A Mini-Hackster I Am
30 June 2009 | 5 Comments
WARNING: Geek post ahead!
So, for ages I was annoyed at policies practised by media-related web sites in the US to restrict streaming traffic strictly to IP addresses originating from North America. So poor old Malaysian-bound Rudi had no way of accessing wonderful music, say, on Pandora.
Of course, I investigated options on circumventing this block. Unfortunately, most of them were pretty unreliable or worse, unusably slow.
I eventually forgot about this and just resigned myself to the vagaries of international licensing and royalty legislation.
But recently I took out a VPS in California to host my clients’ sites. I did this for the added reliability, resources and speed, but a nifty side effect of this (expensive) upgrade are a couple of dedicated IP addresses. It suddenly occurred to me that… uh-huh.
Short version of the story: SSH Socks Telnet tunelling into my Linux VPS lets me surf completely undetectable on websites as if I was calling from California. Which means Pandora, Hulu etc are now accessible! And the best part is? It’s just about almost as fast as a native direct connection. And because I, in effect, own the connection, it’s utterly reliable and private.
Gotta love it! And my dad will probably love it as well if the iTunes store practices IP-based restrictions, as he claims it does.
Next step: set up a dedicated VPN service on the box with filtering to allow only HTTP traffic through to my static IP address here at home. Learnin’ Linux! About time, really.
New Creations
22 April 2009 | No Comments
My world is unravelling before my eyes, and I am stoked. May 2009 be a year of tremendous opportunity for us all, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Ecc 11:9.
Invisibility
26 January 2009 | 1 Comment
Question:
If you could be invisible for just one day, what would you do?
Just think about this for a moment.
Okay? Got your answer?
Now tell me, was it something innocent or was it something naughty?
Chances are, it was something naughty.
Why is it that when removed from the vision of others, the first thing many of us think of doing is something naughty? Is evil and selfishness so innate in us that it instinctively pops up the moment we can be free of the opinions of others?
In fact, the only two things I can think of that I could do whilst invisible that are not naughty is to be alone without anyone disturbing me, and to observe animals up close without freaking them out. Other than that, my mind is filled with all the mischief I could get up to.
Hmmmm…
Precious
22 January 2009 | 7 Comments
preâ‹…cious
1. of great value; very valuable or costly
2. highly esteemed for some spiritual, nonmaterial, or moral quality
3. dear; beloved
4. affectedly or excessively delicate, refined, or nice
5. a dearly beloved person; darling
6. all of the above, and then some
Far Away
5 December 2008 | 6 Comments
Another day, another load of bad news.
The mini-headline Man killed for ‘hogging karaoke’ greeted me on the BBC News web site. Curious to see which prehistoric country it was this time that was producing such senseless horror, I clicked on the link…
…only to discover the incident happened in the motherland herself, at a bar in Sandakan.
Sigh. -_-