Lately I’ve been working with quite a few AWS EC2 Instances which have required me to SSH into them at various points for troubleshooting, so I thought I might as well document a few basics of SSH with key pairs. Using PuTTY PuTTY is the most prominant Secure Shell (SSH) client out there as demonstrated by its inclusion by serveral other applications, such as WinSCP. PuTTY can make the process of connecting remotely to a server via SSH (mostly) painless.

A little rundown on how I’ve used Kimono and a little Json transformation to automatically retrieve and display various metrics from across the web on a Geckoboard dashboard.

java.awt.Desktop

Recently, I discovered the java.awt.Desktop class (added in Java6) and it’s really helpful to trigger various operating system tasks such as opening a website, a PDF or even opens a file for editing in the operating system’s default editor.

In this post I’ve compiled a few ways to demonstrate the usefulness of the class and hopefully something that’ll help you to achieve something easily too.

One of the many podcasts I listen to on my daily commute is the Thrasher’s Wheat Radio Hour which offers a little insight into the huge and varied catalog of Neil Young.

I’ve been a fan for many years now and when I discovered this show I immediately wanted to subscribe to the podcast feed in my favourite “podcatcher” Miro. But this was to no avail … I could not find the feed link! The most recent show is merely added to an existing blog post as an update on the original page: http://neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org/2012/08/podcast-thrashers-wheat-radio-hour-show.html.

This wouldn’t do, so I decided I could roll my own feed of the show.