Category: Geek (page 1 of 1)

I’m stuck. Google is down and and I don’t know how to find anything on the internet without it.

The TiVo I bought back in January was the bottom of the line, 40 hour in a TiVo branded box. It’s worked great. Right away I added on the USB ethernet adapter so it could talk to home base through my broadband internet rather than dial up because I don’t have a land line – haven’t since ’98. I got the home media option so I can wirelessly stream mp3’s to my tivo, but I hardly ever use that feature.

The problem I’m having is I can only save like one episode of a few shows and they’re automatically deleted after a couple days to make room for upcoming shows. I needed a bigger TiVo. So I watched the deal sites for a economical 160 GB drive (51$ shipped). I bought a slick case adapter for the tivo that allows for an extra fan and a second hard drive. Then all I had to do was burn a boot cd, format the drive, set the jumpers on the internal 40 GB drive to Master, add the second drive and fan to the TiVo, and plug in the machine.

Now I’ve got a dual HD TiVo with 208 hours of recording time, instead of 40, and it was on the cheep. Plus, I didn’t loose any of my settings or old recorded shows.

Geeky. Sweet.

Now that I have a camera phone I had to add the $2.99 unlimited picture messaging option to my 3000 anytime minute plan ($49). I just a got note from T-Mobile that informed me that with this cheap option, I now get unlimited GPRS.

“Ooooh, big deal. So you’ve got a GPRthingamajig on your phone, but what the hell does that do?” you ask.

Handy geeky crap that’s what.

GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) is how cell phones transmit data packets for when you surf the web on your phone – they used to offer this service for 20 bucks a month.

Now, because I’ve got bluetooth and Mac OS X panther, I can use my Sony Ericsson t610 as a GPRS wireless modem with my Laptop. Better still, I don’t need a dial-up ISP (like earthlink etc) to access the web, it acts as my ISP. So I can check my saltedwound email and my mac.com email all as if I was connected to my cable modem at home – only slower.

Basically anywhere I have cell phone coverage I can now access the internet at nearly 3k per second (comparable to land line dial up) to check email, surf – whatever (Ozzy, you could surf for porn everywhere you go). I just choose connect from my modem menu, it finds my cell phone even if it’s 30 feet away in my jacket pocket, and dials out. It would also work with inferred, but but bluetooth is nicer because it doesn’t require “line of site”.

Simple, slick. You can read the extended entry for info on how I set it up.
Read more

With the release of Panther (Mac OS 10.3) Apple has built in a new technology, called URL Protocol Support, that allows for a clickable link in a browser to launch Script Editor and populate it with a script. This makes it easier to share AppleScripts online.

On my handy little script section of Objective Labs I’ve just implemented support for this new feature.

Apple has an AppleScript that is sort of cumbersome in that you have to pre-convert your scripts into clickable links to put them online. If you’re a big geek like me, and you store your scripts in a database, it’s easy to use php to convert a script to a clickable url protocol link on the fly.

Just use this php code:

$yourScript = rawurlencode($the_variable_holding_your_script);

and place it in the scirpt portion of the link like this:

<a href=”applescript://com.apple.scripteditor?action=new&script=<?PHP echo $yourScript; ?>>The Link</a>

And you will end up with something like this:
Panther users click here to open this in script editor.

I was in the Computer room the other day when all I wanted to do is take down one simple little computer and remove it from the group. I went to the Special menu and selected Shutdown as I’ve done thousands of times before. I don’t remember selecting a super-shutdown-all-these-mothers button, but that’s what happened. Do you know what 17 servers shutting down simultaneously sounds like? Exactly, “OH SHIT!”

Apparently redundant power with a UPS battery backup and a diesel backup generator are nothing when you put 80+ amps on a 20 amp circuit breaker it’s going to trip when there is a power spike of any kind, like shutting down a computer (go figure!).

I had to scramble to get as many up as possible while migrating some to another location. I called in the network boys and a PC supportster and got them to pull new cat-5 and move equipment while I’m typing logins as fast as I can.

The kicker was, when I was planning on adding a new g5 to the group earlier that morning, I wondered out loud:

Me:“Do you think we’ve got to much running off this circuit?”
Group:“Awww hell no, this baby is wired for anything!” was the collective answer.

Well I showed them.

This PHP code maintains a rotating list of the last 50 unique iTunes songs as
reported by Kung-Tunes ( www.kung-foo.tv/itti.php ) using the HTTP post feature of Kung-Tunes.

Download it here: www.saltedwound.com/downloads/itunes-kung-log.tgz

REQUIREMENTS

I was at a friends apartment and opened my laptop to enter an address. Seconds later I hear my “new mail” chime. My TiBook had found a wireless network, logged in, and checked my mail. Sweet.

I got curious, and drove to work today with my laptop on. 10 wireless networks showed up in my 6 mile drive, one was less than a block from my house. Looks like I’ll have to make a Cantenna and scam on the neighbors bandwidth.

Who says you can’t get free internet access?

Remember when I said I wanted a bluetooth iTunes remote for my T681? Well, Jonas went and built it, with a couple cool features.

First and geekmost foremost it’s scriptable. So you can add features to the phone part of the app that can control any AppleScriptable application – that’s most every application if you didn’t know.

A cool feature is the proximity sensor. It’s a feature that performs an action when it finds a phone, or a known phone looses contact. So, when you walk into a room your iTunes music starts, or your email program launches, or you computer says “welcome home Dave”, or (if you have x10.com devices) the lights come on, or the shades open; well, you get the idea. It’s Bill Gates style house automation on a budget.

All you need is a Bluetooth mac, a sony t68i phone (currently free with activation at amazon) and the Sony Ericsson Clicker system extension.

O’Reilly & Associates has released a new edition of “Learning Unix for Mac OS X”

“Learning Unix for Mac OS X, 2nd Edition” by Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson is just about the best way to get into the geekness of OS X. It offers sections on how to: customize the shell environment; print from the Unix command line; edit and create files with the vi editor; access Internet functions; understand pipes and filters; use background processing; and use Fink, the best way to install open source Unix software on Mac OS X.

All kinds of startup mac geek goodness.

What is all this about? Well – it was born out of a good lunch, like lots of ideas; where we hit upon the idea of creating a hobo language for wireless access points.

Find a node, and leave a chalk symbol for others to find the node with a minimum of all that tiresome netstumbler business.

Just trying to do my part to bring this topic to the top of the Daypop top 40.

Jake Stetser came up with an AIM-Google API bridge. You can talk to it. Then, it talks to google, and gives you the top 5 responses. Interesting. Add voice recognition and you’ve got the closest thing to a Star Trec computer with Google as the brain.

I’ve been playing with, partaking in, and following the developments concerning the automatic discovery of RSS feeds, written about extensively on dive into mark Basically, you insert the following code (note: it has changed slightly, so if you did this a while ago, double check your code):

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”url/to/rss/file”>

The code goes in the <head> section of your html. You may have noticed my (experimental list) to the right. Just tinkering you see, but I think there are some real possibilities with it. I’m working on making it auto generate the list using PHP from a list of URL’s by reading the sites link tag. It’s quite simple.

Someday, when the google api supports this, you will be able to have content from sites that google believes is similar to your’s embeded into your site with some simple javascript.

Sony just announced a Play Station 2 price reduction of $100. It may be time to buy one, and sell your X-Box because I say the PS2 is going to win this battle. Sega couldn’t take it, and I doubt that can Microsoft will stay in the arena too long. Though, Micro$oft, full of cash, is probably not the best company to start a price war with. Still, Microsoft reportedly loses $87 per box at the current price – how much can they afford to lose? A lot would be the correct answer.

The latest version of Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, dubbed Dreamweaver MX is a 68 MB download and a 12,000+ file install. That’s heavy, hope it’s good.

Update: I’m not the only one having problems with it.

I found a slick site for those of you who simply love bombarding your brain with low level radiation via your Nokia cell phone. The site is YourMobile.This handy tool has every ring tone you can think of – theme songs, oldies, rap, hip hop, and all for free! Just click send, enter your email and cell phone number and the tone is sent directly to your phone. My tone of the moment is American Pie by Don McLean.