Synergy2 is in good company however. There are plenty of other services I feel are inappropriately difficult to coerce into doing relatively simple things – I’m lookin’ at you apache, sendmail, and procmail.

This solution needed the following features:

• works on any flavor of Linux/BSD/OS X, and Windows too
• open source
• layer 2 to make printing, file sharing, DAAP stuff easier
• reasonably easy to set up
• gratis
• actively developed
• peer-to-peer – hairpin routing through a central concentrator is bad

One of the problems was that I would always start looking into a solution like OpenVPN, OpenS/WAN, PPTP server built into DD-WRT – but I always got distracted by more interesting projects. They just were not easy enough to make it worth while – dynamic DNS and ssh was my methadone.

Then I found out about Hamachi, a peer-to-peer layer 2 vpn solution that really did “just work” the way I wanted. The rad thing was it sorta worked like SIP with a STUN server – not really sure if it used UDP, but it didn’t really matter. Connections were brokered through a Hamachi server, but the data flow was peer-to-peer. It worked great for all my machines through NAT and was cross platform. I used it for several months and now I had a taste for what good remote connectivity could be. There were some shortcomings though – it was not open source, and after it was purchased by LogMeIn it looked like development stopped. Bummer, but at least it was free and still worked.

After quite a while searching for an open source peer-to-peer style NAT piercing VPN solution I stumbled upon N2N, software that was super similar to Hamachi but open and from the good people at NTOP (have used NTOP and fProbe in the past – cool). Within ten minutes I had downloaded, compiled, and configured it and was absolutely blown away at the ease of use. I tried it out on OS X and Windows and it worked – hallelujah. One thing that might be a bit of a challenge for some folks is that you do need a server with a static IP to run the supernode on, but to me this was much better than relying on Hamachi for STUN type stuff (since they occasionally had outages for their free service).

Basically you just set up the supernode on a server on any UDP port you desire. It brokers the connections and then the traffic flows peer-to-peer over UDP. Here is the absolutely KILLER feature (which may be more of a side effect than feature) of using this connectionless UDP stuff – I can rip out the rug from underneath it and it still works. Lets say I have five terminal sessions going and I have been working off my 3G card in the car. Then I get home and Network Manager picks up the WiFi and flips over to that. N2N couldn’t care less, all those connections within the tunnel stay up and working. Good luck doing that with an SSH or ipsec connection. No messing with keepalives – it really does work better than expected. For touch-and-go connectivity like mobile broadband, a solution that kills all your work and requires a reconnect just isn’t going to cut it. Oh, and I can suspend and wake my machine without needing to reconnect.

I have probably been using it for about a year and have never run across anyone else who uses it and wanted to give it some props. It fills in the Hamachi requirement gaps for me and I give it my big fat seal of approval.

Reasons secure WiFi is a good idea, and why you should not care

People would steal my bandwidth
How about being nice to your neighbors and paying it forward a little bit. In the days of 20Mb/s Internet connections are you really going to notice when the next door neighbor who can’t afford their own connection wants to check the weather or look up a recipe? It would be foolish for someone to hop on your connection and then peg your bandwidth by seeding all their movies on Bittorrent – they would be noticed. If you do notice it is trivial to just cut them off.

People could use my connection for nefarious purposes and I’d be on the hook
Sure, they could use your connection for something bad, but how likely is this in reality. The ice cream man down the street that likes to browse some of the most repulsive pornography known to man is more likely to use TOR or a few select proxy servers then to drive to the front of your house to use your WiFi. If my neighbors had their WiFi open as I do then if my Internet connection were to go down while I was working at home I could pop onto another network and keep working without trouble. I this this use case is far more likely. There is also plausible deniability that goes along with being neighborly and leaving your connection open. Should you find yourself facing a civil suit from motion picture or recording industry it is perfectly reasonable to say that this traffic could have originated outside the walls of your home.

The neighbors could sniff and see where I am browsing
Yup, the neighbors could sniff all your non-secure connections. After setting up a sniffer they will see what sites you frequent and who you are talking to on insecure IM conversations… just like everyone else in the path of the TCP connection can do. Look, if you want to be secure and you’re not using end-to-end security like TLS/SSL then you’re not really secure anyway. Your ISP can sniff as well. Most people I see use WEP anyhow, which as I understand is completely broken. The type of person that would want to sniff your traffic is the type of person that can go to lengths to crack your WEP… use WPA2 if you have a stalker and insist on using insecure protocols for information you want protected.

My Windows computer could be owned
It already is.

Why your security is annoying

When friends come to your house with their iPhone or laptop, now you need to search around for what your password is – which you have about even odds of having lost. You probably won’t remember if you’re using WEP, WPA, WPA2 or whether you have a 64 bit or 128 bit ASCII or HEX password. If you’re using a password worth a damn then it’s going to be near impossible to type that into an iPhone. Maybe you’ve only set up “don’t broadcast ESSID” and implemented MAC address filtering. A tcpdump and a couple minutes later and I could get on your network anyhow.

Hardware

Before even addressing software issues, I needed to get the hardware working. For the most part all of my hardware just worked. The special keys on my Apple keyboard even worked for changing the volume.
I was able to mount my HFS+ formatted firewire drives and my FAT32 formatted USB drive from work with no problems. An all too typical search through the Ubuntu forums gave me the necessary configurations to get my bluetooth mighty mouse and wacom tablet working. I even got my iSight built-in camera working with a Photobooth-like application called Cheese. Unfortunately, this was another trip to the web to figure out how to get this going.

Surprisingly my Apple remote control just worked with Totem and Rhythmbox, I may get back to that though and do some customization. With Xorg we are finally moving toward being able to configure X without needing to edit xorg.conf. In many situations all the necessary configuration will be auto-detected and “just work” but in my case, trying to run an external monitor only, the GUI tools actually just botched my xorg.conf – and I didn’t have a good way to revert other than my backup I had made on the command line. Really I’m not so sure that the GUI configuration is as good as even Windows 98. After some xorg.conf battles I was able to get my external 24″ Dell monitor working beautifully at 1920×1200. Still, I look forward to these tools getting better in the future with true “bullet proof” X.

Music and Podcasts

There are a buhjillion applications you can use to manage your music and podcasts in Linux and none of them can hold a candle to iTunes. The big four are probably Rhythmbox, Amarok, Banshee, and XMMS. I immediately discount XMMS and it’s 1996 stylings – this is really equivalent to the first version of WinAMP ever. At work I’ve been using Rhythmbox, mainly because it doesn’t choke and crash when importing some of the more dodgy tracks in my 16-thousand-deep music library. Amarok doesn’t coke either, but it is so bulky and impossible to figure out – it’s like the emacs of music world. Add to that the fact that it’s KDE based and doesn’t seem to support all the features I want without configuration and its a non-starter for me. Both Rhythmbox and Banshee have nice DAAP support, so I can share my music on my home network. Unfortunately neither can read from an iTunes share because Apple made iTunes incompatible. I can get around this with the Firefly DAAP server on the Mac. Banshee shares also seem to be unreadable on iTunes, but Rhythmbox shares are perfectly readable. After all of this I think I have settled on Banshee.
As you can see here, Rhythmbox looks pretty darn similar and would be comfortable to anyone who is used to iTunes.
One of the big things I love about Rhythmbox is the half-broken lyrics plugin that can grab lyrics from the web. After digging around I managed to find a similar plugin for Banshee that actually works much better. Banshee can grab podcasts for me and sync with my iPod, but good luck if you have a small iPod and want to sync only certain playlists or files. Fortunately the Banshee folks have a roadmap that I think puts them in the right direction. They are reworking the iPod support, and will be adding new features like a play queue – a feature I love in Rhythmbox and wish that iTunes had as well. Banshee does a great job with album art and giving me recommendations of other music. Last.fm support is also there for audioscrobbling (sharing what I’ve been listening to with others). I think this is a great tie into the social web and someplace that I hope iTunes goes as well. Of course, Banshee is just a music player, so for my video podcasts I need to go elsewhere. Of course it can burn a CD and rip music and all that other shit I’ll never do.

Sound is beyond terrible on Linux. Acronym soup will confuse the hell out of you and ultimately the solution is to just pray that it works. To make the volume control on the keyboard work the way I want I had to go into the sound applet and control select two items – that worked, but who the hell can actually figure this out. OSS, ALSA, blah blah blah. It’s far too confusing. PulseAudio is the latest buzz, but I still betcha sound is going to be confusing as hell.

Video

Ok, so there are a few things I do with video. I watch video podcasts, I rip DVDs, and I just watch the ripped or downloaded movies. iTunes was nearly worthless for this. The restricted codecs manager makes it fairly easy to get the right codecs. The only problem is that by default Totem, the built in movie player, uses the gstreamer back-end. I’m not sure why, but for highly compressed video there is no post-processing on by default. This wasted hours of my time looking for a solution. I managed to fix it without replacing the gstreamer back-end with xine, but I don’t know how I did it. For some reason every video engine tries to use XV. I don’t know, or care what XV is, but with my Intel video card I need to figure out how to switch everything to X11. Scrubbing through videos also bites with Totem – not necessarily worse than Quicktime though. I prefer Gnome-Mplayer which has beautiful post-processing and scrubs through beautifully so it’s easy to get back to where you were or scrub back to see something you missed. I also like the fact that with both mplayer and totem that I can strip them down to a nearly interfaceless window. On the mac I used NicePlayer for this same purpose.

For ripping movies I use Handbrake. Some dude finally put together a good GTK based front-end for Handbrake which seems to work well enough.

Not too much to say beyond that – it just works.

My video podcast client of choice is Miro, which is kinda like an open-source Joost. The cool thing is that it can do torrent based rss streams, so I can get real tv using tvRSS or something like it. It is not perfect, but it seems to work well enough, better than iTunes anyway.

Also, Nautilus is great at giving me information about a video and showing fun little keyframes. Check it out.

Photos and Graphics

I have not finished testing this all out, but right now f-spot is working well. It indexes all my pictures without choking on its own vomit like iPhoto sometimes did with my library. It works with my Canon raw format, and can launch Gimp for more advanced stuff. I still need to recreate all my albums though. It’s much faster than iPhoto, but certainly is not as fancy and pretty. I can send my pics right out to Flickr without any trouble – it just works. Here’s a shot of it.
I almost don’t care so much about albums on my local computer – that’s mostly for sharing and I can manage them well enough on Flickr. The big thing for me is being able to import easily, do small tweaks, and get them up on the web without much effort. F-Spot wins in that regard.

Desktop Search

Ok, desktop search still sorta sucks balls on Ubuntu. On Tiger, spotlight sucked as well – slow and unreliable. Leopard however flips that on its head – so I sure hope there is some rapid development on the Tracker front (the default indexing tool in Gutsy). Deskbar is a nice quicksilver-like launcher I use. It is a plugin based search bar, so it can do things like look up words in the dictionary, launch applications, or search with Tracker. The only problem is that Tracker just plain doesn’t work reliably for me. It flips out and either returns no results when I know there should be results, or it somehow thinks all my images are great results for just about every word I type. I don’t see a lot of utilities built in to troubleshoot either. Anyhow, here are the screenshots.

Other Stuff

So here are some other things.

Pidgin rocks, but it still has a long way to go with features. Of course voice and video are the most requested, but for those who want VoIP there is a built-in softphone called Ekiga. Pidgin works with every protocol, and can sync in some ways with the Evolution address book. I can tweak it just how I like, to be small and out of the way.

I’d really like to see more zeroconf stuff in the Linux desktop. After some tweaking and installing of tools I have a great view into DAAP shares, ssh services, and Bonjour printers on my network – but the integration could go a lot further.

Maybe the best thing that Ubuntu has over OS X is central management of all my software updates. It’s easy to find new software, install it, and upgrade it. This is just the way it should be. I usually use Synaptic, which is the more advanced software install tool.

On OS X, iSync is so so close, yet so far away. Conduit is a very raw and new tool (meaning buggy as all get out) that can sync the stuff you’re interested in, like photos and notes and all that. It is actually working for me right now, but it’s really a manual process rather than syncing when a device is connected or on a schedule.

Evolution, the calendar, contacts, and mail client in Gnome, is feature rich, but buggy as hell. I’m still sorta surprised this was included with Gnome when it was. Web calendars seem to work great – even integrating with the clock. The contacts manager though seems to flake out way too easily. I’m trying to submit bugs where I can.

That’s about it really. There are plenty of problems, but most I have been able to overcome. I really think Linux can become an easier solution than Windows or OS X in the future, and I hope the community and distributors continue to focus on ease of use. I don’t have any show-stoppers so far, so I’m pleased.

I’ve gone through the obvious steps to try and breathe life back into iPhoto. I’ve blown away all my preferences. I’ve repaired permissions. I’ve even done the super secret command-option start and had iPhoto rebuild the entire library and all thumbnails. I’ve got a somewhat big iPhoto library – almost 10,000 pictures, but should that really matter? I store my library on an external HFS+ formatted firewire 7200rpm drive… could that be a problem? I have maybe 100 albums. These all seem reasonable to me.

On the plus side, I actually can run iPhoto now. It still locks up my computer, takes gigabytes of memory, and crashes constantly (I have been able to work with it for almost 15 minutes before a crash though). Poop. I tried just opening iPhoto and patiently watching Activity Monitor. The real memory usage eventually grows to over 1.5GB and the virtual memory creeps to over 2.5GB and iPhoto just crashes hard. Under disk activity I see 6MB/sec being written pretty consistently – which seems to correlate with the virtual memory creep I suppose.