East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Ah, fun, Joost’s beta invitation arrived in my inbox today so I decided to give it a try.

The first impression is not so good. A lot of stutter, where it’s apparently not getting the feed through fast enough. This month I will have to blame that on my ISP (cable broadband) who announced there will be interruptions throughout the current month while they upgrade their network.

The program I’m looking at right now seems to have audio and video out of sync, but that may also be because of all the stutter, time will tell.

I had to turn the system proxy settings off before starting up Joost, otherwise it wouldn’t even try to connect out.

It had to poke four outgoing and one incoming port in the firewall:

• TCP/80 outgoing
• TCP/443 outgoing
• TCP/5223 outgoing
• UDP/33333 outgoing
• TCP/5223 incoming

Once it’s started I could turn the system proxy settings back on, btw, which is pretty silly but there you go.

I’ll keep running it from time to time and see if the bandwidth issues have been solved (locally or elsewhere) and then try to give a more elaborate review of the software and setup.

Handy snippet of the day, if you want to change the default Aqua Blue image that is used in OS X’s graphical login program:

 sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture -string "/Library/Desktop Pictures/Nature/Stones.jpg"

And of course replace that last filename with the image of your choice.