Author: Pat Skinner

I make apps.
I love empowering people with tech, saving time, and delivering delight.
Piano player and German speaker.

Categories
japan

Mt. Murone

After participating for a few weeks in various efforts around northeastern Japan, it’s difficult to overstate how intense our daily work is. Cleaning up a huge fish plant, removing tsunami goop, sawing through ruined flooring, debris removal – it’s serious and demanding physical labor. I experienced the most malodorous day of my life at a local fish plant, only to be succeeded by a significantly worse one at the commercial plant the next town over (Ofunato).

But there are positives amidst the exposure and sore muscles. The team has been living at a beautiful campsite near Kesennuma. After a long day’s work, we get to enjoy daily trips to the onsen, a relaxing hot bath. I’ve noticed that Japanese people have a tendency to look far younger than they report their age to be. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover evidence supporting onsen being a way the Japanese stay young.


This photo is from the grounds of our onsen on Mt. Murone.

Categories
General

Arrived in Kessenuma

About one week ago I arrived in Kessenuma, Japan. I’m volunteering with the help of a non-profit organization to assist with recovery of the hardest hit areas of the country. So far that means urban areas on the eastern coast of the Tohoku region, including Kessenuma, Rikuzentakata, and Karakura.

The damage is unreal and the work ahead of us incredible.

At the moment the team has limited internet, but I will be making an effort to post content to onpaws.com/helpjapan. For the latest information from the scene here please stay tuned. The site RSS feed is a good way to automatically stay on top of new posts.

Categories
Handy Interface Technical

Homebrew: 1. Mac App Store: 0.

CLI junkies, this one’s for you.

Mac OS X doesn’t ship with an official package manager in a Unix/Linux sense. And why should it? Apple has a proven track record targeting the casual technology user ready to trade a credit card number for convenience, and this approach earns buckets of money. Thus the recent introduction of the Mac App store should come as no surprise. (And personally as a fan of ‘Internet as change agent’ I love that it will, even marginally, help reduce carbon emissions – Apple already plans to remove boxed software from its retail stores.)

Unlike in the smartphone world, software distribution for both producers and consumers on PCs/Macs has been traditionally been ‘everybody is on their own.’ On Windows there are standard 3rd party conventions, such as NSIS, and Microsoft/Apple-sanctioned ways of packaging software for distribution (.MSI and .PKG respectively). But developers/ISVs are not required to use them, and many don’t. (I’m looking at you, Adobe – your Mac installers are seriously the worst I’ve ever seen! Sometimes devs have reasonable grounds (read: limited time/resources) to employ them, but VISE and other Java-based installers I’ve encountered are unabashedly gross.)

Let’s jump away from the commercial side of computing for a moment and talk open source. Command line junkies (read: me) are into simple, lightweight solutions. We probably won’t ever use the Mac App store, preferring traditional open source package managers. We’re the folks comfortable at the command line and with modifying config files. Debian’s apt, Gentoo’s portage, FreeBSD’s ports, Red Hat’s yum are our bread and butter. The philosophies between us and the App Store’s target audience couldn’t be more different.

Speaking from the command line junkie perspective, I recently made the move from Darwin ports to homebrew. The best experience so far was the first one:

brew install git

It pulled the source and ‘just worked’ with minimal messing with my existing system.

ports, we’ll chat again when

port install git

doesn’t start weirdly compiling perl 5.8 on top of the perl 5.10 already supplied, supported by Apple, and working fine, thank you very much.

Categories
Handy Technical

iPhone 4 and the world

Interesting experience today: every single Apple Store in New Jersey was sold out of the iPhone 4 today. I know because I called them all.

A couple things: One, congrats to Apple. New Jersey today is hardly a representative sample but so-called “antennagate” doesn’t seem to matter in the state. Two, I got to experience first hand with building incredulity over each successive call how much people don’t care about the inherent inferiority of American-sold iPhones. What do I mean?

At first glance the US price appears to be the cheapest, but you’re locked into a 2 year contract with a $350 early termination fee. Much worse, the phone is artificially locked to AT&T’s network. If you want to travel, count your blessings that an unlock was released yesterday but it is of course temporary and will be assuredly be patched by Apple. (Unlocked phones are different from jailbroken phones.

Categories
Cool Handy Music Technical

Stream your iTunes from home

Want to listen to your iTunes music at home from work, a coffee shop, etc?

It takes two steps: setup an SSH tunnel and forward zeroconf (‘Bonjour‘) traffic.

If you do it my way everything is already installed on your Mac and, especially nice for you corporate folks, doesn’t require admin privileges.
Windows users, you’re not necessarily SOL but Windows doesn’t ship with what you’ll need.

I use this technique on Snow Leopard, but I think it will work on Tiger and higher.

  • Enable SSH on your home computer.
    System Preferences->Sharing->Remote Logon
  • Enable iTunes Sharing.
    Preferences->Sharing->Share my library on my local network
  • Still from your home computer, browse to 192.168.1.1 (or whatever your router runs on) and enable SSH port forwarding if you haven’t already. This technique definitely won’t work without this step.
  • Protip: Optionally, register your public IP with a free Dynamic DNS service so you only have to remember a single domain name.
  • At your work machine, go to a terminal and use the following two commands: 
    dns-sd -P "myTunes" _daap._tcp. local 3689 localhost 127.0.0.1 &
ssh -N -f homeComputer -L 3689:localhost:3689

    The -N means non-interactive, the -f means go to the background.
    The -L xxx:hostname:xxx enables a tunnel on the iTunes sharing port (3689).
    homeComputer is your router’s public IP address, or the domain name you hopefully setup earlier.

  • To clean up when you’re done, you can run a 
    killall ssh dns-sd

Finally, if you’re cool enough to keep your music on a Linux machine, you can also use this technique with Firefly formerly (mt-daapd).