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
^_^
the GREEEEEEEEEEENNNN maaaan!
Turns out that I like this color of green. Neat.
If you see any black text boxes/unreadable shit just comment. I'll fix.
Vidjia Games!
Games!
This is long winded and a tangent from my daily life, so... yeah you've been warned.
I just watched Adam Sessler's (from the ill fated Tech Tv of my pre-drinking days) response to the flame war regarding his Killzone 2 review. (available: here and pretty damn funny to see a tv host with the freedom to tell people to "shove a cock in your mouth.") Let me brief you as I'm fairly sure only META has any idea what I'm talking about. Killzone 2 is a game that just came out for the ps3. It's apparently good. It's earning good reviews from the sources I trust.
Sessler's review has created a flamefest rekindling some "xbox 360 vs playstation 3" internet flamewar.
What the fuck.
This generation - that I think I'm still a part of - has the desire to go out and defend a consumer product vehemently on a multitude of shared conversation spaces across the internet. Let me restate that. There are lots of kids. Who go online. Who then post messages to forums at a hundred a minute. Defending a consumer product. As if it's their own kin.
This issue speaks to me fundamentally. Our generation (it's becoming harder and harder to lump myself in with my perceived idiocy of my peers - a hauntingly hypocritical statement) has been lam-blasted with commercials, product placement and the most materialistic culture in known history since conception. McDonalds has had toys in it's food for as long as I can remember. Saturday morning cartoons are about collecting shit and competing with (beating's more accurate) your friends over all else - due to a larger collection. It's these fundamental aspects of our culture that has given the message board dwellers the entitlement to name call and defend an entertainment system with such bravado.
Of course, it's not any one company/person's fault that individuals act this way about an entertainment system. It's everybody's. We all buy into consumer culture and feel some of this - that's how it has become a value in the younger generation. (I've heard sociologists refer to it as 'generation entitlement' - not much sums up my view more elegantly.) We're all guilty of replacing social interaction with some easier convenience, slowly weakening our ties to our community and neighbors. We are more "social and connected" than ever before, but in reality, not many of us will ever talk to a stranger in their daily life unless they physically bump into them (I do. Fuck does it startle people. ESPECIALLY students! ha!) We exist solely in cellular 'tribes' of people, larger cliques that occasionally interact and exchange members with one another, but pretty much stay within our well defined walls. We'll sit around at home talking to other friends on the internet instead of existing in our local community.
This brings me back around to the 360 vs ps3. One group of people who "invested" in the xbox and one group of people who purchased a ps3. A very obvious, core value to each of these groups is that they do not OWN the other console. There is an instant, implied loyalty there. After a person makes a 300$ investment, they now are entitled & even expected to defend their investment in the eyes of their peers. (peers in this case are 'gamers as a whole' not the individual groups of xbox/playstation.) They have created the shared group identity solely in opposition to the other group. It's not "I play games on the xbox!" that comes across in any game forum. It's "Playstation 3 is SHIT for x, y, and z reasons now fugoff" or "you're bias against SONY because you're getting PAID by MICRO$OFT!" Instead of a greater community that any new game or system is accepted and judged on it's merits, we have games that are instantly filtered through a "oh it's a PC game instead of a console game" lens. (it took me quite some time to actually judge the xbox fairly as an entertainment system - years in the 'PC trenches' caused a deep biases.) That a glimmer of my perception on why people are so dumb about something as simple as a review of a game.
So, Adam Sessler, it's not your fault. It's just you reported (fairly) on something that's a pulsing, inflamed and raw nerve amongst our generation. That's why the pires were constructed and burnas applied.
My solution? Light a cigar, kick your feet up and antagonize playfully - only through self realization will this culture refocus its alignment towards something besides materialistic shit. Read Fight Club. Eat a good steak. BREATHE.
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*edit: I should have titled this "SUCK ON SOCIOLOGY!"
Lazy chris-mas
Izzard & Conan - paraphrased below.
Conan: "Are the British, you know Europeans, this crazy with christmas too?"
Izzard: "oh. oh yes, they're crazy but not so much as here. We're celebrating the birthday of Chris afterall!"
That about sums up my view of the "Christian" pagan holiday which is giving me this awesome 5 day weekend.
COMPUTERS: That's right, I installed vista on a macbook air. This was mostly out of spite - OSX cannot handle use by an impatient, mostly ADD, raised on comptuers DBA. Whenever I work on a computer, I spend a maximum of 1 second waiting for something to load. If this time is exceeded I fire open a new tab and search for something else, open a simple game and play through it, find something to read out on the blag-oh-mah-sphere. OSX doesn't seem to be built to handle this type of impatientness.
Aside: I don't know if I'm more impatient than anyone else, but I feel I'm a fairly accurate representation of the "counterstrike kiddie" generation. I've singlehandedly brought development applications to their knees by simply using them like I use everything else. There is no 'gentle' or 'waiting for loading screens' bullshit. When I see the link I want to navigate too next, I fucking press it as fast as possible not caring that all of the onpage ajax hasn't finished loading yet. And dammit, when I do that, it'd better work. Program your shit fast enough to keep up with me, isn't a comptuer's decision stream measured in billions of yes/no's per second? How hard is it to make your software fast and NOT SUCK?
Anyway, the process to install Vista, native - not through the bootcamp or VM shit, is remarkabally simple once you figure out the magic mac keybuttons/hold commands on boot.
- throw in XP CD, hold down 'c' on boot to boot from the CDrom (this works either with the superdrive, or to my shegrin, off a virtually mounted iso shared from a linux box)
- boot into windows XP's terrible 8bit install process.
- wipe out the existing partition information. Vista will NOT touch your OSX partitions - you can't even wipe them out with disk utils. It's sorta crap. format NTFS
- reboot, holding the mouse button, pull out XP cd, replace with vista, again holding c to boot from it.
- install pirated vista, throw in the first macbook air disk, install the bootcamp utilities. (this has drivers, multitouch, iSight, makes the function keys work, and even installs some of the better mac-sounds.)
- Update the intel broadcom & chipset drivers to the newest version. (fixes the close-the-lid sleep issues with the supplied drivers.)
- casually post to twitter about how much faster it is than OSX
- enjoy the hate mail
Keep in mind, I fucking HATE microsoft. Macintosh has never "wowed" me either. I enjoy linux, but it provides alot of challenges that I don't want in a "check the weather, blags, and shop online from under my covers" comptuer. In this instance, on this hardware, it is my opinion that vista is simply the better operating system for my type of use. It's crap for development. It's awful for photoshop. It's unstable in the hands of an idiot. I know. The fact remains that I'm using Microsoft on a Macintosh and it is simply better. (Also I can play Dawn of War on it. Letsa see OSX pull that one.)
MEATSPACE: Uh, nothing really has changed. I have a few glorious days off where I plan on maintaining a state of inactivity not seen since my stoner years. Then I'm back to work for 3 days and finally off to Colorado to try for the trifecta of deaths. Hopefully I can manage to die 1. in a plane crash 2. in a terrifying snowboarding accident or 3. from liver failure. Mmm!
I don't know why university support staff don't get the same amount of time off as faculty. We're here to support the faculty! when they're not here, we sorta run outta stuff to do. Oh well, all the blags out there got a good readin or two.
Aaahh, progress!
Work: I've been productive as shit today! Like, rolled-up-dung-beetle shit! Moving right along my daily tasks, figuring out things that baffled me last week and getting them done, with 22 minutes to spare in the workday. This means, time to dick around and post on the blag!
Meatspace: I shipped my snowboard off with Liz (coworker) last thursday. She's hopefully delivering it to Bicho over yonder in colorado instead of pawning it off and spending the proceets on blow. Who knows. Anyway, I have a full week of work this week - followed by 2 more days of work, 3 days off for some guys birthday, another 3 days of work, then I'm off until January 11th. Mmm. I'm looking at lift tickets and shit online, looking like an average of $55 or so per, so I'm planning on 7 days total of boarding. Should be good for the body to be pummeled that much!
The rest of the time will be spent drinking, hanging out with sister Katherine - Bicho - Shana - daddy and drew, getting various blood tests (daddy's a blood tech!) to see what STDs and various other viral hitchikers I have, and playing silly games on my laptop.
Totally looking forward to the christ-day long weekend. I'm skipping family visits due to religious... obligations and pretty much hanging out with jess at her place. The rest of the time I intend to work on my survelliance project AND play a retarded amount of video games. My only bummer is we don't have a fireplace to sit next to during all of these festivities. Oh well!
Computers: it's fucking impossible to get the webcams I have working with gentoo, so I'm going to try ubuntu and see what's up. I have high hopes since alot of people report getting them working in ubuntu skype with some "pwc" pack of drivers. I dunno if I'm just modprobing wrong or being retarded regarding my gentoo install, but twice I wasn't able to get it working. Maybe I'll try one more time before actually giving up the ghost and throwing them on an auxillary system.
Oh yeah! I got a capital one card. One of those that you get to decorate your own. I'll spend a few minutes sometime soon and get a few images, then see if I can't whip together a vote to see which is favored.
Weather: FUCK IT IS COLD, FUCK. Why doesn't First Management invest in INSULATION for their 100 year old apartments? Stupid company. Remind me to execute them if I ever rise to a seat of power.
Giving Lans.
Computers: LAN party was fantastic. Slord (Bob), Drama (John), Wussy (Gary) and I spent gloriousus amounts of time shaming whatever others came to test our gaming prowess. Mechwarrior 4 is fantastic, Clan LBXAC20s to the FACE proved as effective against Drama's head as I remembered. Age of Mythology is also fantastic and the appetite for walls hasn't been satiated.
I've also begun to get my surveillance webcams up and into production. So far, my motion tracking doens't work and the Microsoft Vx3000 I'm using doesn't have that great resolution inside of linux. I'm gonna be looking around for a few wireless & cheap webcams to spread around the apartment. I also want to hack one to use an IR filter using an instructable I saw on lifehacker a while back. I feel my next step will be to build one of the old pentium3s I have lying around into a constant server to provide power and IDE hdd space for them - mainly to give me a use for the 750+GB of storage I have lying around of IDE and to spread out the processor & usb port abuse of having 4-6 webcams running on one workstation.
Interblags: Bartzilla posted this on his twitter. It is awesome enough to spam here:
Meatspace: Thanksgiving was pretty fantastic. Had so much food that I've pretty much reduced myself down to one minor meal a day since Thursday. Visiting with Xich and family at my mum's was quite nice, as was the lego extravaganza that followed dinner. (thanks for the idea allan! that shit was fun!)
I got my computer setup onto my desk properly this time - I had an abundance of room underneath the desk. However, I have secured an invitation to Drama's shop. I'll be taking advantage of that soon and whipping up some welded coldrolled angle steel supports for my new desk. Maybe a drawer kit as well. Definitely going to do the lifehacker 'pegboard under the desk' cable management route, and even planning on perma-mounting most of the misc device chargers I have.
ZOMBIES
Meatspace: This weekend was very nice; I spent the majority of it playing Left 4 Dead (link to allan's synopsis) with Bicho & random other twats on the interwebs, hanging out with jess, watching movies and drinking. Jess and I watched "Brick" under the recommendation of Xich and it was fantastic. I dig Tracer Bullet style dialogue and noir themes. Good stuff.
I rebuilt my desk with a solid door flat and some adjustable sawhorses. My only qualm with the sawhorses is they require an awful lot of under-table space to get the full A frame shit going. I may scavenge around a scrapyard for a couple pieces of angle steel to zap together with my MIG - I'd like to move the monster server case under the table again as it'd free up monitor clutter and I wouldn't have to wall mount those two poor speakers. Here's a shot.
I also received my bindings for my snowboard. I have everything I need to hit the slopes sans a pair of good winter gloves - anyone have any recommendations on some really good gloves? Otherwise I'll just be hitting amazon's reviews.
Fallout: This fantastic game has been put on the back burner of "whenever Bicho's not online for left 4 dead goodness and I want to play something." Anyway, here's a glory shot of Cuntastic. (since I don't think you can take a screenshot from the sexbox 360, this is literally a macro photo of my tv) Presently level 17, rocking some outcast power armor and a gatling lazer. She's pretty much unstoppable, resting at a native 10 luck - all the critical bonus feats, and a retarded amount of damage soaking; there's simply not much that can take her down. (outside of a misplaced mini nuke or one of those fucking unkillable giant rad scorpions.)
Jess says she's a Dike. "Bittercup" from Big City keeps giving her drugs and running off, maybe she should hit that little lezz's shit.
Oh, I did find "Dogmeat" thanks to Bart. Sweet puppy has a fantastic habit of jumping RIGHT INTO the V.A.T.S. targeted minigun blasts to the face. I've not seen a dog take that much fire from "Eugene" before.
Future: As some of you may know, I've recently reenrolled into university courses. I have finally decided on the reason that I'm not satisfied working at an extremely good job at a university: The IT industry is just a fancy facade for service to people who don't know how to use computers as well as the IT folk. In this way, it is becoming the new service industry. I'm totally not satisfied with that - I feel that I'd find more reward working harder and learning new things that will directly benefit me. This is where being a researcher/professor holds such benefits. I will still have the socially rewarding aspects of teaching and assisting students, but I'll also be in a position where my skills with computers will directly benefit my research and my projects. This in turn will benefit the university as a whole and the route to satisfaction is MUCH more direct.
In other words - I find myself much more satisfied playing with tech on my terms. I don't want to be told to 'research n and decide if it's best for a, b, and c.' I'd really like to be in a situation where I end up thinking "damn I could certainly use something to automagically kick off these 15 tests each time lightning strikes." Then spend the next week producing some poorly hacked together software & hardware to get that task done.
Anyway, that's my driving reason now for going back to school. Don't worry, I'm not quitting my day job for a couple more years - it really is a damn sweet position with rockstar benefits and no pressure. I just don't want to 'settle' until I can't wait to get out of bed to go to work in the mid afternoon.
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.
Doktor
HALLOWS: For halloween this year I had decided early that I was going to rock a "Mad Scientist" or "Mad Doctor" costume. I started on this costume uber-early as it excited me in the pants to think about - I mean hell, I began purchasing stainless steel tools on Ebay in frickin August. BTW, I blame the medical fetish on Angelspit.
Anyway, so my first project was randomly stumbled upon when lifehacker did an article on diy halloween shite and a "living hand" instructable caught my eye.
So I made one.
Another quest was to find a small child to take candy from me.
Freshmen were more apt to taking mah candy. I seriously spent 4 hours walking around on campus visiting friends in offices, old professors, and generally making a fool of myself handing out candy to strangers. Dressed like this.
So it was a terribly fun time. That's right. Terrible. Here's the final glory shot:
Uh, most of the other photos are on facebook/other peoples blags. I just stuck these here for mr META.
Fallout
Work: yesterday was cvap. I spent 4 hours doing a doctoral student dissertation's quantitative statistics figures and the end result turned out to miff him. Not a big enough cohort selection or whatever. Blah, fuck it, not my job to care.
Today's looking better - already riding a post-hangover coffee buzz that has me getting what shit I can done. Everything else is contingent upon other peoples actions, so I can take a break and pick at my ass... er.. blag here.
Meatspace: Hit up the Lyon after work with Anthony. That shit was FUN. Three pitchers then a chipotle burrito (which, btw, is gonna make me take one of their patented monster-ream-out-my-fleshy-insides poos later today) and about 3 hours of great conversation. Didn't realize how much I missed hanging out with him.
Games: I received Fallout 3 yesterday and dug in as deeply as I could around bar time & playing geometry wars 2 with Jess. Escaped Vault 101 at the... uh... shegrin? expense? yeah expense is right. At the expense of every other soul around. I literally started that game's combat with a crit headshot from a 10mm pistol. That guy's head EXPLODED, in a panoramic slowmo, and then he was immedately disrespected by a group of giant "radroaches." I then continued to play with the games combat systems by killing every other meatsack I ran into along the way.
The beginning stages, as I hinted at on the tweet system, were cute as fuck. Paging through a childs book to set your stats? Taking a 'placement exam' with hilarious questions to judge your perks? It was all pretty awesome - and ironically, my answers built little "Cuntastic" into the bruiser I would have created anyway. She's not as hawt as Princess Shepart from Mass Effect, but I've got the feeling that she's gonna be an even colder, calculating bitch. Who will use a giant motherfucking energy weapon. GIANT. ENERGY. WEAPON.
(for now she's just clubbing everything with a police baton. gets her through the day.)
I've been looking forward to a new fallout installment for quite some time - I never really dug into the original rpg style games that much - but fallout taticts ate my soul alive for a solid 3 months. The only thing that made me stop playing it was a harddrive crash and failure to restore the savegames. The environment of the fallout serise aligns so perfectly to my dreams that it heightens my enjoyment of an already solid backstory. Now I'm afforded to wander around a mutant infested wasteland, next to utterly destroyed chunks of highway and ruined cityscapes with giant weapons and a chip on my shoulder the size of liberty city? What's not to love?
Gentoo: OMG FUPPES WORKS! it WORKS! everything but .mkv audio transcoding, I'll figure that out when I don't have freaking AWESOME downloaded tv to watch and even AWESOMER games to play.