Now there’s an alternative to the Greyhound and Fung Wah bus service between Boston and New York City. Vamoose offers free complimentary WiFi service on the bus!  Limoliner also has WiFi access, but Vamoose is cheaper at $22 one way. They also have guaranteed seating when you call in advance. found via Boston Knows

Since the iPhone still doesn’t let you share it’s EDGE connection with a laptop computer, having WiFi on the bus would be very handy. And even if I were to hack my iPhone share its EDGE connection to get Internet on my Macbook, it would still be much slower than WiFi.

I’ve been meaning to get down to NYC to visit friends, and now I have one more reason to make the trip. I can be connected during the 8-9 hrs spent on the bus!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: iphonenewyork boston bus greyhound fungwah vamoose limoliner wifi bostonknows macbook

I’m doing some testing of a Plone site locally on my Mac, and I want to test the registration process. This requires that I have a mail server such as postfix running on my Mac, listening on port 25. Tiger ships with Postfix but it’s disabled by default. I found these instructions for enabling Postfix, so I can now send emails from this local mail server.

This also comes in handy when you are trying to send email from Mail.app or Thunderbird and the network you are on is blocking traffic to port 25. If you run a local mail server, then you can avoid this problem. But be aware that some anti-spam tools will try to do reverse IP lookup, and if they don’t find a fully qualified domain name for your machine, it’s likely that the message will get flagged as spam.

In this case, you can setup an SSH tunnel over a port that is open, and route your SMTP traffic over the SSH tunnel.

Technorati Tags: plone, postfix, macosx

I’ve been looking at getting a new mobile phone for the last few months, but all of them seem to be somehow lacking. I was keen on the Nokia E62, but for some reason they crippled this one to not have Wi-Fi, even though the E61 which is sold in Europe and is identical to the E62 except that it has Wi-Fi built-in. Of course, I could buy the unlocked E61 on Amazon but then I have to pay a premium, rather than get the discounted price from Cingular.
Well, today I decided that I live with my aging Sony Ericcson T637, and wait a few more months for the Apple iPhone. Steve Jobs announced it at Macworld, and from looking at the keynote transcript, I have to say that this looks like the most brilliantly designed mobile phone I’ve ever seen. It even appears to have most of the functionality of the Nokia Internet tablet, which I was considering getting for awhile (although not because I needed one, but because it was cool.)

Of course, like the iPod, Apple lust comes at a premium price. The 4GB version is going to cost $499 and the 8GB will be $599. But I figure that it’s worth it to get in one device:

• music player
• video player
• photo browser
• cell phone
• web browser
• camera

Gone are the days of carrying around four devices: iPod, PDA, camera and mobile phone. With the iPhone, you have convergence of these devices with the beautiful Apple design and usability. I want one!

Technorati Tags: apple, macintosh

On a recent project for a customer, they needed to send me some keys to connect to their company VPN server. Email is not secure by default, and anyone could intercept the keys along the way which could compromise the security of their company intranet.

With the usage of GPG signing and encryption, we can not only verify the sender of the emails, but also encrypt the data so that if it were intercepted, it could not be read. These are the steps I went through to set up GPG with Apple’s Mail.

1. Installed GNU Privacy Guard
2. Installed GPG Keychain Access
3. Launch GPG Keychain Access
4. Choose to generate a new key – used all the default values
5. Exported my public key and sent to client as .txt file
6. Imported public key from client into GPG Keychain Access
7. Installed GPGMail – plug-in for Apple Mail

For more information about configuring GNUPG for a variety of MacOSX email clients, read this howto: Configuring GNUPG

If you’re using Windows, take a look at GPG4Win (found via Jon Stahl’s blog)

Technorati Tags: apple, encryption, gpg, macintosh, pgp, privacy, email, security