A while back an ex-coworker, who knew I loved woodworking, came into work excited to share "a cool tool hack" with me.
Did you know you can put a screwdriver bit into your electric drill and use it to drive screws much faster than using a screwdriver?
Umm.. Yes. I did. I’ve driven thousands of screws that way. That’s why cordless drills have a clutch.
I take it for granted that all the guys I know just know this stuff. All of my friends and I grew up tinkering. We’ve all wrecked our share of our fathers tools learning how stuff works. Now I never was particularly mechanically inclined, but I do know how to operate a wrench, a screw driver, a circular saw, and even a drill. It really shocked me that someone wouldn’t know this stuff.
Just kind of a funny story.
The wireless hardware on Anji’s laptop cooked itself last week. We took this as an opportunity to upgrade from our 802.11B wireless network to something a bit faster. I’d had my eye on the Linksys WRT54GL’s with the replaceable firmware so we bought one of those from Memory Express.
I had that up and running fairly quickly and then downloaded a new third-party firmware, DD-WRT v24 (download), and installed it. Installation went mostly good and now we’ve got this very cool looking web control panel. In addition I can login via SSH and poke around.
DD-WRT seems quite similar to the software that shipped with the device only with way more options. However you do get some coool extras; You can crank the signal strength, change to use illegal channels, use more dynamic dns services, setup a hotspot, setup QoS, and other fun things with DD-WRT.
It supports static DHCP leases for internal machines which is really handy for port forwarding and setting up a DMZ.
Details on connected wireless devices and DHCP leases.
Real-time network activity monitoring graphs:
A coworker just introduced me to Overclocked Remix. They have remixes of tonnes of old computer games including:
I’d forgotten how totally awesome Mutt is for an e-mail client. It’s entirely text based, ridiculously configurable, and all-around completely awesome.
I’d forgotten the joy of pouring through on-line samples of .muttrc (configuration files) searching for the one true configuration. Learning how to support multiple addresses with multiple signatures, etc. So fun 
Not to mention how great it is to be able to enter e-mails using Vi!
I love gmail but boy is mutt cool!
[I'm actually serious here]
When I used to host my own DNS I would frequently use a free service called DNSReport. It would analyze a domain and make sure that everything was looking good. It would check that all name servers were up and serving the same version of zone data, it would check MX records, and a huge variety of other things. It was exceptionally handy for catching all those little mistakes.
Well I’m back to hosting my own DNS and, unfortunately, DNSReport is no longer free and I don’t do enough of this to justify paying for the service.
Luckily a new service called introDNS provides something very similar with an even snazzier looking UI.
I’ve started using FireFox 3 (RC1) and, so far, I love it. I’m using it on my XP box at work and also on my Mac at home. It’s fast (according to other performance tests: very fast) and stable enough.
A lot of plug-ins are not available for it yet but the primary one I use (the del.icio.us plug-in) is supported.
One nice thing is that it supports registering web pages as handlers for things like mailto links (ie. clicking on an e-mail address can open up the compose page in Gmail.). In the past you could do this with plug-ins. Now you don’t need them. See instructions here.
There is also a portable version of Firefox 3 for use on your USB key or just to keep it separate from your working Firefox 2 installation.
For whatever reason the mysqld_safe process on my machine ran away and took over pretty much the entire CPU for days. I eventually had to kill it with extreme prejudice and restart it and now my CPU load is back where it should be for a totally unused server.
I wonder what was going on there? Odd.
It makes for a cool graph though
I came across this totally cool video of loading a bobcat onto a truck without using an ramps. You have to watch this. It’s amazing!
I’ve been hosting my sites with Dreamhost for a few years now and no complaints. For the peanuts I pay them, their service is fantastic.
I used to host my sites on my own servers. I used to spend hours tweaking qmail and djbdns into working order. I’d spend many an evening fiddling with Apache and PHP. Ah the memories… But I let it go and opted for the super simple Dreamhost control panel. Well I miss it! It was fun hosting my own mail and DNS. This Dreamhost thing is just too easy!
So I signed up with Linode (again). Linode is a vendor that sells virtual servers. For $20 a month I get a reasonable chunk of CPU time and memory (384MB), 10GB of disk space, some serious bandwidth (200GB / mo) and a static IP. Onto that virtual machine I can install a number of different Linux distributions using their web based control panel. From there I can login as root and run with it. Now this is fun.
Their web based control panel (above) is fantastic. I can build, configure, start, stop and restart the machine easily all from my browser. The technology under the hood is either Xen or UML (depending on the server you end up on).
They provide useful graphs of CPU usage and bandwidth usage:
In addition they provide a free secondary (or primary but I run my own DNS) DNS as part of their plans.
Upgrades are even easy and web based:
If you are in the market for hosting, and you’d like a bit more control over your environment, and you know Linux, you should seriously try them out. Very cool!
I’ve started using Microsoft’s Live Writer for posting to my blog. It’s awesome. Actually, it might even extend beyond awesome!
It’s basically a nice Windows front-end to various popular blogging packages (blogger, movable type, wordpress). It gives an easy-to-use, highly interactive, interface for updating your blog. My favorite feature is how easy it makes it to insert images into a blog post and have them get uploaded to the server.
It supports updating multiple blogs nicely. You can edit existing posts/pages and create new ones. It lets you edit using your style-sheet so it’s about as WYSIWYG as you can get.
Finally a piece of Windows software so cool I might actually go to the effort of installing Windows on my Mac at home! Nice work Microsoft (those who know my are probably clutching at their hearts after that comment).
