This short tutorial explains how you can set up a small bash script and cronjob to automatically reconnect your Endian firewall at particular times. I'm referring to the Community Release here; I can't tell if this is applicable for the hardware appliance as well. The script is tested with version 2.2 and 2.3 of the community release.

1. As first step, log in to your Endian device with SSH.
2. Create a file in a folder of your choice (e.g.
   /sbin

   ) and name it
   reconnect.sh

3. Copy the following script into the empty file.

The script simply disconnects and reconnects by stopping and starting the main uplink with a three second pause in between. If you have more than one uplink you can see a list in the Uplink-Manager located under Network inside the web-interface. The first column ID is the name used for the script.

After saving the script, make it executable by running the following
chmod

command:

chmod +x /sbin/reconnect.sh

Setting up crontab to execute the script

To ensure a periodical execution of the script we need to add the script to the crontab.
Open up the crontab file (
/etc/crontab

) in an editor (e.g. nano or vim).

nano /etc/crontab

Add these lines at the bottom of the file

Read this Wikipedia article for other examples and the cron syntax.

After saving the crontab file and closing the editor, restart the cron daemon:

/etc/init.d/fcron restart

You're done. The router will now automatically reconnect as desired and not in the middle of your workday with a 24h forced reconnect.

So there I was, working on my computer as usual, when I had a sudden inspiration as I recognized the arrangement of some application icons in the OS X Dock:

My first thought was "Hey, that's fun! I wonder how many letter icons there are to build words in the dock. There could be an app for that."

That was the moment Iconscrabble was born.

Unfortunately, I'm not a pioneer with this idea. Somebody put iPhone app icons in alphabetical order as a nice effect. Also, Mario Georgiou had the idea of designing an Adobe Icon Scrabble using the two-lettered app icons from the Creative Suite in 2006.

But no concept combined this idea in an art project that also incorporates informational value.

Warning: Tech Content

An hour after my initial idea, I had cobbled together a small PHP script that generates a composite image from single icon files and a given word. Every icon has its letter equivalent mapped in an associative array and the script uses GDlib to stitch the single icons together.

A central concept also includes the possibility to cover two letters e.g. by an Adobe application icon (like "Ps" from Photoshop). The webapp basically checks from the longest possible word fragment down to a single character and randomly decides which parts are used to render the composite.

The first simple script was extended with a user input field as well as a database backend to save the generated images. A unique permalink is assigned to each image so a composite can be saved or shared on the Internet. The implementation was done with CakePHP - my framework of choice when it comes to database-driven projects of this size.

Discovering new apps

A great side effect of the database support was the fact that every icon and logo could hold a name, description and URL of the service or brand associated with it. The concept was quickly adopted to implement an informational value for the user — Icons that are linked to the specific company, and tooltips that show you the brand behind the logo.

What users are scrabbling

In 10 days of uptime, 5.351 icon composites were generated. The top 3 entries are Love, Hello and I love you, followed by the most common swearwords and raunchy terms on the Internet. However, most people just seem to feed their name to the generator which brings forward the obvious application of using an iconscrabbled name as doorplate.

I hope you like the arty and diffuse approach of Iconscrabble. We're looking for letter-based icons from computer-related brands and companies all the time. If you'd like to help us, I'd suggest submitting your recommendations or comments via the Leave Feedback tab on the app's site.

A link to a website concept I recently found on reddit really blew my mind.
It's a concept for General Electric's campaign Ecomagination.
To get a grasp, watch this video:

You can try out the actual application on ecomagination.com.

Update: The concept of using Augmented Reality in advertising has also been used in this ad for the Mini Cabrio.
Update 2: The microsite has apparently been created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in cooperation with North Kingdom (Source).

In OS X Tiger, network shares provided with Samba (SMB) shares from my local NAS showed up in the Finder sidebar automagically.

However, since I switched to Leopard, available SMB shares did not appear before they weren't connected (except the host was an active windows machine). I always had to manually connect to servers with Cmd+K — A step back compared to the ease of the one click it needed before.

Various researches throughout the MacRumors forums at least pointed out the fact that the SMB workgroup has to be set correctly under the WINS-tab in the OS X network settings, but this alone didn't to the trick.

In order to make it work as expected you have to activate file sharing with SMB on the Mac side, even though you don't have to share any folders on your OS X machine.

To activate SMB sharing under OS X Leopard, follow these simple steps:

1. Open System Preferences > Sharing.
2. Activate the checkbox for File Sharing.
3. Click the Options button in the File Sharing panel.
4. Make sure the checkbox Share files and folders using SMB is ticked.
5. Then restart your Mac or put it to sleep for a short time to make the changes take effect.
6. All your Samba shares should finally appear in the Finder again.

Marking the checkbox for a specific account is not necessary unless you want to connect to shares located on the OS X machine from a Windows client. This option apparently activates Microsoft-specific network services so the NetBIOS names of SMB shares are resolved.

What I'm still wondering is why the SMB shares generally show in lowercase.

Because Versions officially released it's Beta today, I dug out this draft that had been unpublished for a long time (It was intended to be published in addition to the Versions Beta announcement one year ago):

This list represents three very popular graphical user interfaces for the Subversion client svn. The applications help developers to manage their repositories without being a bash or shell champion. Feel free to leave a comment in case I forgot an essential tool.

Read the full entry "Subversion Interfaces on Mac OS X"

Alekc provides a simple but stunningly fast Last.fm wallpaper generator that fetches your favourite album covers and stitches them to an impressive wallpaper.

After choosing a resolution of your choice it could look something like the following image - a collage of my favorite albums for the last 3 months: