I’ve been using Sofa Control for my Apple Remote since I bought my Mac in 2009. I use Sofa Control pretty much every week when I volunteer with the youth ministry at my church. The Apple Remote by itself only works with certain programs that are designed to handle its input and it lacked support for other programs we were using such as OpenSong, which we use for song lyrics. So I bought a license for Sofa Control. Recently Sofa Control’s move to the App Store required all existing customers to repurchase the license. I didn’t want to shell out another Continue Reading
Computers & Technology
Saving keystrokes with a SSH client config file
I regularly have to SSH into my servers, and on most of the ones I connect to the SSH server is running on a non-standard port for obvious security reasons. I used to include the port number manually in the SSH command, for example: [shell] ssh seymour.dennistt.com -p 922 [/shell] This worked… as long as I remembered to type the port number in, which was probably less than half the time on the first go. So I finally got tired of having to retype the command with the port number in it. Luckily you can create a SSH client configuration Continue Reading
An eye for good design
What better to do on a 12-hour flight than to explore the in-flight entertainment (IFE) system looking at ways that it can be made better. Having completed CPSC 344 (Human-Computer Interaction) last term, I have an even more eager eye looking at interface usability. So here are some things I found about Air Canada’s IFE interface.
VMWare ESXi 5 Whitebox
I have 2 old computers (Pentium III and Celeron computers circa early 2000’s) that I currently use as servers for file storage, backups, and testing. I thought it was about time to consolidate these servers I had, up the performance, and set up a flexible test environment for my coding endeavours. VMWare’s free ESXi hypervisor piqued my interests earlier last year. It’s comparable to XenServer but apparently has better support for Windows virtual machines. Being a bare-metal hypervisor, it should give better performance than a usual virtual machine sitting on top of a full-blown operating system. So I set my Continue Reading
XDMCP Login from Mac to Lubuntu 11.10
My old desktops run Lubuntu (Ubuntu but lightweight!) 11.10, which just became part of the official Ubuntu release. Life is a lot zippier in Lubuntu compared to Ubuntu when you’re on Pentium III and Celeron machines. I wanted to be able to login to these computers remotely with a GUI, sort of like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop but Linux style. I didn’t want VNC because I wanted to be able to create a new login session instead of using the main console. Luckily XDMCP does exactly that and most of it is built into Ubuntu. The Setup Following one question previously Continue Reading