Category Archives: Macintosh

FreeBSD Crater

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I started out looking at FreeBSD based on a draw from FreeNAS, which then led to ZFS, the primary file system that FreeNAS and FreeBSD use. At work, I am looking at the regular handling of enormous archival files and the further along I went the more I realized that I would also need storage for a long time. There are a lot of ways to ensure that archival files remain viable, error correcting codes, using the cloud, rotating media. So all of this has led me to learn more about ZFS.

I have to admit that at first, ZFS was very strange to me. I’m used to HFS and EXT3 and EXT4 type file systems with their usual vocabularies. You can mount it, unmount it, and check it with an option to repair it. ZFS adds a whole new universe of vocabulary to file systems. There are two parts, the zpool creates the definition of the devices and files you want to use for your file system, and the zfs command allows you to manipulate it, in terms of mounting and unmounting. When it comes to error-checking and repair, that is the feature called scrub. The commands themselves aren’t difficult to grasp but the nature of this new file system is very different. It enables the administrator to perform actions that other file systems just don’t have. You can create snapshots, manipulate them, and even draw older snapshots – even out of order – forward as clones. So let us say that you have a file system, and you’ve been making regular snapshots every 15 minutes. If you need something from that filesystem at snapshot 5 out of 30, you don’t have to roll back the file system manually; you can just pluck snapshot 5 and create a clone. The cloning procedure feels a lot like “mounting” a snapshot so you can access it directly. If you destroy a clone, the snapshot is undamaged, it just goes back into the pile from whence it came. The big claim to fame for ZFS is that it is regarded by many as the safest file system, if one of the parts of it, in the zpool should fail the file system can heal itself. You can tear out that bad part, put in a new part, and the file system will rebuild and recover. In a lot of ways, ZFS is a lot like RAID 1, 5, or 6. Apparently there is a flaw with RAID 5 when you get to big data volumes and from what I can gather, ZFS is the answer to those problems.

So I have ZFS ported over to my Macbook Pro, and I’ve been playing around with it for a little while. It works as advertised so I’ve been enjoying that. One of the biggest stumbling blocks I had to deal with was the concepts of zfs mounting, unmounting and how they relate to zpool’s export and import commands. I started with a fully functional ZFS file system, created the zpool, then mounted it to the operating system. Then the next step is to unmount the file system and export the zpool. Exploring the way you can fully disconnect a ZFS file system from a host machine and then reverse the process. While doing this, I was reticent on using actual physical devices, so I instead used blank files as members in my zpool. I was able to create, mount, and then unmount the entire production, and then export the zpool. When I looked over how to reverse that, import the zpool I just had the system told me that there weren’t any pools in existence to import. This had me thinking that ZFS was a crock. What is the point of exporting a zpool if there is no hope on importing it afterwards? It turns out, there is a switch, -d, which you have to use – and that’s the trick of it. So once I got that, I became much more comfortable using ZFS, or at least exploring it.

So then today I thought I would explore the source of FreeNAS, which is FreeBSD. BSD is a kind of Unix/Linux operating system, and so I thought I would download an installation image and try it out in my VirtualBox on my Macbook Pro. So, I started with the image FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso and got VirtualBox up and running. The installation was very familiar and I didn’t run into any issues. I got the FreeBSD OS up and running and thought I should add the VirtualBox Guest Additions. I thought I could just have VirtualBox add the additions as an optical drive and that the OS would notice and mount it for me in /mnt or /media. No. So that was a no-go. I then looked online and searched for VirtualBox Guest Additions. I found references to procedures to follow in the “ports” section of the FreeBSD OS. I tried it, and it told me that it couldn’t proceed without the kernel sources. So then I searched for that. This turned into a fork/branch mess and I knew that familiar sinking feeling all too well. You try and fix something and that leads to a failure, so you look for help on Google and follow a fix, which leads to another failure, and then you keep on going. This branching/forking leads you on a day-wasting misadventure. The notion that you couldn’t get what you wanted from the start just sits there on your shoulder, reminding you that everything you do from this point forward is absurd. There is a lot of bullshit you are wading through, and the smart move would be to give up. You can’t give up because of the time investment, and you want to fight it out, to justify the waste of time. The battle with FreeBSD begins. At the start we need the kernel sources, okay, use svn. Not there, okay, how to fix that? Get svn. Sorry, can’t do it as a regular user. Try sudo, command doesn’t exist, look for su, nope, not that either. Try to fix that, can’t. Login as root and try, nope. So I pretty much just reached my limit on FreeBSD and gave up. I couldn’t get VirtualBox Additions added, svn is impossible to load, sudo is impossible to load. Fine. So then I thought about just screwing around with ZFS on FreeBSD, to rescue some semblance of usefulness out of this experience. No, you aren’t root, piss off. I even tried SSH, but you can’t get in as root and without sudo there is no point to go forward.

So, that’s that for FreeBSD. We’re up to version 10 here, but it is still firmly bullshit. There are people who are massively invested in BSD and they no doubt are grumpy when I call out their OS for its obnoxiousness. Is it ready for prime time use? Of course not. No kernel sources included, no svn, no sudo, no su, no X for that matter, but honestly, I wasn’t expecting X.

It points to the same issues that dog Linux. If you don’t accept the basic spot where you land post-install then you are either trapped with Google for a long while or you just give up.

My next task will be to shut down the FreeBSD system and dump all the files. At least I only wasted two hours of my life screwing around with the bullshit crater of FreeBSD. What have I learned? Quite a lot. BSD I’m sure is good, but to use it and support it?

Thank god it’s free. I got exactly what I paid for. Hah.

Peer to Peer File Transfer, Reep.io

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I recently needed to move about ten gigabytes of data from me to a friend and we used a new website service called reep.io. It’s quite a neat solution. It relies on a technology that has exists in many modern browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera called WebRTC.

The usual way to move such a large set of data from one place to another would probably best be mailing a USB memory stick or waiting to get together and then just sneaker-net the files from one place to another. The issue with a lot of online services that enable people to transfer files like this is that many of them are limited. Most of the online offerings cap out at around two gigabytes and then ask you to register either for a paid or free account to transfer more data. Services like Dropbox exist, but you need the storage space to create that public link to hand to your friend so they can download the data, plus it occupies the limited space in your Dropbox. With reep.io, there is no middleman. There are no limits. It’s browser to browser and secured by TLS. Is that a good thing? It’s better than nothing. The reason I don’t like any of the other services, even the free-to-use-please-register sites is because there is always this middleman irritation in the way, it’s inconvenient. Always having to be careful not to blow the limit on the transfer, or if it’s a large transfer like ten gigabytes, chopping up the data into whatever bite-sized chunk the service arbitrarily demands is very annoying.

To use this site, it’s dead simple. Visit reep.io, and then either click and drag the file you want to share or click on the File Add icon area to bring up a file open dialog box and find the file you want to share. Once set, the site generates a link that you can then send to anyone you wish to engage with a peer-to-peer file exchange. As long as you leave your browser running, the exchange will always work with that particular link. You don’t need any extra applications, and it works across platforms, so a Windows peer can send a file to a Mac client, for example. That there is no size limit is a huge value right there.

If you have a folder you want to share, you can ZIP it up and share that file. It’s easy to use, and because there are no middlemen, there aren’t any accounts to create, and thanks to TLS, nobody peeping over your shoulder.

Killing SpotifyWebHelper

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I’ve had a problem with Spotify for a while now on my Mac. The damn program opens up spontaneously all by itself unbidden. What’s really annoying is that it also frequently auto-starts and auto-plays tracks I didn’t want to play.

I found out that when I start my Mac, or start Spotify itself, there is another application which is automatically started called SpotifyWebHelper.

I’ve noticed that when I go into Activity Monitor and kill this app, the unwanted automatic start and play problem goes away. That’s good, but it’s not really the answer. The answer is to murder SpotifyWebHelper.

So I turned to the CLI, you can issue the command killall spotifywebhelper and press enter. That does kill it, but what I want is to prevent it from ever being run. So I unloaded it from launchctl and deleted it’s LaunchAgent .plist file. When Spotify starts, it puts it all back.

Then I went where SpotifyWebHelper is located and renamed it. Spotify repairs this as well. Then I tried to set the SpotifyWebHelper application in ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify so that it had no posix rights whatsoever by chmod a-rwx SpotifyWebHelper. The next time you run Spotify, it fixes it all by itself.

This is less of a feature and more of a virus. A zombie virus, you just can’t kill it.

But I have killed it for good, and here is how to be free of SpotifyWebHelper:

  1. Quit Spotify
  2. Open Terminal, killall SpotifyWebHelper
  3. cd ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify
  4. rm SpotifyWebHelper
  5. cd ..
  6. chmod a-w Spotify
  7. Close Terminal, done!

After that, you will be free of the horrible SpotifyWebHelper bullshit and Spotify won’t automatically run and play things you don’t want it to.

Sandboxing FTW

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After I reminded people that I offer a complimentary attachment checking service through my office I got a submission from one of our warehouse operators in Texas. It was an oddly-named attachment called UmjSJCk.zip. I saved it to my Mac and opened Terminal. Then unpacked the zip file and it unpacked to Quotation.exe. I giggled a bit when I ran the file command on it and saw that it was a Windows executable. Exactly what I expected. So I put it in a folder called sandbox and started my copy of Windows XP that I have in VirtualBox. The OS has it’s hard drive set to immutable, so any changes or write activities that the OS does is not sent to the VHD image, but rather to a “snapshot” VHD image on the side. Each time I start the OS, it’s as if I am starting it for the first time, because when an immutable VM finds something (anything) in the snapshot folder, it dumps it first then creates a new snapshot image for writes. I make sure the sandbox can’t see anything beyond my Mac by assigning it’s LAN connection as a Host-Only Adapter. That means that the VM can only see VirtualBox’es fake network host and nothing else.

So start this sandbox Windows XP, mount the sandbox folder as a drive to the sandbox – set as Read Only also, by the way, no baby-backwash here… and then double-clicked on Quotation.exe. It loaded a process and started to grope the network connection. Of course it did. So, with the bug trying it’s best to reach out and fetch it’s payload I clicked on the little red close control and told VirtualBox to power off the virtual machine.

Poof. All gone. Changes and everything. Then I dumped the sandbox contents.

I think whats more concerning here is that my scan using ClamAV on my Mac in regards to this data showed no infected data. Well, it certainly was trying to be nasty.

Then I start to wonder about the inherent usefulness of VirtualBox when it comes to airgapped computing when it comes to privacy and really being paranoid about encryption. But then I realize that when I turn off my Airport on my MBP, that it’s just as good as anything I could screw around with in VirtualBox. An infection in my MBP? Heh… piff.

Geek Excursions: BitMessage

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Along with my curiosity surrounding Bitcoin, there is a similar technology that has been released for public use called BitMessage. This system is a really neat way to securely communicate in a secure method that involves absolutely no trust whatsoever. It’s a completely decentralized email infrastructure and has captured a lot of my spare attention. BitMessage works a lot like how Bitcoin does, you can create email addresses on the fly, they are a long sequence of random characters that your system can display because you have both a public key and a private key. In a lot of ways BitMessage deals with the biggest problem surrounding PGP/GPG, which is key management. Nobody really wants to manage keys or use the system because it’s extra work. Plus even with PGP/GPG, your identity is written on your keys for everyone to see.

Getting started with BitMessage is a snap. First you need to download the BitMessage client, and you can get that at bitmessage.org. There’s a Windows and Mac client available, you can start it and be instantly attached to the BitMessage network, ready to create new “BitMessage Addresses” and throw them away just as easily. So, for example, you could reach me by sending me a BitMessage to this address: BM-2cWAk99gBxdAQAKYQGC5Gbskon21GdT29X. When you send a message using BitMessage, its to this address and from an address that your client makes, so the conversation occurs securely and since every node has a copy of the data it’s impossible to tell who is getting what information. I think an even more secure method would be to cross BitMessage with a PGP/GPG key. The only problem with a key like that is that classically PGP/GPG keys require that you include your email address as a subkey so that you can be identified by a human-readable email address when looking for your public key or when someone else is looking for it, to verify a signature for example. The PGP/GPG system doesn’t require an email address, you can of course create a public and private keypair using PGP/GPG and make the email address up from whole cloth, and instead just let people know the key ID that you want them to use. So technically if Alice wanted to secretly communicate with me, we could give each other our public keys to start and then use BitMessage as the messaging mule. I don’t see how any eavesdropper could make sense out of any of that data flow. It’s unclear what the contents are, the PGP/GPG encryption keeps the contents of the message secure, and BitMessage itself seriously obfuscates if not outright eliminates being able to tell where the messages are ultimately going to or coming from.

I have to admit that BitMessage is very user friendly and very handy to have. My only issue with it is that I don’t know anyone who uses it, but perhaps this blog post will change that. If you are interested in this bleeding-edge crypto/privacy software, I encourage you to chat me up on BitMessage for serious matters or for fun.

Apple Watch

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On September 9th, 2014 Apple unveiled their iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch to the world. It was a really poorly kept secret that Apple was working on a wristwatch, so nobody was really surprised when Apple came out with their new designs. All we didn’t know what to what extent Apple was going to go with the technology.

They released more details on Apple Watch. The more I learned about the device the less I found myself thinking it was a good idea. There are so many places where this new watch is a problem.

Humans Have Limited Attention

We haven’t learned how to properly cope with the iPhone and now Apple is going to release an even more disruptive and attention-stealing device on the population. I’ve heard stories of crackdowns in Chicago where the police were pulling over people who were using their mobile devices while they should be driving their motor vehicles, and then learn that on the heels of the crackdown that the police recorded nearly everyone was breaking the law. Pulling over those people would have effectively shut down the entire highway! We just do not have the proper respect for all the technology in our lives, we cannot cope with these bright shiny attention-stealing devices while we are in command of an even larger device that requires our undivided attention at all times. So now Apple is going to put something even brighter and shinier on our wrists and we’re going to have what little attention that is left between our vehicles and our mobile devices divided again by this cleverness strapped to our wrists.

The tight integration between iPhones and Apple Watch will make our addictions to these devices even more challenging to master as well. Many people I know have a very hard time disconnecting from their devices anyways, now that there is an intimate extension of that device that we wear? I can only see this getting worse for those people who want others attention when we are all physically together. I’ve heard anecdotal stories where entire families sit in one room but nobody talks to anyone else because they are all besotted with their technology. What will this mean when the technology is always with us and on our wrists?

Haptics

The Apple Watch, a wearable device includes technology that includes haptics, or the sense of motion or vibration, both in the user interface with the light tap versus the deep press and the vibrating device buried deep into the watch itself. This will only worsen our abilities to control our attention and in itself is a place where we are going to have trouble. The watch can be paired to another watch and send heartbeats across the network, it’s Apple’s romantic notion of intimate communication. I can foresee a paired watch between a married couple and the husband feels his wifes pulse quicken, he worries that she’s having a stroke or a heart attack and rushes home to find a strange car in his driveway and a strange man in his bed. Cheating spouses is just the tip of the iceberg, this watch could be used to cheat in so many other places – cheat at the Casino with a complicated card-counting or odds-calculating routine piped into the players Apple Watch, or exam cheating by looking at the watch and seeing the letters for the answers appear as drawings on the Apple Watches screen.

How will these situations play out? For cheating spouses, there are the courts, so that’s rather a dull thing, but for the others I could see a new no-watch policy being extended to driving vehicles, entry into a casino, and standardized testing events like the SAT.

Nothing for the Sinister

The one thing that I noticed after discussing the Apple Watch with someone I know who is left-handed, that the device completely abandons functionality for the left-handed amongst us. It’s a hard choice Apple has made. Either you build a right-handed watch and a left-handed watch, or include handedness configurability in your design. It’s obvious after looking at the demo pieces that Apple has nothing set aside for the left-handed of us and have left a significant part of the population out in the cold. They could still use the device, but it will be much more awkward for them to actually use the device. I can see the detraction of non-handedness to be a compelling reason to not go ahead and purchase an Apple Watch.

Another Power Hungry Device

The Apple Watch is power hungry. It needs to charge nightly in order to continue to function. I find myself looking at the function of my wristwatch, a Seiko 5 Analog Automatic and immediately find what I have on the end of my arm, this watch, to be much more useful and compelling than this Apple Watch. My Seiko, if I care for it properly will never need winding as the mechanical automatic winder will never wear down or degrade or stop working. My motions feed the watch, and as long as I wear it every day, just living my life means that my watch will continue to count out seconds and sweep out the minutes and hours. My Seiko cannot do all the things that the Apple Watch can, but it can do the one thing a wristwatch should do very well and that is keep track of time. So far my Seiko has retained proper time for the few months I’ve had it. There is no technology in there that is synchronizing it to atomic time, and there is no need for that precision in my life. A watch that is bound to the power grid seems to be a risk to me, and since the most recent power outage, which for me was last night, the idea that my fancy Apple Watch could run down and just be a chunk of expensive metal and glass really concerns me.

Welcome to the Apple Silo, Penthouse Level

The Apple Watch creates an entire new floor to the Apple lifestyle silo. People are usually drawn in with a consumer device, like an iPod Nano or an iPhone, and then they are buying Macs and now the Apple Watch. I have to admit that Apple has a very good compelling company story, and they are leveraging this story magnificently well. They know that one Apple device usually turns into another, and before you know it you are knee-deep in the Apple Digital Lifestyle. The watch requires the iPhone to function, this is a very bold and possibly hazardous step for Apple to take. All the rest of their devices are independent devices, but this one, this Watch, is utterly dependent on an iPhone to function. I think this is the first fundamental break with the legacy of Steve Jobs and represents a really dangerous case for Apple. They are betting sales on pre-existing devices. That is either very ballsy or really stupid. This will only reinforce the cultural divide between people who flaunt this luxury versus people who do not. If you have an Apple Watch, then you necessarily have an iPhone. I can see this becoming a new and really upsetting hazard in big cities. Before it was a mystery what was plugged into a pair of headphones, it could have been anything from a cheap transistor radio, to a cassette Walkman to an iPod or iPhone. Now it’s really something quite different. If you see someone with an Apple Watch, you know that their iPhone isn’t far away. You are advertising that you have an iPhone to everyone who notices your watch. In small communities where theft and robbery isn’t a problem this won’t even show up on the map, but I foresee in bigger cities like Chicago and New York, that this will take on a new life all its own. A new spate of “Apple Watch” theft events. People getting mugged because of what they have on their wrists marks them out as being ripe for the plucking.

Price

The Apple Watch comes in three editions. There is the plain edition, the sports edition, and the luxury edition. The different editions put an embarrassing irony to the features that the phones are sold around, the replaceable wristbands most specifically. Why couldn’t it have just been one watch with different bands for different editions? Make the initial purchase for the core device and then let people swap out wristbands for the luxury components of the deal, if you want a canvas strap, a rubber one or a gold one, let those be options. Instead of that, there are three distinct Apple Watch varieties.

Then there is the price. $349 for the Apple Watch! In our society, what middle-class person would dangle such an expensive bit of technology on their wrists? Again I’m drawn back to my Seiko 5. The comparison of prices for what I need in a watch is all the reason enough to turn my back on the Apple Watch. My Seiko 5 cost me $70, that’s five times cheaper than the Apple Watch for a device that will never run out of power for as long as I don’t run out of power! It blew my mind, when I saw the price tag on the Apple Watch. I figured this could have been a jubilee celebration from Apple, they have billions of dollars buried in their company treasury, they could have made the Apple Watch a loss-leader for their iPhones, priced it at $70 and it would fly out the doors. Apple would lose money on each unit, but they’d make it up on the back side with all the cultural silo’ing that comes with using a device like an Apple Watch which necessitates an iPhone to go along with it.

Apple is betting that their Apple Watch will play as much as their iPads and iPhones did, selling millions of units. It may sell, and it very well may sell well, but I don’t think that $349 is worth this sort of technology. If it could do more, or if it was independent of the iPhone that might have helped, but it’s expensive, hazardous, and risky. I can’t see it really shining in sales numbers like the other devices did. Apple should have set it’s very lofty estimates for sales of the Apple Watch much lower. It’ll likely have the same sales numbers as the iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

I won’t be buying the Apple Watch. I have everything that I need already. The iPhone I have is enough, and my Seiko 5 does a magnificent job and you can’t beat the features or the price. I can’t imagine anyone I know actually going ahead and buying this thing, but we will see how that all pans out next year when it’s available for sale. This is going to be a hurdle that Apple doesn’t jump over gracefully.

Mac Mail Scripting: Send Message to Evernote

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I’ve been trying to replicate the “Send to Evernote” button that gets installed with Microsoft Outlook 2013 at my work to also be an option for my Mac Mail app. My first stab was to see if there was some sort of toolbar button I could use, nope. Evernote hasn’t gotten that far yet.

I looked around Automator, hoping, and saw nothing for Evernote in Automator. So then I thought I would turn to AppleScript. I opened up the AppleScript editor, then opened up the AppleScript Dictionaries for Mail.app and Evernote.app. Through a series of web searches I figured out two main things:

1) How to extract the sender, subject, and content of an email in AppleScript
2) How to create a new Evernote Note with the details gained from Step 1

So, here’s how I did it:

Open up AppleScript Editor and copy this code into it:


tell application "Mail"
set theSelection to selection
set theMessage to item 1 of theSelection
set theText to content of theMessage
set theSubject to sender of theMessage & " : " & subject of theMessage
tell application id "com.evernote.Evernote"
activate
create note with text theText title theSubject tags "mail"
end tell
delete theMessage
end tell

Then you need to do some clever things in AppleScript Editor to get this all to work properly:

1) In AppleScript Editor, open Properties.
2) Put a checkmark in “Show Script menu in menu bar”
3) Close the Properties dialog box
4) Save your AppleScript to your Desktop called “Send Email to Evernote.scpt” and save it.

Now you have to install your script:

1) Open a finder window, arrange it so that you can see the finder window comfortably and also see your script on your Desktop.
2) Navigate to your Macintosh HD, then Library, then Scripts, then Mail Scripts.
3) Click and drag the “Send Email to Evernote.scpt” into the Mail Scripts finder window. Your Mac will stop you, ask you to Authenticate, so do that. The file should copy into this folder.

Now when you go back to Mac Mail, you’ll notice a little script icon in the menubar. Click on the Script menu bar item, then click on “Mail Scripts” and then click on Send Email to Evernote. Your Mail message will disappear. The message has gone to the Trash, and the text of it is now in your default folder in Evernote, with the senders name, a space, a colon, a space, and the subject of the message as the title of the note, with the contents of the note set to be the contents of your note itself.

That was enough for me. Please note, this script creates notes and deletes mail. There are no guarantees that this script will work for you. I don’t really support it as I barely understand AppleScript as it is. It works with just one message at a time and it’ll probably butcher attachments and I have no idea what HTML messages will do if subjected to this sort of treatment. An epic-level “Your Mileage May Vary”, so you know, be careful.

The Future is Forsaken

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A few days ago, a brand new MacBook Pro 15″ laptop arrived. It is meant for one of my coworkers and I thought I had everything set up to rock and roll. Well, so much fail came to roost today on my shoulders. First, the MacBook, a big beautiful machine requires Windows 7 64-bit to be present to be able to set it up in Bootcamp on this machine, d’oh! I have Windows 7 32-bit on memory stick. Fnord.

As I was fiddling with the unit, and the fact that this didn’t occur to me at all is a testament to how pervasive wifi is in my life, I noticed that this laptop doesn’t have an Ethernet port on it. Apple sacrificed the Ethernet port in the aim to make this sleek slim metal box of sexy technology happen. It’s the 21st century and if someone buys a MacBook, then the logic that I can work out for myself is that Wifi is assumed. Except for when it isn’t. There’s an adapter that will make it work, and frankly I can’t be really shocked that Apple would dump Ethernet especially when there is Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapters for sale, as Thunderbolt can easily carry gigabit data rates and the port is supa-teeny.

So here I sit, this laptop will be starving for Wifi soon, and I need an adapter. After some investigation it appears that the best solution is USB Ethernet adapters as the Thunderbolt adapter (as far as I can tell) fails to understand sleep/wake cycles and that’s a deal-breaker for me. I don’t need gigabit speeds so it all works out to be the same in the end.

It’s interesting to me to witness all the technology that is no longer around by default. COM ports are gone, long ago. CD/DVD drives are gone, which is constant source of surprise to me, and now Ethernet ports are all being shuffled off. All of these things can be adapted to USB, and some of them to Thunderbolt, but these bold choices are surprising me. I find myself agreeing with them, for the sake of the form factor and how USB and Thunderbolt can do so much, it does make sense to me.

God help people who are used to certain historical technologies, they may find themselves on the sacrificial stone block to the gods of progress.

Alternatives to Clouds

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I’ve been toying around with a wonderful free utility from BitTorrent Labs called BTSync. You can find it here: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync.

What really drew my attention was the lack of centralized service that stands at the core of BitTorrent technology. It’s distributed, without any company or cloud provider dwelling in the background. All the hardware is owned by you, the “secret” code you use to share that identifies your sync experience also forms the encryption key so that the data that is flowing across the network is secure from prying eyes. Because you own all the hardware and encryption covers the data exchange, you can store whatever you like in your BTSync’ed folder and not have to worry about anyone else peeping over your shoulder or removing material from your storage without your knowledge or permission.

This free system has clients for workstations and mobile devices, so it really can be a drop-in replacement for services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. You can share the secret with anyone you like and anything you place on the folder set up with BTSync will synchronize across all the connected devices. You can also send “Read Only” secrets to sync your folders to people who you want to have your files but don’t want them deleting or changing your files and since this uses BitTorrent technology you won’t have to pay hosting fees and the more people share the data, the faster the system sends updates and changes and new data to all the subscribers.

I’ve created a Work folder, a Sync folder and have them set up on my work machine, my work laptop, my Mac Mini at home, and my iPhone and iPad. Since I own all the hardware, the maximum storage that I can store on this system is only limited by the smallest storage unit amongst all the shared machines. The folder lives on a 1TB USB HD at home, at work I have hundreds of GB’s available and the same as on the laptop. The storage in Mobile isn’t the same as a full workstation as the BTSync app doesn’t actually download data to store on the mobile devices directly but rather downloads a file list making it possible for you to pick and choose what you need on mobile when you need it. If you need security in the storage components you could leverage Encrypted Disk Images in Mac systems and TrueCrypt Encrypted Volumes on Windows machines. For Linux clients, you could likely use loop filesystems set with EncFS or something like that.

The applications for BTSync are amazing. Freed from middlemen companies I can store anything I like without having to worry about some company evaluating what I’m storing or even being able to respond to warrants to reveal what I’m storing on the service. Something like this could be a great benefit to companies that need to share files without having to worry about “buying into the Cloud” since everything is free. You can run a BTSync on a server, host a folder and share the secret out to all your employees and have a very handy share drive and even if your central server fails, copies of your data are stored on all the connected workstations so to recover the data all you would need to do is download the small BTSync client again, re-establish the shared secret code, identify a folder and watch as all your connected clients swarm and return all your data back to the “central depot” server.

Another wonderful option is to host a family shared folder, where you can store anything you like, securely and backed up amongst all the connected workstations. Alternatively, if you were an aspiring artist you could place a folder with all your work and establish a read-only secret and publish it on your social networks. Not only would all your fans be able to have your work, but you’d also be able to cleverly transform them into a swarm of willing backup sources for your work. If an artist has their secret code and a copy of BTSync client and they lose their primary system and all their data, they can just get a new system, re-establish the client and secret and smile as all their work comes back home as it was stored on all your fans computers. That’s amazing to me!

Getting started using this utility is a snap. Download the client and install it on your system. Then on whatever storage medium you like create a new folder. In the BTSync application itself you can create a new shared folder with a single click, there is a “Generate” button which creates the shared secret for you, you can then determine if you want it to be full-sync or read-only sync and then point the app to the folder you want to share, then minimize the app and you’re all set. Send the shared secret code to anyone you want to share with and your data will immediately be sent to their systems according to your preferences.

BTSync is the best of all worlds. You have a secure cloud infrastructure without anyone in your way, judging you or risking any intrusions from companies or governments.

PAD Book – 1/1/2014 – Stroke of Midnight

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January 1
Stroke of Midnight
Where were you last night when 2013 turned into 2014? Is that where you’d wanted to be?”

On the last evening of 2013 I was alone with my two boys during the winter storm raging overhead. My partner had the day before left to visit his family in Albany and I was tending to duties around the house and keeping my two boys safe and occupied. Actually I don’t know who was keeping who happy more. I certainly was a warm lap to sit on and the food-giver, but in a lot of ways they were almost always with me, keeping me company and keeping me occupied with their adorable (and sometimes destructive) antics.

I found a bottle of bubbly wine in our collection from M. Lawrence winery up in the Leelanau Peninsula that I had purchased long enough ago that I don’t really remember when. Around 11pm on New Years Eve I inspected and uncorked the bottle and puttered about the house, a small plate of christmas cookies and a champagne flute that I thankfully found hidden in the rearmost of the top cupboard in the kitchen where we keep all our wine glasses.

At 11:50pm, my iPhone rang and it was Scott with an incoming FaceTIme call. We spent the interval from New Years Eve to New Years Day linked virtually by FaceTime. It was a great use of technology and in many ways we had our cake and got to eat it too. Scott got a chance to visit with his family and we got a chance to spend New Years together, after a fashion.

After 2014 had arrived, I disconnected from FaceTime and finished my glass of wine and with cats in tow, padded off to bed.

Was it what I wanted to do? It really was a matter of what I had to do. I couldn’t leave my two boys on their own for a week as the eldest is the most fragile and I frequently worry after his health and activity level. I was able to use technology to cheat around the edges as it were, to be both at home and in New York with my partner at the same time. I’m so glad I was able to take advantage of the technology and it’s just one more, amongst a gallery of other reasons, why I’m so very glad that I have Apple technology in my life. It made it all seamless and easy. I could have done it other ways, but it would have been a mess. The Apple way is smooth and simple and just as easy as answering the phone.

– This is also the first of the Post-A-Day prompts from the book that WordPress.com assembled to inspire bloggers like me to write more and more frequently.