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Saturday, July 5, 2003
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 Saturday, July 5, 2003
started 7/5/2003; 5:08:20 PM - last post 7/6/2003; 12:07:54 PM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, July 5, 2003 
7/5/2003; 9:08:20 PM (reads: 5489, responses: 2)
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Shades of Max Headroom 
Incomplete Inconvenience
| | A few years ago, in one of his many books or essays (I forget which), John Updike said we live "in the age of full convenience." Well, some conveniences are more full than others. Indoor plumbing, for example. Paved roads. Electrical service. |
| | "Convenience" sometimes serves as a synonym for toilet. |
| | The Net needs to join the portfolio of full conveniences, in the nature of electical service, plumbing, sinks and toilets. |
| | Internet fees in hotels and other public places needs to become as declassé as pay toilets. Even in ski resort hotels where the idea isn't to be on the Net anyway. We're talking about necessities here. At least for some of us. You know, like wheelchair access or something. |
| | At least that's the way I feel about it at the moment, when I swelter in the hospitality business equivalent of a pay toilet: a locked "Internet Lounge" (Open 24 Hours. Key Access at Front Desk") with two crummy PCs in an unventilated room the size of a bathroom stall. Discredit where due: there's a big noisy box fan on the floor, but it sits behind the door, which you need to leave open, or the room turns into an oven. For this I'm paying $2 for every 15 minutes. |
| | I'm only on because the two PCs are fed the Net via DHCP. Or so I discovered when I jacked the Ethernet cable into my laptop. Can't figure the mail server, though. It won't let me use my own email server. I get 550 errors. Their email is some kind of Microsoft Exchange thing. Can't find the server address. Arg. |
| | Where else can I go? Hmm.... Information comes up negative or incomplete here, here, here, here, here, here and here (no wireless Starbucks at all in Utah?!?)... |
| | I think I'll go on a Wardrive. There's gotta be something... |
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Dave Polaschek - Re: Saturday, July 5, 2003
7/6/2003; 4:07:01 PM (reads: 532, responses: 1)
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I've found that if I can set up ssh connectivity, that's my preferred solution for emailing from crummy "Internet Lounges". Set up two tunnels, one for pop and one for smtp and I'm golden. The email client on my laptop is configured to talk to localhost.
Here's the invocation:
#!/bin/sh
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C -f -N -L 2500:betternerds.com:25 betternerds.com
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C -f -N -L 1100:betternerds.com:110 betternerds.com
where you'd replace betternerds.com with the name of your email server(s).
Then you just set up your email client to send mail via localhost:2500 and receive via localhost:1100 and you're good to go. Different ports apply for IMAP, natch.
If I can't maintain an ssh connection, the connection is too flaky to trust my email to anyhow, and it's time to move on.
Hope this helps,
-DaveP
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Dave Polaschek - Re: Saturday, July 5, 2003
7/6/2003; 4:07:54 PM (reads: 592, responses: 0)
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Oh crud. Line-wrapping bit me. The invocation again with extra line-breaks:
#!/bin/sh
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C -f -N -L 2500:betternerds.com:25 betternerds.com
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C -f -N -L 1100:betternerds.com:110 betternerds.com
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