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Kayray’s Internet Roundup

Here’s some useful and/or fun and/or interesting stuff for you:

WebbAlert is Morgan Webb’s daily videocast (M-Th), covering the day’s developments in tech news, video gaming, gadgetry, and digital culture. Henry and I love Morgan’s show and watch it together every day. At first I found her a little too perky, but now I think she is adorable. Her vidcast is very entertaining and informative.
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Do you have a mac? Do you use ssh, scp, or ftp frequently, perhaps to and from your personal server? If so, you’ve got to try MacFUSE:

MacFUSE implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above).

Ok, I know that sounds pretty dry, but stay with me. When Dan first told me about MacFUSE I was not particularly interested. It doesn’t sound nearly as useful as it is! He installed it, and sshfs, on my Macbook and I started using it and fell in love. If I need to copy a recording over to my webspace, I just drag it over in Finder. When I need to update a podcast feed, rather than ssh in and use vi to edit (or worse, to ftp the file back and forth), I just double-click the file in Finder and it opens in my local texteditor (SMULTRON). (And next time I can just Open Recent from the File menu!) I can’t tell you how useful it is. Today I installed it on my iMac, and, though it may sound a bit daunting, it’s easy — anyone can do it.

Go to http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/downloads/list. Download the MacFUSE Core Installer Package dmg and the sshfs filesystem dmg. Install the MacFUSE core first, and then sshfs. Run sshfs. It’ll ask you for a server and a username, and then a password. Once you’ve connected to your server, it’ll show up as a drive in Finder, just as if you had an external hard drive plugged in. You can quit sshfs now. Now you can use your mounted server just as if it were a local box!
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And now, some games:
Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2 (sound will start when you load the page, turn down your speakers!) — Mash the buttons along with the arrows and letters. I have gold medals for Hollywise, This Way, and Super Mario World Rock, and silver for Zelda. Those button combos kill me. I just tried one of the Pro songs and got about 4 points.

Desktop Tower Defense — place and upgrade units and defend your tower. Or whatever. Cute artwork, cute sound effects. Horribly addicting, try it at your own risk. I am an ace at Easy of course, but I still can’t get very far on Medium.

Speaking of addicting, we discovered Travian a few weeks ago. I started on US server s2 and Dan followed me, but we discovered that there are a few enormous, powerful alliances there that bully other players, so we switched to another, newer server in hopes of forming our own alliance and, possibly, standing a chance to play a more balanced, more peaceful game. We have a 13-player alliance there with some of the LibriVoxers.
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Ok, that’ll do it for now. Have fun :)

Category: Blog, Tech 4 comments »

4 Responses to “Kayray’s Internet Roundup”

  1. Lena

    One little downside to Macfuse – it has a habit of putting extra files empty out there. If you are the only one using the server, you can easily tell the difference – BUT, trying to explain to clients they should ignore certain files doesn’t work. You can’t see the files unless you look for them with an FTP program or view them in your browser.

    All that being said, it’s the neatest program. I can’t wait until they fix that problem. It’s such a cool thing.

    I’ll be checking out the games! Thanks for the heads up!

  2. kara

    You mean good old .DS_Store? Heheheh. While I was googling around one day I think I bumped into a way to get MacFUSE to ignore .DS_Store, but I don’t remember what/where/how!

  3. Lena

    You know, I’m not sure those were the files I kept getting. But, if you come across the fix link, I’d love to know what it is. (:

  4. kara

    Here you go:
    http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/CHANGELOG
    Do a find on noapplespecial. “Use at your own peril” heh.


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