Geekblok

Many people face the problem of handling e-mails efficiently. There is no right or wrong way to handle e-mail, but some methods just are a little easier to work with than others.

A lot of people ask me how I handle all my e-mails. In this post I’ll describe my setup. It’s far from perfect, but for me it works and it might work for you too.

I’m a Linux geek, so I use a CLI mail agent, named mutt. This simple yet powerful piece of software is wisely described as:

All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

As funny as it might sound, it’s true. After using PINE for a long time, I’ve switched to mutt and never looked back. The interface is powerful and it does close to everything you’d want your mail client to do. Other things, like filtering the mail, I do with a custom script using Mail::Audit (yes, I should use Email::Filter). I prefer a custom Perl script over procmail for I have difficulty grasping the procmail way of writing filters and rules. It just seems too complicated to me. Mail::Audit is a lot more simple, as we’ll see in a minute.

Ok, now that we know the tools we’re working with, let’s look at how I hook it all up.

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The next trick I am going to show is how to build a localforward tunnel with ssh.

To be clear, the machines that I am using in my guides are example servers for this blog, so you should set up your own test servers to play around with. Check wikipedia for more background info on the example.net domain.

Ok, now for the example. Imagine you have something like tomato running on your home router joffie.example.net.Imagine the router has a ssh shell enabled that allows you to log into the router from the evil Internet using ssh on, the non default, port 666. All of the other ports are filtered, including the webinterface of the router. The webinterface can be viewed only from the local network of the router. But what if you want to view it from the Internet?

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Face recognition is a thing I always look at in awe. Usually, the demos are fairly smart and promising. But now, we can even try things ourselves!

MyHeritage offers a demo in which you can upload photos of yourself (or others). After uploading, the website will try to find a celebrity that looks like you. But, of course, the best way to test this system is to upload celebrity photos and see if they match!

I’ve uploaded a few, starting with a tricky one I thought (the website most likely belonging to a US-based company): Vladimir Putin. The result was actually right on spot!

Yes indeed, I’m an Apple fanboy. And I know at least one other reader of this shiny new blog is an Apple fanboy too. So this post is probably not that much news to that particular reader (or any other Mac-addict!).

Today, Apple finally announced Mac OS X version 10.5 aka Leopard, will be released on Friday 26^th of October.

The best looking and most stable (with it’s roots in FreeBSD) of commercial OS-es will bring a whole lot of improvements and new features. A whole lot? Yes, more than 300. Threehundred-and-sixteen to be precise. Now that’s what I call a lot!. M$ Vista, eat your heart out!

A look at that huge list reveals Boot Camp and Front Row are now included by default; tabbed windows in Terminal (goodbye iTerm?); Spaces, goodbye VirtueDesktops…; EXIF Color Space Support - Joffie should be delighted. I could go on and on for more bytes on this space. Still no mentioning of ZFS as default file-system however…

I’m not sure whether Leopard will run smoothly on my iBook G4, that has a 1.2GHz PowerPC and 768MB of RAM under the hood (though it qualifies to the requirements), but all the features and especially the inclusion of Boot Camp makes me think twice before upgrading to a new PC or a Macbook Pro! It sure makes playing QW:ET, either in Windows or Mac OS X possible.

In the meantime (for the next 8 to 9 days at least) I’ve discovered a site with lots of useful tweaks to improve your current experience of Mac OS X that will keep you busy for at least a couple of hours, whether using Tiger or Jaguar. Worth a look too!

Most people use ssh only as a secure shell version of telnet. This is a somewhat limited view of the real power of ssh. One can use ssh for so much more. On request of B10m I’ll start writing a few entries on this subject. Most of the time I am using openssh for this, but the tricks will probably work on other versions of ssh too.

I noticed that most people use ssh like this: ssh -l joffie example.net. This works of course, but can also be written as: ssh joffie@example.net.
Or, when your username on your local system is also joffie, as: ssh example.net. If that is not the case there is also the trick of putting the username in your ssh config file: ~/.ssh/config, by default:

bq. $ cat ~/.ssh/config
Host example.net

User joffie

One can even put an alias for the host in the config file:

bq. $ cat ~/.ssh/config
Host X

Hostname example.net

User joffie

With the above config file a ssh X will log user joffie in to the server example.net.
There are a lot more options of ssh and in following articles I’ll explain some more.