Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Mac love
The lack of postings recently are partly cos of my absences abroad, partly cos life is hectic, and partly cos I've recently got a new machine and am slowly getting everything installed on it and transferring all my documents and so on across. And it's a Mac, and it's wonderful. Just nice, basically. Most things work. It's stable (except for EndNote, the bibliographic tool for Word, which crashes too often). It does things fast, easily, and looks great. It's quiet, the screen's good (23"), and for digital stuff its magnificent. To be fair, it's replace a 233MHz PC at home, which could never cope with any images at all, but I now have a decent repository for photos, video and music.
Disappointments are few: Powerpoint isn't so good (e.g. there's no keyboard shortcut for new slide - new presentation, yes - but not a new slide). EndNote I've mentioned. Wireless network is dodgy for my PowerBook and my router doesn't support WDS so extending it is tricky.
ssh tunneling for web proxies can't be set up for certain sites only (as far as I know at the moment).
But it's a sea-change - I like working from home to get research done, but for the last few years the Uni has been in front in terms of processing power and more importantly access to electronic resources - but now all that's changed. Broadband at home has had a major part to play and we only got enabled in March - it's revolutionised my life. Now home is much more amenable to research - unless it's user testing or whatever. But for thinking and reading and writing.....
The lack of postings recently are partly cos of my absences abroad, partly cos life is hectic, and partly cos I've recently got a new machine and am slowly getting everything installed on it and transferring all my documents and so on across. And it's a Mac, and it's wonderful. Just nice, basically. Most things work. It's stable (except for EndNote, the bibliographic tool for Word, which crashes too often). It does things fast, easily, and looks great. It's quiet, the screen's good (23"), and for digital stuff its magnificent. To be fair, it's replace a 233MHz PC at home, which could never cope with any images at all, but I now have a decent repository for photos, video and music.
Disappointments are few: Powerpoint isn't so good (e.g. there's no keyboard shortcut for new slide - new presentation, yes - but not a new slide). EndNote I've mentioned. Wireless network is dodgy for my PowerBook and my router doesn't support WDS so extending it is tricky.
ssh tunneling for web proxies can't be set up for certain sites only (as far as I know at the moment).
But it's a sea-change - I like working from home to get research done, but for the last few years the Uni has been in front in terms of processing power and more importantly access to electronic resources - but now all that's changed. Broadband at home has had a major part to play and we only got enabled in March - it's revolutionised my life. Now home is much more amenable to research - unless it's user testing or whatever. But for thinking and reading and writing.....
Comments:
New slide in Powerpoint = Command-Shift-M.
Tunnelling web over SSH is pretty easy but conventionally you need to have a terminal running an SSH session to do it. Instructions are winging their way to you over email.
I use a tool called "SSH Tunnel Manager" to run my SSH tunnels without having to use a terminal. It's an unobtrusive app you can sit in the corner of your screen. Download it from here:
http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/stm/
There you go. Hopefully that's two fixes closer to hassle free computing.
Tunnelling web over SSH is pretty easy but conventionally you need to have a terminal running an SSH session to do it. Instructions are winging their way to you over email.
I use a tool called "SSH Tunnel Manager" to run my SSH tunnels without having to use a terminal. It's an unobtrusive app you can sit in the corner of your screen. Download it from here:
http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/stm/
There you go. Hopefully that's two fixes closer to hassle free computing.
Thanks, Dave. I had got ssh tunneling working (thanks, Rob, too!) but found the sitching a pain - using Locations is a good workaround. However, it would still be better, IMHO, for the user to be able to identify domains where they wanted it used, and those they didn't, and have it seamless.
Oh, and Dave is at www.davegurnell.com, not .vom.
I think .vom is a party extension :-)
Oh, and Dave is at www.davegurnell.com, not .vom.
I think .vom is a party extension :-)
I find Keynote 2 to be a brilliant application and much much better than powerpoint. I recommend looking into iWork. If you're a power-user for word-processing then you'll really love it and the themes make it so simple for novices too. Pages works with multiple formats as does Keynote 2 (which obviously can handle the opening and saving of .ppt).
Definitely go with the SSH Tunnel Manager. The beta version is brilliant. I have no troubles and I use it for tunnelling mySQL from my web host.
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Definitely go with the SSH Tunnel Manager. The beta version is brilliant. I have no troubles and I use it for tunnelling mySQL from my web host.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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