I finally got around to setting up a few services on my Mac related to dynamic DNS hosting. Having done so, I'm asking myself why I didn't do this long ago.

So, what is dynamic DNS? Here's a brief and imperfect overview. Let's start with DNS, or Domain Naming System. This, broadly speaking, is a service that translates hostnames into numbers that a computer can understand, and vice-versa. It's DNS that allows you to type 'www.viewfromthedock.com' instead of a hard-to-remember number like 69.89.31.161 (an IP address). Your computer has an IP address. All the sites you visit have an IP address. Everything that accesses the internet has an IP address.

The thing about IP addresses is that, for a variety of reasons, there are only a finite number of them to go around.

This affects you directly. Because of this scarcity, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) only has a finite number of addresses to pass out to all the computers using that ISP that wish to access the internet.

The result of this shuffling act means that the address of your computer is changing all the time. That makes it hard to get back to your computer if you are remote and need to connect to, say, grab some important documents. Enter the dynamic DNS hosting service.


The folks at OpenDNS took a look at dynamic DNS hosting and asked 'What else could we do with this?' The result is a service that does a number of interesting things. OpenDNS does not provide you with an unchanging, easy-to-remember hostname (actually, it does track your ever-changing IP address, but only for its own purposes). What it does do is serve as your primary DNS server (instead of the DNS server used by your ISP). You don't need to install any software. You simply need to point your computer (or router) to the OpenDNS DNS servers. Read on if you're not sure why you should care.


This is a service owned by OpenDNS which basically does one thing: it transmits your current IP address to whatever services you are using. In my case, it ensures that both DynDNS and OpenDNS get my latest IP address from my ISP.

So what do I get out of this?

- With DynDNS, I can now use my user-created hostname to help me remotely access files on my Mac using SSH (Secure Shell). If I didn't have DynDNS, I would not know my current ISP-assigned IP address. With it, I always do.

- With OpenDNS, I get a big boost in speed and reliability when surfing the web. In my case (using Comcast), I would often type in a site address and it would take a bit of time for the page to load. Sometimes, nothing seemed to be happening at all. With OpenDNS, I've experienced a noticeable difference in speed, and I've experienced no delays in page look-ups.

- OpenDNS also offers several other added features that make it very worthwhile. Essentially, they've taken a basic service (dynamic DNS) and built in a bunch of extra useful stuff built around it. With this service, I can block access to certain types of sites. I get an added layer of built-in phishing protection. I also get sophisticated error-checking (for those times when I type in 'cmo' instead of 'com,' for instance). For those times that OpenDNS can't quite figure out what I'm looking for, the service offers helpful suggestions. I can also create shortcuts (e.g., I created one for this site that enables me to enter 'vfd' in the browser instead of the full web address). Finally, I can view stats related to all of the visited domains and IP addresses accessed through my router.

- DNS-O-Matic, finally, is a simple service that ensures that DynDNS and OpenDNS always have my latest IP address. If you don't use these services, you may choose to sync your IP address with a whole slew of other similar applications as well. I opted to use this service in lieu of installing the DynDNS client software on my Mac.

All three of these services are currently free. It takes a little effort to set it all up, but it's worth it. If you have no need for a consistent hostname for remotely accessing your Mac, then you may not need a service like DynDNS. However, OpenDNS is worth the effort for the speed and reliability boost alone.

One final note: OpenDNS collects information about your surfing habits, so be sure to check out their privacy policy.

We get our furniture and other household goods from Hawaii this Friday. All of our stuff will finally join us here in Maryland…and I will soon once again be able to sit at a proper desk in a proper chair to update this site.

Now that we have a new mailing address, I decided to start off right by stopping the influx of junk mail to our new abode before it even starts.

I’m using a free online service (still in beta) called ProQou, a one-stop source to turn off all of those unwanted mailings.

It’s easy to use. Time will tell how well it works. If you get a lot of junk in your mailbox, check it out.

Grab a cup of coffee. We already have Bean, the excellent and free rich text editor. Soon, we will have Espresso from MacRabbit, creator of the best-in-class CSS editor, CSSEdit.

Reading through the features, it looks like Espresso will be a hybrid application that combines many of the coding-friendly features of BBEdit or TextMate with the great UI and navigation of CSSEdit (to include CSSEdit’s live preview functionality). It also offers built-in publishing tools. It is geared towards web development, so it will surely be a strong Panic Coda alternative as well. Can’t wait to test it out.

I’ve signed up for the beta.

Today is the Ides of March, the day of Julius Caesar's untimely demise in 44 B.C. What's does this have to do with the Mac?

Well, I first thought of Caesar. Then I thought of Colleen McCullough's excellent Masters of Rome historical fiction series, which I recently finished reading. That got me thinking about books in general. Then I thought about Delicious Library and LibraryThing, two excellent bookish tools you can use on your Mac. Hence, this post.

Delicious Library

Delicious Library, from Delicious Monster, is a cataloguing tool that is perhaps the most ingenious use of the Mac's built-in iSight I've seen. Scan the barcodes of your books with your iSight (or any webcam or connected FireWire digital video camera) to create a digital catalog. Then browse through your new digital collection. You can synch up your catalog with your iPod, print out your catalog, and get personalized recommendations based on your collection. If you regularly lend out your books to friends, you can use the tool's loan management system to keep track of who has what. I can't put my finger on it, but I find it oddly enjoyable to scan barcodes on my Mac. Beyond being fun to use, it's a great inventory tool.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a web-based social 'book club' with a user-based catalogue of 24,000,000 books and growing. Wow. Create a free account to get started, enter some books from your library, write a book review, join a discussion group, get some recommendations based on your catalog. You can choose to add just a few books that you most recently read, or enter your entire library (if you enter more than 200 books, you will need to pay a modest fee). Or just surf around to see what others are reading. I could spend days on this page alone. The strength of this tool is its depth of information: pick a title and check out the book info and social info pages to see what I mean. I don't think you'll find better, non-commercial info about a book anywhere on the web. If you really like books, you owe it to yourself to check this out. It's a great discovery tool.

More Connections

By the way, the series of connections that led to this post led me to think of James Burke. I used to love reading his Connections column in Scientific American (he is probably most well-known for his excellent BBC television series). Burke specializes in tracing the interconnectivity of things: how events and inventions in the distant past lead up to the modern day. The connections he makes can be surprising (an example from the TV series: Burke shows how a test of gold’s purity 2500 years ago leads to the atomic bomb).

Check out the James Burke Institute Knowledge Web project — I've had this site bookmarked for years awaiting it's launch. From the Knowledge Web site: "it will soon be an interactive space on the web where students, teachers, and other knowledge seekers can explore information in a highly interconnected, holistic way that allows for an almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events."

I accidentally discovered a great Mac-compatible game today, and ended up losing a whole afternoon of productivity.

Here’s what happened. I use LaunchBar to quickly access programs on my Mac. This afternoon, I typed the keyboard shortcut for LaunchBar (-space bar), typed ‘n,’ and then hit return. This is my two-second method to launch NetNewsWire. But I must have misfired, because LaunchBar never opened.

Instead, I inadvertently typed ‘n’ in the address bar of FireFox and hit return. This accident loaded an intriguing page for something called ‘N’ from a company called ‘metanet software.’ There was little on this page, save for a link that said ‘Come and check out N’s new home, at The Way of the Ninja!'

Unable to resist a link with the word ‘Ninja’ in it, I clicked. What I found there was a free Flash game for Mac and PC. Of course, I downloaded it and fired it up. To my surprise, I had stumbled upon the coolest lightweight free game I’ve seen in a long time. The graphics are simple, but the physics simulation is really something to see. This game is beyond addictive. N may be old news to gamers out there, but it was news to me.

Give it a try, if only to watch how smoothly and elegantly the little stick-figure ninja moves around the game space (and explodes spectacularly, employing what the developer’s accurately label ‘bitchin’ ragdoll physics').

I had intended to restart work on my PIM review series this afternoon…sigh.

Congratulations to the team behind the successful landing of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander this weekend. In the coming months, the Lander will send back data that will hopefully answer questions about the past and present climate of Mars, the Martian arctic’s ability to support life and the history of water on the planet.

Here are some different ways you can follow the Mission on your Mac:

1. Phoenix Mars Mission website

This site is, as you would expect, the primary source for the latest images, video, news. There is some great blog content here, too. As an aside, check out this CIO article about the behind-the-scenes challenge of serving up web content for the mission in near-real time to tens of thousands of people at once. It’s especially impressive considering that the imagery content is streaming in from millions of miles away.

2. Twitter with the Phoenix

Yes, even the Phoenix Mars Lander has a Twitter account. This is a convenient way to get regular updates — and the spacecraft is even responding to user questions (the tweets are written in the first ‘person’).

3. Visit the Mission on Second Life

And, yes, there’s also a Second Life site for the Mission.

4. Mac screensaver, widget

You can download a couple of Mac freebies over at the Phoenix Mars Mission site. The Mac screensaver features current imagery that auto-updates each time it is launched. The widget provides current Martian weather data.

5. Get the iTunes podcast

There’s also a Phoenix Mars Mission podcast hosted by the University of Arizona. This is the first time a public university has led a Mars mission.

I’ll leave you with an interesting fact: there is a DVD fastened with Velcro to the Phoenix Mars Lander. It’s called Vision of Mars, and it’s a compendium of Mars-related text, art, and radio broadcasts from the 19th and 20th century compiled by the Planetary Society. It also contains 250,000 names of Society members and space exploration enthusiasts. According to the Society, it’s “a message from our world to future human inhabitants of Mars.” The disc, billed as the ‘first library on Mars,’ is reportedly the most expensive DVD ever made. It’s comprised of silicon glass and is designed to last for 500 years.

If it were up to me, I would have attached a Nintendo Wii.

If you've been following the PIM series here, you know that I recently delayed my reviews because the Worldwide Developers Conference is just around the corner (a time of year when many Mac apps are updated). But I have a confession to make. This delay is also a convenient excuse! I haven't had time to devote my energies to the PIM review series over the past couple of weeks, and this offered a valid reason to postpone. With the recent update of two of the five apps in this review series (Together and EagleFiler), I plan to be back with the next review soon. I may change the order of the reviews and start with the recently-updated apps as a precaution.

Speaking of the PIM reviews, there has been an interesting development regarding this series: Alan Schmitt of Metadata posted a very well-thought out argument that VooDooPad shouldn't be part of this review series since it's a fundamentally different sort of application. Alan makes a distinction between PIMs as data organizers and PIMs as data creation tools: while the former is focused on manipulation of metadata, the latter is focused on manipulation of data. I think this is an excellent point. What I'm thinking about now is how the various Mac info managers fit on the creation vs. organization spectrum. I'll post my thoughts soon.

Meanwhile, here's a short round up of odds and ends that recently caught my interest around the Macosphere.

 

1. Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction is a community-driven customer service site with an aim to create new and better connections between companies and users. It's a place to get tech support, a place to gripe about a product or service, a place to interact with employees from a company, and a place to share ideas. For companies, it's a great way to manage tech support and directly engage with customers (and it's free). For customers like you and me, it's a very interactive and interesting way to get help with an app or service (or just to monitor what people are saying). I also like the newly-added 'Overheard' feature on Get Satisfaction, which allows companies to track what people are saying about them in the Twittersphere. It's an interesting way to view a narrow segment of Twitter posts. It's also a novel way to generate tips and ideas for posts for bloggers (for instance, I can monitor the worldwide Twitter stream of all posts that mention Apple). I have the sense that Get Satisfaction is a harbinger of things to come as social networking/microblogging evolves and matures. It's a great tool that is worth your time to check out. Let's count down the days until it's bought by Google.

 

2. Alternative Twitter Views

I'm still adjusting to the Twitter phenomenon. The best description of it I've heard so far comes from Adam Christianson of the MacCast, who noted it's like iChat without the commitment. I like that. At any rate, here are a couple of interesting sites that provide alternative views of the Twitter stream. The first, twittervision, is a mash-up of Google Maps and Twitter. As you might expect, it displays Twitter posts in realtime on a world map. The second, Firehose, presents a realtime Twitter timeline. These sites aren't particularly useful, but they are interesting. The Firehose stream is particularly mesmerizing.

 

3. Delicious Library 2 Nears Release

The developer of Delicious Library, the barcode-friendly media cataloguing tool, announced the availability of a Beta download of version 2.0 yesterday via a Twitter post. If you buy the current version of DL (1.6.6), you will get the 2.0 upgrade for free. If you've never tried DL, download the trial and check it out. It's the slickest use of the built-in iSight camera that I've seen. Note that the 2.0 Beta is optimized for OS X Leopard 10.5.3, which has not yet been released.

 

4. Ready-Set-Do! GTD App Updated

Ready-Set-Do!, a Getting Things Done workflow app, updated to 1.3 recently. This isn't as much an application as it is a cleverly packaged set of Applescripts that allow you to manage the files on your Mac using GTD methodology. From what I've read, this app is for people who really grok the GTD process. It appears to be most similar to Midnight Inbox, in that it aims to serve as a GTD command post to manages all the files on your Mac by creating alias links (in other words, files are not actually moved around, they are only referenced and managed through the Ready-Set-Do! interface). Interesting idea.

 

5. Links for web developers

I'm kind of tired of 'top ten' style lists, but blogwell.com's 100+ Resources for Web Developers is a good reference and summary.

 

6. Graffletopia

If you use OmniGraffle, you must check out Graffletopia. Here, you can choose from over 300,000 free stencils to use in your OmniGraffle project. If you're unfamiliar with OmniGraffle, it's a tool with which you can create diagrams. If you peruse through some of the Graffletopia styles, you will quickly get a sense of just how useful this tool can be.

Here's a project idea for the long weekend. Have you heard of scanner art? The basic idea is this: you scan things and you try to make something something artistic with it. Is it art? Is it really photography? Some say yes, some say no. I say, 'Who cares?'

I have found that I can get some extraordinary results with my trusty scanner (the Epson Perfection 4490). I particularly like how the scanner captures intricate detail in natural objects. Here are a few samples of items I've created (click for a larger view).

Edge.org, where the stunning work of Katinka Matson is often featured. Intrigued, I started experimenting with my scanner. I don't have any sage advice about creating scanned artwork, but I do have a few tips:

• Ensure you clean the scanner bed really well before you scan
• Be prepared to spend several hours cleaning up dust and artifacts from each image you scan with your image editor of choice (even if you DO clean the bed well, you will spend a good deal of time on this task).
• I prefer to scan in the dark with the lid of the scanner open. It produces nice clean lines and a black background, which makes it easier to extract the image.
• This is a great way to experiment with your image editing program (I use Photoshop), particularly for creating interesting backgrounds, arrangements and frames.
• Try scanning anything and everything. For items that might damage your scanner bed glass, some say to try using a transparent film (e.g. a rigid piece of clear plastic of the type used to protect business reports in days past). Haven't tried this myself — I just use the 'be really, really careful when scanning' method.
• Try playing around with arrangement and layering of your scanned items.
• Scan the same item from different angles, then try piecing it together the various images into one montage.
• Scan the same item at different resolutions, then try assembling something interesting from these scans.

If scanning objects appeals to you, check out Scanner Magic and Photo Vinc for more tips and ideas.

I received an invitation to beta test Aviary today, a new web-based creative suite from a company called Worth1000. I received access to Phoenix (an online image editor) and Peacock (an online pattern generator).

From the Aviary site:

Aviary is a suite of rich internet applications geared for artists of all genres. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for everything. At Worth1000, we are creating a complex ecosystem for artists and providing the world with free, capable collaborative tools and an approach to collaboration and rights management that will turn the marketplace for online art on its head.

I haven’t done much with it yet, but I tried it long enough to determine the image editor is responsive and fairly feature-rich. If you want to give it a try, shoot me an email. I have five two invitations to pass on.

I just spent an hour playing with Microsoft’s just-released WorldWide Telescope. At first glance, you may dismiss this is as just another space simulator like Starry Night, Stellarium, Celestia, or Google Earth. However, I think it will stand on its own as a unique and extraordinary offering. 

WWT allows you to surf around the galaxy, seamlessly viewing stitched images from our civilization’s best telescopes. Panning and zooming around the galaxy is exceptionally fluid — faster and more immersive than other offerings I’ve seen. The technology behind this is Microsoft’s new high-performance “Visual Experience Engine.”

As one not ordinarily impressed by Microsoft products, I have to say that I really like WWT. The navigation controls are easy to use. The imagery is incredible. As you’re sailing along, the thumbnails along the bottom of the screen instantly update to show you what’s in the neighborhood. You can change views on the fly to look at galaxies, constellations, and other formations at different wavelengths. Overall, you get a sense of where you are in the universe better than other tools I’ve used. One other feature that stands out: slick multimedia guided tours from experts and enthusiasts — and you can create your own tour, too.

I’m always happy to see a new, free astronomy tool for the public. This is certainly a great addition. The only bad news is that it’s Windows-only.

I thought I wouldn’t get the chance to test this package out given the minimum system requirements to run WWT on your Mac:

- Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended) with BootCamp - Mac with Intel Core 2 Duo (2.2 GHz or faster) processor recommended - 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM; 2 GB RAM recommended - NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card with 128-MB SDRAM or recommended - HFS+ hard disk format (also known as Mac OS® Extended or HFS Plus) and 10 GB of available hard disk space - 1440 x 900 or higher-resolution monitor

I don't have Windows on BootCamp, but I do have VMWare Fusion 2.0 Beta. My Mac isn't quite 2.2 GHz. But I decided to try it out anyway. After some wrangling, I got it to work. Here's what I'm running:

- MS XP Home Edition SP2 on VMWare Fusion - 24-inch iMac Core 2 Duo/2.16GHz/2MB RAM running Mac OS X 10.5.2 - VMWare Fusion 2.0 Beta (Settings: 2 virtual processors, 1120 MB RAM, Accelerated 3D graphics enabled)

This worked well for me, with a few caveats: I experienced video and audio stutters when clicking on an object for 'more information' or when starting up a tour. I also found the tours played back much more smoothly (with better image quality) after I let them play through once, and then played them again. I also had to reboot after I was finished running the application through VMWare — my Mac was quite sluggish afterwards. Not bad trade-offs, all things considered. One note: I tried cranking up the alloted RAM for my virtual Windows installation all the way up to 1830MB (VMWare's recommended max for 2GB RAM), but this did not work. I experienced severe sluggishness, probably due to memory swapping. It worked fine once I turned the RAM back to 1120MB.

I would run BootCamp, but the version of Windows I own (Home Edition) is not compatible…and I don’t want to buy a newer version of Windows. If you’re in this camp (and your Mac is as good or better than mine), this is a working alternative if you want to try out WWT. It’s worth a look. If you run Windows on BootCamp, definitely give it a try.