Google has become more than a traditional search engine to me – it’s become a means of navigation by keyword, like a application launcher on a traditional desktop.
This is of course not optimal, each time I want to generate a random password I used to just search for ‘random password’ and find the first available on line tool and just use that. In time I would know what to search for to find a specific tool I want to use and just repeatedly perform those searches. Not very fast but it worked in some way.
Enter YubNub a full blown command line for the web, users can define a keyword such as ‘g’ any query into YubNub for ‘g something’ will do a Google search for ‘something’.
To take my example of the password generator above further you can define (and someone has indeed done this) a ‘passwd’ command that is a front end to Winguides.com’s password generator. Simply typing ‘passwd 8′ into YubNub will give you 8 character passwords, not too shabby. The idea is sound and I like it, so what’s wrong?
Well lets say my company has it’s own policy for passwords that I’d need to use, I still want to use the web as my command line to this kind of tools but I’m stuck with YubNub’s ‘passwd’ not complying to my policy. I could in theory define a ‘rippasswd’ command that points to an internal server to produce my passwords but that is just bad for many obvious reasons. What you really want is your own version of this, and indeed you can download the YubNub source code and run your own. For most users though I think the full YubNub on their own systems might be overkill or you might just not be a Ruby on Rails fan.
There are other alternatives – one very notable one from Yahoo! called Open Shortcuts – this lets you do something similar by prefixing your keywords on their toolbar with a ! so you could search for “!passwd 8″ and achieve the same goals. Yahoo goes a bit further you can create your own ‘passwd’ keyword overriding any existing one which effectively fixes one of the major problems I had with YubNub, except now you have to really be using the Yahoo toolbar which is not an option Yahoo is well known for their very very bad practices with delivering all sorts of nasties onto your computer along with their toolbar, so while the idea is great it isn’t viable.
Back in August I could not sleep one Friday evening and I wrote a self hosted keyword query system very much like YubNub except it is not intended to be open to everyone to add/edit keywords. This is specifically intended to host on your own machines – think company or personal intranet – it allows you to add your own keywords, it has a normal YubNub inspired user interface and also at the moment a Firefox Mycroft search plugin.
You can see my install of it at cmd.devco.net. Having used it now for 5 months I can safely say I cannot imagine my online life without it ever again, it has become as essential to me as Google itself. Looking at my stats I’ve done 2500 queries against it with only 1600 of them being Google, that means it has saved me from the search-click-click-click pain of using online tools that I had before. You can see which commands I have defined on mine here. I am going to release this as opensource to everyone soon, at the moment it requires Postgres but I intend to make it use SQLite instead and polish up the documentation etc a bit first.
The web as command line
SynergyKM
Most readers here will probably know Synergy already, it’s a tool that lets you share one keyboard and mouse between two machines. The machines can run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X etc. in any combination. I don’t always realize it but this little tool is as integrated into my work environment as the computers themselves, I simply could not live with out it.
Till now getting it going on the Mac was a major pain, it involved all sorts of silly files being copied by hand etc, was hard to make auto start etc. Enter SynergyKM, it’s a GUI to Synergy, has a System Preferences plugin and sits nicely in the menu bar (optionally) showing your current status. It supports auto discovery of your current location via Bonjour otherwise you can just select your location like the normal network location tool on the Mac. It supports configuring both client and server mode.
Google Calculator Command Line
I have been contemplating coding up a little script that scrapes Google to write a command line to the Google calculator, seems I was beaten to it by John Bokma who wrote a nice Perl based Google calculator interface
% gc 50 usd in gbp
50 U.S. dollars = 29.105303 British pounds
Truecrypt Version 4
I’ve previously posted about Truecrypt and mentioned how much I like it and how I’m using for my OTFE needs.
Today they released version 4 which comes with a very long list of enhancements the most significant new feature is support for Linux and binaries for a number of distributions. There are so many enhancements in this version that I won’t attempt to go into much detail here the history file does a great job. If you use Truecrypt then check out the new version today.
Library Thing
I’ve been looking for book catalog system for a while now, I’ve tried a few but all desktop based ones. The problem with these are that they’re not platform independent, hard to share with other people, just more things to backup etc etc.
I have been considering writing my own for a while now, today again I figured I should start on this, then I read about Library Thing on Blogspotting.
Library Thing is fairly typical for todays online tools, you add the books by ISBN or title, author etc, it searches Amazon in many countries or the Library of Congress in order to find all the information about the book, including images. You can tag your photos, it shows tag clouds, author clouds etc and will help you find other people who share your taste in books.
Crucially it has a export function that lets you save your data locally, import into Excel or whatever. Great site, I put my 170 books into it in about a hour.
You can see my catalog of books, hopefully soon there will be a API that lets you build on-top of it. So far I am within the free account limit, but I cannot see why I wont upgrade to a paid account soon.
Google Blog Search
It seems my wishes has come true and Google has finally launched a Blogsearch service.
It does not have all the bells and whistles of other blog search tools, you cannot restrict searches to OPML feeds etc, but I’ve never used those features in the competition. I just do a simple text search and want results.
The search supports all the usual google search modifiers like link: but also has some blog specific stuff: inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl:, more at the FAQ.
UPDATE: Scoble is doing some comparisons between google and others, check his blog for new entries but so far see these: 1, 2, 3.
Google, IM and GMail
So everyone knows Google released their IM System today based on Jabber. The client is a bit low on features and the audio isn’t great.
More on this when they start talking with more jabber servers, till then it’s Just Another Jabber Server. I want to run a corporate Jabber server with my own security policy and encrypted links, but people should have the option to speak to Google Talk users etc if they wish.
What’s more interesting is that they’ve recently allowed you to set your own From address on gmail, this is great news and something I would have thought would get more press.
Just click Settings -> Accounts and there should be an option to add more From addresses.
If you then compose a mail you get to choose the From address. It is pretty nifty but does not change the envelope address, just the From header so its not 100% ideal but I can understand why they did it that way.
One step closer to being able to use gmail as a primary mail interface.
A month of Flickr
I uploaded my first picks to Flickr on the 14th of June so thats just over a month ago.
I obviously was pretty much sold on it back then already since I uploaded 700 photos in the following few days, but now I am realizing other things about Flickr that was not apparent during my poking around on it leading up to the uploading of photos.
Mostly the things I’m realizing are about the community on flickr, people really do contribute, comment, make suggestions, post to the forums etc in a very friendly and accommodating way. In short it’s one of the best photo communities I’ve taken part in.
Some stats on my photos hosted there:
| Number of Views: | 10380 |
| Photos with comments: | Difficult to say, > 100 |
| Photos that’s been marked as Favorites: | 73 |
| Photos with > 100 views: | 6 |
| Number of Contacts: | 71 |
| People who list me as Contact: | 59 |
There are some other interesting stats but I think this paints the picture, when I had my photos on a Gallery hosted on my own machine I got loads of hits as well but nothing like on Flickr and those hits were mostly driven from Google and very much a hit-and-run type scenario. No-one left comments or anything, I never had any kind of interaction with those viewers, it’s very different on Flickr and that’s the major selling point.
Flickr has the concept of contacts, you add them, they get a mail that you’ve done so and they can see your photos and choose to add you as a contact too. There is a special page that shows a stream of photos uploaded by your contacts and also an RSS feed. This is great for keeping track of peoples work instead of just following a blog since people tend to upload only their best to a photoblog.
Photos can also belong to groups, there are groups for anything you can imagine, so I tend to send photos to groups like People in Black and White, these groups also have discussion forums.
So to sum up, I’m very happy with the $24.95 I spent to get me on Flickr for a year, it’s been great and it’s changed drastically how I work with my photos, even in strange ways like making it easier to publish to my photoblog which means I do it more often. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for casual photo hosting for family and friends and for anyone interested in a community driven site.
On The Fly Encryption (OTFE)
I recently got a LaCie 250Gb external drive to do some off-site backups of my data. I am a bit worried about security though since it is so easy to get these USB devices talking to just about anything.
I read up about disk encryption software commonly called On The Fly Encryption – OTFE for short. I use XP and OS X as my desktop Operating Systems but I think I’ll stick this drive mostly into my XP machines for now so I am focussing on software for that at the moment.
The amount of data I need to encrypt is probably much less than 5Gb, it is just things like mail, configuration files, a few database dumps and so forth, the rest could go in the plain onto the disk. However some of these tools allow encryption of full devices so that would be an ideal. I would for example not be too happy if my raw files of my photos gets stolen, this is the main chunk of data I need to arrange off-site backup for.
There are a number of free and commercial options, I tried a few in each catagory:
| Product Name | Cost | Comments |
| FileDisk | Free (GPL) | Command line only, though the FreeOTFE author wrote a GUI front end for it. It seems to be unmaintained though and certainly was the reason for quite a few hard resets of my box today. |
| FreeOTFE | Free (GPL) | Early days in developement but looks promising. I had it stop responding a couple of times when copying large files onto it. Lacks good progress indicators for things, so you think its crashed when its just taking its time. A big plus of this product though is that it has the ability to make Linux compatible crypted disks, this could be a big selling point. |
| TrueCrypt | Open Source (Own License) | Works flawlessly so far. I particularly like the nice progress bars on creating and formating of the data files. |
| CryptoExpert Lite | Free but restricted | Has maximum file size limitation so did not try it. |
| Softwinter Sentry | $49.95 | This product also worked flawlessly, not as nice progress bars but it works. |
From the above table it should be clear that amongst the products I tried TrueCrypt and Sentry are the winners, I’d consider buying Sentry if I needed very long term storage and need the kind of backing that a company tends to give, backwards compatibility and so forth.
My usage however as a off-site backup system means I will be overwriting the last backups – or perhaps rotate them for 2 or 3 months – so I most certainly do not need long term archival.
TrueCrypt can also encrypt a full partition so I also tested that and I must say it works great. The initial format over the USB2 of 200Gig would take about 5 hours – so I did a quick format for testing but this is not suggested for actual use. This works great so I will put all my data on the crypted partition and leave a 32Gig FAT32 on the drive to store the TrueCrypt software on etc. You do not need to install anything on the windows machine to run TrueCrypt so can even be run off a memory stick.
My choice therefore is TrueCrypt, kudo’s to them for a very professional looking product with a good UI and great documentation to go with it.
While researching this I came across this site that has a whole lot of useful encryption related information.
One For All Mosaic on the XBox
I bought a One For All Mosaic aka URC-9990 universal remote control to try and make sense of the mess of remote controls on my table.
Primary concern was compatibility with the xbox specifically to use with XBox Media Center (XBMC). The remote itself is nice enough, UI leaves a bit to be desired during the setup stage but I guess you can’t have it all in a £40 remote.
Getting stuff going in the XBox though was another story, the Mosaic has a internet download function that plays a WAV file through your speaker into its microphone, bit like a 300 baud modem without any handshaking or carrier. I downloaded their XBOX profile this got the basics going but since the actual XBox remote control lacks volume, mute etc these were not added.
The Mosaic has a learn function like most of these remote controls I guess but I am sure there is a limited capacity for learned codes so I wanted to not use these if at all possible. It also has a Key Magic system that lets you enter codes manually, the hassle though is that they have obfuscated the codes and what actually gets sent. They say the Key Magic thing is patented etc and you need to speak to their customer support to get the right Magic key to your remote codes. Well thats just b/s all it is is a lookup against one set of numbers that will output the real number out via IR. IR only has 255 valid signals so its not that difficult.
I set the XBMC into debug mode where it shows the IR signals it receives and so made a table of Key Magic codes to actual codes, I also put in what default codes are in use on the XBox remote controller. View the full entry for the table of codes. It was actually very easy there are easily detectible patterns in their mapping from Magic codes to actual codes.
XBMC has in its latest version a global volume control that can be activated in all screens, it also has short cuts for accessing Videos, Movies, Weather and so forth, all accessible by the remote if you know the codes and can program it correctly. The keymap.xml defines what happens when keys or IR signals gets sent. The definition for the global volume up is:
<action> <description>volumeup</description> <id>88</id> <gamepad>rightthumbstickup</gamepad> <remote>volumeplus</remote> <keyboard>+</keyboard> </action>
Simple stuff, so to activate the volume button on the Mosaic I simply assigned a Magic Key using the table below and put the actual value that the Magic Key sends in the keymap.xml like this:
<action> <description>volumeup</description> <id>88</id> <gamepad>rightthumbstickup</gamepad> <remote></remote> <remotecode>129</remotecode> <keyboard>+</keyboard> </action>
Notice that I cleared out the <remote></remote> blocks and added the <remotecode></remotecode> ones. Actual code 129 maps to Magic Key 262. Using the same simple procedure I also added quick access keys for movies and music and activate the mute button.
I am not sure why One For All feel they need to obfuscate something so fundamental to the operation of the remote control, but I hope this helps you use the device you paid good money for without having to waste additional money and time by having to call or mail them.
Licence
