I love bypassing content filters. Here’s a fast and easy way you can use your computer at home (Running an OpenSSH server) to get past  web content filters at work or school.

Here’s what we need

1. A computer at home running an SSH server.
2. SSH port (22) open on your router to your SSH Server
3. A computer running Linux or Leopard

You may be surprised to know that Leopard includes a command line version of Quick Look called “qlmanage”. If you’re a heavy terminal user like me this is incredibly handy.

I tend to do all my file organizing via the terminal so say I’m copying some jpeg files and I want to make sure they’re the ones I’m interested copying I can type the following command into the terminal to get a Quick Look preview of them all

qlmanage -p ./*.jpg

Which shows me all the .jpg files in my current directory or I could just preview one

qlmanage -p ./image.jpg

If you’re into bash or Perl scripting this opens up all sorts of cool possibilities.

There are also a selection of command line switched aside form the -p (preview) switch. I’ve listed a few of the more useful ones below.

-t                  Show thumbnails of the documents
-s size          Size for the thumbnail
-f factor       Scale factor for the thumbnail

As always if you have any problems, questions, comments or suggestions post them below in the comments section.

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about Synergy. Synergy is a free (as in beer and speech) piece of software that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse with multiple computers. This differs from a traditional KVM in a couple ways. 1. You get the added screen real estate as each machine needs their own screen 2. You don’t need additional hardware the keyboard/mouse switching is done over your existing network. The advantage of this is that Synergy is cross platform, there are currently Synergy clients for OS X, Linux and Windows (No official support for Vista however, It may be possible but your mileage may vary. let me know how you make out if you try it) so you can have a Windows XP machine on the left monitor an Apple machine on the center monitor and a Linux machine on the right monitor or you could have 3 machines all with the same OS.

Recently the time came to replace my aging gaming rig. It was originally built about 5 years ago and over that 5 years I’d upgraded the bejeezus out of it just to keep the new games running reasonably. Well during my planning for a replacement I’d come to the conclusion that it is no longer cost effective for myself to use the PC for Gaming (mainly for the following reason)

a High end Video Card alone would cost me $400 – $700 and I’d need to upgrade this yet again in 6 months to a year.

This made no sense to me when I can buy a PS3 or an Xbox and a year of Xbox Live for around $500 anyways and I won’t need to upgrade those for the life of the system. To make this long tirade short Gaming on the PC is dead to me it’s just not cost effective anymore.