Somewhere out there!

Run across a pile of interesting tools and cool gadgets of the last couple days:

URLy Warning is a Windows version of curl, cron and diff. Undoubtablely useful for you stock trader friends.

LibraryThing is like flickr/de.licio.us, but for your books. I wish I’d discovered this before I’d purchase Delicious Library. Definitely more useful when travelling. Although the video barcode scanning is damn useful.

The Noguchi Filing System, a useful management hack for organising paperwork. Particularily useful as it provides an inbuilt method for dealing with when to archive.

I’ve been thinking about trying out a PSP for quite a well. Now I’ve got a Treo 650 (which is a very good phone and reasonable good PDA, review to come sometime in the future), my iPAQ hx4700 is now really finding time only for reading dot-lit ebooks. If I could find some way to read dot-lit and ereader ebooks on the PSP. Then ombined with the Neo 4-in-1 Pad the PSP would quite useful. AA battery option, CF or SD slot. Combined with the large clean screen it would become the better travel companion, with a much improved form factor over the hx4700.

Some what odd but cool, a gamer pillow raises heads, lowers posture expectations. Not that I game much these days, but the several other places this might be useful, like as one commenter states on a plane.

Finally from: TED Blog: Inspired Holiday Gifts, Part 2:

For someone who loves entertainment … and being first on the block: Sony LocationFree TV. Watch your Tivo’d programs, local TV, or your DVD collection from anywhere in the world. The base station in your home streams the video over a broadband connection; the LocationFree TV screen — or your PlayStation Portable handheld! — receives it at the other end. All we can say is: Wow. TEDster Dan Dubno’s review (in his holiday gift guide), will get them started. $1099 w/7-inch TV at SonyStyle

I’ve just installed this comment-spam plugin Akismet from the WordPress.com crowd.

At the moment I still get the odd storm of spam. Mostly though it ends up in my moderation queue. Sometimes this obscures the odd real comment, hopefully this will improve things. We’ll see how well it goes over the next month.

Performancing is a Firefox extension that provides a full featured blog editor.

Point and Print in Samba is a nice short article about how to install print driver into samba, Windows clients pick this driver up correctly. I had to do some additional fiddling with force user and changing the readonly setting, so I could actually get the drivers installed, but it worked eventually.

Something I should have figured out many years ago.

WiKID is another project I’ve been checking out recently.

WiKID is a two-factor authentication system. It consists of: a PIN, stored in the user’s head; a small, lightweight client that encapsulates the private/public keys; and a server that stores the public keys of the client’s and the user’s PIN. When the user wants to login to a service, they start the client and enter their PIN, which is encrypted and sent to the server. If the PIN is correct, the account active and the encryption valid, the user is sent a one-time passcode to use instead of a static password. You can think of WiKID as ‘certificates on steroids’. It is more secure than certificates because the required PIN is only stored on the server, so it is not susceptible to offline passive attacks.

From reading a couple articles about how WikiD works, it seems it is a form of two factor auth, where the something you have is a software client with a trusted key.

How I read it, is kinda like having a GPG key, encrypting and signing you PIN with that. Sending that to the server which has both your key and pin. It checks and then encrypts and sends back a OTP token with the same key. So the token is useless without the PIN and vicevesa. However I’m not sure how save the system is to a man in the middle attack, where the attacker has stolen a copy of the key. Would this allow a) the attacker to encrypt the key on the way to the server to be authed, or b) steal the OTP token on the way back to the user and thus create an auth race condition.

Also given there are now some python bindings, I’m wondering if there might also be some ruby bindings around the corner. It could be a useful system to build into easy use for rails.

iFolder is one of the useful technologies that is coming out of Novell. Its something that looks very useful for both personal and business use. At the moment though its not that straight forward to use:

When we decided to build the Simias Store on the Flaim database, we partially did it because we were hoping Flaim would follow suit and become open source. Opening Flaim has not yet happened, but Simias is being kept out of distributions today, like Ubuntu, because of a proprietary license on Flaim.

There are a guides out there for Debian, but nothing aptable at the moment. So for the moment its on my todo list, and maybe once I have my new v20z Xen machine up I’ll try it out in a SuSe guest domain.

Jorge Castro has quite a few interesting comments on how he current uses iFolder and ideas about future direction. The revision control mechanism, I think, would be the most useful.

As people and business become more mobile, with tools such as SIP and WiFi making the work and living place more generic, the means by which we manage the data we drag around needs to become easier as well.

A good place to look if you want to figure out how to convert a command line mount to a fstab mount is /etc/mtab.

For example:

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qmail-qstat
messages in queue: 15981
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0


Fscken spam.

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While hunting for a combined headphone-mic headset for the hx4700 I discovered these useful pages about RealVGA mode on the PocketPC. One thing that’s annoyed me for a while is the large font in Microsoft Reader. Well now I have four times the screen real estate. Nice!

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Note to self, look out for the hx4700 version of the WM 5.0 upgrade at HP.

Reviews look good. Especially the comments about the persistent storage feature and battery life, 10-30% more battery life.

Sounds like buying a new PDA for only 40USD.

I’m pretty much only using the hx4700 as an ebook reader at the moment, haven’t had time to explore its other features. Once I get a chance I’ll see if I can integrating Tracks and the hx4700 calander, probably via vCal.