Thursday, July 24, 2008

Couchsurfer 0.4 for AppleTV 2.1 firmware

Yeah, although not officially announced yet, it looks like a new version of Couchsurfer that works with the 2.1 AppleTV firmware is available. Check here for the download, you will want the file called couchsurfer-0.4-2.1-bin.tar.gz. I tested it and so far it looks like it is working just fine. With the 0.3 version I had crashes and the bookmarks & history did not work. That's all fixed. What I did not test yet is add the flash plugin, but I guess that will work also (will update you on that later).

Update: installed flash (and other plugins), tested youtube.com and as expected it works.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

What does your iPod touch / iPhone home screen look like

Thought it would be nice to share my iPod touch 'desktop' or home screen. What I did is try to group functional apps next to eachother:



You can make your own screenshot this way:

hold the 'Home' button
press the 'Power' button
the screen will flash
screenshot is saved in Photos

Put a link to your home screen in a comment if you like.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

AppleTV 2.1 update - patchstick applied


Yesterday Apple released the 2.1 firmware of AppleTV. Like many others, I have my AppleTV patchsticked (jailbroken, hacked, or whatever you want to call it). So I hasitated to do the update (was still running 2.01). But after reading at the awkwardtv.org wiki I thought to give it a try.

The updated went just fine, within about 10 to 15 minutes the new firmware was downloaded and installed and working just fine. The biggest new features are MobileMe support and the new remote control from an iPhone or iPod Touch support. I had already updated my iPod Touch (grrr no iPhones left yesterday in my store) to the 2.0 software, which enables it to use applications from the App Store. On of the apps there is the 'Remote' app by Apple and its free. What this does is give you the ability to control your AppleTV or iTunes on Windows or Mac machine. Really cool and for AppleTV very nice to listen to music without having to turn on your TV.

Now for the patchstick part. I had a USB stick still lying around with the patchstick software on it, just a simple one that installs sshd (secure shell access). That worked just fine and after the patch I restarted it and everything is ok. Now ssh is available on to installing the plugins nitoTV, ATVFiles and Couchsurfer. Had to do the first two by hand and Couchesurfer installed through the nitoTV 'install software' menu. Also did all the other nitoTV installs (perian, mplayer codecs, kext load, smartUpdater). What's missing is afp. Had to install to that throught the commandline. The patchstick did some wrong copying of a Kerberos framework, so had to fix that. Setup the mounts to my movies, music and tv shows (hosted on a linux server running netatalk which gives you afp access to linux).

But not everything is working for the moment. nitoTv already issued an updated version for the 2.1 release which runs perfectly. But Couchesurfer and ATVFiles have some problems. Couchesurfer crashes a lot when leaving the page you're viewing and my bookmarks and history don't show up. ATVFiles works for music, but when starting a movie (m4v h.264) or a tv show (divx/xvid) the Finder restarts. So for now I have to use nitoTV to watch this type of content. For TV shows that's fine, but for movies there is a little problem still in nitoTV. When a m4v file has an ac3 stream (and that's how I convert all my DVDs) you loose the AC3 output when you pause or skip through the movie. On startup it's outputting AC3 just fine. This did not happen in ATVFiles on 2.01 and also does not happen when playing through AppleTVs own 'Movies' menu (using synced content).

Hope this little article helps some of you. Leave a comment if you have any questions, maybe I can be of help.

update: The ATVFiles problem has to do with AC3, if you turn off AC3 passthrough in the settings movies will play fine, but without the nice dolby digital sound track of course. Found the problem description in the AwkwardTV forum.

update 2:
Good news on ATVFiles, the developer is working on fixing the AC3 crash problem, there's already some new code checked in, now we wait for the compiled update :-).

update 3:I fetched ATVFiles from svn (build 440) and compiled and installed it. The AC3 problem is fixed with that build. The official release for ATVFiles 1.1.1 is not there yet, but it looks like this will be the one.

update 4:ATVFiles 1.1.1 for AppleTV 2.1 has been officially released. Build 444 is the one being released.

Friday, July 11, 2008

iPhone arriving at Rotterdam late night

It's 12:00am in The Netherlands and there comes the truck at the Rotterdam T-Mobile store:

http://twitpic.com/3h7l

http://twitpic.com/3h7t

http://twitpic.com/3h7v

And this is the guy that got the first one:




















Hope I can get mine tomorrow during normal daytime hours :-)

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

List of Firefox 3 (working) extension I use


Here's my list of extension I use in Firefox 3. I can confirm that they are available and working properly:
  • Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4
  • Answers 2.2.48
  • ColorZilla
  • DownloadHelper 3.0.4
  • Firebug 1.2.0b2 (see my post on this)
  • lori (Life-of-request info) 0.2.0.20080521
  • MeasureIt
  • Password Exporter 1.1
  • StumbleUpon 3.18
  • Twitterfox 1.5.5.2
  • YSlow
  • Web Developer 1.1.6
List of extension I would like to have for Firefox 3:
  • del.icio.us
  • foXpose
  • Paste and Go
  • PicLens
  • zoomFox (although this one has no real use anymore because of the tremendous new zoom feature available in FF3)

Firefox 3, the missing link...

One thing I found missing from the new release of Firefox is a button for the toolbar that allows you to easily send the current webpage as a link. I got used to this functionality when I was still using Flock.

I found an extension that adds a Send Link button and it works just great. Maybe the final release of Firefox 3 will have the send link button included, but I don't expect it to be because release candidates normally have all functionality that a final release will have.

Get it at the Mozilla add-ons web site.

Monday, June 09, 2008

iPhones everywhere now, including The Netherlands


Good news today for people waiting everywhere to get the iPhone in their country, or waiting for a version with 3G (or UMTS/HSDPA whatever you want to call it) internet. But that's not all, it will also have a built-in GPS, nice! And for us here in The Netherlands finally legally for sale at T-Mobile shops, wonder what the price will be for the phone and the subscription plan... But I for sure want one, have an iPod Touch now and that's already great. To have internet everywhere independent from (open) Wifi networks would be very nice.

At the t-mobile site you can sign-up for a newsletter informing you on any news they release about pricing and availibility (which will be july 11).

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Serious web developers use Firebug


Really, as a serious web developer coding in (X)HTML and CSS you can't really do without the wonderful Firebug extension for Firefox (also works with Flock).

I just switched from Flock to RC1 of Firefox version 3. Wow that thing is fast, rendering, start-up, memory usage; everything got faster and better! But a lot of extensions are not yet ready for FF3, so you will have to do without them or wait until they come available.

The one extension I really need is Firebug. A quick search learned that there is a beta version (1.2) of Firebug available and it works with FF3rc1 ! Though it is still in beta, you have to be a bit careful maybe, but who really cares: you're developing, so your code is not perfect yet either, right ;) ?

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Download / install Firebug 1.2beta from official site.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

The unofficial Google shell

Saw this very cool website (if you can still call it that) coming by on twitter: a command line interface for Google called goosh.org.

Screenshot (click it for larger version) of the site and the available commands:



This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell. You type commands and the results are shown on this page.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Couch Surfer 0.3 Released


AppleTvHacks.net writes:
Good news. Brandon has just released Couch Surfer 0.3. Just in time for us to relax and surf the net on our big screen TV getting ready for the weekend.

Here are some new features of Couch Surfer 0.3

* accelerated scrolling holds up and downi
* improved Bookmark support now with support for adding current page
* History support
* Back menu
* USB keyboard support for text entry dialogs.

The best part is that once Couch Surfer 0.3 is installed, USB keyboard feature is available to all other plugins.

Thanks again, Brandon. You da man!

If you have NitoTV installed and the previous version of Couch Surfer, you can upgrade through the NitoTV install software menu. After installation the AppleTV menu will be restarted automatically. What I noticed is that I lost my bookmarks. The Bookmarks.plist file is still in the /Users/frontrow/Documents directory, so maybe the layout changed. Will have to check this to see what happend there.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

My browser is better than yours...


Come on now, this has to stop already! Now the browser 'war' starts again. Because Apple is now offering Safari 3.1 on Windows through its 'Apple Software Update', people are getting mad.

Why is this a problem when Apple (or whoever) uses their auto update to distribute software. Microsoft does this all the time: SilverLight, DreamScene, soon Internet Explorer 8. Yes sure these are 'part' of Windows and they it's ok ? Microsoft has been pushing the world for years to use Internet Explorer. I think it's time someone else starts showing people there is an other way to surf the internet. Mozilla should do the same thing: if you have Thunderbird, use auto update to 'push' Firefox and vice-versa. Isn't Safari part of iTunes anyway already, for use within the iTunes store?

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

My OS is better than yours...


Sigh... the never ending discussion about which Operating System is better and people getting mad when you say you use this or that. They start telling you that you should use 'their' OS, but most of the time just bashing on the OS you have and why it so bad.

The idea for this article came to me today when a friendly neighbour sent me an e-mail saying that now even Apple OSX (Leopard in this case) also has security issues. So I made a short reply saying that of course Apple also has this, it's software and all software has problems, bugs, leaks, etc.. The fact that my neighbour thought that OSX is/was save is that so many Apple users always say that. And of course we know that when you say that your software (in whatever form) is save, it will be hacked within 15 minutes.

Right, so I continue my argument with my neighbour and say that another reason why OSX is less interesting to hackers (especially the criminal kind) is that OSX has a much lower market share than Microsoft Windows. But I gave up on this endless discussion about which OS is better years ago. However, there are people that still try to have that discussion with me. So it's difficult for me to even talk about anything else than Windows otherwise I get that comment again 'ah you with your -fill in the blank OS-'.

At this moment I have the following OSes in house: Linux as server (running dhcp, dns, mysql, apache, squid, samba, etc...), Windows Vista because I have to keep up-to-date with this technology and for about 6 months now a shiny new iMac with OSX Leopard which I use as my main computer now to do my work at home (mainly develop in PHP and Objective-C). Also have a PocketLoox running PocketPC 2003, but not using that so much anymore.

In the past I have used and presently am still using a multitude of operating systems: ZX81 (that's where the trouble began, lol), MSX (I was getting good with assembly by then, can still read the Z80 hex code), DOS (lot's of versions), OS/2 2.0,3.0 and 4.0, OS/2 Warp Server (even got certified for that 9 out of 10), PalmOS, Windows 2.x, 3.0, 3.11, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2000,2003,2008, VMware ESX 3.x. They all have their problems, trust me..

But what is the concern of the average day computer user? Usability! That's what I think, the thing should just do what you want it to do at the time you need it. Just like a television set, if you turn it on you want sound an vision right. And when pressing that almost used up zap button you want it change the channel to something better. If computer will ever be that simple to operate... I think they will, but that will take some more years of development and trying out new creative things.

As computing power will increase even more - yeah I know the new Core2 chips from Intel are insanely fast compared to my first Z80 but still not enough - operating a computer will become easier or at least it will be possible to make it easier. Somebody still has to make some software to for example make a computer do what we tell them (yes speech, but not like the simple voice recognition we have now) or maybe even do what we think. Why am I still typing this story on a keyboard (ok it's a nice aluminum Apple keyboard, but still..). I mean, the whole story is already in my head, now it takes me half an hour to type it out and some more time to reread it for mistakes. Touch screens, gesture interfaces and true speech recognition, like I saw Lorn Green doing in Battlestar Galactica when I was 10 years old, that was cool with that sound it made when the words appeared on the green monochrome monitor. The movie Minority Report comes to mind...


But still all this will of course be just software including the bugs, programming errors, unforeseen user interaction, etc... Unless somebody invents a piece of software that is so intelligent that it can find these problems, do something about it and prevent that they are exploited. Not talking about 'simple' anti virus / spyware solutions here. These are not enough and can be bypassed.

Enough talk about this now from me. I got to get some coding done, not the stuff I talked about here, but just some more of that software containing bugs :-)

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. ~Doug Linder

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

I installed the Apple iPhone SDK


So, yesterday I installed the Apple iPhone SDK. Kind of strange to do that, because I only have an iPod Classic at the moment :). But thinking of getting an iPod Touch or wait until Apple and some telecom company will finally start selling the iPhone in The Netherlands. But I like programming, so I just had to install the SDK. First tried the sample application of course, running in the Aspen iPhone Simulator. Wow, that's a very cool simulator!

And now for the hard part: learn Objective C and get to know the SDK. Since I have not yet created anything ever for OSX, I guess I have a lot to learn. I do have C and C++ knowledge, so that should be a good start. But a first quick look at objective C, most part looks like C, but also some 'strange' [[ ]] stuff. Have to find a good book explaining the basic language rules.

Then after learning all that stuff, find some ideas to make into nice applications, tools and/or games. Things I saw during the iPhone SDK event were very impressive, makes me feel the way I felt when programming for MSX long time ago (in the 80s) :-). I made some great stuff on the MSX back then (if I may say so myself).

Monday, March 10, 2008

Web Thumbnails

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Sunday, March 09, 2008

Download the new SqueezeCenter 7.0


SqueezeCenter powers the Squeezebox, Transporter and SLIMP3 network music players and is the best software to stream your music to any software MP3 player. It supports MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, WAV and more!

SqueezeCenter 7.0 is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Perl source code is also available for all platforms.