OSX: How to use ssh using Back to My Mac

10.5: How to use ssh using Back to My Mac – Mac OS X Hints.

In summary, if you need to ssh a mac of yours to which you have “Back to My Mac” access, just do this:

ssh hostname.username.members.mac.com

where “hostname” is the name of the machine you want to ssh, and “username” is you MobileMe account username.

[UPDATE for iCloud and OSX Lion 10.7.2]

in iCloud, it’s the same idea, but uses a different domain (members.btmm.icloud.com), everything else works the same. You can find your domain by poking around with the “mDNS” utility and the -E arg (Enumerate recommended registration domains):

mymachine1:~ myusername$ mDNS -E 
Looking for recommended registration domains:
Talking to DNS SD Daemon at Mach port 5891
14:25:23.650 Recommended Registration Domain local. Added
14:25:23.650 Recommended Registration Domain XXXXXXXXX.members.btmm.icloud.com. Added

In OSX 10.8.x instead of mDNS -E, use dns-sd -E (more info here)

Where XXXXXXXXX is a number. I can now do:

 ssh mymachine2.XXXXXXXXX.members.btmm.icloud.com

from any machine signed into iCloud (in the example, mymachine2, for which I have BackToMyMac active and registered in my iCloud account).

It would be nice though to use instead of the XXXXXXXX number your iCloud username… otherwise, you first need to have terminal access to a machine registered in your iCloud BackToMyMac pool. :-\ Must investigate this option.

32 bit Flash Player is sluggish in OSX 64 bit browsers

Lately I’ve been experiencing quite a sluggish performance (i.e. more than usual) in everything that uses Adobe Flash (arghht) in my MacPro 8-Core box with OSX10.6.7 installed. This is quite noticeable when watching videos from YouTube or Vimeo, where after some time video framerate gets so slow that you end up watching a slide show instead of a movie.

After some research on the problem (and after reinstalling the latest and “greatest” Flash version from Adobe), it seems that Flash is still a 32-bit creature, and that browsers in OSX running in 64 bit provide a 32-bit layer that allows Flash to run as a 32-bit process. However, some problems still exist (like the one described above that I’m experiencing).

I’ve found two proposed solutions:

1. Make your browsers run as 32bit apps in OSX (just google how to do that in OSX – it’s quite simple)
2. Download and install a 64-bit beta version of Flash, known as “Square” (more info here).

I’ll go for option number 2 and see how it works. I’ll report it back here. 

Kinect Audio: it’s more than just a 3D camera

Kinect Audio: Preparedness Pays Off – Microsoft Research.

Really nice article that let us know the sound and speech features included in the Kinect (which so far have been under the radar for most FOSS driver hackers/developers/users), and which will definitely pave the way for truly multimodal NUIs.

Access Google Groups/Docs/Sites using a non-Gmail account

OK, I’ve been recently dealing so many times with the creation of mailing lists (using Google Groups), sharing documents (using Google Docs) and creating collaborative websites (using Google Sites) with groups of people who sometimes do not have (and do not want to have) a gmail account to login to those Google services.

There is a widespread belief that it is mandatory to have a Gmail account in order to acess GDocs, GGroups and GSites, but that is in fact not the case. You can create a Google Id using any email address you wish and never actually create a Gmail account. The link below has some slides that explain how to do that (it’s actually quite simple):

Using Non Google Id With Google Groups.

In case you prefer a video tutorial, check this one:

Youtube: Using Google Docs without a GMail Account.