Archive for November, 2005

With Christmas around the corner, many iPod owners are contemplating some accessories for their beloved music player. The first thing on most lists is an iPod dock.

Unfortunately, unlike past iPod models (like the iPod Photo), Apple doesn’t get rid of their older iPod docks when a newer model comes out. This is because different iPods have different “docking needs” and a single iPod dock can’t cover them all (although there is one that almost does). I guess you could say that iPod models advance too fast for the docks to keep up with. So, we still have old docks available.

Keeping your bookmarks synchronized between different computers is difficult since operating systems represent data differently. While social bookmarking sites like digg and del.icio.us, or RSS readers like Google’s Personalized Home and Bloglines let account holders store links and feeds to their favorite sites, I’ve found that I still want to use traditional bookmarks, but am frustrated when I move between my different computers and they are not there.

This article will compare three blog services, one that is free (Blogger), one that is paid but rather inexpensive (TypePad), and one using open source software but provided as a service from a traditional web host (Drupal). Each option has pros and cons, which I’ve listed below. You will find a number of interesting links and you may even discover some features that your current blogging solution is lacking.

This article was created in response to a visitor’s request from a Matt Thommes article titled Using Paths to create smooth, rounded corners in Photoshop. The visitor requested a write-up on how to create images with rounded corners in the GIMP, a free, open source image editing and manipulation program.

RSS is a form of content syndication, excellent for tracking a large number of sites or for simple notifications.

With the surging popularity of “blogging” tools, such as WordPress and Movable Type, many users underestimate (and take for granted) the inclusion of RSS capabilities.

This article will show you how to create your own RSS feed, from scratch - to track any type of data or information.

There are many different types of syndication formats available, but this article will only focus on RSS 2.0.

A quick overview

This article is a quick and dirty guide detailing my experience getting X11 Forwarding to work on OS X. You don’t need to know all of the details of the X Window System or of the XFree86 Project to get this working, I found I just needed to know which ssh flags to use with the computer I was connecting to. One of the really useful things about my new iBook is having a system running ssh and capable of X11 Forwarding out of the box.

While visiting home I realized that I didn’t have a way to connect to my mom’s computer when she needed help. In a previous article I experimented with Window’s Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance, but found that is was not quite right for what I wanted to do. If your mom is on Windows XP and having a computer problem, UltraVNC is an amazingly simple way to remotely administer her PC and fix problems while she is still logged-in. Unlike RD where only one active user can be logged-in at a time, UltraVNC (a.k.a.

While you may think you need to run a separate server application like Internet Information Services (IIS) to be able to connect to your Windows XP/2003 machine over the internet, the Remote Desktop (RD) application built-in to Windows XP Professional Edition and Windows 2003 is installed as a service that can be configured to be constantly listening for incoming connection requests. Therefore you do not need to add the IIS component or have another server application running to be able to remotely access your PC.