NekFit, hokey but useful

At Macworld, I saw an iPod Nano case called nekfit. I have been running with my iPod Nano using an armband, but the wires always got in the way, so I was intrigued by nekfit. When I stopped by their booth, the marketing guy said if I didn't like it, give him a call and he'd make it right. So, I went ahead and ordered one. I received it a few weeks back and must say that it looked like something that was slapped together in a garage. If you take a pair of sunglasses, but them on backwards around your neck and attach an iPod to it, that's what the nekfit looks like.

I've taken it for a few runs and after I got all the wires tied up the way I wanted (one of the wires kept getting caught on the side), I think I like it. It's pretty comfortable and definitely keeps the wires out of the way. I had to turn off the rotate mode on my iPod Nano 4G as I couldn't switch tracks when it was rotated (it kept going to CoverFlow mode). My only complaint is that I wish I could adjust the angle that the iPod hangs as it kind of rubs against my neck.

Will this last? I have no idea. My previous armbands had to be replaced as the neoprene started breaking down and smelled so bad that I couldn't use it anymore (I went as far as bleaching it and that didn't help).

For $35, it is definitely a viable alternative to an armband as long as you don't mind people thinking you're a little crazy for having this thing around your neck!

iWeb, the hidden gem?

I bought iLife '09 and installed it, but all I've had time to do is launch iPhoto a few times and play with the facial recognition which is pretty cool. The other night I was watching CNET's weekly TiVo videocast and they reviewed or at least introduced iLife '09 (which is kind of surprising as they seem to not like Macs). One of the things that was mentioned is that iWeb '09 now has the ability to upload to FTP. Hmmm...I only played with iWeb a few times way back when, but ignored it as I don't have a .Mac/MobileMe account. I fired up iWeb '09 and immediately looked for the FTP export. Not only did I find it, I found that it also did SFTP (Secure FTP, which is FTP over SSH). To top off that, it lets you specify the SSH port (I changed the port on my server from the standard 22 to another port to reduce the number of attempts to get in; while people we're getting in, it bogged down the system denying the requests). Very, very cool. I played a little more with iWeb and am quite impressed; I like the ability to place pictures wherever as it seems more flexible than anything else I've used. Publishing worked well and this might be my new web tool of choice (for the little web work I do).

Hurting the environment by conversing

Prior to our son being born almost 2 years ago, my wife and I decided that we'd use cloth diapers with him (she did the research and I just nodded my head). They are a bit of work to clean and wash (my wife does most of it), but we figure in the long run, they will be better for the environment. How can we say that? Well, we believe that there will be clean energy in the future (solar, wind, etc.) and we'll (as a society) be able to cost effectively desalinate water.

On the other hand, disposable diapers possibly use less energy to make, don't require any water to clean, but they will end up in the landfill where they can't decompose (decomposition requires sunlight and most items in a dump don't get any sun).

Our mayor has announced that we'll have water cutbacks this summer and there will be fines for excess use. Since we use a lot of water to do diapers, we have to consider if we're going to eat the fines or switch to disposable diapers. So if we conserve water and are unable to wash diapers, we'll have to use disposable diapers that will basically hurt the environment.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The joys and pains of a VPN

After many years of securing each service, i.e. email, web site, etc. for my servers and servers I managed, I came to realize that the only way to secure a company with more than 1 server is with a VPN. Now that I've used a VPN for about a week, I'm extremely happy with it. This will allow us to stop maintaing the firewall on 7 separate servers! My IT coordinator has done an amazing job at getting it running and when he was stuck, he called in a pro (knowing when to say that you don't know something scores points in my book).

This week, we were trying to connect our San Diego office to our main Minneapolis office. This proved to be much harder than it should have been. We have Cisco routers on both ends and used the EZVPN in the router to establish the connection; turns out it wasn't very easy. We had it working yesterday, but when I took it into the office, it failed to work. I took another stab at it today. After lots and lots of Google searching, I stumbled across some information about MTUs and made a few changes that amazingly got the VPN working flawlessly! The problem was that I could make connections that only sent a little data, but SSH connections and full web pages over the VPN failed.

The following are changes I had to make to the Cisco 871 on the remote side:

crypto isakmp keepalive 10 periodic

For the Vlan and Ethernet interfaces, I set:

 ip mtu 1400

and on the Vlan1 interface, I set:

 ip tcp adjust-mss 1200

(The last bit was the key.)

I'm tempted to get Cisco certified, but I'd probably pull my hair out if I encountered a problem like this again.