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Dear Reader,

I am such a pretentious bastard. So much so that I had to have my blog running on my own site and it had to be running Typo (powered by Rails and written in Ruby). Thus it has moved. Gaze upon it’s new shininess!

blog.erik.rainey.name

This site, along with my previous blog at LiveJournal, (and my much eariler iPaq blog) will remain where they are, slowly gathering digital cobwebs and nano-dustmites as the ages move past us. So update your RSS feed already.

If you’re an SSH tunneler like myself, you know that you can’t use RDP with a tunnel reflected off yourself (localhost). I just figured out how to do this. Though, it’s rather simple and I’m somewhat ashamed that I didn’t think of it before. Just add a line to your C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.

127.0.0.1 me

I then used an SSH tunnel to redirect the port number as well.

ssh ... -L 3390:192.168.0.85:3389 ...

This will redirect port 3390 to the RDP port, 3389. Now connect to me:3390 for RDP.

I’ve been eating up alot of my free time installing and configuring an Asterisk server. Asterisk is an Open Source PBX (private branch exchange) which you can use as a mega-answering machine, a conference center for your family, and a home automation interface, amoung an infinity of other clever things. I’ve cataloged my worklog of installing and configuring it so that I can come back later and not worry about forgetting what I did. It should be a fairly concise, if not obtuse, guide to installing it yourself. It’s not quite complete yet, I’ve got to add some more config information but the bulk of it is there.

Technorati Tags: asterisk

I can’t believe I actually wrote this up. All the movies I’ve seen since I’ve lived in Dallas.

Over the last week I’ve been reorganizing my home office. Last weekend I went to IKEA and picked out a GALANT Desk, after I played around with their IKEA Office Planner. Having this tool is completely invaluable! I got the explicit list of components I needed from the tool once I settled on the layout of the office. I printed out the list, went to IKEA, walked up to the cashier and paid for the list, then went over to the stock area and got the stuff after waiting about 30 minutes (it was jam-packed busy because of their recent 20th anniversary). I’ve been posting photos my progress on my Flickr page. I’ll post a before and after when I complete my metamorphosis. So far the IKEA desk had been put together without a hitch and is, in my opinion, top quality. I received 2 redundant sets of instructions, with all the components I bought, so I have plenty of help in putting it together, which I don’t think I really needed, since it was actually quite easy to put together.

Technorati Tags: IKEA, ikea, ikea rules

You’ll find 2 new t-shirts in my pixel tee’s store. Ruby Life and Workout Shirt (that one’s for working out). These are in addition to the normal stock of fine nerd-related t-shirts, such as Katamari Damacii. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: pixeltees

TiVo just opened their TiVo Blog today. I hope one of their first posts isn’t “Going Out of Business”.

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… you just got served. I find it delicious irony that his visage is sold within a capitalist society on practically everything. You’d think he was a real proponent of the system instead of it’s pretty-boy nemesis.

Technorati Tags: capitalism

I discovered Backpackit.com a while ago but I never really used it. Today I started writing a lot of things down that I’d like to do over the next week and I realized that I desperately need it. So I went full boar and fleshed-out my free account. Check out my “Games to Play” list here.

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Forwarding your iTunes library to your work computer is not as hard as one might think. All you need to do is follow these steps.

1.) Enable Library Sharing on home machine’s iTunes.

2.) You have to be familiar with ssh tunneling (try here for a tutorial) or if you don’t use a tunnel, add the port forwarders to your firewall. For ssh tunnels, you want something like this:

$ ssh -g -L 3689:192.168.0.86:3689 my.home.net

Where “192.168.0.86″ is the local net IP of the home machine and “my.home.net” is the name of your computer on the internet. Of course, you’ll have to be forwarding the ssh port to your home machine too.

3.) Get RendezvousProxy, which mimcs some of the UDP traffic that won’t come through some firewalls. Add an entry for the tunneling machine if you are using that. Be sure to use the iTunes protocol (_daap._tcp.local.).

4.) iTunes should automatically detect your machine. You might want to add a password to your library so other people at work don’t cruise your stuff.

Technorati Tags: ssh, itunes, rendezvous