HR Geeks

toxicboy has recently accepted Make magazine as his lord and savior and has been feeding me some neat project ideas. One of the more interesting items he’s passed along was the Arduino Diecimila Plus USB board. For the low price of $34.99 it’s worth checking out.

I’ve had dreams of building my own UAV to spy on my neighbors pets and thought this little guy would be a great addition to my project. As chance would have it, Hack A Day
has a link to an Arduino powered blimp.

I did some searching for other UAV projects that use the board I found a sub built by University of Ottawa. The ARISE website has some details and an incredibly boring video of their project. Even the catchy music can’t make that video interesting.

I’ve discovered a neat SSH trick / timesaver. You can create per-user ssh configuration files – ~/.ssh/config – which can contain host aliases.

For example, I SSH to ‘host.long.stupid.domain.com’ a lot. I can shorten this by putting:

Host myserv
HostName host.long.stupid.domain.com
User myDomainUser

into the configuration file. Now, I can do:

user:~>ssh myserv

and ssh will effectively run:

ssh myDomainUser@host.long.stupid.domain.com’

without having to type it all. Combine that with ssh keypairs (~/.ssh/authorized_keys2), and you can save a serious amount of typing!

Here’s a cool tool for everybody using OS X that needs to work with files on other UNIXy machines. It’s called ‘MacFUSE‘, and is based on the work done for the Linux FUSE user-space file system driver. Basically, it provides a framework for userspace file system drivers in OS X, using a plugin style architecture. There are quite a few plugins available already, but the most useful by far is ‘sshfs’. The sshfs plugin uses the MacFUSE system to provide OS X system mounts to remote file systems using ssh/scp. Once you install it, and give it connection details, the remote filesystem shows up just like any other SMB / network share mount in Finder. Drag / drop works, assuming you have permissions on the remote side to create/modify files. Opening files, mime detection, etc all appear to work flawlessly. It also hasn’t crashed or locked my mac up yet (I’ve been using it for a few hours with TextMate, to do remote editing without getting frustrated by Terminal.app).

MacFUSE Site – http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

SSHfs installer | read_me (requires MacFUSE first)