Burst Attention Span

Someone is spoofing my kodama.ch domain to send unsolicited commercial emails. If you are coming here to see who sent them… it wasn’t me, honest and if I had some spare \/1/\gr/\ I wouldn’t be selling it to you anyway.

Thanks for your understanding.

Although apparently intent on piggybacking Senator Stevens’ illiterate characterisation of the internet as a ’series of tubes’, this product isn’t such a bad idea.

It appears to create a VPN replicating private network shares called ‘Tubes’ onto a group of subscribed machines. Each machine has its own copy of the files, but when a file changes in any one share, it will be copied to the others. Access rights can be defined so that only certain subscribers can change or remove files but I haven’t found any description of how versioning is controlled when, for example, two people change a file at the same time or if the owner of a file deletes it from his ‘Tube’.

Peer to peer connections are used within the Tubes network, similar to the way Skype uses your bandwidth even if you aren’t making a call. I haven’t found out if users will be host to p2p traffic from people outside their own buddy list though.

Having used community based peer to peer software since Adam Hinkley’s Hotline for the Mac through Soulseek and DC++, I am very interested to see how Tubes develops. If it’s as easy as setting up a Windows share and adding user rights, works through firewalls and with my mobile devices then it’ll be tubetastic.

***UPDATE***
Not such a good experience, I downloaded the installer but it completely failed to run.
Posted for help on the forum so we’ll see if they care.

For now though, I’m still looking for a decent workgroup file sharing system that doesn’t require all machines to be on the same network. Here’s what I’m investigating:

BeInSync – Professional and friendly looking
Unison – Free, open source, academic work. Handles changes to the same file in different locations.
FolderShare – Part of Windows Live, maybe better integrated than the others?

Anyone else got a recommendation?

Ever felt like you just don’t have enough computers? As a web developer, I often need to test sites on a number of target platforms and browsers but it isn’t practical to have a machine for each setup.

Late last year, VMWare released a player version of their full Virtual Machine Workstation product. This utility uses ready made disk images or ‘appliances’ with pre-installed OS and software. The only restriction was that the player cannot create new virtual machines. Was a restriction… :)
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I’m addicted to looking stuff up. If someone asks me a question that I can’t quite answer, I’m straight on Google to find out. When travelling without a network connection, the immediacy of this approach can be lost. I often search using my phone over a GPRS connection, but that can get expensive, and reading the results on a 2 inch screen is a pain. Enter Webaroo, a free website-packager, not unlike a cross between AvantGo and Internet Explorer’s MHT web archives.

The twist with Webaroo is that they are offering pre-packaged slices of the web, including all of Wikipedia in a 6GB download, as well as a promised 40GB ‘all the web’ package later in the year! Not that it hasn’t been thought of before, and I’m doubtful about the usefulness of a 40GB web archive to me, but the value of being able to grab any number of websites and read them in an airport departure lounge without paying their mad wi-fi charges can not be understated.
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It’s all very well having a super PDA/phone/organiser/Teasmade full of contacts and appointments, but why is it always such a pain in the arse to share that information with another computer, let alone between handheld devices? In addition to getting the right connection cable (or in my case bluetooth adapter for the PC) and proprietary transfer software, you almost always need a copy of Outlook to handle the data transfer – which then acts as a hub for syncronisation to other PDAs. Outlook Express came free with my PC. Does it support syncronisation? No! The full version is required…

It used to be so much easier when I had a Mac. Using the free Claris organiser and its XTND translators I could sync and transfer data in any direction to any format you could imagine including my Palm and Newton devices. This was ten years ago, and I still haven’t got back to that level of control on the PC, although SyncML seems to be a good candidate, if only all the device manufacturers would support it.

Although still quite dependent on Outlook, the writer of this Engtech article has a similar setup to me, and explains how to get all your devices on the same page, relatively smoothly.

My parents just got a new, cool (and ‘doody’ according to my li’l sister) Skype phone, so now they can talk to me through the computer without looking like they’re on Blake’s 7. I want one too, but none of the ones in the shops are at all ‘doody’ enough for me.

Enter Instructables’ step by step DIY USB Phone. Now, all that’s left is to decide on an ordinary household object to build it into. After trying to decide between a power strip and an old Apple mouse (a la Scotty in Star Trek IV) I realised I could just mix it up with another DIY project seen recently… that’s real doody.

“Look at me, I’m just cute as a button!”

To celebrate my successful pre-Wii-order, here’s an Apple spoof comparing the two systems. The Wii definitely comes across as more ‘pick up and play’… but the PS3 seems like the candidate for those long evenings on the sofa. She’ll need her own, I’m afraid…