the Pleb

OmniFocus and Things, Followup

So maybe you read my last piece on my dilemma in selecting a project organization app from the app store. Maybe you even commented on it, or gave your two cents in answer to my question. Well for me, the question has been solved, and I thought that I should let you know, and give the matter a few final thoughts.

OmniFocus and Things were the two major competitors for my app store dollars. OmniFocus weighs in with a price tag of $40, while Things comes in at a relatively inexpensive $20. Neither of these apps are for casual use really, if you want casual, look at my old post for some ideas. What I ended up doing was going with OmniFocus, here is why.

OmniFocus

Basically, it boils down to the ecosystem. For me, OmniFocus had already been purchased on both my iPhone and desktop. I decided not to abandon those dollars quite yet, and I knew OmniFocus would be a great product. What I did not know at the time, was that the purchase of OmniFocus for the iPad got me into a private beta of a wireless syncing system, which works between all my devices. It is great, in fact, it is better than Frosted Flakes. Although it doesn’t auto sync at the end of my tasking session, as long as I remember to tap that sync button before I close it, the syncing is flawless. Way to go, OmniGroup. I may have contemplated leaving, but you really earned your place on my dock.

Things

Ah, the runner-up. It is really a tough place to be in. Especially when the product is as good as Things is. Believe me, Things is good. Great feature set, thoughtful design, useful organization. Things has all of these, er, things. It also has an iPhone as well as a desktop client, if you are looking for the complete ecosystem. The only problem for me was that I already owned 2/3 of the other ecosystem. Sorry Things.

So in the final analysis, I did go with OmniFocus. If you already own pieces of the OmniFocus puzzle, or if cloud based syncing gives you goosebumps just thinking about it, I might suggest that you do the same as me. However, if you are new to the game, looking for an iPad only task manager, or just need to save some sponduli, Things is your pony. I can heartily recommend it.

OpenBSD Firewall: Configuration

Now you have your clean, freshly installed system. Or at least you should! This is a continuation of the article I wrote previously on installing OpenBSD. This particular article will cover the system settings that you need to get setup so that you can use your awesome new OpenBSD box as an extremely powerful firewall. So the question is, where do you go from here?

This is actually going to be just a series of commands and a few file creations. Hopefully you set yourself up an account that is not root in the install process. If you haven’t, that is the first thing that I recommend you do. Type adduser and follow the instructions. Now there are a few quick things that you need to take care of so that you can use the sudo command as intended. Login as yourself, then switch temporarily to root using this command:

su root

and the providing the root password. Now edit the file /etc/groups like this:

vi /etc/groups

Add your user name to the wheel group, so if your username is bob the first line of your groups file should look like this:

wheel:*:0:root,bob

Save changes and exit. Now exit out of your root shell with exit and then out of your user shell with exit. Log back in, and run a test by typing:

sudo ifconfig

If everything was done correctly you can provide your password and perform the root action. You can, of course, perform all these steps as root, but I don’t condone it! So let’s get started. First we need to collect some network information. Type:

ifconfig

This will display all the networking interfaces that you have available. You don’t need lo. You want the names of the other network devices, which correspond to your actual physical network cards. I will call mine vr0 and vr1. Make a mental note of your interfaces so that you don’t get confused. Remember, it is highly unlikely that your network cards will be named the same as mine. Yours may be something like ath0. So let’s set these up:

sudo echo 'up' >>  /etc/hostname.vr0
sudo echo 'up' >> /etc/hostname.vr1

This tells the computer to bring your network interfaces up at startup. Now you need to create a bridge.

sudo ifconfig bridge0 create add vr0 add vr1 up

This will create and start a bridge for you. To make it permanent you need to create a file named hostname.bridge0 in /etc/ with this command:

sudo vim /etc/hostname.bridge0

and the file should contain the following lines:

add vr0
add vr1
up

Just those three lines (looks similar to the command we issued earlier, doesn’t it?). Your bridge is now configured! We still have a few shenanigans to cover before we are protecting ourselves with the firewall, though, and that is to turn on pf. Pf, or the packet filter, is what makes OpenBSD such a great firewall. To enable we need to add a line to our local rc file. Edit it with this command

sudo vi /etc/rc.local

and add a line to the end of the file that reads like this:

pf=YES #enable pf

Everything else we need to do we will have to do from the pf file itself. You can test the connection to see if you are properly bridging by putting the ethernet cord from your internet into one port of the firewall, and have another cord from the other firewall port going to a switch. Anything that is hooked up to that switch should still be able to communicate across the network. It should get an IP address just as it normally does.

Things to check if it doesn’t work.

Your system may not work at first. There are a few things that you can check if it doesn’t work the first time. One thing you can check is to make sure that one of your interfaces isn’t still in DHCP mode. In order to work in transparent mode neither of your interfaces that consist of the bridge can have IP addresses. Check your hostname.vr0 and hostname.vr1 files located in /etc. They should only contain one line up.

Another thing you can check is that IP forwarding is turned on. In rc.conf you should see a line that controls the IP forwarding. It should look like this:

ip_forwarding=YES #turn on IP forwarding

You can restart your interfaces by issuning the command sudo ifconfig vr0 down and then tell sudo ifconfig vr0 up. This should reset the interface. Do that every time you make changes to the interface. Also, you can try a restart sudo halt. The restart will put all your networking to the state that you specified in the files we created earlier. It may help if something really weird is going on.

Focusing on Things

I do not know if you subscribe to the Get Things Done (GTD) philosophy or not. My personal point of view is that some people make the system more important than the actual doing of the tasks, and it can lead to procrastination. It doesn’t help to have a system if you spend more time curating the system than you do getting actual work done. With that being said, I say do what works for you. I certainly have over the years, using notecards, a handy little moleskin, writing a text document. I have tried lots and lots of programs on my computer in an attempt to keep myself organized as well. TaskMate, ToDoist, Today (which is actually really cool), the Hit List, etc. So my history is long and varied with these types of things.

I have begun a new semester at school, and so my life has become very busy once again. I do full time school on top of my full time job, and the now I am a daddy at the same time! So, I am very busy, and if I don’t think about something, it can fall through the cracks so quickly, it is frankly ridiculous. I had been lackadaisically tracking a few tasks in TaskMate on my work laptop, but this wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to do some comprehensive task and project management. Since I have used a GTD system before, I knew that I needed one place, always accessible to store my tasks. I liked that. I always have my iPad with me, so I began to look into some of the task management suites available. Some, like Next Thing were to simple. Taska worked, but I could never get it to sync to Toodledo correctly: the iPhone version could never pull my tasks. It also seemed a little complex when doing a simple brain dump scenario, a common use case for me. I disliked the kitsch of ToDo, so that one was out. Finally I narrowed the list to 2 candidates, Things and OmniFocus. Now I need to figure out which one to buy.

Things is a great program. I have used it before on the iPad, and I loved the ability to dump tasks, and tag them. Contexts is also wonderful. I can also tell that they have put lots of thought into the interface. It tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, and yet still manages to provide deep functionality. This is the secret of really good, thoughtful design. It was also fast, and fully functional, the hallmarks of good coding. In short, I really like this one. The price tag is $20 for the iPad app. However, an ecosystem does exist, the companion iPhone app is $10 and a desktop client is available for $50. Of course I could simply use the iPad app as a standalone. Attractive thought, because I would not have to worry about syncing, which is the true bane of anyone seeking to keep all the lists current. The desktop client seems very attractive and thoughtful, just as the iPad app does.

The other option is OmniFocus. This requires a rather large layout on the get go; it is $40. I have not used it before, but it seems very clean and functional, with lots of added functionality like maps of contexts and special features that would be unavailable to to-do lists on other platforms. Also in favor of OmniFocus is this, a long time ago I shelled out for OmniFocus for OSX ($80), as well as OmniFocus for iPhone ($20). I already have an ecosystem in place. That is actually pretty handy. The desktop client is starting to show its age, but I hear that they are working on OmniFocus 2 soon, they stopped working on it to turn out the iPad application. Of course, that means to stay current I will have to shell out for a new desktop client in the near future. It is not problem that it feels a little stale though, because for the most part I would be managing tasks on my iPad, using my iPhone for universal capture, and then using my desktop client to keep it all synced together and current. Not bad, not bad.

So these are my two options. I could be relatively cheap now and only shell out for Things, but I then run the risk of wanting to buy into the ecosystem later for much more dinero. Alternatively, I could drop the dough on OmniFocus now, and enjoy the advanced features (which I will probably rarely use, honestly) and the existing ecosystem (which I will use all the time). Of course, I might end up spending some extra cash (ha!) down the line on that too, if the new desktop version comes out. It is something of a quandary. I am sure that I will figure something out soon, I really need something like this, the sooner the better. While I mull it over, what are your thoughts?

Note Taking Nirvana

What I want is simple. I want to be able to take notes on any of my devices, and then have them instantly accessible on any other of my devices instantly, and without me having to do anything. Impossible you say? Not so. I have just entered Note Taking Nirvana, and best of all, the price was free! Well, for the software anyway. This is my setup. 

On my Macs I use Notational Velocity. It has fantastic keyboard shortcuts, and super simple, fast searching. I can find the note I am looking for usually with a few keystrokes. This little desktop gem syncs with the Simplenote service, ensuring that my notes propagate across all my Notational Velocity enabled computers. That would be my iMac at home, my main Macbook Pro, and even my old Macbook Pro that my wife mainly uses.

Of course, what matters here is ubiquitous capture, I need to capture the note, thought, or idea wherever I am with whatever I have. For that I have the newly updated Simplenote app [iTunes link!]. It is a free Universal Binary for my iPhone and iPad. Just in time for me to start taking notes in class, they even updated these excellent little apps with the one feature that I wanted most, full screen entry. Yes! So yesterday, when I wanted to remember a license plate number, I just punched it into my phone. When I was sitting in class, I typed all my notes into my iPad comfortably in fullscreen. It is much much lighter than lugging a computer around campus. When I got home from work and sat down in front of my computer all my class notes, as well as the license plate number of the car and an idea I jotted down on the bus, were available at the tips of my fingers. No manual syncing needed. I can go about my day in full confidence that the things I write down will be available to me anywhere. My wife’s preferred order at Firehouse subs that I took down months ago? If I need it, I can just pull it up on my phone.

In short, I am in true note taking nirvana. All my note taking is now focused on the notes themselves, I don’t have to worry about availability or formatting. Do you want to know perhaps the best part about all this note taking? Not a Marker Felt typefaced word in sight. Now that is saying something.

OpenBSD: Installation

The primary purpose of this is to get OpenBSD installed. Really, this is much more straightforward than it used to be. Our install will focus on getting a transparent firewall ready, and the decisions that we make will be with that in mind. I know that I said that the install process has been made easier, but it still is fairly complicated, especially if you are not used to it. I will walk you though all the responses that you need. To build and OpenBSD transparent firewall you will need the following.

• Internet Access - to read this guide!
• A computer to dedicate to it
• At least 2 ethernet interfaces, 3 preferred.
• CD Burner and blank CD

First you need to get OpenBSD. In all likelihood you will want the i386 flavor of the latest version, which at the time of writing is 4.7. Download the install47.iso and burn it to your CD. Excellent, you now have the media you need.

Read More

OpenBSD: Series Intro

Since my work and interests have led me in the direction of OpenBSD recently, I decided to do a brief series on getting OpenBSD running as a home firewall for yourself. Why OpenBSD? Simple: it is secure by default, has some great options that are matched only by some very expensive enterprise firewall appliances, and can almost certainly run on that 2 generation old computer that you have been planning to do something with, but is actually just gathering dust somewhere. This will be an update and expansion on some previous OpenBSD articles that I have written. The old articles were written circa OpenBSD 4.4, and with 4.7 out now and 4.8 looming in the near future, I have decided to go over and update my notes.

There have been a few important changes in the way OpenBSD works with transparent firewalls, and by and large I think those changes are for the better, they just need some clear documentation. As an improvement over my last articles on OpenBSD firewalls, I am going to break it into a series of more manageable chunks, rather than one massive post. I think that that will make it more simple to find just that one thing that you remember you read, but can’t quite remember the exact command. Something else to remember is this, clicking on the OpenBSD tag on the left will bring up a page with all my OpenBSD related posts, should you find yourself lost. This will be the order in which I publish.

• Installation: Should publish concurrently with this overview piece.
• Configuration: Some of the config files you will need to make it work. 
• pf.conf: How to make you firewall sing, securely

These three areas will cover the basics of the firewall. I may add additional tips later.