sadevil.org

Sade linked me to this nice ebook by Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. Unfortunately, you need Adobe Digital Editions for it, which only exists for Windows and Mac. Since she’s a Linux user, that one didn’t really fly with her.

So, to get that thing to work, here’s a very low-tech way of doing it:

1. Install Digital Editions on a supported OS (I used Mac OS)
2. Download/open the ebook’s ebx.etd file
3. Let Digital Editions open, download and authenticate the file
4. Print to PDF 40 pages (the damn thing won’t let you print more)
5. Close the digital Editions app
6. Delete (in my case) the ~/Documents/Digital Editions directory
8. Reload the webpage
9. Goto step 2

Repeating this until you have the entire ebook in PDF’s for easy reading at home, under your favourite OS / device! ;)

After yesterday’s clone I noticed some applications behaved erraticly, amongst which Preview, Thunderbird, Appfresh… rather irritating.

After some searching I found the fix on this CCC Forum thread:

sudo chgrp wheel /var/folders/*
sudo chmod 700 $TMPDIR
sudo chown $USER $TMPDIR

In short, the permissions for that directory werent taken over correctly from the original, hence the problems. All fixed now ;)

Upgraded my Macbook with a bigger disk: from an 80gb Toshiba MK8034GSX drive (with which it came delivered) to a (secondhand) 320gb Hitachi HTS543232L9A300 (what’s in a name…). Long live diskspace! ;)

And thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner the migration was painless.

You know what I really hate? Crap parkers. People that have a car, and that, according to them, needs to take up atleast 1.5 parking spots. Parking so badly that you - parked nicely in between the lines, in the bloody center - can’t get in or out of your car anymore, save by crawling in the car over the seats.

Lately we’ve been encountering more and more of these idiots, so we’re starting a new category: the crap parkers.

Here’s the first (ok, not _that_ crap, but it was crap enough that I couldn’t get in anymore the regular way) - car on the left:

Simon’s Cat YouTube channel

Read more »

Here’s a short how-to to get the iodine dns tunnel working on your Mac.

In this short howto, I’ll assume you’ll be using a linux server to act as your gateway to the world. I’ll also assume you’ve read the iodine documentation and setup your DNS accordingly. For my example, I’ll be using a (nonexistant) DynDNS.org static DNS entry, iodine.rulestheworld.tld. I’ll also assume that you’ll be using a public internet address of 1.2.3.4, and a private subnet of 10.0.0.1.

1. Install the tun/tap driver for Mac OS X. Easy as doing *click* *click* done! :p
2. Next, install iodine on your Mac. Easy as download, extract, and typing make; make install
3. Now, install iodine on your linux box. It’s included in the package repositories of the usual suspects, for instance debian: apt-get install iodine.

   Start it (or configure it to use) with:
   iodined -P <password> <unused private IP> <dns name>
   or in our example:
   iodined -P mypass 10.0.0.1 iodine.rulestheworld.tld

   This should return the following:

   Opened dns0
   Setting IP of dns0 to 10.0.0.1
   Setting MTU of dns0 to 1024
   Opened UDP socket
   Listening to dns for domain iodine.rulestheworld.tld

4. Configure your linux box for IP forwarding: sysctl -e net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
(and add this to your /etc/sysctl.conf file), and configuring your firewall (iptables) for masquerading:
   iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
5. Next, download NStun.sh, a very handy script that does all the hard work of changing the routes and so on :p

   You’ll want to change the script: change the first lines as the script reads, and lower, change the
   

   NS=`grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf|head -1|awk ‘{print $2}’`

   line to read

   NS=”62.213.207.197″

Now, start NStun.sh on your Mac, and surf away! (well, slowly, but freely, atleast!)

I was trying to get xrdp running on my Linux box, so I could takeover the screen from the outside world. The rdp protocol is a (huge) bit more performant than VNC, which is why I wanted to use it.

Today I was trying for the 3rd time to get it to work, using CoRD as an RDP client, but I never got any image back - the client started, I saw the connection being built up, but I never got any image over. Starting rdesktop locally gave me the output I expected.

This gave me the idea of using Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 Public Beta, to see if it might be a problem with the client… and yup, it is.

Seems CoRD 0.4.3 (the current stable) is unable to handle the output of xrdp. I now installed the 0.5 beta 1 which works without any problems.