Many thanks go out to sabominator for pointing out toothpaste for dinner. Applegeeks makes me laugh. A lot. Gina makes a hot bride. Mac Hall inspired Applegeeks. The Inventor makes a guest appearance. We have a bunch of little pricks wandering around the house, and you should buy stuff. The Trunkmonkey is passing 6 GB to 20 GB per day (leeches). Hamor.com needs some attention from Google. And, finally, Pepper Computer just released Pepper Keeper 1.2.
Blog
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A fistful of quickies…
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Mac OS X – Clearing DNS Cache
Once you go to a Web site, or do any DNS lookup, the IP gets cached for quite a while. This becomes a royal pain if you’re a systems administrator who is in the middle of migrating domains from one server to another. Executing
sudo killall lookupdlookupd -flushcacheUpdated November 26, 2007: Thanks to Syd, the Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) command has changed to
dscacheutil -flushcacheandlookupdhas been deprecated. -
Cheap dedicated servers!
Although it’s too soon to give a review or recommendation, ValueWeb has been rocking my nuts for the past few days. Expect a full review in the next few weeks once we get all of our Web sites transferred over and convert our 768 Kbps SDSL line to a 6 Mbps ADSL line.
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Liquid ecstacy?
If Poland Spring sparkling water is liquid crack, then Crystal Light is liquid ecstacy. Both are hopelessly addicting, but freshly-mixed Crystal Light has a warm and fuzzy tartness to it. One tub makes 2 quarts, so half a tub mixes perfectly in my 32 oz water bottle. And what do I mix it with? Ice cold Poland Spring spring water out of the office water cooler, of course! Twitch…
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Complete home network reconfiguration…
Last night I finally got around to decommissioning the last of my obsolete power-hungry hardware. For the past three years, a clunky AMD K6 system running OpenBSD and, later in life, SmoothWall Firewall has been chattering along accomplishing the monotonous task of dutifully inspecting, filtering, and redirecting billions of packets across my LAN, VPN, and DSL interfaces. Not that I’m not grateful for its three years of dedicated firewall service, but no tears will be shed as I toss its rotting carcass out into the street in hopes that it will find a new home with a deserving owner before being smashed with cinder blocks by the neighbor kids.
As a replacement, I’ve officially become a consumer and picked up a Linksys BEFSX41 EtherFast Cable/DSL Firewall/VPN Router. It’s small, it’s quiet, it supports SPI, VPN, and DMZ, and it neatly stacks with my existing access point. Sure, it doesn’t have all the functionality of a BSD- or Linux-based firewall, but it’s perfectly adequate for our needs. My only complaint is the fact that it tops out around 2 MBps (16 Mbps) when passing packets across the firewall. Although those speeds are faster than any consumer-priced Internet connection, transferring large files to and from the Web server outside the firewall is much slower than the grumpy old AMD K6. If I end up moving the Web server into the DMZ, I’ll get true 100 Mbps, but I’ll need to research exactly how the DMZ operates and make sure traffic can’t leak from the DMZ back into the LAN.
In addition, I’ve also picked up a Netgear MR814 Wireless Cable/DSL Firewall Router ($20 – $30 rebate available) to setup a secondary public/guest wireless network that sits outside the primary Linksys firewall. Not only will this move all non-trusted traffic to its own isolated honeypot, but the physical location of the antenna will dramatically improve outdoor reception in the backyard, garage, and on the back deck. Right now, the Netgear is setup in the Hedgie Room, but I’ll be looking to extend the range even further with external antennas for both the public and private access points. This should extend the range enough to allow the cool neighbors down the block to jump online. -
Passion
I was about to write an entry entitled Apathy, wherein I was going to say something along the lines of you know it’s going to be a long day when you wake up so drained that your only motivation to drive into work is the fact that there will be incredibly bland Cinco de Mayo Amerixican specials in the cafeteria that you can slather in hot sauce to make slightly palatable. A very simplistic thing turned my entire morning around, however. While doing a Google search to find a Cinco de Mayo page to link to, I saw that the page that Google returns first in the list is down. I’m not sure why, but that makes me smile. To quote Tre, Google is God.
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Can hedgehogs read?
I just signed one of our hedgehogs up for four free issues of Time Magazine. I hope that doesn’t give her any weird ideas about her place in the food chain.
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Is Google AdSense borked?
It appears that Google AdSense isn’t quite working up to snuff today. Every single page I’ve gone to that has AdSense ads on it has been showing PSAs. Even the Try Before You Sell tool reports No Applicable Ads for every single site I look up.
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Flashing my camera?
After a month or two of procrastination, I finally decided to reflash my Digital Rebel and upgrade the firmware to version 1.1.1. Since I purchased a FireWire Delkin CompactFlash reader, I had the ability to write the firmware to a card without jumping through the hoops of a data upload via the camera’s USB cable.The upgrade went without a hitch, and only took a couple minutes. I haven’t noticed any changes in the camera, but I’m a geek and it gives me the warm fuzzies to have the latest and greatest code on all of my hardware.
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My Trunkmonkey is growing up…
Like most parents who watch their children grow up, it sometimes eerily feels like you’re watching someone else’s life on TV. You can’t always be there, and your child eventually takes on a life of their own with their own friends and activities. You hope for the best, because if your child was anything like you were as a child, you know they’re up to something when you’re not around.That’s more or less what’s happened with my Trunkmonkey concept. Originally started as a sick joke back in 2000, the idea took off and spawned a life of its own, creating a cult mascot that’s now graced thousands of Subaru owners’ cars. The joke was more or less contained within the Subaru community, and all was well.
But then Suburban Auto Group released a series of Superbowl commercials featuring a Trunk Monkey, and the innocence of the Trunkmonkey was lost. Although R/West, the creators of the Trunk Monkey ads, claim that they came up with the idea on their own, I’m hard pressed to buy that story. There are too many parallels, right down to the security Trunk Monkey wielding a crowbar.
But, alas, what can you do? When a joke is let loose into the public domain, there’s not much you can do to stop it once the ball gets rolling. I might as well just cash in.
