Technology

My Sort of First Mac, Again

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Back in November while I was searching for the iBook G3 clamshell I got curious and was looking up other Mac’s that I might be interested in. I immediately was drawn to  the first Mac that I ever bought, the iBook G3 12 inch in white. I was pleasantly surprised to see this model plentiful on eBay and also relatively inexpensive at about $50-$75 depending on condition. For that price I kind of wanted to buy one. What I ended up searching for and buying was not the exact model that I owned. That was because the advice I was given was that model is prone to issues. So I stayed away from the G3 polycarbonate white and got the last version made in that body type that was a G4. It was harder than I thought to find one that did not look visibly beat up. After a while I did find one in order to.

After getting the laptop the screen feels a little washed out however I’m not sure if it’s this particular computer or if I just don’t remember the screen being like that on those older computers. It’s still very usable and I was happy to see that the keyboard and hand rest was in good shape. I purchased some headlight cleaner from a recommendation that is perfect for cleaning polycarbonate. I haven’t yet however I intend to clean the shell of the computer to get looking in better shape.

As with the G3 clamshell I have specific plans in mind for this computer. It is not just an impulse by to sit around. Now that I have them however I’m not sure if I’m going to swap what I intended them to do or not. I might end up just keeping the clamshell G3 for show since it looks awesome. I would then use the polycarbonate white G4 to do what I wanted to with the G3. Use it as an educational computer for the girls. I have my eyes on my favorite PowerBook of all time. The 12 inch PowerBook that I owned three or four different versions of over the years. If I do get that I would use it as my off-line writing computer that the polycarbonate white computer would have been used for.

As I am slowly preparing to install software on these computers I’m surprised at how much software I saved that is in my backup archive of Mac software that will run on the later variance of OS 10 at work on the PowerPC chips. There is a bunch of things that I’m missing from my latest backup that I have online. I need to go to some off-line hard drives with backups circa 2009 or so to get a few more applications. In any event I should be able to easily do what I want to do with this computer.

Now all I have to do is find time to work on this and other projects I would like to take on.

My Sort of New Vintage Keyboard

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In addition to the vintage computers I picked up I also bought an Apple Pro keyboard from the early 2000’s. Over the summer when I bought my wireless Bluetooth mechanical keyboard I did so because I thought fondly of my old black Apple Pro mechanical keyboard. As I was shopping for vintage Mac laptops I started to look for how much a pro keyboard would cost me. Most of the ones I found were pretty dirty shape. The going price was somewhere in the range of $30. I searched around and want to bid on one that looked pretty decent. With shipping I think I paid less than $40. For a good mechanical keyboard that’s not so bad.

When I got it I was eager to tried out. It typed as I remember it did. After using it a bit I did realize that my new Matais mechanical keyboard based on the same movement typed nicer. I found myself able to type faster and more comfortably on that one however the old Pro keyboard is still pretty slick.

I was using the Pro keyboard on my second computer set up for a while at home. A few weeks ago I decided to bring it into the office to use so I can bring home the Matais keyboard. The computer it’s plugged into I delight amounts of typing on however having the mechanical keyboard on it has been an improvement over the newer white and silver Bluetooth Apple keyboard that I had.

My experience with the Pro keyboard versus the Bluetooth Matais makes me want to get a new wired mechanical keyboard. The only issue I have with the Matais is it loses its Bluetooth connection with my laptop much more frequently than I would like. I had many more problems with it than I do with my Mac keyboards. That was one of the reasons why I took it home.

I Figured Out My Problem With The Apple Watch

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Back in early October I was curious enough to pick up and other Apple Watch. I bought a series 138 mm. I felt the 30 mm was better fit on my wrist even though my other watches are larger. From what I read series 1 was as fast as the series to and should solve all the problems that I felt I had with what is now called the series 0. As much as the series 1 wasn’t super cheap, it wasn’t that expensive. At present it’s actually the most expensive watch I own since my Seiko was slightly more.

Since I bought the Apple watch for the second time I’ve been using it exclusively. I like it. Functionality wise I’ve been pleased with it. I haven’t had major frustrations with the speed of anything that it does like I did with the series 0.  I find myself telling the watch to set the timer or an alarm often. I also like the ability to see how much times less than the timer instead of having to go to my phone. Other advantages of the Apple watch for me has been the fact that I do not need to wear my Fitbit. Seeing and sometimes replying to texts on the phone has been useful however I don’t do it often. Also the ability to answer the phone and talk on speakerphone briefly from the watch is something I don’t do often but I’ve done it and it’s been helpful at those times.

Right after I bought the series 1 I regretted not having the waterproof series 2. The series 1 was available immediately when I ordered it whereas the series 2 I would’ve had to wait almost a month for. When I bought it I didn’t think I really cared much about the waterproof. I had some buyers remorse and thought about returning it within the two week period I get from Apple to make a return. In the end I opted to keep the cheaper version of the watch did not think the waterproof would come in handy for me.

Until Friday of this week I’d worn the watch every day since I got. Recently however I missed the nicer looking watches I own. I contemplated switching back however i was concerned about the loss of functionality if I stopped using a “smart watch”. Friday for some reason I decided to put on my X-33 and where that instead. What I found was a few times during the day I went to look at the watch to see the date. I also went to set the timer and after two seconds I put my arm down and reached for my phone to do it instead. Other than that I didn’t really miss the smartwatch. I had to get used to the fact that the X-33  was noticeably heavier then the Apple Watch. It makes sense that it was heavier however I am use to my titanium X-33 being the lightest thing I wear.

When I first started wearing my jawbone Up several years ago I wanted to encourage myself to be more active. Nowadays I’m pretty knowledgeable in knowing what I do and how active that makes me. I learned a lot from four or more years of wearing an activity band. Friday when I put the Fitbit on since I wasn’t going to be having the Apple Watch I immediately took off the Fitbit. I did not want to wear the extra weight or hear the clanking of the Fitbit against my Omega. The loss of the standup notifications in my activity tracking was slightly noticeable however I was pretty okay with it.

We are traveling this weekend and at first I packed the charger for the Apple Watch so I can bring it with me. Before we left however I put it away and unpacked all the gear I needed for it and just put on my Speedmaster instead. Yesterday I again went to my wrist for a few things that the  Apple watch does for me before I realized I didn’t have it. Other than that I don’t really miss it day-to-day. I miss the idea of it and how cool I think doing electronic stuff on my wrist sounds like. In practice however I don’t miss it. I also like how my mechanical watches look significantly better than the smartwatch.I feel like that sums it all up for me and why I’m not so sure if I’ll wear the smartwatch again.

Unfortunately I know myself and I’ll sell something and not have it for a while and little get updated and I’ll feel like hey this major issue I had with it is solved I should get it again. That’s why I got the series 1 in the first place. I’m glad I did because it was an improvement however when you boil it down I just don’t feel like I need it. I do waffle about this stuff so it doesn’t mean that I don’t want it sometimes however functional speaking I don’t miss it.

I Bought a Classic iBook G3 Clamshell Laptop

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One of the guys at work has been talking about some of the old computers he’s been buying and reconfiguring or restoring to get working. It’s fascinating to talk to him about it partly because he’s very passionate around the topic. Also it’s something that I have thought about doing with one or two computers but never had the space or time to want to do it.

I’m finding it very funny that for some time now I have wanted a classic iBook G3 Clamshell laptop circa 1999. I never owned one however they always did look pretty cool. I personally did not get into Max until the G4 around 2002. I’ve also wanted a lampshade iMac. For some reason I keep thinking about the 15 inch version although the 17 inch is better and the same physical footprint. I owned a 20 inch version of that computer and loved it. I was reminded of my desire to want the iMac when I was at my sister-in-law’s I saw that she had one and she commented about oh that old thing or something like that. I told her I’m jealous since I actually want one.

The final straw for me was when my friend was talking about how he bought and restored and upgraded the G3 iBook. I started asking questions around how we found a good one and how much it costs. He gave me a bunch of pointers on what to look for on eBay and I started to search. The prices weren’t too bad however I was surprised that a 18-year-old computer was worth even that much. It goes to show you that this particular model was in demand. I found a blue G3 that had its internals upgraded to slightly better variant that did not come in blue. It also had an SSD instead of an IDE hard drive. Even had a new power brick.

I was ex cited get the laptop however when I got it I realized there was something wrong with it. The LCD backlight was out. The seller on eBay was extremely accommodating and I sent back the laptop. He fixed it and send it back to me. I had a choice of a full refund or options on a different model but after I got the laptop it was in perfect shape other than the backlight and one hairline crack in the case. The crack was visible in the auction pictures even though I didn’t see it myself the first time. The computer was still functionally fine with the crack and he barely noticed it so I was happy to keep this particular computer if he could get the LCD to work. Thankfully he was and shipped it back the same day he got it after fixing it.

The girls wanted to play with it. Originally that was my idea to get it working with some educational software for the girls to use. Now that I have it however not so sure I want them playing with a vintage laptop. Just because it’s so cool I don’t want them to break it. It’s very heavy I’m not sure other than the LCD if they could break it but I don’t want to chance it. I do have a few use cases in mind for it.

My friend needs to own up and take responsibility for all the money I spent since knowingly or not he gave me the idea to go out and buy this laptop. I was just following is very bad/very good footsteps regarding vintage computers.

Dual Monitors

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Now that the girls are in school full time when the opportunity arises unable to work from home more often. Sometimes it’s a necessity because of the girls being in school and the need to drop off and pick them up in the same day if MC cannot for some reason. Other times it’s just general convenience. Being able to do that has posed new challenges for me. I used to have to hide in my bedroom with a laptop so no matter what I did I was not comfortable. Now I can go to my desk however I don’t like sitting in front of the laptop screen all day. It was a big production to reconfigure my monitor so I can plug my laptop into it to work. My solution was second 27″ monitor so I can have two computers running at the same time.

This configuration solves another challenge I had since I wanted to run a Linux desktop in tandem with my Mac mini. Or sometimes plug raspberry pi into monitoring my desk and work on. With my Apple Cinema Display I’m unable to do any of that since it has the thunderbolt display adapter that limits what computers I can use on it. Amazon had a good deal on a 27 inch Dell monitor. It’s basically the 27 inch variant of the 24 inch monitors I have at work. They’re pretty good so I was confident in buying a larger 27 inch.

Even I measured before I bought it that both 27 inch displays will fit I have very little room on my desk  with both computers set up. Functionally speaking the set up does exactly what I wanted it to. I put my desktop and the cable run for the laptop to a shelf on my desk so I save surface area. When I’m not using my work laptop I can plug my MacBook or a Lenox computer into the second set up. I’m contemplating buying and building a Lenox desktop however  I don’t have the time for that project just yet with a few other projects I have still going on at home.

Inbound Network Lockdown With an SSH Proxy

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Ever since I started working on building my backup network using raspberry pi’s and BitTorrent Sync I’ve started a list of other home projects I want to do with technology. One of the things that’s been in my head however not high on the list actually do was create a VPN endpoint with my home router so I could VPN in while remote. I tried to play around with open VPN and ran into some pickups. Didn’t have all the time I really needed to sit down and figure it out so I gave up on the project. Even while I was trying to set up an inbound VPN friends of mine at work were saying it was probably overkill anyway.

At least one if not more people recommended that I set up a SSH proxy on one machine and use that to connect to all the other resources. I like the idea but never gave it much focus until recently. I have a Zotac ZBox C Series Mini Computer that I have been running Ubuntu Linux on for a while. I’ve been baking it in as a next-generation BitTorrent Sync machine for my network. I hadn’t deployed it yet and figured I would try using that as my SSH proxy.

The proxy itself was trivial to initiate to the box. Deciding how I would configure my computer was not difficult however it took some thought so I could be connected to the proxy in one web browser and not affect all other Internet traffic. I opted to try FoxyProxy in Firefox. I do not normally use Firefox on a day-to-day basis so being able to dedicate that browser for direct proxy connections to my home network seemed reasonable.

The setup worked with less than 30 minutes of configuration. Once I was able to prove to myself that I can do this and maintain I needed to figure out what my permanent solution would look like. The Zotac likely won’t stay at my house and I’m using it for other things. If ongoing have a proxy I use often I want isolated and basically have it do one thing only. I opted to set up one raspberry pi as a dedicated SSH box. At the moment I have enough spare pi’s to dedicate one. I initially had concerns about the 100 Mb limit on the network card however I doubt I’ll be doing anything of high traffic that I should worry.

My set up for now is simple enough. I have a plain-vanilla Rasbian install on a Raspberry Pi 2 with a 16 gig SD card. I have the pi plugged into an ethernet jack on my router. Besides SSH I installed Fail2ban to protect myself from potential attacks on the Internet. I also used a password of significant complexity for the login details. I have a dynamic DNS entry set up so it’s easy to connect from anywhere.

This setup works well on my laptop however I am not sure if I could get it working using my iPad. That’s one trade-off with this configuration however most if not all of the services that I previously exposed to the Internet should be fine with this limitation. If anything I can use remote desktop software from an iPad to connect to a local machine and then bring up those services.

The next thing I want to do involve making it easier to access my home network while on my laptop remotely. That mainly involves configuring Royal TSX sessions to use my proxy details. I also would need to set up the proxy connection within royalty TSX. I also need to finish creating localhost entries for my home network services as well as bookmarks within Firefox to make accessing everything easier. As much as I want to do that all up front it’s a little bit of effort that I will probably just take care of as I need it.

An additional enhancement I would like to make is to go beyond having Fail2ban and a strong password to enabling to factor authentication. That will require A bit more skill for me to learn and at least one hardware USP token. For now I consider that a reach goal.

I still want to find some time to play with inbound VPN configuration. Even if it’s just to show myself I can do it. For now however the SSH proxy more than meets my needs and is working today. There are other projects on my “Technical Maker Board” that I set up that I’d like to get to next.

The Apple Event

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By many I am considered a fan of Apple products. I guess I am however that’s only because they make good stuff. When they stop making goods product I’ll stop buying them. That’s an old argument since many don’t realize I’ve owned many an android device so I have my opinion of Apple-based first-hand experience between both platforms.

I have mixed opinions on the product updates that Apple recently announced. For the Apple Watch I am very curious if the series 2 watches are fast enough that there is no lag when I lift the watch to my face to look at the time. That was a huge annoyance for me and one primary reason why I sold my original Apple watch. I will wait until the series 2 watches are available in the store to test it myself. Until then I  am still happy with a nice classic analog watch.

When I first saw the specifications for the iPhone seven I realized there was no compelling reason for me to upgrade. I have a success plus as my personal phone and there was virtually nothing that stood out and said who I need to have that. Last year forced touch was compelling enough for me to try it however afterwards I realized it wasn’t a worthwhile upgrade. I had several conversations with friends about the same topic. Then I spoke to someone I met via the parent meet up groups. I think even admitted wasn’t much of an upgrade however he was upgrading anyway. It got me thinking why he would do that. It turns out you might be right. I buy my phone out right when i get one. I have for doing that because I set aside money every month for my “tech fund”. Why sell something on eBay I put it back into the fund. When I buy a new iPhone I typically sell the old one on eBay and put it that sale amount towards buying the new phone. I usually get about 30 to 50% of my money back depending on the condition of the phone. What this friend said was that you could do the same thing with apples purchasing plan and still get a new phone every 12 months. I did the math last year and for some reason didn’t think it was compelling. Looking back I think it was because I didn’t want to be locked into something and also because apples purchasing plan includes the extra cost of AppleCare. Thinking about it now I want AppleCare anyway and the price of the phone is no different than me buying it unlocked. The fact that it’s still an unlocked phone even though I’m in a purchase agreement doesn’t matter either.

After weighing all the options using apples purchase plan in essence you can’t get a new phone every year. Now if I was a different person  this might not make sense. If you upgrade annually you’re constantly in an agreement to pay for phone. If you want to upgrade every three or four years then upgrading constantly is not for you since you wouldn’t want to be continuing to make payments. For me however buying the phone every year or two anyway. Even if I did an upgrade to the iPhone seven this year I would definitely be upgrading next year. I amortize the price out over two years that means I’m always paying a fee for my phone anyway. By buying into the Apple purchase plan it just makes it easier to get a new phone every year.

An Update on The Disembodied Female Voice Called Alexa That My Kids Always Hear Me Talking To

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When I last wrote about my Amazon echo I said I would be trying to teach it some smart things commands. Yeah, so I didn’t do that. Since setting up my Logitech Harmony with my echo to turn my TV on and off I haven’t really spent much time with the echo teaching it anything new. I’ve continue to use the echo. Apparently not as much as other people who are very vocal about how awesome it is however I am using it. My use case has become listening to music and checking the weather. Of course the main reason I bought the echo in the first place was I wanted to use voice commands to listen to music and my phone paired with a Bose Bluetooth speaker wasn’t doing that very well. With that fact in mind the echo is extremely successful at what I originally purchased it for

I did have hopes of using it for more than just music. I’m not sure if it’s usefulness hasn’t improved for me because I do not use Google for contacts, calendars, tasks. I also do not currently get my news from the radio or TV. I could see using an echo in my bedroom to listen to news stories as in getting ready in the morning however I don’t see the cost benefit of buying another device to do that specific task. The current echo I have is in our living room and suits its primary function very well in that location.

I could see over time having another device in different rooms however I’m holding back on that partly due to curiosity if Apple will release something to compete against the echo. They likely will however what the product turns out to be is anyone’s guess. And plenty of people are guessing, so I’m not going to. Until Apple makes an announcement I keep reading the weekly updates I get from Amazon on what new tricks the echo can perform to see if there’s any new features that will peak my interest. So far I’m still waiting.

One thing I do want to find time to focus on is ;to see if I can integrate my smart things with the echo a bit. That project however is not on the top of my hobby project list. Of course there’s a lot of specific things I want to do with my smart things that I haven’t done in over a year. Since we want to get a house at some point in the near term investing in any fixed devices such as power or light switches in this apartment doesn’t seem worth the value or time. All this extra integration might just wait until after we move.

Securing Email Isn’t Only For Spies, Dissidents, & Journalists, Right?

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Over the past year and a half I have been taking lots of steps to secure my digital life. I’ve written a lot about the different aspects of that. My migration from Google mail and other services to more secured options.

One thing I’ve known has been a concern that I’ve not yet addressed the quantity of data online. For example even though I moved my mail to a Swiss based provider I still had my entire email archive available. I have mail going back as far as 1997 I believe. I have been wanting to take that archive off-line and out my email provider’s servers. Over the years I’ve had the packrat mentality where I want to keep all of my messages. Recently I’ve grown to not want many of the messages I received. I’ve been deleting stuff that are unnecessary however there are still things that I get a do want to keep. In general I would like to keep the archive, especially my personal correspondence.

The challenge that I have is that I’m growing less trustworthy of any service provider. Even though my email hosting company is in Switzerland they take no extraordinary security precaution so the system is just as susceptible to hacking as most. That means my mail at rest is in the clear, unencrypted. But I want to do is take my mail and store it off-line so I have more control over it. I currently plan on keeping it in a local archive on my Mac at home. I will also have it backed up on my bit torrent sync network.

The first step in this process was for me to copy all of my mail to a local application. For my purposes I found the built-in Mac mail application to work the best. Once I had a downloaded copy of all the mail I was able to export it to an mBox formatted archive. At the same time I took the opportunity to recategorized how I organized my mail. In the past when I was using Google I had been using tags extensively. When I exported out of Google I went back to a folder structure where each high-level tag was its own folder where I put received mail. When I exported the mail to a local folder I put all sent mail in one folder and all received mail and another. Using mail tags I was able to continue to tag and make smart queries of the male if I ever needed to get a hold of the categories that I used in the past.

Once I had the off-line mBox files I put them in an archive on my BitTorrent Sync network. I kept the live copy in my Mac mail on my computer in case I need to search for and email in the archive. Over the past few weeks after I’ve done this I’m surprised how often I do go back and reference old emails for things like key codes or when did I buy something. After I was satisfied that the mail was backed up I deleted it from my hosting provider.I did leave this calendar year’s mail on my hosting provider. I figured that was a good round number to keep online. I can annually do an archive. Having to be at home or to remote into my home computer to perform mail queries has become a slight inconvenience however it hasn’t been the end of the world.

In addition to moving my entire mail archive off-line I want go further and start using a secured email provider like proton mail that takes extraordinary steps to encrypt the data at rest.I do not need that level of security for all my mail however does come in handy for some of it. There’s been several messages I’ve been hesitant to send or had no choice but to send that contain sensitive information such as bank information or Social Security numbers in the past that I would prefer not to use via email. And of course that’s not my paranoia security experts say never do that. Having a secured provider that encrypts the mail at rest and also has mechanism for sending secured mail to others could be useful. Really what he secure mail is doing is it sending email to the recipient with a link back to the website that secured that contains the actual message. I need to provide a password hint in the body of the mail I send. It’s not perfect however in most cases it will solve the problem of sending outbound secured man.

One of the challenges in a system such as proton mail is that at present there is no mechanism to import or export mail. That means anything I receive is locked into that system. On day one that’s not a problem however I like to have data portability. Protonmail says they are working on that function however who knows when or if it will ever come to pass. I may still use them for some correspondence only and in essence had two private email addresses one for security and one for unsecured messages. That way I can route one I want secured to the encrypted system.

I’ve also been looking at Tutanota as an alternative to proton mail. It appears to have the same import and export limitations however otherwise seems like a very similar and comparable option. Both systems offer a free tier.I signed up for both services to play around with them. I’ve since signed up for a month-to-month service with both of them and them in the process of pointing in unused email domain to Mutant, while I’ve already completed setting up proton mail. Protonmail so far seems like a slightly better option in terms of usability however it is significantly more money per month than Tutanota. The only reason I signed up for the paid version of Tutanota after I signed up for Protonmail was because it was less than two dollars a month.I hope to give both services try for a month or two before settling on one or the other.

For now the combination of moving my mail off-line and having a encrypted provider as needed suits my needs. These changes are all still pretty new so I will see how things pan out over the next month or two before I decide to make any tweaks or to let the situation be as is for the time being.

That Time Were My Security Paranoi Might Pay Off in a Real World personal Scenario

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In a recent post I wrote about how I had to wipe my Mac Mini at home due to a potential compromise in my chrome browser. The ironic thing with that issue was for months I’ve already started taking steps to minimize the chance of such an exploit. The problem likely began months earlier and didn’t present itself until recently however the damage was already done. It just justifies the extreme measures I am taking taking in regards to securing my web browsing.

At a high-level my approach is isolating some but not yet all of my browser traffic to Linux virtual machine. I know that theoretically a virtual machine is not 100% isolated. I’m willing to chance using the virtual machine over booting into TAILS using a USB key. That level of inconvenience is not something I typically want to be bothered with and I feel that my current solution will be good enough.

Within the virtual machine I installed Firefox and chrome browsers as well as the TOR browser. I also configured open VPN to use my VPN provider. I then set up a visual cue i.e. a distinct background of the virtual machine to note that when I am using it I am in a semi-isolated system.

To protect the virtual machine from most exploits I take a snapshot about every month that includes the latest patch level for all the applications in the operating system. I do not ever use the virtual machine prior to that snapshot to do anything other thank update software or make base OS and application configuration changes I want to be persistent. Once a snapshot is taken I will use the virtual machine and then when I’m done I will revert back to that clean snapshot. I might not revert back to the clean snapshot after each use however I try to do it as often as possible. At minimum when I go to update the virtual machine I will revert back to the last known good “clean” snapshot and upgrade that. Then I’ll take another snapshot.

Late last year I implemented this solution using an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. In April I built new ones using Ubuntu 16.04. Because I own a copy of VMware Fusion for personal use and a work copy of Parallels I have both virtual machine flavors of the operating system image. Other than a few minor tweaks with the new image the 16.04 version is mainly an operating system upgrade. I now have a “secured virtual machine” on all the main computers that I use day-to-day.

The solution isn’t perfect however as a first pass at this I feel that it gives me the best trade-off between additional security and ease of use. The VPN gives me some anonymity. TOR And VPN gives me more. The snapshot of the virtual machine decreases the chance that the system can be infected.

Longer term I want to build a dedicated machine for TAILS or Quibs. That solution would only work at home since I need a dedicated computer setup for it.  For now I will settle for the VM solution I have implemented until I am comfortable using it and able to accept the extra effort involved in a dedicated machine configuration.
What’s interesting or disturbing to me is some corporate executives and even government representatives (NSA labels Linux Journal readers and Tor and Tails users as extremists