My previous post was written as I was working out how best to use my new Mac setup — in addition to my MacBook I now have a first-generation mac mini.

The primary boon I wished to score was that of freeing my laptop from the desk. There were several conspirators keeping the laptop on the desk.

Firstly, most of my data is stored on a large LaCie usb hard-disk, meaning if I wish to access it my macbook was tethered to the disk and so the desk. The LaCie is designed to sit below a mini, so my first move was to place it there. The mini acts as a file-server, using afp to share the disk. The laptop wirelessly connects and mount the disk.

Yesterday I was asking around my long-suffering friends for two pieces of software.

The first request was for a piece of software which would allow me to use speakers attached to a mac as a set of AirTunes speakers — so they would appear as an output in iTunes on a second mac. The reason for this was laziness — I wanted to avoid fiddling with wires when changing the mac I was using for music.

All my flickr photos are now under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This means they can be reused by anyone for non-commercial purposes as long as I am attributed. I think these are fairly reasonable terms; should the unlikely happen and someone wants to use a picture for commercial usage, they are free to contact me.

I’m not sure whether my writings here will be placed under the same license. Though I think their value to be insignificant, the principle is sound. Before doing this, however, I need to rewrite my site’s FTP client so it doesn’t swamp the destination server so much.

I must sign up for accounts on innumerable websites; it seems barely a day goes by without my requiring to come up with a supposedly unique password for yet another account. Of course, I don’t have unique passwords, and I can’t imagine any but the most paranoid do. It would be simply untenable to remember them. This situation is self-evidently ludicrous. It would be much simpler if there were a single location which can verify my identity on behalf of other sites.

This is a very quick recipe for using a backend process with a Rails frontend. I’ve been experimenting with Rails at work and needed a long running backend process to keep the information displayed in the frontend up to date and to do house-keeping tasks.

I wanted to share models and helper code between the back and frontends, so required the ability to use Active Record outside the typical Rails environment. It turns out this is simple to do. I couldn’t find an example on the web on how to set this up, so I decided to write one.