Brain on Fire Tim McCormack, distilled.

Use the Tor network to hide your communications. Incidentally, this is particularily useful when certain file types have been blocked, such as torrent files. The following instructions are written for Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux users. Tips for other systems are welcome.

Edit: Be extremely careful when surfing over Tor. There are rogue Tor exit nodes that will attempt to steal your information (credit card number, password, etc.), so when using Tor you should enable and heed all of your browser's security warnings. When using Tor, only submit personal information from a secure page to a secure page. Remember that a page is not secure if your browser couldn't completely verify the security certificate. This is a very real threat. In summary, try to only use Tor for reading unless you're sure you know what you're doing.

I've got a handy tip for folks who have a desk job: Keep your personal and professional life separate by securely controlling your home computer from work (VNC over SSH). As long as you're aware of the advantages and disadvantages of this technique, it's very convenient and useful.

Edit 2006-10-8: I flubbed the ssh installation instructions. There is no "openssh" package. There is "openssh-client" and "openssh-server", both of which are necessary. You can install them both by installing the package "ssh".

Edit 2008-2-17: Changed local VNC listening port to 5901 to avoid port conflicts.

Problem: Firefox on Ubuntu is crashing when it encounters flash content. Solution: Uninstall the libflash0c2 package.

Problem

KimDaBa doesn't always have the clearest interfaceKimDaBa, despite being a wonderful program, still has a few interface issues left to work on. Notably, the gallery creation tool, "HTML Export", requires quite a bit of trial-and-error before it can be used successfully. I could not find any useful documentation on the "Destination" tab's fields, so I write it here today.

Solution

The philosophy behind the KimDaBa HTML Export dialog is that you will have a series of galleries in the same folder. The "Base URL" is the publicly accessible base directory, while the "Base directory" is the location you want to store the actual files to. "URL for final destination" is the most confusing of all; it refers to the address of the main page of the gallery. I use index.html, but you can use an absolute address instead, if you want. "Output directory" is appended to the "Base URL" and "Base directory" to form the full directory path.

Enough with the philosophy, here's an example. I want to publish a set of photos, accessible at http://brainonfire.net/gallery/party/index.html. Let's say brainonfire.net runs off of my local machine, to make this easier. The server is located at /var/www, and has a directory called gallery. Here are the proper field values:

Base directory

file:///var/www/gallery

Base URL

http://brainonfire.net/gallery

URL for final destination

index.html

Output directory

party

You can publish to an ftp server as well, or over various other protocols. I won't go into that here.

Problem

Jamendo.com offers a program called JamSeeder that allows users with good bandwidth to seed album torrents. Unfortunately, the info page is hidden and there is little to no documentation, though the statistics page is referenced prominently on the main page. There is also no documentation on installation or usage.

Solution

1. Download the tool from the project page on SourceForge.
2. Install the RPM. On Debian-type systems (like Ubuntu), use sudo alien --to-deb --install jamseeder-0.9.1-2mdv.noarch.rpm
3. Run the program using python /usr/share/jamseeder/jamseeder-gui.py
4. Every time you change the settings, you will need to close and re-open the program.

Notes

Since JamSeeder uses the official BitTorrent client, which does not support encryption, users behind traffic-shapers or external firewalls will not be able to seed torrents well or at all.

Resources

• JamSeeder application page on Jamendo -- currently consists of screenshots and a link to the download page