Friday, October 22, 2004

Google's advanced search operators

Google Guide: Using Search Operators (Advanced Operators)

Review: iPod battery replacement, iPod repair services

Wired News: Pumping Up the Power of the IPod

A Wired Magazine report on iPod battery replacement for 1 & 2 G iPods. They also mention some repair services. Apparently the firewire connection in 1/2G iPods was badly designed and fails after > 1 year (out of warranty) of use. The repair is difficult. Interestingly one of my 3 replacement 3G iPods from Apple (AppleCare) had a bad firewire port -- you could charge it but not sync it.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

VNC over SSH for OS X

macosxhints - Use an office Mac from a home Mac
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems overly complex if you have ssh access to the gateway host, and just want to connect with VNC to an internal host.

Why not just use ssh port forwarding?

ssh -L 5901:192.168.1.2:5900 workfw

Then, just connect your vnc client to localhost/127.0.0.1 port 5901, and it will go through the ssh tunnel to the internal host (192.168.1.2).

Sigh. I need to play with this. I still don't quite get it.

OS X and using CUPS drivers with a print server

macosxhints - Print to a Brother HL-1430 via a Linksys print server
Primary tip is about a specific model of printer, but methods are generalizeable.

Tracking space usage on an OS X drive

macosxhints - Another means of getting a disk usage summary
In addition to the script method, the comments reference other solutions. I'll use at least one of them.

The Google Browser

The New York Times > Technology > Google Envy Is Fomenting Search Wars
'If you drive by the Google buildings in the evening,' said a person who has detailed knowledge of the company's business, 'the lights that are still on are the ones on the floor where they are working on the browser.'

They deny it of course, but Google is doing a browser. I'm interested in the P2P VOIP and distributed backup parts of their browser. Too bad it will be Windows only.

Alternatives to Google indexing

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > State of the Art: Google Takes On Your Desktop
There's more power and flexibility to be had in programs like Blinkx (www.blinkx.com, free), Lycos Hotbot Desktop (www.hotbot.com/tools, free), Enfish (www.enfish.com, $50 and $200) and DT Search (www.dtsearch.com, $200).

This is odd. I've tried several similar programs, such as FileHand and X1. I've never heard of these despite searching for them. This is a search failure! (I do use Lookout VERY heavily -- it's my right hand these days.)