Oh, and I also got addicted to Facebook and posted all my random mutterings there instead. People actually make comments instead of trying to sell me penis extensions or addict me to gambling.

Maybe I’ll do a Facebook ‘dump’ and fill this site back up with crap from the last few months. Or I might develop a double-posting mechanism that will share on both platforms at once. I.just.don’t.know.yet.

Ciao for now.

Thanks for your understanding.

Hardcore. Waiting for the video… Top Gear, 28th January.

Troy Hurtubise, long-time crazy inventor has made himself a real battlesuit and is willing to wear it while being shot with an elephant gun! The suit is well equipped apparently:

Its many features include compartments for emergency morphine and salt, a knife and emergency light. Built into the forearms are a small recording device, a pepper-spray gun and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed in case of trouble.

Dangling between the legs, that would be a clock.

I hope that’s not a spelling mistake. Whatever was he thinking?

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?

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… :)

The following links will help you download and create as many virtual machines as you need, for use with VMWare Player. For example, I currently have a machine running XP with the excrable IE7 installed, while my productive OS hasn’t been soiled.

Creating an XP Pro VM
How to create virtual machines using VMware Player

Software/Tools
VMXWizard – Win32 EXE
ISO Recorder – Burn ISOs natively in XP
VM Builder – Online form
EasyVMX – Online form

Operating Systems
DOS7.1
Knoppix (Linux) installer image ¦ appliance (you need both)

Appliances
More Appliances
Network Analysis
Multi Browser
Old DOS Games