Life is a State of Mind

I’ve been very happy with our AppleTV since I got the thing hooked up over a year ago. I like it mostly for viewing internet content on the big screen, though we have rented a movie or two and dumped some dance videos and photo slide shows from the computer into the AppleTV for big-screen shared viewing. When Apple updated the software to “Take 2″ it made direct movie renting and YouTube viewing possible, and that added a lot of value to our AppleTV. It did not open the AppleTV to adding my own software nor third party software, and that has been a letdown. As good as Apple’s software is, I want to play with a few ideas they apparently have not figured out as possible yet.

One of the small annoyances has been in ability to surf the web directly for more flash content. So I reviewed some AppleTV hacker sites:

• iClarified’s article on installing SSH with a Take 2 Patchstick; this is the key first step. You’ll need:
  • A USB flash drive, of at least 128MB capacity
  • A Mac running OS X 10.4 or newer, that has both a powered USB slot and a connected optical drive
  • Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 or 10.4.10 install CDs (note, the older PowerPC based 10.4.3 DVD will NOT work); or an installed 10.4.9 or 10.4.10 intel based Mac.
  • Some understanding of ssh commands, scp commands, and Apple DMG files.
• awkwardTV (web site with various hacks, ideas, plugins for AppleTV)
• AppleTV Hacks (web site with forums, news, and tips about the AppleTV)
• AppleTV Bootloader (still figuring out all the stuff here)
• iClarified’s other AppleTV tutorials (very useful stuff)

Anyway; I was able to build my own USB patchstick using the instructions on the iClarified website (I have an AppleTV with v2.0.2 and several Macs running 10.5.3) that got my AppleTV rebooted with all my existing content, v2.0.2 and ssh access. With ssh access I was able to scp Couch Surfer into the AppleTV, and add a couple of browser plugins (Flash Player and QuickTime Player) and the CoreAudioKit.framework; and now my AppleTV can surf the web and play flash and quicktime movies from inside the browser. It makes Blood Ties from Lifetime Network available for free; though so far the viewing is a bit blocky and slow.

Yes, I can easily watch this from any computer using existing web browsers; but the point is to get more content on the big screen so we can watch from the couch and comfy chair. Yes, the videos are also available as iTunes rentals and as DVDs; but this is a new series to us and we want to watch a few episodes for free before we decide if it is worth buying or renting for cash.

This effort is also about having my device open to new software as I want to add it. I suspect I will not stop with just a simple browser; but will find new ways to use the AppleTV now that I have ssh access.

Many thanks to John Gruber and his friend Nat for posting a suggestion on how to fix the nasty bug that crashes OS X when using Time Machine to a Time Capsule to back up your Mac.

I used Airport Utility to enable File Sharing under the Disks menu. Then Disk Utility to “repair” the sparse disk image of the laptop that would crash every time I tried to back up with Time Machine. I am happy it worked like a champ, and Time Machine incremental backups are working again.

I still use Carbon Copy Cloner and a USB drive to back up my whole drive as a bootable image, and that is what I did while this bug impacted me. I suspect the partition on the Time Capsule became corrupt in a power outage we had earlier this Spring.

I have been using Adium for ages to to all my online chit-chat with folks who use AOL Instant Messenger, Jabber, and Yahoo Messenger (Adium supports MSN Messenger too, but I refuse to use that). Adium’s interface is vastly better than the one you get from AOL, and miles better than most of the others I have used on all platforms. Tabbed conversations, clean text only when you want that (or flashy colors if you prefer that), user programmable IM sounds (I use modified Babylon 5 and Tokyo Subway sets).

The one thing that has been very annoying about Adium is that it was really weak at initiating chat rooms. Two way conversations have always worked very well, and joining other people’s chat rooms has always worked, but initiating your own was a problem… until v1.2.5 (released April 28th, 2008). Now chats can be initiated reliably and even bookmarked, so you have semi-permanent chats available to re-start with the same invitees all the time (like your team of co-workers to coordinate server builds).

Anyway, today is a great day because of a little thing like chat rooms in Adium. Yippea!

I just wanted to take a moment to rave about Make Bookmarkable AppleScript from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. I was getting annoyed that our audiobooks were getting randomly played as music when I wanted music, and a quick google search lead me to iTunes FAQ on Michael Alderete’s Weblog. I quickly downloaded Make Bookmarkable, created a new ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder, stuck the script files in that new folder, then selected our audiobook files and used the script on them to change tags and file extensions.

Huge thank you to Michael Alderete and Doug Adams for making such useful information and scripting available.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13777

3 May 1978, first Commercial message on the arpanet, and it pissed people off even then.

You’d think marketing types would get the hint that we don’t like their crap in our inboxes…
Oh wait, that’s right, some morons actually encourage spammers by buying the junk advertised.

I miss the days when server software was written in PL-1 or C and carefully run through Purify software to check for memory leaks by competent, and conscientious programmers who actually deserved and earned the term software engineer.

These days I spend far too much time managing rolling bounces of crappy Java servlet code because no one can even find the memory leaks in their hastily written applications.

This is now a repeatable bug.

Everytime Time Machine tries to back up my MacBook Air (OS X 10.5.2) to our Time Capsule (v7.3.1) over our wireless network, the MacBook Air suffers a catastrophic crash (entire OS, the kind where you must press and hold the power button to reset the machine).

Time Machine backups worked fine until very recently, the only things that changed recently are the application, via software update, of:

• MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 1.0
• MacBook Air Bluetooth Firmware 1.0
• Safari 3.1.1

So logic suggests that one or a combination of those three things has broken Time Machine.
I can disable Time Machine backups and go back to Carbon Copy Cloner for the short term, but I am left wondering what my Time Capsule is for in the long term…

Last week I set up Mom’s TimeCapsule and new 20″ iMac so that when she returns to central New York she can get regular backups done automatically. It is pretty impressive as a backup device, network storage, 4 port LAN hub, DHCP server, and 802.11N wireless access point. As a router and firewall it is rather minimalist, and serious network weenies should probably get their own cheap firewall/router.

That, and some amazing cabling work done by co-workers Alan and Dave, inspired me to plug in our own TimeCapsule and start user-space backups of all the computers Erci and I share. I am thrilled. In our case, since we already have a Linksys firewall/router/DHCP server, our TimeCapsule is simply a faster wireless access point (802.11n/g/b) and a huge NAS disk for backups. The device handles backups from as many machines as you have space for (which was one of my big concerns), so we are backing up both laptops, and both desktops just fine (she’ll need to upgrade her iMac to Leopard for TimeMachine to work). We may even get her Windows box backing up in time. The 802.11n wireless network reaches to nearly every room in the house, which is better than the Airport Express (802.11b/g) wireless we had before.

I still use Carbon Copy Cloner to make image dumps of bootable hard drives (because TimeMachine does not make a bootable copy, at least that I can see so far), and every once in a while you want to boot from a different disk; but TimeMachine over wireless makes it trivial to get generations of revisions into a rolling incremental backup system. Very nice.

This also means that I now own two of the three big things announced at the 2008 Mac World San Francisco keynote, and I previously owned an AppleTV. Kool-aid? No, they are just reliable, useful, and affordable devices that let me focus on my life rather than perpetually fiddling with Win-bloze crap.

My new employer has several Apple XServe 1U rack-mount servers more than they actually need. Is there any interest in XServe G5 hosts? What value do these things have?

Each is a dual 2.3GHz G5 with 4GB memory, gigabit ethernet, multiple firewire slots, and two to three hard drives.

I cannot sell them for Ruckus - but I can put you in touch with the corporate comptroller who can. He knows nothing about how to move older server gear on the open market.

There are three sitting near my desk that can move right away, and we have as many as 40 in use around the country. If we get enough, it becomes worthwhile to exchange the ones in production today with something else, and sell those too. If they are not worth much on the market, we’ll be lazy and leave most of them in service.

Notice anything funny about this:

gromit:~ snolan$ ls -la /opt/local/sbin
total 72
drwxr-xr-x   4 root  admin    136 21 Feb 14:10 .
drwxr-xr-x  12 root  admin    408 14 Feb 11:56 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root  admin      0  9 Jan 22:48 .turd_MacPorts
-r-s--x--x   2 root  admin  35564 21 Feb 14:10 fping

In UNIX sysadmin lingo, a “turd” is an unneeded file left around by a careless fellow sysadmin or user.
Hat tip to Dave for pointing it out.