Want to listen to your iTunes music at home from work, a coffee shop, etc?

It takes two steps: setup an SSH tunnel and forward zeroconf (‘Bonjour‘) traffic.

If you do it my way everything is already installed on your Mac and, especially nice for you corporate folks, doesn’t require admin privileges.
Windows users, you’re not necessarily SOL but Windows doesn’t ship with what you’ll need.

I use this technique on Snow Leopard, but I think it will work on Tiger and higher.

• Enable SSH on your home computer.
  System Preferences->Sharing->Remote Logon
• Enable iTunes Sharing.
  Preferences->Sharing->Share my library on my local network
• Still from your home computer, browse to 192.168.1.1 (or whatever your router runs on) and enable SSH port forwarding if you haven’t already. This technique definitely won’t work without this step.
• Protip: Optionally, register your public IP with a free Dynamic DNS service so you only have to remember a single domain name.
• At your work machine, go to a terminal and use the following two commands:

  dns-sd -P "myTunes" _daap._tcp. local 3689 localhost 127.0.0.1 &
  ssh -N -f homeComputer -L 3689:localhost:3689

  The -N means non-interactive, the -f means go to the background.
  The -L xxx:hostname:xxx enables a tunnel on the iTunes sharing port (3689).
  homeComputer is your router’s public IP address, or the domain name you hopefully setup earlier.

• To clean up when you’re done, you can run a

  killall ssh dns-sd

Finally, if you’re cool enough to keep your music on a Linux machine, you can also use this technique with Firefly formerly (mt-daapd).

Posted originally for my personal reference, but since my Mac tips get lots of Google hits hope this is useful to you too.

Screen Sharing on Mac OS X Snow Leopard – very convenient to have built-in*, and I use it to logon to my Ubuntu server when the CLI doesn’t cut the mustard – infrequent, but it happens.

If you’re like me, you occasionally get an unexpected blank or white screen when you connect to your other computer. It turns out the mouse and keyboard pass through just fine but the display is all white. Fix it by getting info on Screen Sharing.app and ticking the ‘Open in 32-bit mode’ box.

* Technical addendum: I would be remiss to sing accolades of the VNC-based Screen Sharing without mentioning Microsoft’s [Citrix] Remote Desktop. It’s significantly faster than VNC due to some sweet implementation differences – to my knowledge when you connect to the Windows host it switches to a special display driver that sends small drawing instructions over the tubes that are subsequently recreated on your client. VNC, while open source and commensurately ubiquitous in Unix/Linux/Mac land, is not so smart and blindly sends a compressed image of the screen. Just sayin guys – Remote Desktop is awesome.

I really don’t like waiting, especially when I can avoid it. Therefore, when I got tired of waiting for my computer recently I did something about it.

On SSH and passwords

The average ssh logon time consumes what feels like 3-4 seconds on my 2007-era machines. The delay has worsened since Ubuntu 0910, which now retrieves system information on logon (in its default form, nearly useless to me). I really like the idea of seeing useful info at logon time, but bottlenecking logon – the most common act that happens – for multiple seconds is unacceptable. If you’re like me, just use your own script instead of landscape:

apt-get remove landscape-common

I banged out some bash that runs nearly instantaneously and shows only what I actually care about, and it only took some lines in .profile. simple version:

echo 'df -h' >> ~/.profile
PATH=$HOME/bin/

Finally for a really good one that totally pays for itself: think about how many times you type in a password. The net time saved by not having to spend a few seconds typing in your password each time is huge.

echo "PubkeyAuthentication yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

It’s called public key authentication in SSH, and it’s one of the best kept SSH secrets.

Just finished optimizing the page load time by recompressing several large JPGs that used to be part of every page that had a sidebar (i.e. most pages on this site).

Load times are down to an average of about .983 sec from about 1.8 sec before. Hooray for more speed.

RAID5, generally speaking, is a bad idea. Unless you have some very specific needs, RAID5 increases complexity, is more prone to hardware failure and administration errors, and does not automatically back itself up. If two RAID5 member drives fail at the same time, *all* your data is SOL. Individual drives, such as a bunch of externals, are probably a better choice for most people. And if two individual drives fail, you can still get data from the rest of them.

But people are nevertheless drawn to RAID5′s speed and size; it’s a great way to effectively have a freaking gigantic drive. It’s set and forget, easy to expand in the future (with some filesystems), and for reads is substantially faster than one drive. If one RAID5 drive fails, it’s an easy fix via drop-in replacement.

Some advice: when building a RAID array, use drives from different sources. Going different brands is probably a good idea, but caveat emptor: Company A’s 1TB drive will most likely not be the same ultimate size Company B’s. The available space will quite probably be skewed by a few KB or MB.

It should go without saying, but build your array only when you have all drives in hand. To more easily allow future expansion of your RAID, when it comes partition time shave a meg or so off your smallest drive. And when you decide to expand your array, buy a drive that’s the exact same model as one already in there. It will probably be cheaper than the newest model anyway.

Spot on zinger by Gruber:

I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you don’t think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you’re probably wrong.)

50 years ago, if an aspiring Joe Rockstar wanted to step up from recording his garage band to mastering his first demo, he’d soon be thwarted by the cost of time with specialized expensive studio hardware like mixers, multitrack recorders, and (down the line) audio effects like EQs, delays, reverb, and synthesizers. The 90s opened many doors as music software grew up, but limited processing speed and hard drive throughput were frequent road bumps.

Today, a basic laptop and a multichannel sound card are capable of satisfying most common production needs. There is an entrenched market for audio software, and some even stays true to the venerable style of vintage rackmounted audio hardware (i.e. Reason). In some cases modern musical products (such as an MPC drum machine) provide a ‘good enough’ cheaper alternative to their yesteryear equivalent (hired session drummer).

As someone who loves music and technology, I want to take a moment and acknowledge recent years as some pretty incredible ones in the history of music production. Like many other creative fields the advent of cheap and ubiquitous computing has enabled a larger school of musicians to more easily realize their musical ambitions. I think it’s fair to say we are in the early years of the next generation of production and people are in a race to catch up and stay on top of the possibilities.

Personally, I’m an Ableton Live fan, and Logic is pretty cool too when I can cut through the overwhelming interface. (At least the Apple buyout brought us GarageBand.)

I definitely want to give a shoutout to Spectrasonics too, a company whose products I discovered last year. When I first plugged the family’s MIDI keyboard into my old PowerPC Mac, virtual instruments (VSTs, RTASs, or AUs for the OS X guys) existed but had nowhere near the ambition you find today. Between Omnisphere, Trilian, and Stylus RMX there’s an impressive quality to Spectrasonic’s sampling I’m happy to see out there. Trilian, their bass instrument, has 6 different dynamics and 6 different samples that round robin each time you hit a note. There is so much data in the samples that on my MacBook Pro it takes upwards of several seconds just to load an instrument. But the result is worth it – who would have thought a virtual instrument could sound so realistic?

Here’s to the next 10 years of music production!

To keep your bookmarks and RSS feed favicons looking shiny, I changed the onpaws.com favicon again. I was getting tired of the crusty current one which I made on a whim one day:

Passable at 64×64, but it always looked crummy at the more commonly seen 16×16:

After becoming intimately reacquainted with the various ways to disable Photoshop’s on by default selections and fill anti aliasing, I started with a 16×16 canvas this time, using the pencil tool and as per usual keeping the background transparent. This was a candidate:

But I’m happy with this new one for now- it retains the motif of circle + ‘p’ descender from onpaws -> op.

What do you think?

What took them so long?

When I got my MacBook Pro in 2006 it was heavily marketed with Aperture, Apple’s new pro photo management app. Yesterday I was happy to see Aperture get a long-overdue update to version 3, which is welcome, but hardly seems to do more than bring it to feature parity with last year’s release of iPhoto 8 (2009). In the meantime I’ve personally tried moving to Lightroom a few times because, you know, it actually gets regular updates and unlike Adobe’s other products that end in otoshop, is not mired in UI slurry. Unexpectedly, RAW support didn’t get a major shot in the arm. People complaining about lack of GF1 support should look here.

One thing noteworthy: evidence of a supposed Google-Apple conflict recently discussed ad nauseam by segments of the online tech community is nary to be found in this release. The Places features still uses Google Maps. While this was far easier for the developers to implement, I’m now more curious why Apple bought PlaceBase last year, (mentioned before).

Update: What conflict?

I either must really, really not be the target audience, or Finale 2010 for Mac is underwhelming to the point of sucking. Last week was my first time using Finale since 2003 in music class, and my install lasted about 10 minutes before going straight to the trash.

It feels like a Microsoft product of the late 90s – scattered, intractable UI with backwards compatibility concerns taking form as an innovation hindering albatross. The UI is almost exactly the same as I remember the OS 9 version being, with the same Carbon era UI quirks. They embraced OS X by lamely Aqua-fying a few buttons. It seems like the developers value backwards compatibility and user familiarity with all of the Finale quirks to the point of being uncompetitive with modern music software. Maybe the legions of Finale users fiercely resist any attempt at change. And granted, Finale is among very few competitors when it comes to music notation. But what a travesty. My sympathy goes out to the many musicians out there that have no choice but to use this.

I’ll be sticking with Ableton. GarageBand, the same one that came free on my Mac, is fine for those few notation-needed occasions.