I’ve been living outside the US for over a quarter of my life now. With this comes some minor annoyances. One annoyance is that certain Internet sites work ‘better’ when connecting from the US. Luckily we can easily make it look like we are connecting from a US location with the help of the following.

• A US-hosted server with ssh access
• A browser
• ssh

I’ll assume you have the last two. The easiest way to get the first is in the form of a web host. I use Dreamhost which offers unlimited bandwidth for a pretty good price.

The first step to getting things to work is to login to the US-based server using the following command.

ssh -D PORT_NUMBER username@example.com

For the port number, it’s best to choose a number between 1024 and 49151 while avoiding any commonly used ports. Basically, avoid those listed here. In this example, I chose port 8421.

What this does is setup a SOCKS proxy on your local machine at the port given that can be used to tunnel traffic through to a remote machine, in our case a US-based server. Obviously, this connection needs to be maintained the entire time you want to send traffic through to the remote machine.

Now we just need to tell our browser to send all traffic through this port. In Firefox, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings. You should be presented with a window similar to this…

You’ll notice the 127.0.0.1 (localhost works too) and 8421 in the SOCKS host fields. That’s all that’s required. If you later want to revert just chose ‘No Proxy’ again.

Now you can close the preference dialog and should be able to enjoy surfing the Interwebs as an American. Fuck yeah!

Here’s a small update to my last post about the Desktop Summit social events.

By popular demand, we’ve reserved beach volleyball courts for your volleying pleasure. The time (Monday, 19:00-21:00) and location (see the map below) of the volleyball and football matches are the same.

You can sign-up for the volleyball match here and the football match here.

See you there.

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We’ve got some great talks, BoFs and workshops scheduled for this year’s Desktop Summit in Berlin. But let’s be honest, you’re really only coming for the social events, right? If so, here’s what we’ve got planned for you.

Pre-registration event
Location: c-base
Connection: S-Bahn & U-Bahn Jannowitzbrücke
Date: August 5th
Time: 16:00-22:00
Sponsor: Igalia

Many of you will be arriving on Friday and what better way to start a week of talks and hacking than at our pre-registration event taking place at c-base, Berlin’s world famous hacker space. Here you’ll be able to enjoy drinks sponsored by our friends at Igalia. You’ll also be able to complete your registration here in order to avoid the crowd on Saturday morning. At registration you’ll get your WLAN access info for the university, food voucher for the university cafeteria and have a chance to sign up for one of the day trips we’ll be announcing soon.

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Beach Party
Location: The Box at the Beach/Beach at the Box
Connection: S-Bahn Tiergarten
Date: August 7th
Time: 19:30-02:00
Sponsor: Intel

Sunday’s party takes place a few blocks from Berlin’s green lung, Tiergarten (Animal Garden). The evening will begin with a BBQ and open bar on a sand beach along the river Spree. At 11pm will be moving inside where we’ll have 2 rooms with different music styles. The larger of the 2 rooms, we’ve got a local DJ that’ll get you dancing. In the smaller room, we’ve got a more DIY form of music, karaoke. That’s right, we’ve slyly slipped the karaoke in after the open bar.

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Football Match
Location: Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark
Connection: U-Bahn Eberswalder Strasse
Date: August 8th
Time: 19:00-21:00
Sponsor: SUSE

What’s GUADEC or Akadamy without their yearly football friendly? This year’s event is sponsored by SUSE who is providing t-shirts & refreshments. Please use the football match sign-up page on the wiki if you’d like to participate.

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Island Party
Location: Die Insel (The Island)
Connection: S-Bahn Treptower Park or Plänterwald
Date: August 9th
Time: 19:30-02:00
Sponsor: Collabora

Tuesday’s party takes place on the Insel der Jugend (Island of the youth) in Treptower Park. Walking along the Spree from the Treptower Park S-bahn station you’ll eventually approach an arching bridge that leads to the party venue. Once there, you’ll be provided food and drinks accompanied by soul/funk music all care of Collabora. You can hang out inside, on the sun deck or take a walk around the small island.

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So, that’s what we’ve got planned. Remember, all events will require that you are registered and have your conference pass with you. We look forward to greeting you in Berlin.

Just a friendly reminder to get your designs in for the Desktop Summit T-shirt Competition before the May 15th deadline. Please see my previous post for more details.

Happy designing!

Just a quick update and reminder about the Berlin GNOME 3 launch party.

Another talk has been added to what was previously announced.

Mirko Boehm Will be giving a short talk about The Desktop Summit taking place in our fine city. He’ll be giving a progress update and pointing out opportunities for local folks to get involved.

Please let us know you’re coming by registering for the event on Facebook. Or list your name on the GNOME Live page if you’re not a social mediaite.

Till then!

Now that I’ve landed on Planet GNOME, it’s time for the obligatory introduction.

Contributions

The post that got dumped onto p.g.o when my feed got activated yesterday gives some idea of why I’ve been added to p.g.o. Other than that I’ve also (hopefully) finished up the port of Vino to GNOME 3 that Ryan Lortie had started. I’ve also done other odds and ends which you can find on my Ohloh profile.

On the community side, I’m a member of the local planning team for the Desktop Summit, and organizing the GNOME 3 Berlin Release party, which I’ll have more details about in a coming post.

Personal

I’ve got 2 kids. My daughter, Vada, is 2 and my son, Rigby, is 5 months old which means I hack when I really should be sleeping. I’m an American expat living with my wife, Annika, who’s German. I adopted the German looking name from her… just to confuse people.

I was also one of the lucky ones selected for a trainee position at Openismus. Thanks Murray!

Closing remarks

As for my hackergotchi… it’s outdated. But Andreas seemed keen on having one with a moustache for some reason.

I’ve followed p.g.o for many years, so it’s kinda cool to actually have my floating head join the mix. I’ll try not to bore you.

We slept in the new flat for the first time last night. As usual, at least in Germany, it’s going to take a few weeks to get DSL connected. In our case, DSL gets connected on the 30th. This used to be the time when I’d fall into a deep depression due to withdrawal issues. However, this time is different.

For the time being I’m using the awesome new feature in Android 2.2 for sharing a mobile internet connection. Impressed with how easy it is to set up. It’s as easy as turning the feature on and setting the access point name and passphrase. Once that’s done up to 8 computers can connect as they would to any wireless access point.

Unfortunately, my mobile data plan only allows up to 200MB at 3G speed after which it gets throttled down to GPRS speeds. But it’s better than nothing and once DSL is finally connected we’ll be rewarded with 50Mbits down and 10Mbits up. That’s about 8-9 faster than what we had in San Diego for only a little more money.

Annika and I just got back from Conan O’Brien‘s stop in San Diego at the San Diego Civic Theatre. It was heaps of fun. Would have been even more fun if we hadn’t been in the nosebleed seats – last row of the Balcony. I’ve never been in a theater that was so vertically oriented. It felt like being in a basketball arena – extremely steep. Nevertheless, we could still make out what the small characters on stage were doing.

Conan was always my favorite late night talk show host when I used to actually watch TV. I think his show will be better on cable where he can go even further with his brand of humor.

Since I’ve already told family, friends and finally work, I guess I’ll now tell the world. Annika, Vada and myself will be moving back to Berlin on May 27th. We came to San Diego with the intention of moving back once I was done with school, but after living here and befriending so many great people it was a little hard to finally carry through. Annika grew to love the weather that she thought she’d find monotonous and we really like the South and North park areas of San Diego. But, alas, we’ve got tickets and only a few days after I receive my degree we’ll be gone.

I’ve also put in my notice at work. I wasn’t able to work that many hours anyway due to my school schedule. Dropping the few hours I was working will hopefully make the last two months here less stressful. I learned a lot in my 2.5 years at Geodetics. I’ll miss my co-workers but I can firmly state that I won’t miss programming with MFC.

There is lots to do before we are able to leave. Next week is Spring Break and in addition to wrapping up things at work, I’ll be busy putting things on Craigslist and Ebay. Eventually, we’ll need to get rid of the car and do something with my Vespa. I don’t want to sell my scooter but I definitely can’t afford to send it over; at least not now.

I feel like this move may be our last. Ever since watching the fall of The Wall on TV in 7th grade, I’ve been intrigued by Berlin. After having lived there I fell in love with it and I feel it’s where our small family will be staying for some time.

Now that I’ll be a little less busy I hope to start blogging again. Once I’m in Berlin I’ll have lots to blog about. More on that later.

Well, it’s been forever since my last post. School, life and laziness have combined to cause me to completely neglect my blog. No apologies, though. I’m plowing through school and hope to be finished in the next 2 or so years.

Well, the biggest change is that Annika and I are having a baby in 4 weeks. We don’t care to know if it’s a boy or a girl but so far things are going wonderfully and we are looking forward to starting our family.

In preparation for our new family, I’ve changed my name. I’m now Christopher Wilson Kuehl. So I took Annika’s last name as it’s easy to pronounce in both German and English whereas Wilson can give Germans difficulty. Also, I like to buck patriarchal traditions. And who would pass up the chance to be Chris Kuehl (pronounced “cool” slightly wrongly by English speakers).

Also, I got accepted to San Diego State University where I’ll be working towards a degree in Computer Engineering starting next Fall. I’ve really enjoyed the time at San Diego City College. Most of the professors are great and I’ve had the chance and will continue to work with a lot of great people on the AUV project.

Ok, time to stop procrastinating and get studying for my Circuit Analysis exam in the morning.