chris) from the command line:

# sqlite3 sanmo.sqlite
sqlite> CREATE TABLE retweets2 (status_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, timestamp TEXT);
sqlite> INSERT INTO retweets2 SELECT * FROM retweets;
sqlite> DROP TABLE retweets;
sqlite> ALTER TABLE retweets2 RENAME TO retweets;
sqlite> .quit


That will shift all the old data into a new table. The initial database creation routine needs to be fixed in retweet.py and will probably be in version 1.3. The fix above works for me but your mileage may vary.


Host *
ProxyCommand connect -H xxx.xx.xxx.x:80 %h %p


Then I set up my SSH SOCKS proxy as usual.


ssh -ND 8822 eliot@example.org


I used connect.c, but a friend had success with corkscrew.

Goozex is a videogame and DVD trading service I’ve been using and I’m quite happy with it. Each game or DVD has a point value based on the age and demand. You earn points by giving items and spend points to receive items. Each trade costs the receiver 1 dollar. Points can be purchased 100 for $5. New games usually enter the market at 1000 points and age in 50 point increments.

I started using the service when I realized I wasn’t a videogame collector and started getting rid of my Playstation 2 and 1 games. I decided that I didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding a backwards compatible PS3 so I bought an Xbox 360. Again. Of the 15 Playstation 2/1 games I listed, I got rid of 11 within a month. I could then reinvest those points in 360 games.

I like the economy of Goozex because it helps you avoid the new game penalty. You can get a new release, play it, and then trade it before it has dropped in value. Thursday night I completed Assassin’s Creed II. The game was released in late November and is 1000 points. I got it in trade a week ago and just sent it to a new person today. With the cost of shipping, packaging, and $1 for Goozex, the game cost me $4 to play since it didn’t drop in points. I could have kept it another month and it would still be 1000 points. I could use a subscription service like GameFly but sometimes I’ll go long stretches without playing anything. It’s also 2/3rds more expensive than Netflix, a service I use all the time.

I learned about Goozex from Chris Grant at Joystiq. I had used ITradeVideoGames a few years before, but I like Goozex’s reputation system and presentation. It also lets me pick up cheap DVDs without having to deal with random eBay auctions or Amazon sellers.

Next up, I’m going to be resuming my Mass Effect game (wherever the hell I stopped that a year ago) in preparation for the playing the sequel.

I came to OSX from a Linux environment so there are often times when I’m using Finder and thinking, “Damnit, this would be faster with a command line.” I thought I’d share two tools that I’ve found alleviate some GUI pain. The first is Marc Liyanage’s Open Terminal Here which drops you into a shell in the current folder. In my experience, command line mplayer is the least crashy/clunky media player on OSX for playing odd codecs, so I just open terminal here when I find the file(s) I want to play. The second tool is Jim DeVona’s LSelect which lets you select files using shell style globbing just like you would with ls. It’s much faster than the GUI for even the simplest of tasks like selecting just one file type. I’m using both of these with Henrik Nyh’s fine icons. I hope you find these tools useful.

Shareaholic is a browser addon that streamlines the process of using bookmarking services. When it originally debuted, I wasn’t using Digg or delicious that often. I’ve recently accumulated a lot of bookmarklets that I use fairly frequently and decided to give Shareaholic another go. These are the services I’m using Shareaholic for:

• Bit.ly – When I want to share a link on Twitter, Bit.ly is my goto. It shortens and gives you free stat pr0n.
• Google Reader – I’ve got a fun group of people on Reader and this makes it easy to inject stories into my shared items.
• Instapaper – I’m guessing I’d get more mileage out of this if I was an iPhone user.
• Tumblr – Used most often for adding posts to Fucking Curated.
• WordPress – For posting here.
• Amazon Universal Wish List – I always wanted to make more use of this and Shareaholic makes it easy.
• Gmail – Sending links via Gmail was all I every used Mozilla’s Ubiquity for.

I installed the extension on Firefox and now that the dev channel of Chrome for Mac has extensions I’ve got it there too.

Unfortunately, leaving Hack a Day means a lot of reshuffling online. I had only launched this blog two months before starting there so much of my online identity is tied to HaD. My main email address was a Gmail account eliot.hackaday and my AIM account was similar. I decided to start using this domain as my primary contact. Here is what I had to do and a few of the missteps:
First, I decided I’d use Google Apps on robotskirts.com (you can email me eliot at this domain). I had used Google Apps on Hack a Day; it gives you Gmail, Calendar, and Documents. The only thing that’s missing is Reader… this turned out worse than I thought. You can sign up for a Google Account with any email address (i.e. your domain) and use Reader… but Reader doesn’t have access to your Contacts or Chat which are very important to the new sharing features. I ended up forwarding all of my domain email to my existing first.last Gmail account.

The first thing I did was turn on forwarding for all of Gmail accounts I had (5) plus Gmail on my domain. For the incoming account, I set up filters to label the inbound mail so I knew which account it came from. I also added the accounts so I could respond from the appropriate address if necessary. I already had a number of filters setup on my original account. I used a Gmail Labs tool to export these filters and import them into the new account.

Moving Contacts was easy. The built in export/import maintains all groups (this is important since it syncs to my G1).

Calendar export/import works the same way.

Reader’s OPML export/import also works well. The problem is: Google’s tools for adding friends in Reader are weak when it comes to large operations like this. Who you can potentially share/follow depends on who you email/chat with the most… but this is a new account so you don’t have any Chat contacts. I posted a note in my old Reader account’s shared items with my new Google Account profile in hopes people would follow the new account.

I needed to move my AIM and GTalk buddies. Normally I use Adium on my Mac for aggregating everyone’s IM accounts, but to do the move I had to use iChat. iChat uses a separate list for each account. I logged into both AIM accounts and created matching groups in the new account. I turned off “use offline group” so that the offline contacts would show up in their normal group. I then went through each group selecting all and dragging and dropping to the new robotskirts AIM account. I repeated this process for the new GTalk account.

The reason I wanted Google Apps on my domain was because the email address reinforces who I am. There’s another feature that is a big win though and that’s the “Catch-all address” pictured above. When I sign up for a new web service, I use the web service’s name @robotskirts.com. This makes any inbound email easy to filter based on service and I can tell if someone sold an email address. Everything forwarded to my Gmail account retains the original address even though I read it @gmail instead of @robotskirts.

That previous paragraph is the only reason I use Google Apps on my domain (and all of that email is forwarded to Gmail). What I learned from this move is that using Google services without an @gmail account is a complete pain. You’re better to just forward your email there and use the address virtually than to run Apps on your own domain (also, if you want to connect to Jabber from GTalk on your domain, you have to edit SRV records). Granted, this is only my opinion for personal use. Using Google Apps with a team of people on the same domain goes fairly well. To have a central identity and get the most out of Google, you need @gmail.

• Pixelmator
• 1Password
• Launchbar: 1, 2, 3
• Speed Download: 1, 2

I found this talk on FileVault cracking while I was searching. I love all of the little accelerated cracking projects David Hulton has been doing with FPGAs lately.

Cory and many others from Rackspace put in an incredible amount of work helping with the Katrina relief efforts. Here is his story: “Shelter Famous”, or, How To Build Disaster Relief Software (with Rails)