Remote ipython notebooks

I use ipython notebooks a lot. For interactive tinkering, for calculations with units, for interactive control of long-running processes, for easy parallelization (details to come), and to generate plots for all my papers. When I can, I run the notebooks on a server rather than my rather wimpy laptop; apart from the obvious advantages of more cores, more disk space, and more RAM, this also means I can leave things running for ages. It's all very convenient, but it requires some setup. As with the ssh configuration, I've found myself explaining the setup to several different people recently, so I thought I'd put it here. (Still working on that cute-kittens post.)

SSH incantations

I use ssh all the time, for shell access on remote machines, to transfer files, to carry VNC sessions, and to use different institutional affiliations to get at paywalled things. Over the years I have developed a particular way of setting it up that minimizes the pain involved in doing all of the above things. Several times in the past months I have tried to explain the whole setup to someone, so I think that's a sign it's time to post it here. I'll try to post something about, I don't know, fluffy kittens, boating on the Thames, seaborgium hexacarbonyl, or something soon for those of you who for some reason expected an interesting blog.