Today I bought this domain name because I noticed it was still available. Other reasons for purchase include:
Many people suffer from W?BIC! Syndrome and have to fight that internal urge to do stuff. This condition is often made worse when speaking to like minded people as happened to me at the weekend when talking to my Brother-in-Law.
We talked about his new VPN Firewall solution at his work and that he had implemented an Asterisk VoIP server to replace the old telephone PBX. All the functions and facilities of these new services got us thinking what we could do at our homes.
Ebay is a W?BIC! sufferers worst resource as with only a few clicks you can find all the parts to do something you really have no need for. We worked out we could get a cheap low powered PC for £100 from Viglen to run the pfSense Open Source Firewall which would allow an OpenVPN connection to be easily setup and provide QOS for any VoIP traffic. Then with old PC’s we already had we could install Asterisk to provide some VoIP services and do some cool call routing and also use SIPGate for a free number. Then we would just need a SIP IP Phone from ebay and we could call each others houses for free using VoIP.
All this seemed a great idea and we even talked about getting a server rack to house 1U servers to do all this until I remembered I have free evening calls with Virgin Media so we can already call for free, or just use Skype which also works on my Three mobile phone. And finally I could see no reason to need to VPN into my home machine as my files are backed up onto the cloud if I need them.
We did well to fight off the W?BIC urge and saved at least £200 in the process, but did spend a couple of fun hours talking about it :-)
One of my favourite moments from Big Bang Theory
“… because we can.”
This has to be the ultimate W?BIC! moment. http://hackaday.com/2009/05/27/1964-300baud-modem-surfs-the-web/
Using a 45 year old modem to connect to the internet. I wonder how we will connect in 2054?
After reading that Dan had installed Ubuntu NBR on all his machines I thought I would see what Ubuntu NBR would look like on my 24” TFT at work. W?BIC!
It is running off an original Asus eeePC 701 with a wireless Microsoft USB keyboard and mouse that got detected perfectly. Also attached to the eeePC is a 3G dongle.
With Netbooks getting more powerful every day this could one day be my only system, especially with storage on an external drive or the cloud.
I used ImageWriter to create a bootable USB pen drive with Ubuntu (Jaunty) Netbook Remix (or NBR) on it.
I installed netbook remix on my Asus EeePC 701 - that’s going quite ok. Although word of advice: don’t use ext4 just yet, it seems to make my machines freeze.
Then I thought it might be fun to install NBR on other machines, just to see what it’d be like on a bigger screen.
The answer - beautiful.
Ok, so I’m definitely going to re-install regular Gnome Ubuntu on my main dual screened desktop PC soon, just to dial down the WBIC insanity that followed.
But my laptop looks great running it, so something good came of the rampage that I went on.
Recently I gave my English friend who lives in the USA, with his American wife and family, a wonderful gift and it will only cost me £8 a year. I gave him access to Shell account on a UK server. Why did I do this you ask? Well because he wanted to watch programs on the BBC iPlayer and being in the USA access is blocked. Just like access to www.hulu.com is blocked from anywhere outside the USA and also because I could.
Once the UK based Shell account was setup all I needed to do (via remote access) was;
Download putty.exe
Right click -> create shortcut
Right click the shortcut -> properties
At the end of the “target” box, after putty.exe, add “-D 1080
username@servername.com”
From then on, clicking the shortcut will prompt for a password, and
run a SOCKS tunnel on port 1080 for as long as the connection is open
From there, any app with socks support can be told to use that tunnel;
for example in Firefox this would be done from Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings -> set SOCKS host to 127.0.0.1 port 1080
And now he has access to the BBC iPlayer.
It seems to be a recognised character trait, perhaps even a rite of passage, that geeks worldwide undertake completely pointless projects just to prove to themselves that they can, and to satisfy their curiosity.
This blog will host some of those precious moments… stay tuned…
