Hamachi - free secure VPN for Windows

Gibson podcast about Hamachi, a "free" personal Win32/Linux VPN solution, in December:

This week Leo and I discuss and describe the brand new, ready to emerge from a its long development beta phase, ultra-secure, lightweight, high-performance, highly-polished, multi-platform, peer-to-peer and FREE! personal virtual private networking system known as "Hamachi". After two solid weeks of testing and intense dialog with Hamachi's lead developer and designer, I have fully vetted the system's security architecture and have it running on many of my systems. While I am travelling to Toronto this week, Hamachi is keeping my roaming laptop securely and directly connected to all of my machines back home. Don't miss this one!

I went to the web site, from which I could figure out approximately nothing. In particular, I can't see how they plan to make money. Gibson says a Mac version is coming:

Steve: It's www.hamachi.cc. Alex is up in Vancouver, and so he's got a .cc on the end of his URL. You'll go to his site, download his client, currently for Windows or Macintosh - I'm sorry, Windows or Linux, and then Mac is coming soon. Installing couldn't be any easier. You simply run the setup, you go through a little wizard-based install to basically, you know, tell it where you want to load it on your hard drive. It sees that it's being installed in a system that it hasn't installed before. There's a negotiation with the server where it assigns it a unique IP. Your client produces its own asymmetric key pair, which it then uses to perform strong authentication. You do that on a couple other systems. Now, one trick is, he is assigning IPs sequentially. When I installed it on my second machine, for example, one of mine was 5.11.66.114. That was the first one I installed. What's very cool is I can tell you the IP. It doesn't matter. You can't get to 5.

I still haven't quite figured it out. If they produce a Mac client I'll give it a try.

Update: The key to figuring this out is to click on the screenshots and read them. I think I get it. I am also now inclined to believe a Mac client may appear. This is very interesting.

Finally I discover a use for Expose

Lord, but this set of Kelby tips is good. I'd never quite figured out the use of Expose, except for hitting F11 to show my desktop. What was the advantage over hitting Cmd-Tab and cycling between apps? Ahh, but what if an app has many windows ...

Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Switching Apps Within Expos�:

Once you have Expose invoked (you pressed either F9 or F10), you can toggle through your open applications and Finder windows by pressing the Tab key. Press the Tab key once and the next open application and its miniaturized windows come to the front. Press Tab again, it goes to the next open app. Want the previous app? Press Shift-Tab.

When I use Firefox I have multiple tabs in windows, but also multiple windows. The tab/window sorting problem is very annoying (only OmniWeb tried to fix that and I didn't like their vertical tabs, IE 7 is supposed to tackle it better) and this doesn't entirely fix that, but using Expose this way is indeed more efficient than using Cmd-Tab to find a desired window. F9 arranges all the windows, F10 leaves one in the background. I'm not sure which I prefer.

So now I'll be using Expose. Heavens, I might end up using Widgets -- if they put the darned things on the desktop where they belong.

Creating a multi-item archive in OS X

More things I never knew, and the first use I've had for the "Action menu". OS X has a clever way to put multiple items into a zip, without having to put them in a folder first.

Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Making ZIP Files (Compressed Files) in One Click:

...the Action menu (the button that looks like a gear up in the Finder window’s toolbar)...

... You can also compress several different files (like three, for example) into one single archive file — just Command-click (or Shift-click contiguous files) on all the files you want included, then choose Create Archive of X Items from the Action menu. A file will be created named “Archive.zip”...

Display full file name in OS X column view

Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Speed Tip: Faster Full-Name Viewing in List View.

Arggghhh. This has annoyed me for years. Now I discover there's a solution. In columnar view, to see a complete file name, hold the option key and place the mouse cursor over the truncated name (don't click).

I'm going to bang my head on the desk now.

Update: Another way to do something similar is to invoke Cmd-Opt-I. The resulting information display window changes as you click on an object. If you display the name field you can even edit file names this way. It's surprisingly convenient, especially in icon view. BTW, if you select several items and do Cmd-I you get an information window for each one, but if you select Cmd-Opt-I you get a summary window for all three. So clever. In the OS X world, it hardly ever hurts to try the Option key and see what happens. If the Cmd key is the "splat" key, the Option key is the "easter egg" key.

Podcasts - I find some I like

A while back I looked for podcasts that interested me, but I came up short. Since then my office has moved, and I have a half-hour commute instead of a 12 minute commute. Just enough time to fit in a podcast in the morning, and recently I came across two podcasts of interest. One is Public Radio's Marketplace podcast, the other is Steve Gibson's security cast. The latter has an intriguing series on VPN and SSH/SSL security; topics I do need to learn more about.

I didn't go the web sites to add these podcasts, instead I searched for them using iTunes. It worked quite well.

Using Folder Actions

Apple is doing a major revamping of their web site, with special pages targeting user communities. In general it looks like a solid improvement. This might help explain why so many of their web pages were becoming neglected and decrepit -- they were foregoing maintenance pending the new release.

Their "pro" site has a "tip" from Scott Kelby Mac OS X tip every Wednesday. Most annoyingly, there's no RSS feed. You have to remember to visit. Dumb. If they provided a title-only feed they get much more site traffic. Maybe that's coming. Today's tip was on Folder Actions, another Tiger features I've not found a use for ...

Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Adding Automation Through Folder Actions:

At the office, I’m on a network and I have a Drop Box where my co-workers (freaks that they are) can send me files. However, for a long time, if a freak put something in my Drop Box, I wouldn’t know it unless they called or emailed me and told me so. But now anytime one of them drops something in my Drop Box, a message dialog appears that says, “Something freaky is in your Drop Box.” This is a simple AppleScript ...

To assign a script to a folder, Control-click on that folder and choose Configure Folder Actions from the contextual menu that appears. This brings up the Folder Actions Setup dialog, where you toggle various scripts assigned to folders on and off, or even edit scripts (if you know how to write AppleScripts). Click the plus sign ( ) button at the bottom left of the dialog to add your folder to the list (this actually brings up a standard Open dialog showing your folder, so click on your folder in the dialog and click Open). Once you do this, a window will pop down with a list of built-in sample scripts you can assign to this folder, and their names give a cryptic description of what they do. Pick the one that sounds like what you want to do (to replicate my Drop Box warning, choose “add — new item alert .scpt”) and click the Attach button (you’ll see your newly assigned script appear in the column on the right of the dialog). Now click the Enable Folder Actions checkbox at the top-left corner of the dialog. This is a global on/off switch, so any folder to which you’ve attached scripts is now “activated.”

By the way, once you’ve applied actions to a folder, you can turn Folder Actions on or off globally by Control-clicking on any folder and choosing Enable Folder Actions or Disable Folder Actions from the contextual menu.

Export OS X Mail.app Address Book to CSV files

Finally - a tool for exporting Address Book to Thunderbird (and Gmail) - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Handy for moving data out of Apple's lockbox.

Looking for a BetterHTMLExport replacement

For years I used BetterHTMLExport to produce iPhoto web sites (iPhoto's default web export is pretty crummy). Alas, BHE has been sold and I didn't get a good feeling about its new home. I'd have to pay to upgrade to the iPhoto 5 compatible version anyway, so I went looking -- and found
Galerie

It's free (why?) and gets great ratings. Easy to use and install, and, unlike BHE, easy to uninstall. It doesn't mess with iPhoto. I dropped 339 images on it from iPhoto and it generated a nice set of pages using the default template. Alas, Galerie only works with metadata embedded in the image. It can't use the titles and comments from iPhoto.

So Galerie is pretty nice (though I wish it were not free), but I'm still looking.

Update 5/25/06: Galerie now uses titles and comments, so it's the perfect replacement.

Changes to comments

I've changed the Blogger comments settings. Anyone can comment now, there's no longer a requirement to register with Blogger. All comments have to be approved for now, but I'll see how much junk I get. Maybe the very annoying OCR Turing test (type distorted letters) will suffice to limit spam. (I dislike that test intensely since screen readers for visually impaired persons can't pass it.)

Creating a hard drive installer for OS X

macosxhints - Create a hard-drive based OS X installer

Read the comments, it sounds like there's a simpler approach.

Extended Desktop for OS X: Screen Spanning Doctor

I just read a great report of using Screen Spanning Doctor with a 20" iMac like mine. I suspect one would need to disable it if running Aperture, but it would be neat buy a Dell LCD (beware major quality & support issues with this and other Dell produts) and share the Dell between my XP box and my iMac.

If I do that, I'll update this post.

Playlist's top iPod products 2005

Playlist: Plays of the Year Awards has a very nice summary of iPod products. It even included a few I didn't know, like Senuti for extracting tunes from an iPod.

Hardware VPN - the cost effective solution

I've been periodically looking into various solutions for doing remote maintenance for my mother through firewalls, etc. It fiinally occurred to me that I might just as well implement a hardware VPN solution.

I've no idea if this D-Link DI-824VUP device is any good (ie reliable). It is impressive, however, that it includes VPN services, stateful packet inspection, 802.11g wireless, a print server and a microwave oven in a single package -- for about $120. A simpler device without wireless is about $60. So for $200 I could permanently link my mother's network to my own.

Why would I do this - besides doing maintenance remotely? So she can install a Squeezebox client to my music server ...

Update 1/5/06: From a comment below I found this summary of windows remote control options. I should also mention one I rather fancy - FogCreek CoPilot. The same comment also included a great link to Gibson's podcasts on security. I'm a Gibson fan, and the podcast list also includes transcripts. I may work these into my morning commute -- the very first podcasts I've bothered with.

I must say, I'm glad I enabled anonymous posts!

PS. In editing this post I accidentally made it transiently vanish. Sorry.

Configuring VPN services in Mac OS X server

Maclive.net: Setup Mac OS X VPN Server for Mac & XP Clients

Copying DVDs: DVD2One

Shrek won't play on my aging iBook. It starts skipping about half-way through. Looks like my the original drive (read CD or DVD, burn nothing) has trouble with dual-layer DVDs. I also know it won't read a Tiger DVD (also dual-layer).

This is a problem when entertaining the kids on long flights.

I used Mac The Ripper (author site is gone, versiontracker still has it) to copy the DVD to my iMac drive, then tried DVD2one.com to create a compressed version that could be burned to a single layer DVD-R. It sort of worked; after burning the drive didn't show up in the Finder (10.4) and I had to eject using Disk Utility. I was able to insert and play however -- but it looks quite ugly. Too bad!

I'll have to decide whether to put a new drive in the G3 or (more sensibly) buy something newer. Alas the days of playing DVDs on a laptop may be numbered; the movie houses hate us doing that. I refuse to carry yet another device, so we may have to make do with old movie and I may need to learn more about the dark side.