SSH tunneling is an extremely powerful means of establishing an encrypted (secure!) link between your computer and another computer, migrating selected network accesses from one computer to the other.

For instance, let’s say you’re a student, and you have a school library that provides all manner of online reference materials, such as encyclopedias, magazine indexes, etc. In order to prevent these resources from being accessed outside the school, the school may limit access to computers “inside the network.” If you have access to a shell account inside the network, you may be able to use SSH tunneling to “surf the web” from your shell account, even though you’re using Safari on your Mac to do all the web viewing. Nifty, huh?

I have configured something like this before and it’s extremely confusing and easy to get wrong.

Meerkat 1.0 from Code Sorcery Workshop, is a slick GUI interface around providing this type of functionality. It provides nifty luxuries such as named presets for tunnels, and allows for tunnels to be opened automatically when a particular app launches. Cool!

Congratulations to Justin Miller on reaching 1.0 with this product!

What is TapeDeck? Well, as those of you old enough to remember tapes can guess, it’s essentially a very simple audio recorder which embraces with gusto the tape cassette metaphor. It’s pretty fun to watch the wheels of a cute little “virtual tape” turn as you record your mental notes, a riff on the guitar, whatever.

Back in the OS 9 days, Apple used to ship a default audio recorder in the system preferences, so you could easily record your own system beeps, etc. Since then, it’s been remarkably hard to “just grab some audio” in a quick and painless manner. TapeDeck might be the new solution for this problem in my day to day workflow.

Congrats, Chris and Daniel, on a very well done 1.0.