Remote VNC & Dynamic DNS
My buddy Drama asked me last night while drunk & bowling how to install a remote desktop on his daddys puter, so he doesn't have to go there or suffer through painful family phone support. I didn't find any good guides immedatelly, so I wrote him this as an e-mail. Maybe 2 other people in the world will find it as useful, so it gets BLAGGED.
The software I use is TightVNC. Very useful. Basically here are the steps:
1. install tightvnc server & viewer (for testing) on your dads puter
2. open a port you can remember in the router pointing to that computer's ip (I use something like 54545 or 54000 for mine)
3. run the tightvnc server, set a GOOD password, set it to start by default with the computer.
4. test it a couple of times with the "allow loopback connections" option selected. connect to it using the tight VNC viewer and the IP of your dad's house (www.whatismyip.com) followed by the port.
- it'll do a fun recursion thingy here if all is well!
5. go home
6. drink a beer
7. setup TightVNC viewer on your puter
8. connect to your daddy's IP and port, view that shinznat.
Now, to avoid having to ask him to give you his IP whenever you want to connect, set up a service called "Dynamic DNS." Here's how to go about setting it up:
1. setup a free account at a place like dyndns.com.
2. subscribe to the free "Dynamic DNS service." It's hidden pretty well in dyndns, but you'll find it, I believe in you!
3. navigate to the DDNS service on your router. it's in Setup > DDNS tab for DD-WRT firmware
4. set it up with the account information provided to you by dyndns. I used h.dontexist.com because it makes me laugh.
5. set the update intreval to something sensible, every 10 days is fine for most ISPs, some cable companies are much quicker on their IP rotation and should be set to 1-3 days.
6. ping the connection to a port you know is open on the router. You should see it resolve to your dad's IP
- @engelhaft ~ $ ping h.dontexist.com
- 64 bytes from adsl-76-250-254-231.dsl.tpkaks.sbcglobal.net (76.250.254.231): icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.559 ms
7. fire up TightVNC, throw in your dynamic address (h.dontexist.com) and port, connect, do whatever the hell it was you wanted to do.
8. fap
^_^
School Days! School days. fuck the fuck fuck golden rule, fuck.
Meatspace:
So I'm a student again. Just part time, a 4 hour class during my work hours at the university, but I'm a frickin student again. I'm taking an honors section of Physics - and I'm pretty much the dumbest person out of the small group. However, I also care the least so won't be suffering from 'oh noes other people watching me do stuff ayee *fumble.*' After the first day (I was nervous, shutup, I've been out of classes for a while) my uncertainty eased greatly - now I'm thinking that I'll really like the class. As long as I don't think about having homework after a long day of work.
Oh speaking of homework. This class requires you to have an online account with some 3rd party company "WielyPlus" that is the most convoluted, amature, poorly crafted peice of shit I've ever witnessed. 75$ for this thing. The ecommerce portion of the site to check out with? Only works on IE with a WINDOWS native PC (not a virtual machine... had to use my laptop on the 4th try of getting that thing.) To top it off, it's a 75$ access code which "includes a digital copy of the book!." So essentially I had purchased a 99$ paperweight from the bookstore.
Returned that shit then just purchased the access code & online edition. Still alittle sour about it.
Work Work:
I'm busier than shit. Work is pretty much nonstop for me right now as I adjust to the change of schedule & additional time lost for class 4 out of 5 days. Hence why this blag has been lacking - I just haven't actually had a moment at work to sit down and blather something out - must less catch my breath.
Videogames:
Tony, Drama and I have just started a ritual of Tuesday night game night. Playing games at a regular schedule is something I always look forward too (DOTA from the past, at like 6 every damn night) and I sincerely hope that this one sticks around. XBOX live makes it significantly easier, as I can sit in my love sac 2 feet from my tv under an afghan. Hard to beat. We powered through some Halo 3 - then I played my newly aquired Rock Band drums until about 1am. (to the shegrin of my downstairs neighbor)
Vacation:
At multiple times I had made plans to publish photos and such of my snowboarding trip around colorado. Someday!
Projekts:
I added some 30" 4x4s and some support struts under my desk and gave it a smooth double coat of "Ace of Spades" black. (I still really enjoy painting. gonna have to do that as a side job through grad school like I did in college.)
It's considerabally more comfortable leg-room style and quite sturdy. Has plenty of room for me to jam my workstation(s!) under and still nets plenty of legroom. I'm gonna screw some pegboard to it and do some better cable management when I get the second workstation built, but for now it's all routed happily out of the way.
My stereo is setup and I reprogrammed my remote (in a 2 hour process) to fully automate all of the source switching. It's pretty pimp. Oh, part of that 2 hours was getting fuppes to work with mp3s accross the network. There is some 'colla' typo in the code that prevents me from indexing my entire mp3 collection (it's 60GB, I don't think it's necessary to have stereo access to that anyway) but for particular folders it works. It's ok, I only really listen to classical and NIN - Ghosts style shit on those speakers. Everything else is too abrasive for the antiques.
Sold the 101 disc changer for a hella deal to a local guy! Still gotta list the receiver and laptop corpse, I may do that this weekend.
Puter:
I'm going to order my new puter parts this weekend if my budget evens out where I think it will. I should have it all by next friday and have plenty of time and modivation to tear apart the watercooling system & assemble the peices where they belong. I'm eyeballing adding a gigabit & 802.11n router to the purchase ... because I think it's cool to transfer movies at a frickin gigabit.
Projekts – Winter
I was sitting here reading my weekly blags and recounting how much stuff I "want." That served as the standard warning flag to hedge any spending and focus on the shit I've already purchased and the projects that I have been working on and procrastinating about for the past time.
So I felt it would be best for me to recount where each project is and how I should first move forward on each. Since I'll be really refreshed after 11 days in the mountains - I'll hopefully have the gumshum to start some of these before my class starts sapping time on January 16th.
Projekt list:
- Surveillance Cameras -
This project hit a snag dealing with frickin linux drivers. The Internets said the cameras I nabbed had 'decent' driver support within linux. But galdamn if I can figure out how to get one to even return a simple image. Perhaps I need to coax drew with a growler of Ad Astra to help me figure out the driver issues I'm facing with this crap. I really don't want to have to maintain and install a windows server - they suck and can't run on minimal hardware (which is what I have lying around. Can make silent & efficient for cheap.) - Laptop Customization -
I'd like to do some sort of art/etching/anodizing on my macbook air. I don't particularly dislike the look of it, but I'd certainly like some fancy motherfucking skin or blue-black gloss anodized finish. I figure that I'm gonna carry the thing everywhere for the next... 3 years, so it should look and feel ME. I've noodled over the laser etching which is popular with most modder and hackers. I haven't fully discounted the possibility of a custom anodization. This is hinged upon figuring out how to fully dismantle the macbook air then bringing the parts over to the shop for a polish & acid bath. I think powder coating steel goes for 300$ average, and anodizing goes for 100$ or so for a simple single color bath.This doesn't look very easy, but it could be deemed worth it. I'll probably keep thinking about this for another month.
- Desk, further upgrades -
I want to replace the sawhorses for some 4x4 posts of wood on each corner. The use of a solid-core door greatly increased the sag resistance of the table - to the point where I'm fully confident standing on the table to futz around in my ceiling tiles. I want a drawer for the random shit that I constantly have strewn around the desk, it'll definitely make everything look nicer and prevent the 5 minute 'search for the damn nailclippers' dance I do every once in a while. Also I'd like to give it a protective paint job with some various stencil abuse - nothing serious but still similar to tony's. I want a pegboard cable management system built in underneath the desk. I figure I'll only need some pegboard over where the towers sit, then just abuse a few hooks and zip ties to hold everything else up. I'd like a few little shelves facing the external-non-tower-portion of the desk to put subwofers and printers upon, but this isn't really critical if space is limited. Finally, I want to mount all of the power strips and potentially even the UPS battery backup from the bottom of the desk, around the unused side of the legs. This will greatly free up cable clutter underneath my desk and give me the ability to easily clean the hairballs that constantly follow me apartment to apartment.Long term - I'll purchase another Dell 24", a dual monitor arm, and a super nice chair to accompany everything. Oh and wallmounts for all the additional monitors that I naturally have everywhere and constantly on. This is mostly dependent upon continuing school seriously and pursuing a PhD. I'm considering the 'standing desk' option that tony rocks.
- Apartment Stereo -
Thanks to my brother in law, I finally have a receiver worth plugging my old Pioneer's into. I want to find some way to easily wire audio from my computer stereo through the receiver. It's home is about 20 feet away from my desk & computer combo. I'd like to get REALLY nerdy and setup a IR device ontop of the receiver that my fancy remote can communicate with. This, in turn, will be able to control the mp3 player on the linux box, effectively giving me full control over what music is playing from the comfort of my love sac. First things first, I want to wire the speakers and pull an insulated output wire to the receiver. The other option is to buy some sort of wireless audio transmitter. I fear the quality reduction so will probably snob my way away from this option. A shielded wire is probably way cheaper anyway, I'll look at this option at rat shack first. - Kitty Poo Concealer & Spider Stand -
This is a small project of 'whip together a wooden box to cover the kitty poo box and provide a stable standing point for my spider.' This is still in the planning stages but will likely be done right behind the desk update. I'd like to make it - Sell shit on ebay -
1. compaq presario laptop from 2005 with bad hdd ~$60
2. 101 disk cd changer ~20$
3. 5:1 audio receiver with a blown out right channel. ~20$ - Website Design -
Throw up some design all over this thing! I've just been lazy so far and haven't fully setup a development environment on my home workstation. Keep saying "I'll do it at work" or whatever, but then end up doing work.
Big Purchases for 2009
- Bushmaster AR-15 - 1300$
It's against the advisement of a general consensus of friends I've spoken too - but two of my closest advisors still wonder why I haven't purchased one yet. Sitting at $1300+ it's not exactly an easy purchase, but fuck it, I want one and I'm an american. - Computer upgrade - 600$
Looming around mid january and febuary, I plan on purchasing about 600$ worth of new computer parts, cycling out what's upgraded into another machine, and building a server from it. Hopefully I can maintain a quiet computing environment without seriously hacking together a new watercooling system. - Leather Trench Coat - 240$
My old duster is just about on it's last legs. It's weathered 5 burning men, harsh winter after harsh winter, and finally one surly bastard and his bad habits. It's about time it gets retired and given to goodwill - as it's still amazingly comfy just deteriorating rapidly. I'd rather a bum put it to it's final 3 years than live with the daily new quirks of hole-filled pockets and popping off rivets & buttons.
Games and Puters!
Meatspace: Paintball! Played paintball with my big sister, brother in law, schweppie and wussy sunday afternoon. Shit was FUN. Only got lit up once and had a very memorable point blank shootout with Slord. Otherwise it was a standard 'really fn fun' time - beside my precluvity of shooting people in the FACE. I came out with only a few welts, one wicked bruise, and a patina of awesome thorn-related scratches up and down my exposed forearms. It looks like I lost a fight with a really angry cat.
Besides that I had a good weekend of drinking with friends, hanging out with Jess, and watching football. The amount of liquor consumed Saturday makes me smile in fond & hazy recollection. Also, my fantasy team: the "Necrophilliacs" freaking brought it with a ~190point game.
METAL: I was notified that MAYHEM and MARDUK will be touring and I am crossing my fingers/sacrificing virgins in anticipation that the tour comes anywhere near Kansas. Hey, maybe we'll get lucky and they'll hit up Liberty Hall!
Computer: So I just purchased another Western Digital HDD, a new Terabyte to add to the fold. I'm getting dangerously heavy on the 'storage ability' at my place - pretty sure that there's datacenters out there with less redundancy and used space. However, I did this exclusively so I can have a native place for Windows to crash itself repeatedly. This is because through all of my two weeks of testing - I could not find anything that could reliabally play Left 4 Dead under Linux. VMware gets very close with Dx9 support - IE: it's uggo and not really playable when you're used to 1900x1200 4xaa or the sexbox 360 on a 42" plasma screen.
So basically I'm forced to shut of a gentoo machine to play games on decent hardware. The thing that pisses me off further is that I'll have to use a vista install. Hey, maybe SP1 made it NOT SUCK.
Microsoft - PLEASE share your direct x 10 drivers with the development community. Not only will you make everyone who uses linux & microsoft in their daily life much happier - but you'll probably open up DX development to a whole host of able bodied programmers who'll fix little nuancey shit while it's still going up the 10 layers of approval in your corporation. You'll profit due to shorter development times and higher quality products (you're already doing this with windows 7, so good call there.) now go out and SHARE the DX stuff so we can play games decently on an open platform. I hate you for the fact that I must have a dual boot windows partition on my gentoo machine to play new games, and it's all in the interest of 'protecting your technology.'
I could buy this crap for the Xbox, and I typically do (see fallout 3!). However, the xbox is just not my ideal 'shoot zombies in the face over and over and over again' platform. I'd also rather play with my friends on PC than on Xbox - as many more of them HAVE a PC. So you see? I'm completely FUCKED by you and quite bitter about it.
Victory
If you subscribe to my tit-te... twitter, you'll already have seen my victory cries. However, yesterday I got Fuppes working (sans transcoding of .mkv) between my xbox 360 and gentoo workstation. This may not mean much to you - but let me sum it up. Basically I can now stream anything from my computer to my television and view it in high definition merely over a network. This also means that I can download entire seasons of tv-shows and watch them when I want. Same for movies. Don't get me started on how awesome the built in mp3 player is. (ok fine I'll start - playing songs can be handled from the pause menu, AND it automatically replaces the background music in any game. Furthermore - mp3's are automatically 'turned down' during cutscenes.) Basically, I was within inches of paying $50 a month to have cable tv again - now the only thing I'm missing is a sunday full of football. Just that's what the bars are for.
So that's victory. I'm gonna play with TWOLAME tonight to see if I can't get some .mkv transcoding working. Then I get to go back to grabbing/ripping 8GB+ files.
Remaining issues are:
1. Cameras - gotta get mobile working so I can snoop on my house guests & kitty from work!
2. Steam applications - I really want to get steam working over WINE, I've seen some people playing TF2 on ubuntu, so I figure the possibility is definitely there. I'm not very worried about the power needed to play tf2 with opengl as my machine's a bit of a beast and watercooled, so I can do some wicked overclocking if needed. However, frickin Left 4 Dead is coming out within the near months and I would really like not having to dual-boot into windows to play it. I'm sure it'll eat my soul for 4+ weeks as well, especially if Bicho is bored.
3. that's mfing it! Even password safe works within wine - compatible with windows pwdsafe databases.
Meatspace: Football is getting to be really fn fun. I can clearly tell that I'm getting in redic shape - all things considered. I've put on about 7 pounds (of muscle!) since we've started playing and the soreness is more bearable now than ever before. My present limp is from some cleat wearing wussy raking the fuck out of my heel instead of a pulled groin/sore muscle!
Jess is still crashing at my place - and it's great! It's good for the soul to have another human around. Also, I'll note, women are much better at shopping.
I'm getting ready to buy the bindings I need for my snowboard! Once I remember to transfer those photos off my camera, I'll spam a few of those up here. That board is the tits, I cannot wait to get onto the snow over in Colorado. Maybe I'll go out to that 'hill' in KCK and give it a try - make sure I can remember wtf I'm doing on it.
Work: its good! Sucks that it's fuckin monday.
R.I.P. Conference
Work life: Finally done with the Ad Astra conference up in KCK. Ontop of disliking the city - I still have a pretty harsh attitude twoards the entire johnson county zip code collection - the conference itself was akin to a 3 day sales pitch paid for by the university. Altho the folk I attended the conference with were great and I did meet a few people - AND had plenty of time to read Kings: The Stand.
However I'm honestly glad to get back to the office tomorrow.
Meatspace life: A high note - Jess is arriving in the next few hours!
I'm still kicking parts of a cold that has me sleeping a whole bunch. Personally, I'm really enjoying reading the stand while having most of the symptoms of the 'superflu' referenced throughout. It just adds this credible 'atmosphere' to read a passage about hacking up phlem 30 seconds after you finish hacking up phlem into a nearby tissue.
Digital life: I've made more progress getting the holes in gentoo patched up - still having a bit of java compatibility issues with some random websites - but I got the important ones working well. (zero punctuation anyone?!) I haven't gone back to trying Fuppes or MediaTomb so that remains undone. I did play more with my VBox but haven't gotten around to throwing CS3 on it. Pidgin/firefox spellcheck remains elusive.
Time to work on getting the cameras recognised!
*yawn*
Short weekend is short. Unsure why I have the habit of catching nasty colds during the weekends - suspicious that it has to do with binge drinking on friday nights! On the topic of my body, I was half-passed out in the shower saturday morning (due to the devistating equation of headcold + hangover + awesome clawfoot tub = asleep in the shower) and I noticed a bruise running from my taint all the way to my knee. And it wasn't one of the impact bruises, this was something clearly busrt when I was playing football and bled everywhere inside before getting cut off.
I'm amused that I didn't notice it for ONE WHOLE WEEK! whatever it is, it looks healed up now. Prolly good I skipped fooball this week.
Jess is coming up to KC on wednesday to crash at my place for a week and a half. Looking forward to that - here's hoping I'm fully healthy by then.
Back to Gentoo: I've gotten this system done. It's working splendedly, only a few lagging errors (some macromedia doesn't play and a few programs aren't set to behave as default yet) remain around. I've got a VBox running well, so once I fire photoshop into that I'll probably start making the METAL site and a new skin for this.
Work: This week should be OK - I'm at a conference up in KC from Monday - Wednesday. Unsure of what I'll actually learn about it, but it'll be refreshing to be out of the office for a bit talking to new people.
Halloween is so very gloriously close. I've got one awesome costume made - I purchased a retarded amount of antique/surplus medical equipment off of ebay for this one. I just have to do a bit more photoshopping for a lab-pass, find a bucket of fake blood and grab some white hairspray. Then all is golden!
Greeeaaaaaattt
I get to fully rebuild this gentoo system on the amd64 framework! I LOVE this. Yes. JUST what I fuckin wanted.
Hilariously Ghetto
So I'm about three days into a devoted switch from using Windows Xp Pro as my main workstation to Gentoo Linux as full time. I found wiki pages for just about every little contingancy I needed, so I decided that now was the time.
I was really dragging my feet about this decision for quite some time. My primary concerns were as follows:
1. Games - I play Spore and TF2, those are pretty much the only two games I play on the PC anymore (thanks xbox!) that require fairly current hardware drivers. I've seen guides for both online, so I plan to fidget with those after a while.
2. Streaming video to my Xbox 360 - I don't own cable (and I can't steal it as there's no pre-setup jack in my apartment.) so I watch pretty much exclusively downloaded, ripped and youtube content. Combine that with the 42" plasma + entertainment center I have across the studio and it makes a pretty big impact to remove my 500gb worth of media I constantly watch. Sure I have the DVDs I own, but I rip every DVD I own just for ease of access. (who wants to get up and move accross the room to change shows when you can just navigate to a different folder with your fancy remote?)
3. HDD redundancy. I've salivated for some time at setting up a personal Raid 5, 4 disk setup for full disk redundancy. This got shot in the foot (ha!) because I discovered that my onboard RAID controller only manages 4 drives. I was gonna get half a dozen WD500AAKS drives and sit at a comfortable 2.5TB of storate - but this revalation made me decide on waiting a bit and using 1TB drives instead. A comfortable 3TB (after "slimming" down to 1TB of 'must have' data) sounds good for at least another year.
My life has become gentoo-wiki.com!
Anyway. To get a reliable internet terminal near my workstation, I was forced to displace my Ubuntu media center, swipe one of my extra monitors (my workstation rocks 3!) and literally 'string' it across my apartment. Due to being unable to find a spare network cable over 10' long, I have every thing stretched to it's limits to get this terminal here. Literally everything is stretched. Router power cord, walljack cord, patch cable between router and modem, cat5 between router and ubuntu terminal, ubuntu terminal and it's monitor. It's fantastic and almost warrants figuring out camera drivers to show a photo.
Back to the grind!