Mostly notes to self
My mac just upgraded Safari to version 4. Looks nice at a first glance, but what really made me go “whoaa” was the Develop menu’s User Agent submenu. Apparently you can change rendering engine to a bunch of popular browsers out there. This will surely come in handy for a web developer as myself.
I’ve already gone on about how fantastic MPD (Music Player Daemon) is. The server-client music player has totally changed the way I listen to music at home. By having the MPD server (that actually does the playing) constantly running on my HTPC connected to my amp and speakers, I can control the music playback from any device that has an MPD client written for it. Since the server doesn’t stop playing if a client quits, I can start playback using one client and stop it using another.
Until today, I had a couple of text-based clients on the HTPC itself (for controlling playback over SSH ;), two-three clients on my laptop, one on my girlfriends laptop and one on her iTouch. Chances are quite high that at least one of these are switched on and within reach at any given time. However, there are times when both laptops are shut down, the iTouch has run out of batteries, I’m late for work and MPD is happily playing since I forgot to stop it before I put my Macbook to sleep. This morning was such a time.
When I was new to MPD and wanted to install clients on everything including the toaster and microwave oven, I tried out a client for S60 mobile phones. As far as I remember, something didn’t work and I probably lost interest and thought that my gazillion clients already installed would suffice. Well, today I started looking into it again, the JavaME client for MPD, Remuco.
Continue reading ‘Control MPD from your mobile phone with Remuco’
I attended my very first real life auction yesterday. The Helsinki Lost Property Office once again arranged their monthly auction to get rid of a bunch stuff that has been collecting dust in their shelves for over three months without anyone claiming them. Bad for the losers, good for the Office and people looking to buy cheap pigs in a poke. As a real auction-noob, this is of course exactly what I did.
Every once in a while I need to set up a temporary SSH tunnel from one computer to another, possibly via a third one, and can’t be bothered with configuring any of my otherwise frequently used GUI tools ‘SSH Tunnel Manager’ for OS X or ‘SSH Tunnel’ on Win XP. Each time, however, I end up reading the man page for the ssh command or googling for ’ssh tunnel linux’ or something similar, since I never seem to remember how to set up a simple SSH tunnel on the command line. The ssh man page is especially unhelpful:
-L [bind_address:]port:host:hostport
What? Which port goes where? And what’s the bind_address and hostport? If you read the explanation of the switch you’ll probably just become even more confused. After a few trials and errors I usually get my SSH tunnel up and running, but most of the time I’m not quite sure what I’ve really done.
So here’s a note to self on how to do this once and for all.
There are a lot of these out there on the Interwebs, but this is one of the few I’ve run into (since I don’t normally use Windows) and the only one I’ve captured.
There are two serious wtfs here.
Of course, this is a matter of interpretation, but still. Dialogs mustn’t be ambiguous like this.
Failure.