Schinckel.net

So, Apple has released a couple of new bits and pieces. I’m not going to mention the Apple iPhone, as it is unlikely to be available where I live, and the other two are a bit more interesting for me. The first one I noticed was the Apple TV. This is an AU$449 device that hooks up to (only widescreen) televisions, and allows you to watch video, view pictures and listen to audio that is stored on your Mac or PC. Which is exactly what I currently use XboxMediaCentre for. However, from a couple of things I’ve read on the Apple website, I won’t be getting one soon. I think it acts like an iPod, and requires syncing. This because that ‘s’ word is mentioned, and because it also talks about ‘up to 8750 songs,’ and since it has a 40GB hard drive, that sounds about how many tracks you could store on it. I don’t store any media on the Xbox - it’s all stored on a seperate media server. Why waste space by having duplicates of large files? It gets even worse if you look at Movies and TV programs. It may stream movies, I do recall seeing that somewhere. Plus, I may have to re-encode some video files, as AppleTV might not play everything, like VLC and XBMC do. The other feature that I think is missing is recording from TV. This makes it a deal-breaker for me. That’s the only functionality I don’t have with XBMC, and is the reason I’m going to consider getting a Mac Mini to replace it. If Apple don’t come up with something better. Admittedly, it looks much nicer than an Xbox, but it won’t play all of my Xbox games, either. Resolution-wise, the Apple TV might be a step ahead of the Xbox. I’m not sure what resolution XBMC can output, it may be 1080i, I’m not sure. (Note: after research, you can output this res with even a standard Xbox, but you need to get a special hi-res cable). • The other product Apple released is somewhat interesting. Airport Extreme. Basically, it’s an 802.11a/b/g/n wireless router. It has a couple of other key features, however. It also has a USB port, but it’s not a device-side port. Instead, it allows Hard Disk drives, Printers and the like to be plugged in. This would mean that the one device could replace (and upgrade!) my router, and my NSLU2 file server. The bonus is that it can easily handle multiple hard drives, unlike the NSLU2, which I’m probably going to have to install a different OS onto to get this functionality. At AU$259, (IIRC: $229 educational), it appears pricey, but replaces a NAS device, Print Server, and a wireless router. And beefs up the speed to 802.11n, which is 10x faster than my current router. Disadvantages of this over my current setup? I currently use my NSLU2 as a torrent client, and this functionality is unlikely to be built into the Airport Extreme! • What’s next? I’m hoping to see what happens when some real users get their hands on these devices. I’d suggest they might be running a cut-down OSX, or perhaps Linux/BSD or something, in which case they should be eminently hackable. For instance, it might be possible to use the AppleTV hardware, plug in an EyeTV, and bingo, PVR. Much cheaper than a Mac Mini, but with all of the desired functionality. And, turn off Syncing of iTunes library, and instead just look for files on a Server, and stream audio as well as video. As for Airport Extreme, it’s likely that this is a less powerful beast, but might provide better performance than my old NSLU2, which chugs along a bit when trying to grab more than one torrent at a time. (Don’t mention that you should queue torrents, this is for low-rate torrents, and the software I use doesn’t queue).

I’ve ripped a fair chunk of my CDs to AAC format, using iTunes. I used AAC 128kbps, but since I’ve just bought a new 250GB Hard Drive to use for Movies/Television, I can have the 160GB one used almost solely for Music (and data backups for the various computers on my network). I’m thinking of re-ripping my CDs to 192kbps AAC, which will make the files about 1.5 times their current size. I currently have 43 GB of music, but some of this is downloaded (iTunes Store and Podcasts), so the whole database won’t increase by this much. I’m also going to make some other structural changes. I’m not going to have iTunes manage my music files, just the tags inside of them. That way it will play nicer with a variety of clients. iTunes moves files around when you change the ID3 tags, so another version of iTunes, or Xbmc, or whatever, can’t find them anymore. It might mean the filenames are wrong, but I think every system I use will have a database of the tags, rather than the files themselves. I just hope the various systems update the tags when they have been changed. I’m also going to stop using my Wireless Router as my DHCP/DNS server. I just don’t like the inflexibility that Netgear’s system has in this regard. I want to be able to add static IP addresses, and have the hostnames resolve. Which I know the SpeedTouch modem did using it’s DHCP/DNS setup. And then I can isolate the wireless segment of the network a bit more. Not that that’s too much of an issue using WPA, but you never know…

Hidden Threat: Alternate Data Streams Hmm. This is quite interesting. Under any Windows machine with an NTFS disk, you can hide applications inside other files: C:> type nasty.exe > plain.txt:nasty.exe You can then run this command with: C:> start plain.txt:nasty.exe Now, this might not seem like much, but this is virtually undetectable. You can add any file to another file, and even exerienced sysadmins probably won’t find it!

An even better method of getting a random (ascii) password: $ head /dev/urandom | strings -n 5 | sed 'N;s/$//;s/\n//g;s/\n//g' | sed 'N;s/$//;s/\n//g' | head -n 1 (All on one line, naturally). I had to do the two seds to make it work properly. It would have been nicer if this combined all of the lines, and then I could just trim as many chars as I wanted, but this was tricky. The head -n 1 discards any lines other than the first.

Autopia

Texas environmental officials have delayed a proposed ban of biodiesel fuel in the state to allow further studying of the emissions of biodiesel blends.

Really? And the oil companies let them delay the ban?

The skeptic might say that Texas regulators passed a law that exploits the one negative aspect of biodiesel to protect the oil industry in that state.

You don’t say.

UK pair’s tickets caught behind - National - theage.com.au

… But when they arrived in Sydney yesterday morning they were told their luggage, in which the cricket tickets were packed, was still in England and would take three days to get here.

So let me get this straight. They didn’t carry their tickets in their hand luggage? That’s just plain stupid! It’s not like tickets are particularly bulky even! Whenever I take teams touring, they always pack all of the stuff they need for playing in their hand luggage, just in case the airline loses their checked stuff. And it’s a bit harder fitting playing gear and boots into hand luggage than some tickets in a small folder. They deserve to miss the match.

I finally got around to installing a demo of Aperture. Since I’m under spec. for the app, I had to firstly hack the Installer (not easy, I had to copy the ApertureTrial.mpkg ‘file’ (it’s a package, which is really a folder) to the disk, and then go inside it. I then had to enter the Contents folder, and finally edit the ApertureTrial.dist file. This file is the file that tests to see if it can be installed, and since I’m on a desktop, I needed to change the first non-intel test: if (!checkCPUFrequency(1590000000)) I removed one of the zeros, so that it was testing for a much slower clock speed. I then needed to fix the RAM check: if (!checkRAMRequirement(1000)) { I changed this to a 1. Both of these edits can be done in any old text editor. This meant that Aperture could be installed on my Mac. However, it still wouldn’t run. For this to happen, you need to actually edit the application file itself, which must be done in a hex editor. If you don’t know how to do this, then you probably shouldn’t. The location of this file is: /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture I found the instructions at david.djsiska.cz, which deal with version 1.1, to be enough to enable me to succeed here too. There are also instructions for 1.5 at aperture 1.5 hack. Ignore the offsets, and just search for the first and second location of: 40 9e 00 80 to: 48 00 00 88 And then, if you need it, the resolution hack; the next appearance of: 40 9E 00 E0 becomes: 48 00 00 D8 I’ll just point out that you should be working on a copy of this file, in case it fails. I also suspect that in the updated version (1.5.2) this hack will still work. • Now that that is out of the way, how does it stack up against Lightroom? Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent quite a few hours working in Lightroom already, but I didn’t warm to Aperture much at all. It seems to have most of the same tools, although there are a couple of differences (colour tinting, for instance, allows for black/grey/white tinting, rather than just shadow/highlight tinting, but I didn’t find the ability to alter some channels but not others, which is a pretty cool feature). I also found the application somewhat slow. Of course, the laptop I’ve been running Lightroom on is a bit newer than my Mac, and has twice as much RAM, so perhaps I’m just being unfair in that aspect. Having the ability to fix red-eye would be good, but that is something I am sure Adobe will be implementing soon. My Desktop PC is fairly tooled up - the only advantage of the iMac is the lovely large screen, so perhaps that will become my main working machine for photographs. So, I’m going to stick to Lightroom for now. I hope they make it better in the next couple of revisions, and I hope I can come up with a way of making my previews accessible via my Xbox and xbmc, so that I can view them on the TV. That would be cool. Like I used to to with iPhoto, when albums were stored as a series of aliases within folders of the album name. As I think about it, there is one thing I liked about Aperture: you can work on a new revision of a file. This is something I was trying to do in Lightroom just a couple of hours ago (I was resizing some images to be my screen backgrounds on my phone!), so I had to make the modifications, and then export, and then undo the modifications. It would have been much nicer just to have a revision of the original photo. I also think that there is no reason that the develop tools can’t be accessible in the library mode of Lightroom. Why have that distinction? You can already do some minor edits, why not just allow the whole gamut? It just complicates everything. Just saying that reminded me I haven’t really used the final three sections of Lightroom. For printing, I just export without restricting the size, and for Web, I export restricting the width to 500 (that’s the column size on this blog). Perhaps I will investigate those features, as well as the slideshow.

I needed a nice random password, something that is fairly strong. Enter /dev/urandom and md5: $ head /dev/urandom | md5 e98afcb4f093bafa0cc5f90f150df8b7 Obviously, that’s not the password I used. Problems with this method: if you don’t write it down, or save it somewhere, you will not be able to get it back. Second, it only uses a small subset of the ascii codeset - 0123456789abcdef. I’ve tried to come up with something that converts this to ascii, but I’m still working on it. You’d also likely want to ignore 8-bit values, as these can be extended characters. If you ever needed to type this in, it’s sometimes hard to do. The big advantage is that this is a totally random method, and you won’t get the same code twice.

Ain’t this the cutest dog in the world?

By the way, this is as shot. ISO400, 68mm Equivalent Focal Length, 1/15 second (with no tripod!), and f/5.6

Mind you, it did take a bout 50 shots to get the one good one!