Blogo vs Ecto: Final Round

After using Blogo and Ecto (mainly Ecto) for quite some time now, I gotta give the win to Ecto. Blogo has a nice Interface and is really easy to use but is missing to much in depth preferences to make it useful to me. After all not being able to customize how pictures are postet put me pretty much over the top some time ago, but I really tried to like Blogo afterwards, it’s just not for me. After all it’s how I said for just writing Blogo does a good job, and it looks great (besides having one of the ugliest Dock icons ever in my opinion… ), but its just not more. While the preview functions of Blogo are really great, not being able to customize your posts really all that much makes them kind of pointless.

Well after all I guess for just posting simple stuff from time to time both apps work great. So if you care about layout and maybe want to access WordPress Plugins by adding additional options to tags go with Ecto, but If you are a Interface nerd, you might wanna put up with Blogo shortcomings.

For me it’s

Blogo 1 : 2 Ecto

Blogo vs. Ecto

Having setup this Blog, and really wanting to use it regularly, I was wondering:
Whats a good Software for that?
Using a Mac and WordPress, I found a lot of choices, so I had to decided just by first impression first, and then by review. Mainly there where 2 Software Products left:

1. Ecto 3
2. Blogo

I downloaded both and will be trying both but by first Impression Blogo seems to have the Nicer Interface, and more Social Media Friendly (Ping.fm integration). Either was easy to Setup and works great for Posting at least.
So stay tuned, and see what my decision will be, right now its
Ecto 0 : 1 Blogo

Using SSH as VPN replacement

I played around with VPN for personal use for a long time. Since I set up a VPN using IPSEC for a company before I know how to do it but it seems just way to overpowered for personal use. On the other hand, I like the Option to encrypt my traffic if I’m on open WiFi or something like this, so what came to mind was using SSH Socks Proxy.

SSH Socks Proxy opens a Tunnel to a specific Server using SSH and then sents all the traffic through the tunnel if you configure your local machine to use this proxy. Setting it up is easy and for everybody in fear of the Terminal on MacOS, you won’t need it. For me SSHKeychain and the MacOS Proxy Settings do the trick.

So first just to check if everything is workin later go to: MyIP

Now to setup SOCKS Proxy in a couple easy steps:

Start SSHKeychain and go to Preferences and Tunnel
Click the Plus, to add a new Tunnel
Name it unter General to something descriptive
Enter your SSH credentials for any Computer you got SSH Access
Go to Dynamic Ports and add a Port (ie 9999)

Now you can active the Tunnel via the Tunnel Menu. All you gotta do now is, to tell Safari to use it

Go to Safari Preferences and to the Advanced Tab
Click on Change Settings next to Proxies
Activate SOCKS Proxy and Enter localhost and port (ie 9999)
Click OK and Apply

Now to check if everything is working reload your MyIP and it shoud give you the IP of the Server you connected to.

Those Proxy Settings also affect Mail and other Apple Programs so you are form now on using a safe encrypted connection even though your on a open WiFi or any other untrusted Network.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7599312&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

Safe Browsing

Sync all Doc across multiple machine

I’m running all kind of different OSs ond different machines, so keeping documents ins sync is a challenge. I was using Dropbox for some stuff since some time and recently moved all my Documents to Dropbox and now only hav Symbolic links in my Documents Folder (Accept for some Subversion Repositories, which are in sync anyway). It works perfectly! I was kind of curious how Dropbox would handle a large number of files but it works.

So everybody who is, like me, running Ubuntu (Netbook and Work PC) and Mac OS (Main Computer) in parallel, check out Dropbox

Switching to ShoveBox

I’ve been using Evernote for almost am year now, used it for Studying writing little notes etc. But recently I discovered something which is for me a big turn down: There seems to be no way to quickly Export all my Notes in a given Notebook to a Format that is Readable without Evernote. Discovering that when I needed to give the Content of a bit 100 Notes Notebook to a College Friend who needed it for studying, I was quite unsure if I wanted to continue to use it. Especially since the UI also doesn’t Integrate in the Desktop very well, and seems so slow sometimes.

Well so I started to look around, and discovered ShoveBox, Its just perfect for me. It integrates great in Mac OS, provides the ability to create rules to automatically sort your Notes, and I has very good export functions, being able to export as Rich Text, or even Web archives which are then readable by Safari again. Also the UI, and actually the whole App are blazing fast, I don’t know what they did, but it works just so quick I barely notice I actually run a App, It feels more like OS functionality to me. The only thing missing is a Sync to Web, but I don’t really mind because I only use one MacBook Pro mainly, and my Work Ubuntu Box is not the place I want to store notes anyway. So I would recommend any Mac user to try it out. Or if your unsure watch the Screen cast by Macgasm to see if it’s for you.

EDIT: Evernote is now displaying Ads in the newest Version. Also you are unable to add any kind of file besides the allowed once (PDF, TXT, etc.) since discovering that Evernote is now completely gone from all my Machines.

Getting your XBox360 to Connect to an Ubuntu Box

Owning an XBox360, and using it as a Media Center a lot by running Connect360 on my Mac, I wanted to stream Music from my Ubuntu Notebook, too. Looking around I found this little nifty tool x360mediaserve
To get this working to stream to you XBox you need to do the following:

Install all the dependencies: sudo apt-get install faad flac sox lame sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre
Unzip the x360mediaserve: tar -xvf x360mediaserve-x.x.x.tar.gz
Start the Tool: cd x360mediaserve-x.x.x && ./start
Configure: go to http://127.0.0.1/configure set the Music Folder, and the name

Your Done!
Enjoy all your Media on your XBox360.

Backing up VirtualBox Disk Images

If you use VirtualBox, you might want to Backup your Disk Images. Since its a VM you would think this works simply by copying, but no, VirtualBox (or xVM as Sun calls it) needs to strip all the info binding the Image to a specific Machine first. Thats accually not a big Problem since VBox offers a tool for that (vboxmanage), but this tool has no Interface. Not willing to go to the Command Line everytime and remember the Command, I created a little script with a GUI frontend to do that for me, since I’m using a Mac I Packaged it (using py2app) so it seems more native.
If anyone needs it you can download it Here

Simply select VDI Folder, and the Folder to Backup to, and klick Backup.