I too have experienced this difficulty with synching secure data, and it has given me great difficulty. I’ve used a lot of different solutions trying to solve it, including the peer-to-peer VPN solution Hamachi, which worked well for what it does.

But lately I’ve used the recent mac release of sshfs for Mac OS X (without resorting to MacFUSE). While the installer is still frustratingly primitive, I managed to tweak it into order and now it lets me just do backups over the network securely, which as much confidence as ssh.

As for the chess clock, I am now curious if one could easily use Dashcode to make a Dashboard widget to accomplish this. Charles put the justification for Dashboard well, “Pixels cost me”. The Dashboard overlay is where I put less important, but still desirable, data that I want quick access to without cluttering up my desktop.

Oh, and Charles, Quicksilver’s ability to do things for you is directly proportional to your understanding of it. You should play with the triggers and actions and see if you can generalize things, the way I have with project management.

John

To my way of thinking, Post-It notes and Ruby on Rails exhibit remarkable similarities.

Silver Spencer developed a glue, which didn’t quite set -Arthur Fry found a use for it.

Ruby, like other dynamic languages, is of course, glue that has the interesting property of never quite setting.

Both the Spencer’s glue and Ruby just needed the right application to really take off.

Both solutions favour convention (canary yellow) over configuration.

Both are elegant solutions to a common simple problem -with the unfortunate side effect that people will inevitably attempt complete accounting systems using nothing but Post-It notes -or Rails.

Finally

Fry had an epiphany about Post-It notes while in Church, sticking notes into his hymm book. I don’t know where David Hasselhoff (or whatever his name is) was when he invented Rails, but I think it fair to say that both inventors consider their inventions to be divinely inspired.

pf