Matias Korhonen matiaskorhonen

Routing tips for VPNs on OS X

When VPNs Just Work™, they're a fantastic way of allowing access to a private network from remote locations. When they don't work it can be an experience in frustration. I've had situations where I can connect to a VPN from my Mac, but various networking situations cause routing conflicts. Here are a couple of cases and how I've been able to get around them.

Specific cases

Case 1: conflicting additional routes.

In this example the VPN we are connecting to has a subnet that does not conflict with our local IP, but has additional routes that conflict in some way with our local network's routing. In my example the remote subnet is 10.0.x.0/24, my local subnet is 10.0.y.0/24, and the conflicting route is 10.0.0.0/8. Without the later route, I can't access all hosts on the VPN without manually adding the route after connecting to the VPN:

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

Screencapture and animated gifs

I say "animated gif" but in reality I think it's irresponsible to be serving "real" GIF files to people now. You should be serving gfy's, gifv's, webm, mp4s, whatever. They're a fraction of the filesize making it easier for you to deliver high fidelity, full color animation very quickly, especially on bad mobile connections. (But I suppose if you're just doing this for small audiences (like bug reporting), then LICEcap is a good solution).

Capturing (Easy)

Launch quicktime player
do Screen recording

Fallout 1 (and Fallout 2) Hi-Res Patch for Mac OS X

Fallout 1 was originally designed to run at 640x480 resolution. I wanted to run the Mac OS X version of Fallout on my MacBook 11", which has a 1366x768 display. There is a [high resolution patch][hi-res], but it only supports the Windows version of Fallout.

Turns out that the OS X version of Fallout runs through Wine, so we can get this patch working with just a few configuration changes:

Note for Fallout 2 users: The process for Fallout 2 is essentially the same, with a different patch, and some minor pathing differences. Other than that, the process is exactly the same!


	#include <IRremote.h>

	/*

	Send infrared commands from the Arduino to the iRobot Roomba
	by probono

	2013-03-17 Initial release

	#!/bin/bash
	# A bash-wrapped version of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/9536/un-unzip-a-file
	if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
	echo "Un-unzips a file without a root folder."
	echo "Usage: ununzip <filename>"
	exit 1
	elif [ ! -e $1 ]; then
	echo "File not found: $1"
	exit 1
	fi

	<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
	<html>

	<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<title>Single-Column Responsive Email Template</title>

	<style>
	@media only screen and (min-device-width: 541px) {
	.content {

	// 1. Go to page https://www.linkedin.com/settings/email-frequency
	// 2. You may need to login
	// 3. Open JS console
	// ([How to?](http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/8525/how-to-open-the-javascript-console-in-different-browsers))
	// 4. Copy the following code in and execute
	// 5. No more emails
	//
	// Bookmarklet version:
	// http://chengyin.github.io/linkedin-unsubscribed/

	#!/bin/sh

	# To the extent possible under law, Viktor Szakats
	# has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this
	# script.
	# CC0 - https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
	# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0

	# THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
	# IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,

	# Run in terminal:
	/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user