Raj's Technology Blog

Possible Project: iPad + Canon camera

2011-04-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

This is a wild idea and I don't know if its possible, but I'm putting it up here mostly so I remember to try this if I ever get some free time.

The idea is to write an iPad app that can connect to a Canon camera directly through the Apple camera connection kit USB interface. You'd have to reverse engineer the Canon USB control protocol, but these guys seem to have already done so and reimplemented the protocol for use on Arduino microcontrollers:

http://www.circuitsathome.com/camera-control/arduino-based-controller-for-canon-eos-cameras

https://github.com/felis/Arduino_Camera_Control

http://www.circuitsathome.com/ptpusb-control-camera-data

So I think this would be a matter of porting the USB control code to run on iPad, and then working on a GUI to control the camera with.

I'm not saying this will be easy, or if I'll ever have time to look into it. Add this to my pile of "DIY projects I would do if I had the time".

Tutorial: Vevo to iTunes on Mac OS X, Video and Audio (Youtube and others too)

2011-01-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

Vevo offers HD videos of your favorite music. Here is how to download them on Mac OS X. This procedure probably works for other sites too like youtube, and tons and tons more.

Getting the Video

In Firefox, get the Video DownloadHelper add-on.
Go to Vevo (or youtube or most any other tube site), and start watching your video in the resolution you want.
Click the arrow next to the rotating DownloadHelper icon at the top of the browserBe careful of downloading the advertisement that plays. It should be pretty obvious (i.e. if an ad plays, don't click on the top file in the list, wait for the video to load and check the list again. Same goes for changing resolutions.)
Choose the file you want. For high quality stuff on Vevo, you'll most often get the Apple-ish MP4 version (AAC+h264). For older or lower quality stuff, you'll have to get the flash format (FLV file). I'll assume MP4 video from here on out.
If it was 720p (or lower) MP4, this should immediately drop into iTunes and be syncable on AppleTV2/iPhone4/iPad. Enjoy your video!
If it was 1080p MP4 or FLV, use Handbrake to convert to iTunes friendly format.

Converting the Audio for iTunes

If you want just the audio ripped from such a file, you just have to remux the audio to the appropriate Apple container. I tried using Quicktime to make a MP4 movie with audio only in it; while that plays correctly in iTunes, its recognized as a video file, which annoys me. So use ffmpeg to remux just the audio to the right container.

Get remux. This is a ffmpeg gui, but ships with a current build of ffmpeg, which is easier than installing it from source, fink, or macports, and is more up-to-date than ffmpegX which hasn't been updated in 3 years.
Make a symlink to the ffmpeg that lives inside the remux application so you can call it from the command line. I called the link remux_ffmpeg to avoid potential naming conflicts with other tools on my system:
sudo ln -s /Applications/remux.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg /usr/local/bin/remux_ffmpeg
Use ffmpeg to get the audio out and remux to the right container. I had to RTFM to figure out exactly how to call it:
remux_ffmpeg -i in_video.mp4 -vn -acodec copy out_music.m4a
Just so you know, -vn says no video output, -acodec copy specifies the audio codec should be a passthrough/no re-encode.
Now drop into iTunes, and there you go!

Rip Blu-rays with MakeMKV for Mac OS X

2011-01-25T14:33:00.000-08:00

There is this cool multiplatform program called MakeMKV that strips DRM off of your Blu-ray collection, and it works natively for Mac. Its currently in beta, so you can use the following beta key (though I'm not sure how this is really different from the 30 day trial, since the beta seems to be running out soon):

T-1kXI22tN1leidXUU8rW81qqCvCyckQQgOJ4W7XB6n6eEfXwRK6K5UEOIVNNflFq87K

It takes whatever is present on the disk and muxes it all into an MKV container without changing codecs. By default, it will copy the video, multiple audio tracks, and subtitles. There are a few problems with this kind of rip though:

The file size is HUGE, barely smaller than the original Blu-ray.
Only PCs or certain dedicated media streamers can play 1080p, MKV, or recognize multiple/multichannel audio and subtitles.

Re-encoding the video to 720p h264 and the audio to 2 channel AAC in an MP4 container simultaneously fixes all issues; this format is about 1/4 the file-size of the original video, and is supported on AppleTV2/iPad/iPhone4, and pretty much everything else. Here is my workflow for this process.

Use MakeMKV on a Blu-ray.

Use Handbrake on the resulting files.

Start with the high profile.

1280 x 720 resolution.

Turn off decomb and deinterlace

RF of 20

Check large file size

Remove extra audio passthrough

Drop into iTunes and sync with devices.

Of course, if you have terabytes upon terabytes of storage, forget the Handbrake re-encode, and just watch on your streaming/media box. Enjoy!

Jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 on iPhone 4 (with links)

2011-01-05T13:39:00.000-08:00

Update 1: Bluetooth doesn't work as of this release, and neither does Skype. New redsn0w should fix it when it leaves beta status.

Update 2: Betas 5 and 6 have been released since I wrote this, which fix bluetooth and skype, respectively. The link to redsn0w has been updated. The Dev team also says on twitter that they are working on porting the untether to work with a 4.1 IPSW, instead of the 4.2b3 beta firmware only available to developers.

This link has the instructions you need. But the short of it is:

1. Jailbreak with redsn0w.

2. Boot tethered.

3. Update Cydia.

4. Boot tethered again.

5. Install openssh in Cydia.

6. Use jailbreak monte in redsn0w. Note that this requires the 4.2b3 restore file

Here are the files you'll need:

official 4.2.1 restore

4.2b3

Don't pirate this. You should have joined Apple as a developer and downloaded it legitimately.

iphone3,1.4.2.8c5115c.restore.ipsw

redsnow 0.9.7b6

Enjoy! I'll probably be doing this with iPad, so I'll post another one of these when I do.

Galaxy S Tab: the (real) big iPod Touch?

2010-11-10T10:44:00.001-08:00

Giz has a very unfavorable review of the Galaxy S tablet. But I point your attention to this image from that article:

That's an iPhone on top of a Galaxy S tablet on top of an iPad. For those saying the iPad was just a large iPod touch, I ask you to reconsider. Its a really good thing that Apple decided to get close to notebook proportions with the iPad and eschew the 7-inch form-factor, because otherwise you'd end up with what really is a big iPod touch in terms of use-cases / user-interaction.

Giz's review even points out that the UI of apps don't have to be changed at all to be usable instantly on the Galaxy S. Perhaps this class of devices (7-inch Android tablets) will be the iPod touch competitors Gruber keeps asking for. Maybe not though, since the media player type of device he wants would be sub $300.

Ars on HDCP Hack Implementation: "Pointless"

2010-10-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

From Ars:

The software implementation should be able to decrypt a 1080p30 stream given a suitably fast dual-core processor and about 1.6GB of RAM. The poor performance is due to the nature of the algorithm. HDCP was designed to be cheap and fast for hardware manufacturers, but operations that are quick and easy in hardware are often slow and inefficient in software. In spite of this, the developers believe they have opportunities for further optimization and improvement, making real-time decryption on more modest hardware feasible.

Just wait until someone ports this to FPGA or custom ASIC, bearing in mind that Altera dev boards start at $200. Instant HDCP cracking. What's at stake here is pixel-for-pixel rips of ANY content that plays on your TV.

HDCP Utterly Broken, Intel Doesn't Care

2010-09-17T10:29:00.001-07:00

I've been following this story for days now, and it appears Intel has responded saying that the master key that has been released is the real deal. From Ars:

Intel, unsurprisingly, said that it expected HDCP to remain effective. The spokesman told CNET, "There's a large install base of licensed devices including several hundred licensees that will continue to use it and in any case, were a [circumvention] device to appear that attempts to take advantage of this particular hack there are legal remedies, particularly under the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]."

In other words, Intel and the media companies don't care that their encryption systems offer only token protection and consumer inconvenience; all that matters is that the encryption systems are sufficient to meet the DMCA threshold for a content protection system: the threat of legal action, rather than cryptography, is their real tool against unapproved uses of digital content.

My thoughts exactly; by using an encryption scheme they knew was easily breakable and easy to implement, they can still claim they tried to protect copyrights with this technology so the DMCA applies.

They are wrong about being protected though; its only a matter of time before someone programs a little custom microcontroller or FPGA to use the key to make perfect digital copies of any content over HDMI. Then of course, they make all the code and PCB designs available for free. Hobyists and grey market peddlers alike will start making these things, and probably selling them on eBay. In other words, once something like this gets out, legal action won't be enough to stop its proliferation.

iTunes formats converge on 720p, and why aspect ratio matters

2010-09-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

While reading some forums about MP4 authoring, I came to the realization that Apple has finally converged on one video resolution for all of its devices. This is pretty nice, since there will be no more iTunes video downloads that are two files, one for your iPods/iPhones, and one for your AppleTV; now, the ENTIRE video playing mobile line (iPod touches, iPhones, iPad) plus AppleTV support H264 MP4 at 720p.

Now, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad all don't ACTUALLY have this many pixels on the screen, so your video format is always downscaled for viewing on these devices, but the format convergence is a huge enough of a benefit to offset this effect.

But the pixel mismatch is pretty huge too. In fact, the iPhone's/iPod's 960x640 display is two thrids the pixels of 720p, and after you scale a true 720p video to fit on the screen and take the aspect ratio mismatch (black bars) into account, your screen shows "540p" video, for only 56.25% of the pixels of 720p. The iPad isn't much better; it has about 85% of the pixels of 720p, but a 720p video on the screen shows up as "576p" with 64% of the pixels of 720p.

The point here is that aspect ratio really matters when you talk about video formats and video playback devices. Although Apple has converged on a format, they haven't converged on an aspect ratio, and it really makes a difference to your viewing experience. Now, whether or not they CAN do so is a hard question, but it makes for interesting food for thought. With several different film formats, SDTV, HDTV, DVD, recording equipment, etc. all having slightly different resolutions and aspect ratios, and with all the converting that goes on in the media authoring process, its still a big open question. For my two cents, the HDTV standards of 720 or 1080 lines in a 16:9 aspect ratio seem to be driving the digital video revolution we're seeing. Like Steve said the other day, people want to see TV shows, and they want them cheaply. Clearly ABC and FOX are on board for this 99c rental thing, and all of their shows are authored in 16:9 because HDTV standards are 16:9, and so this seems to be a reasonable aspect ratio to pick for the latest and greatest hardware platform. As another example, the majority of Netflix use I hear about is for watching TV shows, which are all 16:9. This aspect ratio also seems to kind of be smack dab in the middle of common formats. Its the least "wide" of the formats we consider widescreen, so its still okay for 4:3 SDTV content, and "anamorphic widescreen" formats don't have TOO much screen real estate wasted.

The problem with this reasoning is that its a tradeoff. Any aspect ratio a company picks for its hardware is a tradeoff between watching different types of content, and its really a sorry situation. What's truly necessary is for the film and TV and camera people to all get together on an aspect ratio; here's hoping that happens with 16:9, driven by the current HDTV zeitgeist.

Netflix comes to iPhone (officially)

2010-08-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

Well, my previous tutorial was all for nothing: its been officially released! Hit up iTunes for the download.

Update: Netflix for iPhone with only iPhone and iPad!

2010-08-23T13:33:00.001-07:00

I did something similar to the previous post, and it works! I did it without unzipping the IPA file; instead I transferred Netflix.app straight off the iPad onto the iPhone, and installed a user agent switcher so that the Netflix website would think I was an iPad. It just works! Jump after the break for better instructions. Enjoy!

Prereqs: jailbroken iPhone and iPad, with ssh running on both. This is in Cydia as "OpenSSH". Both devices should be on the same WiFi network.
On my jailbroken iPad, I used SSH Terminal to log into the iPad (from the iPad). Login as root (Note: if this is your first time ssh-ing into the iPad, the password is dottie or alpine; make sure you change it to something you'll remember using the passwd command). This is necessary because as far as I know MobileTerminal doesn't work on the newer iOS, it just crashes.
cd into "/var/mobile/Applications", then run a "find . | grep Netflix" to find the location of the Netflix.app folder. It'll be stashed in a directory with a long name.
cd into the long directory name from here, and then use scp to copy over this folder into "/var/stash/Applications" iPhone, something like: "scp -r Netflix.app root@IPHONE.IP.ADDY.HERE:/var/stash/Applications". You can find your iPhone IP address in the wifi Settings.
When it finished, reboot the phone.
Go into Cydia on the iPhone and install "User Agent Faker" from BigBoss repo (Tweaks).
Go into "Settings->User Agent Faker->User Agent->Apple iPad"
Go into "Settings->User Agent Faker->Applications" and toggle on Safari.
Log into Netflix.com in Safari and try and play an instant movie. Safari should go to the background and the Netflix app will come up and start playing the movie!

Netflix on iPhone

2010-08-17T07:57:00.001-07:00

This is worth a link and quote so I remember how to do this in the future. From Lifehacker:

Download the Netflix app for iPad to iTunes.
Right click on the Netflix app you just downloaded and select ‘Show in Windows Explorer' if you're on a PC, or ‘Show in Finder' if you're on a Mac.
Rename Netflix 1.0.4.ipa to Netflix 1.0.4.zip and extract the zip file to your desktop.
Look for the Payload folder inside the extracted folder. In there you will find the Netflix.app folder.
SSH into your iPhone and copy the Netflix.app folder to either /Applications/ or /private/var/stash/Applications/.
Change the permission on the Netflix.app folder to 755. You can do this by typing chmod 755 Netflix.app, which worked for me, but it looks like some are having trouble. If that doesn't work for you, try: chmod -r 755 Netflx.app instead.
Reboot your iPhone.
Now go to the App Store from your iPhone and download a non-Safari browser with identification options, such as Atomic Web ($0.99) or Perfect Browser ($1.99). In Atomic Web, go to Settings and select Safari - iPad under Identify Browser As. In Perfect Browser, go to Settings and select Safari iPad under Desktop Rendering.
Still in Atomic Web or Perfect Browser, navigate to Netflix.com, log in, and find a movie to watch instantly. Perfect Browser will close and Netflix.app will start playing your movie.

Also from modmyi and vimeo!

Jailbreak for the Lulz

2010-08-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

From USA Today:

For the moment, the most visible concern for Apple has been pranksters going into Apple and Best Buy retail stores and jailbreaking display models, according to tech blog Engadget. Yet, the security and privacy issues are serious.

Serious indeed.

iSpot released by Clear WiMax; works with all devices!

2010-08-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

Clear WiMax is offering a cheap $25 data plan that works only with Apple iOS devices. They sell you a device, and it acts as a WiFi hotspot only for Apple hardware. "How does it know what kind of device I'm using?" is the first question that popped into my mind, because there is nothing in the WiFi protocol that requires a device to identify itself. Well it turns out the hotspot knows which blocks of MAC addresses are issued by Apple. MAC addresses are easily spoofed though, as per the link below. I am considering getting this, I wonder if its available in Baltimore.

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2010-08/more-ispot-speeds-mac-spoofing/

Update: Engadget reports that hackers have figured out how to modify the settings on the device to prevent it from MAC filtering!

Jailbreakme.com blocked at the apple store

2010-08-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

As you might know, @comex has released a userland jailbreak that exploits a bug in the iPhone PDF rendering code. He uses it to root your phone and then install Cydia, the alternative app store. Well, it turns out that the Apple WiFi networks in stores automatically redirect you to apple.com when you try and visit this site! Fortunately, all the phones in stores have AT&T plans, so you just have to disable the WiFi and hop on the 3G, which unlike the in-store WiFi, isn't controlled by Apple. And just like that, you can Jailbreak phones while the Apple employees watch helplessly.

Not really, they probably would kick you out of the store if they saw you doing it, but how much can they really blame you, the customer, for visiting a website. If anything, its Apple's fault for making a browser flaw that can be exploited in this way. I'll bet if I bricked my phone using this method, I could get Apple to take back the phone and refund me since its a faulty product with a security flaw. Visiting a specific website can't really void my warranty, can it?

iPhone 4: Impressions

2010-06-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

It's a small iPad :-)

The screen resolution is ridiculous for this size.

Upgrading from an older iPhone makes it feel like my iPhone just got really fast overnight. By that I mean that since all of my contacts and settings were automatically applied to the new phone, the final user experience is like someone upgraded my hardware, but it's still MY phone. The experience is unlike any other phone upgrade.

The camera performs really well in good lighting. The video at 720p feels like cheap video but is still of a high resolution. By that, I mean that I was expecting a more film like quality, but it is still quite good. The film like aspect can probably be coaxed out by changing the frame rate down to 24 fps in post production.

The multitasking implementation is good enough if the apps support fast switching. They don't all yet.

The front facing camera will be useful once Skype updates to use the new hardware. I haven't made a facetime call yet, but I can certainly say that the camera quality is far cower than the back camera, according to my preliminary camera tests.

iPhone 3G for sale

2010-06-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

If anyone is interested, I'm selling my old iPhone on eBay, since I've upgraded. Get it for cheap!

Ebay listing

iPhone 4 came in a day early

2010-06-23T20:24:00.000-07:00

The last phone I got was the iPhone 3G two years ago; now I have got the iPhone 4! It came in a full day early. Its kind of an incremental compared to the 3GS, but coming from the 3G, its huge. As always, I'll try to post some impressions tomorrow.

Google TV: First Impressions

2010-05-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-tv-tv-meets-web-web.html

Damn, looks cool. Doesn't blow me away, yet. I'll have to see the tech demo of one in action.

If it can integrate your regular TV option (Cable, OTA, or Satellite) with web, and make it all searchable, I'd say they have a winner. It seems like any old HTPC (or any PC for that matter) can give you web content on your TV; its the integration with the standard TV options that will make this thing awesome. And they'll have to get the UI really slick and seamless when going between TV and web. Maybe couple it with a DVR that records all your shows (maybe every show for the past few days?), make them all searchable too, so that everything is kind of "on demand". Otherwise, it seems like you'd have two classes of content, one that starts whenever you like (web), and one that is "live" and can only be accessed during broadcast.

iPad Jailbreak: What doesn't work

2010-05-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

NES - a NES emulator crashes when you open it

iMobileCinema - Flash movie decoder doesn't seem to work with iPad Safari

This list will be updated as I find stuff.

Spirit Jailbreaks iPad (and all other iDevices)

2010-05-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

New jailbreak is out for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touches. I think it works with all models and all new firmwaress. This appears to be a userland jailbreak, so its FAST; one click does it, and my iPad rebooted, jailbroken in about 30 seconds.

Get it here: www.spiritjb.com/

Now to test out what Cydia apps work, and which ones will make me crash hard :-)

Daniel Lyons: Say What?

2010-04-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

Daniel Lyons is missing something here...

An Apple spokesman says Flash is "closed and proprietary" and that Apple supports other development tools that are "open and standard." But banning Flash also pushes customers to buy movies and TV shows from iTunes rather than watch them on a free Web site. It pushes developers to write apps that get distributed through Apple's App Store, rather than through a Web browser.

This is ridiculous. If you were using flash before to serve free content through a browser, you'll want to stick to the browser and just use the standards in question (HTML5 and H264) to serve free content to the iPlatform now. The user isn't forced into paying for otherwise free content, it'll just come down the pipes in a standard format, and Apple is the pressure forcing developers to use these standards. Look at all the companies who have been rolling out free, standards based (read: non-Flash based) video options like mad since the iPad was announced. To quote Steve:

YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Agreed.

Citrix + iPad = Frankentablet

2010-04-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

Using the Citrix Receiver for iPad to connect to Georgia Tech Virtual Lab remotely. This is Matlab running on a remote instance of XP. It works well and feels crazy :-)

Use iPhone tethering to get 3G on your WiFi only iPad

2010-04-04T20:24:00.000-07:00

I figured out a way to get the 3G service from your 3G enabled iPhone to your iPad, only using these two devices and software! Although there might be other ways to achieve this, this worked for me and is relatively simple to set up.

Jailbreak your phone

There is plenty of info online about how to do this, so google it. As far as I know, the iPhone 3G and 3GS can be jailbroken on the most up to date firmware.

Buy MyWi

Any jailbreak method should leave you with Cydia. So in Cydia, search for MyWi. This application enables the phone's 3G service to be shared over WiFi. I don't condone pirating, so seriously, BUY this, don't steal it via those sinful iPhone repos that are out there that hosting cracked apps. Make sure you get the No Rock version with Cydia. If you are using Rock as your jailbreak package manager, then get the appropriate download.

Enable MyWi

Name your network, set a password. Then hit the on switch to enable to WiFi tethering. You'll know its working when you see the blue bar telling you upload and download figures.

Connect iPad to this WiFi network

Go to your iPad Settings->WiFi. Find the network that MyWi has created. Join it and enter the password.

Win

But be careful of your network operator charging you for extra data, since tethering is technically not part of your "unlimited" service, especially here in the US with AT&T

Preview the iPad Gmail interface

2010-04-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

I changed my browser user agent string to the iPad's:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

And Gmail looked like this:

Awesome, iPad interface is live! To do the same, just change your user agent string in your browser too and give it a shot. The interface looks like Apple mail, and it looks like it will look sweet as well on iPad. Of course, I figured this all out this morning before i read this:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/02/google-tweaks-gmails-html5-web-app-to-better-utilize-ipad-scree/

I really hope the demand is low at the Augusta Georgia Apple Store, where I'm going to try and pick one up in the morning.

iPhone Autocorrect makes iPad into "upas"

2010-04-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

I'd bet a lot to say that it will autocorrect to "iPad" after the next update.

Regarding PS3 Linux Support

2010-03-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

Last summer, Ars interviewed Sony about the Slim not having Linux as a built in option. Here is what they said.

Why was the ability to install Linux removed from the system?
"There are a couple of reasons. We felt we wanted to move forward with the OS we have now. If anyone wants to use previous models and change the OS, they can do so." Koller said. "We wanted to standardize our OS."

There you have it folks. They said if we wanted to use previous models and change the OS, we can. Now they changed their minds. They really can't continue to be so fickle to their customers and expect us to keep coming back for more.

I used to admire Sony products, and preferentially look for them when buying electronics. Sony is now my last choice.

The quote is from here http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/08/sony-answers-our-questions-about-the-new-playstation-3.ars

Apple is singlehandedly changing Web video

2010-03-31T13:34:00.000-07:00

Apple has said "no Adobe Flash" on their mobile platforms. Its been like this since iPhone 1.0, and although there is a huge install base of iPhones, many websites have remained Flash only. Then the iPad was announced. Between January 27th and now, sites with huge user communities like NYTimes, Time, and CBS have been considering using the open web video standard (HTML5) instead of Adobe Flash. All of these groups have more or less acknowledged that the iPad is a major factor in their choice to offer video using HTML5. All of this influence from Apple is on account of what people expect from the unreleased iPad.

Before the iPad, we didn't hear about many big sites who were willing to deploy HTML5 for video. Apple takes one stubborn position and announces one new device, and suddenly HTML5 video is poised to replace the de facto Flash standard.

Things in technology don't move this fast. I'm awestruck.

Sony Open Letter: update

2010-03-30T10:09:00.001-07:00

Here is the reply I got from Sony. They are basically saying that the TOS/EULA allows them to update/upgrade my machine any way they please. And that I don't have to install the update if I don't want to, but the fact is that not updating will brick my console for online gaming, PSN, and new games which require up-to-date firmware.

Here is the reply:

Hello Raj,

Thank you for writing to us in regard to the newest PlayStation(R)3 computer entertainment system.

Due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the "Other OS" functionality through the 3.21 system software update. This will help to ensure that PS3 owners will continue to have access to the broad range of gaming and entertainment content from SCE and its content partners on a more secure system.

Furthermore, consumers and organizations that currently use the “Other OS” feature can choose not to upgrade their PS3 systems, as this is an optional update.

For further information: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-update/

Lastly, as stated in Article 11 of the SCEA's End Users License Agreement (EULA), "Such content may include automatic updates or upgrades which may change your current operating system [...]. Such upgrades or updates may be provided for system software for your PS3™ system, the PSP® system or other SCEA-authorized hardware. Access or use to any system software is subject to terms and conditions of a separate end user license agreement found at http://www.us.playstation.com/termsofuse. You authorize SCEA to provide such content and agree that SCEA shall not be liable [...] for provision of such content or maintenance services."

PlayStation®Network Terms of Service and User Agreement: http://legaldoc.dl.playstation.net/ps3-eula/psn/u/u_tosua_en.html

Please rest assured that we will convey your feedback to Sony Computer Entertainment America's ("SCEA") appropriate management.

Regards,
Tenera S.

Open Letter to Sony Computer Entertainment

2010-03-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

This is an open letter, which as also been sent to the Playstation Consumer Services via this page:

http://us.playstation.com/support/ask/

Begin letter:

PS3 OtherOS support is being dropped in a firmware update according to the Playstation Blog. The post advises users that they can choose to not upgrade at the cost of losing access to PSN and newer games. The blog cites "security concerns".

This is unacceptable. The OtherOS feature was advertised at launch, and was one of my main factors in deciding to purchase a PS3 system. I have been using Linux on my PS3 for academic projects in learning CellBE programming. I also enjoy playing games and accessing PSN. I should not be made to choose between the two, since the device was advertised as a gaming machine with the option to install any other OS I choose to install.

Once this update goes out, I will not update my PS3 system. I would like to know how I may access my games and PSN after this update ships. In the event that I am unable to retain my OtherOS functionality and play my games and access PSN, I will pursue other actions within my rights to rectify this situation.

Sony makes a terrible decision: drops Linux support on PS3

2010-03-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

Are they kidding?

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-update/

They are removing OtherOS support for the old PS3. This was a primary selling point when I bought it, as has been documented in this blog. I have Ubuntu installed on my PS3, and now I have to decide between using Linux, or being able to play games/PSN. This is unacceptable; if this firmware update gets pushed out the door, I'm going to Sony and ask for my money back. Sony advertised this support when I bought the console; by my refusing to update, my system will effectively be a brick when it comes to gaming. I paid for a fully functioning Linux machine AND gaming console, all in one nice box. Soon I'll have only half that functionality.

I wonder if a class action lawsuit is already in the works; I should do some searching.

RedEye mini coming to iPhone; DIY coming soon

2010-03-03T10:36:00.001-08:00

UPDATE 11 Nov 2010: it turns out I was wrong about it being the simple option, and right about the "at most" part. Thinkflood mentions the simple option themselves in a semi-technical writeup of the technology, but goes on to mention the shortcomings of this approach. Instead, they use a microcontroller to blink the LED, and the audio frequency signals are only for communicating with and powering up the microcontroller. This of course means that while the communication protocol between the software/phone and the Mini hardware can be reverse engineered, the microcontroller will still have propriatary code to drive the LEDs; it looks like reverse engineering this isn't going to be fun, easy, or cheap any more, so I guess this project is out. Old post follows.

Old Post

I'm excited about this product that claims to turn your iPhone/iPod Touch into a universal remote control.

http://thinkflood.com/products/redeye-mini/what-is-redeye-mini/

This takes me back to the old days of my Palm m505 that had built-in IR, and plenty of programs that did the universal remote functionality. Since the iPhone doesn't have built-in IR functionality, ThinkFlood decided to make a "hardware" component that costs $50 and plugs into your headphone jack. There is some free-of-cost software to drive it that has the universal remote functionality. I use quotes around hardware because my sense is that this is probably nothing more than an IR LED or two connected to a 3.5mm connector. All the smart stuff is clearly done in the software, which generates audio signals to drive the LED.

~~At MOST, the device has a watch battery, a few transistors, a microcontroller and an LED. Lets hope not.~~

I'm going to try and reverse engineer this thing and make a cheap device that works with the official RedEye app. The audio output should be able to be recorded and analyzed as a starter. Gutting a RedEye mini would be the other part. Stay tuned.

PS: Here are some relevent links that will help in the hacking.

http://www.engadget.com/2004/07/27/how-to-turn-your-ipod-in-to-a-universal-infrared-remote-control/
http://jumpjack.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/worlds-cheapest-remote-control-replicator-just-1/
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=469401
http://www.ladyada.net/make/tvbgone/solder.html

Pre-ordered Heavy Rain

2010-02-22T14:26:00.001-08:00

On a whim, I preordered this game from GameStop. It seems really different from other games out there, so I think it'll at least be an interesting play through. Incidentally, if you preorder you get access to some additional episodic downloadable content. I'll probably post some opinions here about it after I play.

Sync your iPhone with Ubuntu 9.10

2010-01-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to post this link. It didn't work exactly by copy pasting his command, but I did the same steps manually and it worked for me.

http://fatbuttlarry.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipod-touch-iphone-3g-ubuntu-910-in-5.html

Tethering with PdaNet on Jailbroken iPhone

2010-01-14T15:42:00.000-08:00

The PdaNet software provides tethering for jailbroken iPhones. The problem is, after version 1.33 of the software, its no longer free. Luckily, version 1.33 is still available in binary form here:

http://modmyi.com/repo/2debs/pdanet1.33.deb

At the time of writing, version 1.61 is the latest version and has lots of nice new tricks up its sleeve. There are versions floating around the web you can use, you know what to do with the following:

pdanet-version-1-61-a-27193

After obtaining a .deb file, make sure you've installed OpenSSH in Cydia on your phone. Then, all that's left is to scp it up to your iphone:

scp pdanet1.33.deb root@iphone.ip.addy.here:/var/root

The password would be alpine or dottie, unless you've changed this manually. Then ssh into your phone with the same password:

ssh root@iphone.ip.addy.here

And install the PdaNet package:

dpkg -i ./pdanet1.33.deb

Restart your iPhone and there you have it! Tethering over WiFi. If you managed to get version 1.61, then you can tether via the USB cable, but only if your computer is Mac or Windows (no Linux).

http://www.junefabrics.com/desktop/

iPhone Firmware 3.0 Syncing Coming Soon to Linux!

2009-11-13T09:55:00.001-08:00

There is an really alpha stage communication stack that is buggily capable of syncing with the iPhone 3.0 firmware from a Linux machine! I'll be testing it out and writing more about it's usability (even if it is an alpha). For now, the relevant links are:

http://marcansoft.com/blog/2009/10/iphone-syncing-on-linux/

http://marcansoft.com/blog/2009/10/iphone-syncing-on-linux-part-2/

Installing the Canon EOS Utility using the Updater Tool on Mac OS X

2009-11-11T11:39:00.000-08:00

This post is just link love to someone name Nav Jagpal:

http://www.navjagpal.com/blog/?p=16

This is a brilliant little hack to get the Canon EOS utilities without having the original installation media. Enjoy!

respring your iPhone from the command line

2009-10-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

You kill the SpringBoard process just like you would any other one, and it restarts the SpringBoard. Do this if you just installed a .deb package from the command line and want it to show up on your springboard.

killall SpringBoard

It just works

2009-08-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

Installing HP printers (and switching between them) was a pain in Tiger. In Leopard however, it just works; plug it in, and the printer is ready to print immediately. No hunting for driver downloads on the HP website, or hunting for install discs. And certainly no stupid bubbles in the corner of my screen, clicking through "Next...Next...Next" buttons to install drivers like Windows. Plug in. Print. Blog about it. I love this OS and its user experience.

Chrom[ ium | e ] Follow-up: Dev Channel, Flash Support, and Release Date Prediction

2009-08-04T21:07:00.001-07:00

I stand corrected; the "alpha" I referred to is now the Dev Channel, which is updated (about) once weekly. According to one Chrome developer from the comments of the last post, this build possibly gets some quality assurance before it is released through the channel. On Mac OS, you can download the DMG, and you can get the latest Dev Channel release by doing Chrome->About Chrome->Update, as seen here.

Personally, I think I prefer to stay on the bleeding edge with the latest nightly build, but you can possibly do this with the "Beta Channel" as well, so oh well, looks like me script is probably duplicated functionality. I'm still using it, and it looks like the nightlies are ahead of the Dev Channel at this point at least in one really noticeable regard: the flash plugin appears to be enabled by default on Chromium builds, while Chrome requires being called with the "--enable-plugins" command-line option, as in:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --enable-plugins

On either build, Flash movies don't quite work right in that clicking buttons play, pause, or any other button in the Flash embed is a matter of weird double-click voodoo that may or may not work. But youtube clips mostly autoplay and you watch them to completion, so as long as you don't need to reliably pause them, you'll be okay for now. I'm sure the devs will be fixing these Flash issues really soon. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear of Chrome as officially released for Mac OS and Linux within the next few months, maybe in time for the Windows 7 launch?

How to get Chromium / Chrome Nightly Builds on Mac OS X

2009-07-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

Google Chrome has been out as a public release for quite some time for Windows, but hasn't been available as a release for the rest of us, that is, Linux and Mac users. You might have heard is blazing fast. Luckily, since Chrome is just Chromium with official Google branding tacked-on, its available in source-code form which you can check out and build. This is a tedious process however; the build takes hours to complete from scratch on my Macbook. The upside is that the process can be automated on your Mac with some scripts that run automatically to pull the latest revisions, and recompile and build Chromium.

Then there is the so called alpha "release", which is nothing more than the binaries from a snapshot of their main tree, and which is by now a really old revision which doesn't do many useful things. As I last recall, this revision couldn't correctly copy and paste, keep bookmarks, or do any other non web-browsing function. Clicking around the web worked; nothing else did. Did I mention it was blazing fast? You know how when you start Firefox, the icon jumps up and down 8-10 times in the Dock while it loads? Chromium doesn't have time to make a single jump. Pages load faster than on Firefox for sure, and I like the interface better than WebKit nightlies or Safari proper.

Then, today, I found the Chromium project buildbot. My little bit of reading up on buildbot during my final days on the NS3 project told me this was the trick. If you don't know, buildbot is a system which automatically builds / compiles software from source then runs unit tests, regression suites, etc. on the code base to make sure there have been no regressions. It's highly configurable and can do this over a farm of real or virtual machines with different processor architectures, operating systems, compiler versions, etc. It can be configured to make the binaries it builds for different platforms available via its web interface. This is precisely what the developers of Chromium have done. Have a look here for yourself to see the Mac OS X builds. The file in this directory "LATEST" is a plaintext file with one line which is the latest revision number that the buildbot has tested, and there is a corresponding folder. Whenever the bot builds another rev, this file is updated, and a new directory full of the bleeding edge binaries is added.

So I whipped up this little script for myself. It pulls down the latest zip of the build, unzips out the Chromium.app, and moves it to your Applications folder. YMMV, but it works for me and here it is. (UPDATED 11 Nov 2010, thanks to thbarnes from the comments; the update makes it more generic by replacing my home directory name with "~", and updating the chromium buildbot URL to what the project is using these days. Also, make a folder on your desktop called chromium_nightly for this to work)

#!/bin/bash

BASEDIR=http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/snapshots/Mac
cd ~/Desktop/chromium_nightly

echo "Downloading number of latest revision"
REVNUM=`curl -# $BASEDIR/LATEST`

echo "Found latest revision number $REVNUM, starting download"

curl $BASEDIR/$REVNUM/chrome-mac.zip > $REVNUM.zip

echo "Unzipping..."
unzip $REVNUM.zip 2>&1 > /dev/null
echo "Done."

echo "Moving to Applications directory..."
rm -rf /Applications/Chromium.app/
mv chrome-mac/Chromium.app/ /Applications/
echo "Done, update successful"

I hope you like using Chromium as much as I do.

Update: Easy way to get Apple TV boot.efi

2009-01-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

Apparently, the file lives in the "firmware" DMGs that Apple offers for download. The most recent version at the time of writing is available from Apple here. You might find a more recent version listed at the bottom of the page on the AwkwardTV wiki, which also features a great collection of information about hacking with Linux on your Apple TV.

To get a copy of boot.efi (on a Mac)

Download the file, and mount it by double clicking; it should mount as /Volumes/OSBoot. On this mounted filesystem, navigate to System/Library/ and copy the boot.efi file you find here. That's all!

The previous post is still valid as a means of ssh-ing into you Apple TV, fun for tinkering anyway :-)

Enable ssh on Apple TV

2009-01-26T12:32:00.001-08:00

It has been a long time , but I am going to try and post more frequently again. Lots of technologically cool things have happened since I last posted. Most recently, I helped a friend install OS X onto an external USB drive in a way that makes the USB drive bootable on an Apple TV!

I followed the directions here mostly:
http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/f98/634.htm
There is a section where it mentions a boot.efi file, but no link or hint or info is given. ~~So, this is how you get the boot.efi file.~~

Update: I posted a much easier way; This guide remains valid as a way to enable ssh.

The approach is to install an ssh daemon onto the Apple TV, ~~and then copy the boot.efi file to your local machine.~~ On a Mac:

Get the atvusb-creator, and run it
Make a USB stick or drive with that tool. For this, we only need the ssh daemon, so untick the other options:
In the "Create Using->" drop down, choose your USB device which will be the vector for the ssh change.
Click the "Create Using->" button. atvusb-creator will download the Apple TV firmware. Let it do its thing.
When its done, eject the USB drive and plug it into a powered-down Apple TV, and then power up. You'll be greeted by Tux sitting on an Apple TV, followed by a kernel boot and some messages! It will install the patch, and then prompt you to yank the power on the Apple TV. Remove the flash when you do so, then power up the Apple TV.
Navigate the Apple TV setup menu until you find the Network settings which specify the IP address of the Apple TV. Lets call this a.b.c.d
From your Mac now, open a terminal.
~~scp~~ssh frontrow@a.b.c.d:/System/CoreServices/boot.efi .
The password is frontrow

Congrats, you now ~~have made a copy of the boot.efi from your Apple TV! Now use that file in your procedure as specified in the link above.~~ are in to your Apple TV! Play around with the terminal and enjoy!

iPhone Jailbreak Update

2008-08-26T14:07:00.001-07:00

I ended up jailbreaking my iPhone! I have been using the iPhone dev team's PwnageTool. The process is as I suspected:

Get the tool
Get Apple firmware (tell iTunes to download but not install)
Allow the tool to find and patch the firmware
Force the phone into update mode
Flash the patched firmware onto your phone
Restore your phone

The tool really walks you though steps 3-5, so it should be straightforward. There are some REALLY cool Cydia/Installer Apps that aren't available in the App store. My favorite is MxTube, a tool that lets you download YouTube content onto your phone for offline viewing. I started working on an app that does this on your Mac...but more on this later if I ever get it off the ground. The coolest thing in my mind is the ability to ssh into your iPhone and tinker. I have also successfully used SOCKS proxy techniques on my phone to enable me to use 3G on my laptop. More on this in another post as well.

The downside of jailbreaking is that whenever Apple pushes a new firmware out over iTunes, you have to wait for a new PwnageTool update which can patch the latest firmware. It has been my experience that it takes them on the order of several days to get out the PwnageTool update. Luckily, the tool which supports firmware 2.0.3 just came out, so I will be using that to update tonight. Happy jailbreaking!

Comcast Firewire Audio Update

2008-08-17T12:45:00.000-07:00

Okay, two updates. The first is that I have found a workaround to the issue! I posted it to the AVS thread first, so you can see that there, I am hoping to do a nice tutorial here soon.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=13927293

The second update is also related to the forum: someone there works for Comcast and is working to get the issue fixed! If you have this problem, please see the forum post and reply to the guy there with the info he requests. According to them, the engineers are looking at the issue.

Comcast broke firewire audio in firmware update

2008-07-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

I recently noticed my Comcast DVR (Motorolla DCT6XXX something) had different looking menus from before, indicating to me that the firmware had been updated. Incidentally, this breaks the firewire DVR goodness I have been using for months to increase my DVR storage space. I'm going to call Comcast and complain that they are breaking FCC rules here. The only thing I could find on the nets was this single forum post.

If anyone out there knows of a solution, please post comments here.

No word from the community on 2.0 jailbreak

2008-07-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

My RSS feeds are all coming up with nil on the iPhone jailbreak front. From what I can gather from reading comments in the few posts I have found, it looks like it doesn't brick your iPhone and works just as promised. I think I'm still going to wait just a bit longer for some good guides with more clear info to come out before I jump in head first. I'll be posting updates here as I progress in jailbreaking my iPhone.

iPhone 2.0 jailbreak released!

2008-07-19T20:38:00.000-07:00

That's right, the iPhone dev team have released the jailbreak they have been working on since the betas of the 2.0 software came out. It looks it is a MacOS X application that takes a Apple distributed firmware image (like the kind you get from restoring), and patches it somehow. This is as far as I have gotten, but I suspect you then force your iPhone into restore mode with some magic button presses, and load up the patched firmware. I'm not sure what opens up immediately, but looking through expert mode of the program, it looks like the all important Installer.app is unsupported as of yet. It looks like it installs the Cydia installer. I just found out about this, but Cydia appears to be an apt based package repository of iPhone ports of the usual GNU and BSD userland tools/applications. I think that a Cydia GUI frontend is installed instead of Installer.app, allowing for installation from the Cydia package repos.

I patched my firmware, but then quit out of the program when it reported a failure to enter DFU mode (that is, my iPhone wasn't anywhere near my computer let alone hooked up to it). I think I'm going to wait for the fallout, and see what the blogs have to say tomorrow morning. I don't want to brick my iPhone 3G, but this is just super exciting!

Pandora update

2008-07-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

There are several other pieces I saw in the blagosphere today that were relevant to what I was getting at yesterday about Pandora on iPhone. I just wanted to link back to them for reference.

I know yesterday I was going on and on about the seamlessness of the audio experience...well, on the drive home yesterday I finally got a skip in a song due to an AT&T deadzone. And it turned out that when I got service again about 10 seconds later, Pandora just skipped the remainder of the song and went on to the next track. So I guess it isn't perfect as I thought. While I'm on negatives, I guess I have a small feature request list too. It would be great if the app could continue to play in the background while I did other things (like the iPod app does). Presently, hitting the home button just quits Pandora and kills your music. And I think lyrics would be nice, but personally it would only add to the "wow they thought of everything" factor.

My Review of the Pandora iPhone app

2008-07-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Pandora app has to be one of the coolest things to come out of the App Store. This little gem of a piece of software is a way to listen to everyone's favorite "Music Genome Project" powered Pandora online radio. I have been using Pandora on my PC off and on for a couple of years now, and through the simple thumbs up or thumbs down I give it about songs, it has really honed in on my musical taste. When I heard there would be an iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 app for Pandora, I wasn't expecting too much. I figured it would be plagued by buffering/playback/network issues and a pretty bad user interface. In short, I expected it would be an unusable first cut at doing this kind of streaming. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The User Interface
The first thing you see when you load up Pandora is this minimalist load screen. It is clean, and has a nice Apple rotating dial thingy letting you know its thinking. The first time I loaded up Pandora, it asked me if I wanted to establish a new Pandora account, or if I was already a user. After selecting the latter option, I was prompted to enter my Pandora user info. To my pleasant surprise, the next thing I was greeted with was a list of my stations, which at the moment contains one station that is really perfectly tuned in on what I like.

I'll never really cease to be surprised by how good the iPhone SDK controls all look, and by making the controls available in the SDK the same as those from the toolkit Apple's own developers use, it gives the impression that the iPhone experience really hangs together well. Even these third party apps look really polished and like a true extension of the iPhone since it is all the same handful of really well made GUI components.

After selecting "Raj's Radio", it started playing my music. The user interface here is on par with what the native "iPod" app has to offer! It uses the same layout, and at first glance you wouldn't know that you aren't using your iPod app! It has cover art that is full resolution for the iPhone screen, and aside from the expected play/pause, skip, and volume controls, there are the Pandora ranking features (thumbs up and down), and an additional menu that allows you to mark a song or artist as a favorite for your Pandora account, or go immediately to purchase it in iTunes. This integration is something they could have skipped, but makes the experience that much better for people who are interested in downloading these tracks permanently. You can also "flip over" the cover art to reveal a Pandora specific feature which reveals how the song was selected to match your musical tastes, something familiar to Pandora users. For having expected them to really botch the look and usability of the interface, I was really impressed with how clean, iPod-esque, and easy the experience was.

The Streaming Experience
The look and feel is all great, but how does it perform as a streaming music player? I knew that 3G had enough bandwidth to support this kind of application, but I assumed that there would be some network issues, constant "rebuffering", or maybe some kind of lapse in playback as I drove around through deadzones etc. On, 3G, none of this was the case. The network fast enough such that I think it actually buffers one entire song ahead at the start of playback. Even when I hit a deadzone inside my parking deck about halfway through a song, it still finished playing it. As for streaming when you are on Wifi, it is completely seamless. There is about a 1-2 second delay between songs when you are on Wifi, feeling completely natural for an inter-song pause. On 3G this pause was a bit longer, I'd say about 5 seconds, but still quite tolerable.

The transition between Wifi and 3G is completely seamless too from a listening perspective due to the nice long playback buffer. In a test, I started in a building on campus with Wifi, listening to Pandora. I got in an elevator down to a parking deck, got in the the car and hooked my iPhone up to the car, and drove through campus on my way home. The Wifi handed off my iPhone gracefully from one access point to the next as I drove about a half mile towards the edge of campus, and then when I went out of range of Wifi, my phone picked up 3G service. Not a second of audio was sacrificed. No stutter, no rebuffering. Just like listening to my iPod. This thing is fucking brilliant. Forget satellite radio, this idea is poised to be an XM/Sirius killer when widespread cellular IP-based broadband ever becomes ubiquitous (i.e. when WiMAX or LTE or some sucessor catches on). This Pandora solution already makes satellite radio obsolete for its users.

For the purposes of testing, I did end up disabling 3G to see how Pandora's streaming would handle being on the EDGE network. I have to say, this is not to be recommended, but YMMV. On EDGE, I DID get all those rebuffering stutters in audio I was worried about. And more importantly, even when it would work, when using EDGE I could constantly hear that interference noise you get on speakers when your cellphone is transmitting...you know the one, the morse-code-esque beeping, it was non-stop, and loud enough to be heard over the music. No such problem on 3G. I WAS using an ancient tape adapter with a long wire (read: EDGE antenna :-) to connect the iPhone to my car, so this might not be an issue for everyone. I even saw a review on the App Store itself claiming that Pandora worked like a charm on EDGE, so it might work in your area. I'm going to stick to 3G.

Conclusion
Pandora is an awesome application for the iPhone 3G. It is blessed with an intuitive and good looking interface. The new 3G networking capabilities really make it possible to have a seamless audio experience, even driving around. It performs fastest on Wifi, but the difference is a 2 second difference in initial buffer time between songs. It buffers ahead enough to account for deadzones and handoffs, and even the Wifi<->3G handoffs didn't phase the music experience. I wouldn't recommend it for use on EDGE exclusively according to my one simple test, but YMMV. If I had to give it stars, I'd say easily 5/5.

On the difference between jailbreaking and unlocking

2008-07-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

Lots of articles in the blagosphere have been talking about "unlocking" the new iPhone, but have been using the term incorrectly. I really want to clear things up, because its annoying to see great sites like Ars Technica and Gizmodo screw this up. So lets get to it.

Jailbreaking
The act of "jailbreaking" your phone is making it open to third party applications which are not in the app store. This term comes from FreeBSD's chroot jail, a mechanism to segment a machine to different users as if each segment is its own machine. It is a "jail" because you can't break out of it and get into the juicy guts of the system, you can just access the segment you are allowed. Similarly, you can't access the inner workings of your iPhone, you just access the parts Apple allows, which is just their built-in functionality and anything they allow on the App Store.

There are somethings Apple probably wouldn't allow for use on the iPhone ever, like:

An interactive shell/terminal application to access the system guts
An ssh daemon, like OpenSSH (which would allow the iPhone to act as a proxy server to forward 3G over wifi to your laptop)
A web server
Custom XNU Kernel and extensions

To sum it up, since Apple wouldn't allow any applications that make your iPhone more into a general purpose computer instead of a consumer electronics device, you jailbreak your phone to do so. Since you now have a general purpose computer, you can do what you want to do on it, not only what Apple allows.

The jailbreaking process requires exploiting holes the iPhone software's "jail". In the past, this as been achieved e.g. by exploiting some bad TIFF image rendering code on the iPhone. Basically, you just load up a custom made corrupt TIFF image in Safari, which actually contains code. The bad rendering code will cause the iPhone to run the code, and voila, you have broken out of the jail they created for you. These custom made TIFF images then go on to install applications that allow you to access the guts of your system and do whatever you like, essentially rendering the already-in-place jail useless. Jailbreakme was a site that had one such TIFF image that works for older iPhone firmware.

Unlocking
Cellular phones in the US (and practically everywhere else) are typically configured so that you can only use a phone on the network from which you purchased it, even if there are no technical reasons limiting its usability on another network. This is why you can't easily take an AT&T phone you bought here and use it on the T-Mobile network, or take that same phone over to Europe and pop in a local teleco's SIM card to use it on that local network. This is called carrier locking of a phone.

AT&T and others do this so you don't buy a phone of theirs and take it over to another network. They want to retain their user base, and they want you to use their expensive international roaming services when you are traveling abroad instead of using a cheaper local service. There is no technical limitation that prevents any AT&T phone from working on GSM networks in the US (T-mobile), Europe (Vodaphone, O₂, Orange, etc.), or anywhere else in the world. It is simply a way for carriers to protect revenue and market share.

Since there is no hardware limited technical issue, people figured out that by modifying the software that runs the phone, you can make it work on any e.g. GSM network worldwide. This is what's called "unlocking" your phone, and is actually how your phone comes by default from the factory. The carriers later lock the phones for use with their network. Some phones come with the capability to be unlocked by the carrier over the air, or by a code entered by the user. These are for situations in which the mobile operator allows you to use your phone on other networks, for example, in places they have no coverage and no parter carriers. Otherwise, there are various methods by which you can hack the device to unlock it.

In the US, unlocking your phone in a manner unapproved by your carrier was formerly thought to be illegal under the DMCA, as it circumvents a measure meant to enforce copyrights, but there has been an explicit exemption to the DMCA that protects your rights to use your phone on any network it will.

So are Jailbreaking and Unlocking related?
In the case of the iPhone, the answer is maybe. There are typically two ways to use a phone in an unlocked manner.

Use a hacked SIM card. This is typically a thin adapter that attaches to your SIM card, and fools the phone into thinking that the SIM card belongs to the network to which your phone is locked, even though the card is from another network. It has been demonstrated with the latest iPhone 3G. This requires no jailbreak, since you are modifying a SIM and not the phone in any way.
Hack your phone. This requires a jailbreak.

Option 2 is really the holy grail of unlocks, because it is a software only solution, requiring no SIM modification, a process which can require manual cutting with a razor and gluing of the tiny slivers of plastic we call SIM cards. The reason the software unlock requires a jailbreak is because in order to start "hacking" or doing anything useful towards unlocking your phone, you have to have control over what software it runs. This is the jailbreaking step. Once you have jailbroken your phone via an exploit, you can find software out there that hacks its way past the carrier lock.

But note that they are not one and the same. They are quite different things. Unlocking requires jailbreaking, but that doesn't mean that's the only reason to jailbreak. I, for example, want to jailbreak so I can run free games not available in the app store and use ssh SOCKS forwarding to get 3G my laptop. I have no intention of carrier unlocking my phone, but am waiting on a jailbreak to be released for my iPhone. More on this below.

Current status of Jailbreaking
The situation could get a little complicated in the future because of different revisions of the firmware on the iPhone, and now, two different hardware revisions. BUT, that said, all of the first generation iPhones can be jailbroken, regardless of firmware version number. Most of the software out there to do this support all revisions of the iPhone firmware up to the major 2.0 release that accompanied the new iPhone 3G. As of today, July 15, 2008, the latest iPhone firmware (iPhone 2.0) has been jailbroken. The bad part is, the jailbreak is unreleased as of yet, and is in heavy testing to work out any potential bugs. I am personally watching this closely, waiting for the release announcement from http://blog.iphone-dev.org/. If you are following this whole thing, I would suggest signing up for the RSS feed on that page so that you know exactly when they release the jailbreak.

Send SMS for free using AIM on iPhone!

2008-07-14T10:59:00.000-07:00

In the US, just add a contact named +1(ten-digit-phone-number-here) to your AIM buddly list, and then IM this contact using the AIM application on the iPhone. Free outgoing SMS! Gotta spread the love to the original source where I saw this.

AJAX done right = desktop class application in a browser window

2008-07-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to post a quick link to one of the coolest things I've seen online in weeks. This has to be the cleanest AJAX webapp I've ever seen. And its fast. http://280slides.com/

Google Docs' presentation app has nothing on this little gem. So they'll probably buy this 280slides company :-) Check this app out!

Got a 3G iPhone!

2008-07-14T05:17:00.001-07:00

And I only waited in line one hour today! We got there an hour before opening, and were in the first batch to get in (I was the LAST person of the first batch!) After getting in I was in the store maybe an hour, and that was WITH some trouble porting my number. The thing I'm MOST excited about hacking soon is running the phone as a bridge / gateway / modem so I can "tether" it to my laptop to get HSDPA wherever I go! Alright, lets be honest, their 3G coverage sucks outside of big cities, but at least I won't ever be stranded without EDGE, aka connectivity anywhere. Hell, if AT&T doesn't catch wind of this, I might even drop my cable internet service.

There is something funny about still calling it "tethering" though, because these days the process is over wifi. It goes something like this: you jailbreak your iPhone (waiting on pwnageTool release), then install the requisite software on it to get it to forward traffic from HSDPA->802.11b. Then you just connect the iPhone and your laptop in an ad-hoc network and boom, 3G data on you laptop.

Technically speaking, there are several ways to achieve this at various layers of the protocol stack. If done as a purely L2, bidirectional forwarding mechanism, you have a bridge/AP type of setup. If the IP layer does this, you kind of a have a router/gateway setup. If done at the application layer, its like a proxy server. The easiest route on the iPhone is to do things at the application layer, because adding functionality to the data-link and network layer requires changes to drivers and the kernel code. Since not many are in the business (except for Apple) of hacking the XNU kernel code, we run a forwarding application at L5. I hope it is as easy as is described for the old iPhone.

iPhone 3G announced!

2008-06-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

Well, Apple finally did the official announcment, and the new iPhone will be released on July 11th. Notable pros over the older model are 3G, GPS, cheaper price point ($199 or $299), flush headphone jack (so you can use standard headphones without an ugly hack or adapter) and better battery life. Notable cons are increased data plan cost ($30 up from $20), and loss of text messages bundled in the plan.

People are bitching all over forums and blog comments about the increase in plan price, doing clever math like saying that $10 more a month for 24 months of contract + $200 for the phone actually ends up costing more than the current $400. I personally wouldn't even think of being so stupid, seeing as how the new data plan is FASTER. Obviously 3G adds value to the phone, value I'm willing to pay for. Saying the data plan price went up isn't an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended). Who are these cheap bastards that expect to get HSDPA for what AT&T charges for EDGE 's 2.5G offering? Better data plan = more cost for the data plan, nuff said.

AT&T DID drop the included text messaging, which is a bitch move; but its a 5 dollar cost to pick it back up, so in my mind the plan went up $5 on a phone that DROPPED $200 in cost. And lets not be assholes and forget that the phone has gotten more kick-ass while dropping in price.

UPDATE: Giz wrote a piece about this that was far more widely circulated than my humble blog. Check it out.

WWDC Live Audio Stream!

2008-06-09T10:17:00.001-07:00

This is up right now at this moment:
http://www.iphonealley.com/news/wwdc-2008-keynote-live-audio-stream

I'm listening to them talk about the new iPhone software...hopefully they'll announce the 3G iPhone within a few minutes!

GTA4 and new Ubuntu!

2008-05-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

I picked up GTA4 for PS3 last night at got to play for about an hour. It seems pretty good, supposedly really sandboxy/open ended, but as of yet I'm running around doing missions with some loser Russian guy. As an interesting comparison, it looks to me as if the Xbox360 version of the game is sporting better graphics:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/33470.html

It looks much less blurry on the Xbox, but this is a pretty low res comparison, and who knows how they did the capture...it must've been done via component cables, so there is no indication how the purely digital HDMI would stack up against each other.

In other interesting news, the newest Ubuntu release (Hardy Heron) is out! I somehow missed out on the buzz over this release...but I'll have some reviews of features once I get it installed. It'll be a few days I guess because the Canonical servers seem really bogged down by the legions of users upgrading, and I'm getting about 50kb/s to the upgrade server at the moment.

Got to play with a MS Surface

2008-05-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

I've not been a huge fan of Microsoft in recent years, what with switching to a Macbook for home and Linux at work. In fact, I haven't used a PC for more than 5 hour total in the past two years! But they have had this multitouch enabled Surface computer thing in the pipes that seemed really cool. And I have to say, it didn't really disappoint.

The AT&T store here in Atlanta has a store full of Microsoft surface computers. I will start by saying that it being Microsoft product running Vista meant that OF COURSE one of the machines was frozen. Thats right, out of a store with maybe 6 MS Surface machines, one was down, hung on the home screen and unresponsive to all touch. At least it didn't blue screen :-)

I tried several of the other machines that WERE working, and I checked out two of the apps they had. The first was a cellular coverage map application (very iPhone/Google maps-esque) that did touch scrolling and pinch zooming in/out, and little else. I poked around until I found my block in Atlanta, then I lost interest.

The second app was pretty cool, it was one that supports multiple phones being put upon the surface, and then bringing up menus, info, movies, data specs, etc about each phone (this was showed off in a MS demo video I saw as a potential app). It does so by visually identifying tags placed on the bottom of each device. Putting down a phone and selecting "colors" brought up a panel/window with a colored phone, and the panel was movable, rotatable, and resizeable. All the windows had this kind of similar feature with decent manipulation of the panels in a multitouch way, supporting pinch zoom in and out, scrolling, as well as multitouch rotation. The multitouch was pretty good...I think the touch detection, sensitivity, etc. need some more tweaking for responsive, but overall the experience was only SLIGHTLY hampered by the somewhat sluggish feeling of the response.

This kind of multi-user multitouch hasn't been seen before in the consumer arena, so I think it will be very interesting to see where this kind of technology is going. I really think that there are some untapped ideas here regarding collaboration, etc. If this could be coupled with more conventional interfaces like keyboards, I can see this technology really taking off for presentation/demo scenarios, technical group sessions, etc. I think it'd be cool as hell if a coworker and I could manipulate a couple of panes of code simultaneously with multiple keyboards, while still maintaining the multitouch movement capabilities to share a workspace.

More HD comes to Atlanta

2008-05-01T10:07:00.001-07:00

I noticed a brand new Disney channel HD last night...but no HD content spotted as of yet. Along with ABC Family, I guess this is part of some negotiations with ABC to roll out their HD stations.

ABC Family HD comes to Comcast in Atlanta

2008-04-24T07:24:00.000-07:00

Its nice that all these channels are going HD...but this channel is SO weird! It starts in the mornings with 700 club, then goes into episodes of Full House, Sister Sister, Sabrina the Teenage Witch...then ends the day with Greek or Kyle XY or some movie before going back to the 700 club...wtf! Family indeed...Greek isn't a family show at all. Not that I care, its just a weird ass mix.

The other thing that sucks is that the only truly HD content I've seen so far is 700 club. Everything else looks like crap (because he recorded before HD was around). Crap is a bit harsh, at least it looks like a lot of the older sitcoms they show come in at about a DVD quality instead of shitty 480i. Wikipedia claims that Kyle XY and Greek are HD too, but I wouldn't be caught dead watching those.

Using a WTR54Gv5 as a Wireless Bridge to Connect non WiFi devices to the net

2008-04-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

I plugged the NMT up to the internet for the first time in a while to get the latest firmware. This is always an annoying process because while all the other internet capable devices in my entertainment center (PS3, Wii) have WiFi built in, the NMT does NOT, it only supports wired Ethernet. This means I have to run a 15 feet cable across my living room any time I want to use the networked functionality. I got to thinking that it would be nice to get my wireless signal to be picked up by some kind of small dongle with an antenna to pick up WiFi, and an Ethernet cable to go to the NMT.

This kind of thing is called a wireless bridge. It is kind of like an access point, except that it blindly forwards traffic both ways (wireless->wired and vice versa), whereas an access point does NAT and DHCP, and expects the WAN to be on a wired link and the LAN to be on the wireless. As far as hardware goes though, an AP has all of the right parts to act as a layer 2 bridge.

Because of the similarity to an access point, my idea of a small dongle was beginning to fall through, but a different idea was forming in my head: try to use an access point in this kind of bridge mode to make my NMT effectively wireless! It should be possible to do in software on an AP. I immediately started playing with two Airport "Snow" routers I had recently bought to see if they supported this mode out of the box, but they didn't (the newer Airport Extreme series CAN do this out of the box).

So I started looking at my other router, the Linksys WRT54G. I had read that this device was highly moddable with non-Linksys firmware available due to the fact that the device used Linux code, and Linksys released the source code to the firmware to satisfy the terms of the GPL. Clever hackers used this source as a starting point to create custom firmwares that can do lots of fancy things that the stock firmware cannot. One of these fancy things is bridge mode. This was the ticket...by reflashing the device to use the open source free DD-WRT firmware, I was able to use the WRT54G in bridge mode. Here's a quick guide on how to do this if you have a WRT54G, version 5 or 6. This is written from a Windows perspective, but the only difference with Linux or Mac is how you do the static IP assignment, and TFTP step. The static IP assignment, you probably know how to do on your OS. On Mac OS X it is System Preferences->Network->Show:Built In Ethernet->Configure Ipv4 using:Manually. And you can skip the steps that are setting the MAC address of the new firmware correctly. On Mac or Linux, first cd to the directory where you downloaded the dd-wrt firmware, then:

tftp -e 192.168.1.1

Then at the tftp prompt, you want to do this:

put dd-wrt-blah-blah-micro.bin

When it report success, you are done! Ctrl+d out of tftp, and the router should reboot and voila, you have a magically better router. Log in, and remember the username is root and the password is admin. To get the wireless bridging you desire, you can use either client mode wireless (in which the router DHCPs and NATs the wireless signal to its wired ports) or client mode bridge (in which the router simply does a layer 2 forwarding). I prefer the bridging, this way all the devices are on the same subnet.

Using older Airport base stations with Leopard

2008-04-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

I wrote a while back that I can't get excited about Leopard on the Mac...and that's still true, I'm still holding out and using Tiger. But I did come across this tidbit for Leopard users with older Apple Airport basestation hardware. It turns out for a while there, there was no way to configure your older Airport (graphite and snow) on Leopard; the new Airport Utility was only compatible with the newer Airport Extreme and Express lines, and with Time Capsule.

Needless to say, people were pissed that their hardware stopped working with the update. The situation was bad enough that some poeople started selling old Airports: I even picked up two older basestations for a good price from a friend of a friend who had given up and bought the newer products (exactly what Apple wanted).

Well, it seems Apple has finally rectified this situation. Last week, they released a tool called the Airport Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow. This is a legacy compatible utility that lets you configure your older basestaions. Prior to this, a workaround was discovered whereby a version of the admin utility for OS 10.3.3 could be extracted from an old installer package, and copied onto a Leopard machine. It looks like Apple probably just repackaged and renamed this older tool to be officially Leopard compatible.

Using Ghostscript to Concatenate Multiple PDF Files into one

2008-04-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't written here for a while, but I decided to post helpful tips I've come across. Have you ever wanted to take a bunch of PDF files and concatenate them all together, but don't have Acrobat Pro, or any other editor capable of doing this? Well have no fear. If you are a Linux/Mac user, the following command will do the trick, assuming you have Ghostscript installed:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH [list of files here]

I guess this will work on Windows too (if GS has a command line interface), but YMMV.

NMT has arrived!

2008-01-07T13:17:00.000-08:00

Its been a while since I've posted, but the NMT has come in! It seems to be a pretty solid little device...it can definitely handle the HD stuff I've thrown at it so far (1080i MPEG2 cable TV). On the other upsides, its cheap and the development team is really VERY responsive. I posted a reasonable feature request to their forums, and they replied within a day saying they'd add the feature. Less than two weeks later, they released new firmware with my requested feature!

Now some of the downsides. Firstly, it can't decode all audio formats! The DTS audio technology has to be licensed, and since the manufacturer doesn't pay the fee, they just output the audio digitally as raw DTS without decoding. You need an audio receiver to do the decode. Luckily, I don't have any material that is DTS encoded. Secondly, the system is far from perfect in seeking, FF/RW etc. There is no backwards seeking for MPEG2, and the seek/searching is a little buggy in general. Sometimes when I press play during a fast forward, it will just return back to the beginning of the clip (REALLY annoying). Another issue I've found is that certain combinations of container format and audio codec cause the audio to not be recognized or played back. I've found that when I use VLC to transcode to their MPEG2 PS, any AC3 audio is not recognized. When I use ProjectX, the generated "m2p" file's audio is recognized. The terminology is kind of muddled for me, as there are MPEG2 PVA, PES, and PS...and I'm not sure what VLC or ProjectX are really doing under the covers.

So basically, this thing is really still a work in progress. It still has lots of issues and bugs to work out with the different container formats and seeking, but they are regularly releasing firmware updates and I am really glad that they were able to go ahead and release this product to the market.

Updates - Assasin's Creed, PS3 Divx, NMT

2007-12-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

Assassin's Creed
Ubisoft finally released the Assasin's Creed patch that fixed up the freezing issues. After completing the final portion of the game using the patch, I have to say that it appears that they have removed the freezing bugs entirely. The graphical bugs are still there, but it doesn't matter so much to me anymore since I've beaten the game. It seems it doesn't have a whole bunch of replay value. I might go around and collect all the flags one day when I beat Ratchet and Clank and the new Mario game.

PS3 Firmware Update
Sony released the newest firmware for PS3 (2.10). The updates include support for the final Blu-ray specification, and a full Divx-blessed MPEG-4 implementation. I'll be doing some testing with different formats to see what all plays and what all doesn't, but I hear that basically Xvid and Divx both play from media (hard drives, CDs, etc) but that streaming Xvid doesn't work. I'll post my results.

Networked Media Tank
In other news, I was finally "invited" to order that Popcornhour NMT. In case you didn't know, because of all the demand and buzz around the device, they are are allowing customers to place orders on an invitation basis. You sign up in an invitation queue, and when its your turn you get an order invite that is good for two days. Its kind of like preordering to guarantee that you'll get the NMT eventually. So I'm excited about this device shipping...it should be in sometime in January.

Assassin's Glitch

2007-12-03T09:54:00.000-08:00

I got Assassin's Creed for PS3 even after reading the mixed reviews. All the reviews I've seen echo the same thing: repetitive gameplay. So with this in mind, I decided to go ahead and buy it anyway. I figure its about expectations: I wasn't expecting a lot of variety, so I wasn't disappointed. I'm now on the sixth assassination into the game and I am still not bored with the gameplay. Saving citizens is probably my favorite part of the missions you can complete: there is something satisfying about owning four or five guards and then walking away stealthily just in time to hear the investigating guards say "Who has done this!". And all the RPG folks who are used to getting engrossed in a story will probably have no problem with the verbosity of this title (there is a LOT of dialog). Does it have real stealth on the assassinations? I've only managed to pull off ONE truly stealth assassination so far, so I'm thinking no. Is it a hell of a lot of fun to fight and stealth kill guards, scale the rooftops, pickoff archers with throwing knives, and fly through the air for cinematic hidden blade kills? ABSOLUTELY. The game falls short in several areas, and could have been one of the most amazing titles ever. But having known what to expect a priori, this title is still really really fun.

And now the bad part, the reason for the title of this post: the game is glitchy as HELL. And on multiple levels. For example, there are blatant graphical bugs, like people and smaller details like pots and boxes being drawn-in off in the distance. I even once had a guy draw in about three feet in front of my eyes. Aside from the intermittent framerate drops that last for a second or two, after one assassination as I was running back to headquarters, the framerate dropped to about 10 fps or less (no lie) and stayed that way. It was unplayable. And I don't mean for 5 or 6 seconds: it was several minutes. There was no more guard action or chasing, I had cleared the alert, etc. and it still lagged.

And these graphical glitches are the upside. When I next entered headquarters to complete the assassination in 10fps mode, it froze on the next load screen. I rebooted (luckily it had saved the assassination) and tried to leave for the next city. The load screen froze again while riding my horse out of town. All told the game froze about 4 times on Saturday, and twice yesterday. They are always slightly different too:

The load screen where Altair can walk around never goes away. I was gone for half an hour, and when I came back it was still "loading".
White "fast forwarding" screen freezes, but you can walk around "underneath" the white screen. It was frozen like this for minutes, but I could run and climb and hear myself doing these things from the audio.
During a pickpocket while I was locked onto a guy, all he characters including myself stop moving and I can't pause the game, but the camera can still be controlled.
Straight up freeze in game.

Basically, it seems to me that I get one freeze that requires a reboot once every 1.5-2 hours of continuous gameplay. When I notice this sort of mean time before crashes and freezing of software, I immediately think "memory leaks". Its the same reason that Firefox 1.x is pretty much guaranteed to crash if you use it without quitting it for 3-4 hours. You'd think that the developers MIGHT think to run some sort of primitive memtest or profiler on some real gameplay scenarios. It appears to me that they didn't. There is word from Ubisoft that they will be releasing a patch addressing these issues. Let's hope that it doesn't take TOO long to come out. All told though, this game is still striking me as so damn fun that I don't really care.

Installing Gutsy on PS3 and musings on Blu-ray backups

2007-11-20T11:16:00.000-08:00

Well, its done. The instructions on psubuntu.com are really all that you need, so I won't go into much detail here. I'll note that I tried an update straight up using the update-manager, but this left me with an unbootable system, so I decided to install from scratch. Then I upgraded the kernel to support Bluetooth, Wifi, and UDF 2.5.

I popped in a Blu-ray movie, and was amazed to see that the UDF 2.5 functionality actually works and the disk was mounted as a drive almost immediately. I was able to browse through the disk's directories etc. but due to AACS, was unable to play any of the m2ts files containing the actual video and audio. Next thing I'm going to tackle is how to work with Blu-ray movies to decrypt them and put them onto my external drive for watching. The following things come to mind, which remain to be tried out:

Using the dd command to rip an ISO of the entire disk from PS3 to an external drive, then mounting that ISO in Windows and using AnyDVD to do the decryption.
Using DumpHD in on the PS3 itself to do the decryption (I THINK this is written in Java, have to make sure).

Of course there are annoyances here with number one, like determining what filesystem plays nice with Windows and Linux while supporting 20 GB files, all the while remembering that my target drive is formatted for playback with my Mac. I think HFS+ is my best bet, as Ubuntu supports it, MacDrive is available for Windows, and its Apple's native format. Number two sounds easier, but I'm not sure at all how user friendly the UI is. I guess I'll post another update maybe after Thanksgiving.

Divx support coming to PS3!

2007-11-13T10:37:00.000-08:00

That's right, it looks like there is going to be some sort of a software update either from the Divx folks of from Sony that will enable Divx playback on the PS3.
This is a huge step towards making this device a better media hub. I think its really funny that in July, I got the following comment in response to my rant about the suckage of the PS3's media abilities:

"No console supports xvid/divx for a reason and they most like [sic] never will." --Roberto (who won't keep a public profile)

Looks like "never" was less than 6 months. Oh well, people are dumb and horribly wrong sometimes.

Ars is also reporting that the 360 will be getting Divx soon too. This has me now wondering if the 360 would do a better job at playing 1080i HDTV rips. I think the 360 even supports HFS+ formatted drives, making it a good candidate for us Mac folks as a HTPC type of device. The question now for me is how much of a dork do I look like if I have all three of the major gaming system's that are out there now? And I've been looking at this NMT solution from Popcorn hour, but they're making like 50 of those at a time and selling out before I can get one. Oh what to do?

Why I can't get excited about the new Mac OS X Leopard

2007-11-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

There have been plenty of reviews out there about how awesome the latest version of OS X is. I can't help but see a few a day as I go through my RSS feeds. Well, I'm here to say that I'm not thrilled. It doesn't actually seem that much greater than what I've got now with version 10.4. I'm going to run down a few of the new features, and my opinion on them as applied to my Macbook. Looking at their advertising, the biggest features they are pushing are:

Snazzy Finder and UI enhancements.
Time Machine backup capability.
Spaces.
Upgrades to apps: Mail, iChat, and Safari.
Parental controls.
Boot camp.

Let's start with number one. Obviously, these are cool...new ways to interact with your system, cool new visual effects, etc. They've added a iTunes-esque cover flow UI for navigating your files, a cool file preview mode, and some improvements to the dock. That said, they kind of screwed up little aspects of the dock too...remember that little black triangle under your icons that told you an app was running? That's gone, replaced by a blue bubble that is about the same color as the new dock itself. Coupled with the dock transparency, you'll have no idea which icons have this icon and which do not.

What about Time Machine? From a software perspective, it is probably one of the best solutions to regular backups, and seems very well written. The thing is, I have a laptop. Time Machine requires an external drive, and I'm not going to buy one and lug it around or want to plug into it regularly, especially for a feature that is pretty useless for me. My laptop is for lightweight use, i.e. I don't have lots of un-losable data on it. Its just a feature that I don't particularly desire. In other words, I never once thought OOH! I need daily backups on my Macbook!

Then there are Spaces...oh what to say. They're a tired old UI that have been around in the GNOME desktop for years as workspaces. They even shamelessly stole the name. Being a GNOME user in Ubuntu, I can say that they aren't phenomenally useful if you have multiple monitors. I suppose they'd be useful on my Macbook though, but again, it doesn't WOW me at all.

The application upgrades are all really cool...I just don't use any of those apps. I use Firefox for browsing, gmail for mail, and Skype for messaging when I need it, if at all.

Parental controls...I'm not a parent, its my personal laptop. Completely useless to me. Nuff said.

Boot camp has been upgraded from the beta. What does this mean? Well, they released some new drivers on the Leopard install DVD, and got rid of the public beta installer while replacing them with install files on the DVD. That's all! Boot Camp isn't even a separate technology...its just multiple OSs, a feature of ALL hardware, coupled with some drivers from Apple so that some of the devices like the built in webcam is better supported in Windows. You can hack your own multiple OS setup without Apple's blessing anyway. And I'll bet I'll just be able to get the new drivers soon too.

So, while there are some cool features in Leopard, none of them are must haves for me, particularly at the $129 price. The only thing that makes me go "hmm" is the new Finder and UI aspect. I think they're cool, but not THAT cool. I guess I've gotten spoiled on getting my OS upgrades for free with Ubuntu. To summarize, if this upgrade were $50, I'd get it in a heartbeat. But at the $129 price, I'd rather spend my money on Wii and PS3 games.

Gutsy on PS3

2007-10-24T09:21:00.001-07:00

There are two places I use Ubuntu: at work, and on my Playstation. The work machine has been upgraded, so now it is time to upgrade the PS3 to Gutsy. This should be very interesting...I'll tackle this in the next few days and post updates.

Upgraded to Gutsy

2007-10-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

The upgrade went off without a hitch! I'm now a proud user of Ubuntu 7.10.

In terms of features, it is more of the same of what you love about Ubuntu. The system runs as it should, and I'm happy with it. I really haven't noticed much new, other than the Display control panel that now has support for multiple monitors. It didn't do what I wanted really (screwed up the resolutions), so I went back to the files I had from when I manually edited my configuration files to work perfectly. Its a shame that this was supposed to be one of the biggest features, but doesn't seem to quite work. The whole system seems a little more snappy and responsive though which is nice, but it could just be my imagination.

Upgrading to Gutsy Today

2007-10-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

I decided to beat the rush and get the newest Ubuntu a day early. It goes official release tomorrow, but there is a chance that the servers will be overloaded on release day. For those of you wanting to do the same today, just run "update-manager -d".

Back to Technology: The Networked Media Tank

2007-10-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

I've recently lost a little focus, writing about things other than technology. Today, I'd like to go back, namely to a product that is coming out soon, the networked media tank (NMT). This is from a company called Sybas, but they only sell to other distributors right now, like popcornhour. I've been looking at one of these, as it is basically a standalone playback device that can play directly from a hard drive, and can connect to a screen/TV via HDMI, component, etc. Think "stripped down home theater PC" (or "Apple TV without the restrictions of the iTunes/Apple universe").

I've got a lot of media recorded from my DVR and backed up onto external HDD, and as I've said before, it would be great to have a simple solution to play this content back without having ANOTHER huge device in my entertainment center, be it full blown computer or my laptop. I thought the PS3 would do it, but Sony's MPEG playback is still bugging out on files that do fine on a PC...but I digress, I'm tired of that not working. As it is now, I have to set up my laptop whenever I wish to watch this content. I have to:

Plug my laptop into the power outlet.
Plug the external drive into the power outlet.
Plug USB from the drive to the laptop.
Plug the mini-DVI to HDMI cable into my laptop.

Its pretty intense and takes just a couple minutes longer than I want. The NMT might solve my problems now, as it can playback the files off of my drive directly. Of course there is still the dreaded filesystem support question...it looks like the NMT supports the Linux EXT3 filesystem and no others, so this is another issue...sigh.

If you want to comment, at least keep a public profile

2007-10-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of tired of reading comments from people and thinking that I'd like to know more about them, only to find that their profile isn't publicly shared. I'd say that this is 99% of the case with comments. Please people...if you are going to comment, at least make it so the reader can find out a little bit about who you are. The meaning of a comment on an article or post is diminished without context. For example, if I post on someone else's blog about a technical issue with, I don't know, software, well then at least you can look up my profile and blog an maybe glean that I am somewhat qualified to talk about such things. I feel that people kind of hide behind anonymity, which is the point of the internet I suppose, but it never hurts to bring in real world context into online discourse.

Watch out for Amway/Quixtar

2007-10-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

I was recently approached in a parking lot by a fresh off the boat Indian guy looking for the campus bookstore. I pointed him in the right direction and began walking away. As I did, I heard the question "Are you from India?". I get this a lot, and I politely answered that no, I am not, but my parents are from Bangladesh, the country next door. He starts asking me where I'm from, what I do, etc., and he exchanges the same information with me. He tells me that he works in IT, but that he also has his own business on the side in which he has a concept similar to amazon.com, in which he is partnered with people like Dell and IBM to help increase their market share. I think "cool, this guy might have connections, it never hurts to keep contacts." I'm thinking that because he is a kind of start up, he might need a coder to manage this new amazon.com type of website. How wrong I was.

He asked for my phone number, and since I thought he'd be a good connection since he had a start-up internet business, we exchanged numbers. I get call Friday night saying how he really felt good about me, and that his company was kind of hiring. He wanted to meet to discuss the opportunity.

The meeting started with a condescending overview of how franchising works, and how McDonalds makes their money, and how I have to multiply my time by getting others to work for me if I want to become wealthy. Instead of offering me a job opportunity in any real start-up, he goes on about how I can open an online store through this system he uses, and how I can get bonuses for signing up other people into the system. It became apparent that this guy was just trying to get me to sign up so that he gets more of a cut.

Basically this guy has an "online store" where all of his product is provided by this company called Quixtar, which is just the online arm of the notorious Amway. I suspect the online store website itself isn't anything at all but just the Quixtar page itself, and I'd have to put in some sort of ID number indicating that I'm buying from him. The fact that he had given me a business card with no URL for this supposed e-business website should have tipped me off.

He showed me some DVD on his laptop of a conference he attended, a Quixtar conference where 20k people with 40 millionaires among them attended. Of course this is a part of the scam, you have to drink the cool-aid and attend conferences and meetings to be successful...and guess what, you have to pay big money to attend, money that goes directly into the hands of higher up members who host the conference to teach you how to be successful. There is some bigwig up at the top of this scheme who started a company that sells informational materials and conference tickets on how to be successful in this program.

The point is that there is really not money in moving the retail products themselves, only money in selling promotional materials and signing up other poor saps. I think I've learned my lesson. This guy was dishonest with me, misrepresenting himself as a businessman looking to hire, when really he is just a peon in this pyramid setup. Note I don't say pyramid scheme, because that is a very specific thing regulated by the FTC, but Quixtar straddles the boundary between multi-level marketing and pyramid scheme. So if you ever encounter someone claiming to be a business person wanting to discuss an opportunity, makes sure you ask them upfront if they are with Quixtar...and if they are, wish them good luck and walk away.

Gutsy Counter

2007-10-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

Its just a few days now until Gutsy goes official. If you've been on the fence about Linux, give this one a try when it officially comes out.

Editing hosts file for convenience and ad blocking

2007-10-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

DNS Servers
When you type in www.google.com into your browser, we all know that there is a DNS server somewhere that gets queried to resolve that name into an IP address that can actually be used to start connections. But did you know that you can override these lookups locally? The TCP/IP stack looks in a file called "hosts" that resides somewhere on your system to FIRST resolve names to IP addresses before querying the DNS. This file is just a plain text document with a list of IP addresses and hostnames. On most *nix machines (MAYBE not on all BSDs though), the file lives in /etc. On Windows, it's usually in windows\system32\drivers\etc. Play around with it.

Make Digg Load Faster
I've had a bug with the digg ad servers that causes each digg page to take upwards of a minute to load, with my status bar saying "Transferring data from y.digg.com", so I added the following line:

127.0.0.1 y.digg.com

This redirects all requests to y.digg.com to the IP address 127.0.0.1 which always corresponds to your own machine, the localhost. Since your machine isn't hosting any evil ad server, your browser can't establish a connection and gives up immediately trying to contact y.digg.com, making digg load faster. There are other fun things you can do, like add aliases to your hosts file for commonly accessed hostnames:

192.168.1.110 rajserv

This could let you do things like ssh rajserv on a local network instead of having to type in the whole IP address.

General Adblocking
The more general thing to do with this technique is to find hosts files on the net that have a list of all the bad adservers on the web. One such file can be found here, or you can just google for "hosts file". Some care must be taken editing these, just make sure to keep back up copies of the file when you are editing. On *nix, you will have to be root, so make sure to do the proper su or sudo before editing.
Having one of these adblocking hosts files pretty much blocks every ad/banner/cookie you can imagine, making the web experience a lot faster for many sites. Enjoy!

Learning Typesetting in TeX and LaTeX

2007-10-01T06:32:00.000-07:00

If you are in academia, or ever have been, chances are you've seen the output of a system called LaTeX (pronounced la-tek or lay-tek). This typesetting system lets you create professional document with figures, mathematical equations, etc. Many professor's notes are written in this format and then distributed via PDF or HTML. Many professors then take sets of notes like this and publish textbooks. Pretty much every peer reviewed journal out there requires submissions to be formatted in LaTeX. In short, if you want to be in academia, its important to know how to work with it.

I just wanted to share this good tutorial I found:
http://frodo.elon.edu/tutorial/tutorial.pdf

This is a good reference if you are wondering "how do I insert a _________?", this document will most likely tell you how to get the symbol you desire. Another good place to get this type of information is from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula
It turns out that the equations and math typesetting in Wikipedia use a subset of TeX, of which LaTeX is a variation/implementation. So most of these are valid and useful, although you may find that some of the tags/commands on this page don't work as expected.

I hope this was useful to SOMEONE...

Gutsy goes beta officially tomorrow!

2007-09-26T07:36:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been using Linux at work for about 9 months now, and switched to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise a few months ago in hopes of having GUI configuration of multiple monitors. The version of Ubuntu that is the newest officially supported one (Feisty Fawn) has no such tool, but the release that is coming out next month (Gutsy Gibbon) does:
And this goes officially beta tomorrow! I'm excited. Of course it's been available in alpha form for a few months now, but the development process is moving along towards the release date next month.

Motorola STB 5C bug?

2007-09-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

DVB can be encrypted, making it useless once captured via Firewire. If you're using the Apple Firewire SDK, these channels come up as "Copy Once" in the Copy Protection field. I found a workaround...just play with the Pause and Play buttons during playback and recording. I hope this works for you, and sorry for the intentional vagueness. The DMCA is a scary thing.

1080p Macbook Update

2007-09-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

This is an update to my original post, which is a full tutorial on getting 1080p to come out of your new Macbook.

I've been getting comments about how the workaround given here doesn't work for some particular TV models. Several people have issues with 10.4.9. I would suggest firstly to update to the LATEST (10.4.10 I believe), which is what I've been conducting my tests with.

There is another caveat I failed to mention, and that there is an issue with signal strength that could be at fault. I've read reports on other forums that TVs expect higher signal voltage levels than what the Macbook outputs, resulting in the TV being unable to lock onto the appropriate parts of the signal. This could be the problem for people getting a picture for a moment, and then a garbled nonsense screen. This device could be the answer, although it is pricey. Googling for HDMI ampilfier might help, or if you're and adventuresome electronics tinkerer, you might be able to DIY, that is make a three channel high bandwidth amplifier.

Others have suggested using switchresx:

Take the 1080i settings and just disable interlaced button and set the 30Hz refresh rate to 60Hz. I now get the problem that the picture is totally blurry/blocky. (Thanks David)

This is unfortunate, because when this works correctly, you get a glorious full resolution image that looks breathtaking.

My last bit of additional advice is to bootcamp install Windows if all else fails. XP home is sufficient, and hopefully you have an old copy lying around. I retired an old Pentium II machine I had with XP Home on it, and transferred the license/key to my Macbook. Or you can hope Leopard has fixed this issue entirely, but that is a more expensive solution, and one that we have to wait for until next month.

iPhone recessed headphone jack DIY hack

2007-08-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right, this "hack" enables you to use your iPhone the way YOU want to, not the way Apple wants you to. They want you to use their stupid headphones or an adapter, and YOU want to use your own.

What does it even mean to hack a headphone jack, does that even make sense? I think of hacking as a way of making an item/object/system/whatever do something which it isn't designed to do.

Which brings me to the fact that the iPhone has a recessed headphone jack, meaning that unless you happen to have a pair of headphones with an incredibly small connector, it won't quite fit right into the iPhone. Companies like Belkin try to sell you an "adapter" that fits into the recessed jack for like 10$, but this is a bunch of bull, its a direct feed through. We can make one ourselves for a few bucks and about 2 minutes of our time. Get a hold of the following:

A 3.5mm M/F audio cable if you want to plug in other headphones. If you are trying to plug the iPhone into another device that accepts 3.5mm input, use a M/M cable. I would suggest Monoprice, but you should get a good look at the cable before you buy, so try your local Radioshack if you are unsure. More on this below.
A sharp knife (anything that uses a razor, like a utility knife or box cutter, etc).

I had these both laying around the house, and I suspect many others do too. If you're buying the cable, make sure you get a good look at it, particularly near the base of the metal jack. There is always a little bit of a metal disk at the base, and you have to make sure this is smaller than the recession in your iPhone. In my experience, most cables have one small enough, but try to look at to make sure anyway.

To apply the hack, simply whittle away some of the plastic jacket around the jack itself. I would recommend using angled strokes starting at the metal disk's edge, then cut a wedge off downward. Do this all the way around, so your plastic jacket is now more of a cone than a cylinder. Don't give into Apple's BS, DIY instead.

Return of the Hack
This is really just another option, but "return of the hack" sounded so much cooler :-) Get a hold of an old pair of iPod earbuds. I happen to have a pair I stepped on that don't work. It's little connector is small enough, so we're going to use it to make a Frankencable. If you have ANY experience splicing your own cables, this should be cake, but I'll walk you through it anyway.

Snip snip. That's right, cut the cable just anywhere between the jack and the earphones.
Keep the side with the jack and strip away the insulation, about two inches worth. Your teeth work well for this, or just get crafty with a utility knife (or god forbid wire strippers).
There should be three little wires in here, strip away about an inch on each one of these.
Repeat steps one through three on your good headphones, but cut closer to the jack this time and work on the headphone side instead of the jack side. See where this is going?
You should have three bare wires sticking out of both parts. Now all we do is twist them together in matching pairs, and electrical tape each splice. Now electrical tape all three together, et voila.

If you wanted to (and aren't afraid to try) you could apply some solder to the twisted splices, and maybe use some shrink tubing instead of electrical tape. This makes for the best solution, but the one given above is quicker. I'll leave the details up to you. Enjoy.

1080p out of a Macbook

2007-08-11T16:29:00.001-07:00

You have a shiny new Macbook, and you want to try it out with that 1080p native TV you have. Chances are you have an HDMI input on your TV, and hopefully one that also accepts external audio. This is a little start to finish guide on how to get it all hooked up and working.

The Hardware
You'll need the following:

If you already have an HDMI cable laying around, you can instead get a DVI-HDMI converter for step two. Luckily DVI and HDMI use the same kind of TMDS video signals/protocol just with different connectors, so this is a nice simple conversion of pinout with the signal not even being altered. And its all digital, so don't too much worry about signal loss through all these connectors.

A Problem Arises...
This covers the hardware side. Run the mini-DVI to DVI from your Macbook, plug in the DVI-HDMI cable you have/made into this, then plug the other end into the TV. If you want audio, use the RCA cables from your audio out to the HDMI audio in. You'd think you could plug it into a 1920x1080 native TV and it would "just work" right? Well it doesn't:

As you can see, the maximum resolution listed in your display preferences is "1920 X 1080 (interlaced)". There is apparently a little bug in OS X ~~Leopard~~ Tiger that makes it output 1080i, and no matter how you fiddle with your Sytem Preferences and Display settings, it won't give you 1080p. (Updated 9-26-2008; I mistakenly said Leopard before, I meant Tiger. I think Leopard fixed this issue, not sure though)

The Workaround
Despite this bug, there is another related bug that makes 1080p work. First, go to System Preferences -> Displays, and check "Show displays in menu bar".

Before

After

You might or might not have already had this enabled. Then, go to the display settings, and set the external monitor to something else like 1600 x 900, then back to 1920x1080 (interlaced). This has the effect of adding the 1920 x 1080 resolution to your list of recently used resolutions. Note overscan is in this set of menus too, and depending on your TV, you might have to turn it on or off. The TV needs to be set in a 1-to-1 pixel mode too. This is called "Full-pixel Mode" by Sony, it will vary by manufacturer...go through the TV menus to find these settings.

So now check the top Display menu you just enabled: it should have two options for 1920x1080 on the external monitor with no difference between the two visible in this menu:

There is however, a difference: one is progressive, the other is interlaced. All you have to do is try the other one, and watch your TV to see when it says it is receiving a 1080p signal. Bingo!
Update 10-15-2007: Increase the number of recent items in this menu if you still don't see the extra item. Thanks to Kristofer from the comments for pointing this out.

Caveats
You might notice some low framerates if you try 1080p trailers and the like. This is because the Macbook (with its RAM sharing Intel GMA 950 graphics chipset) may not be the best powerhouse to deliver full framerate 1080p, so I'd reccommend dual booting into Windows. Why? Because for some reason, according to Wikipedia, Windows will share up to 224MB of your system RAM for graphics purposes, while OS X will only steal 64MB. So if you have the RAM for it, Windows will do a better playing back some 1080p trailers and whatnot. Enjoy your new monitor :-)

Multiple Monitors in Linux

2007-08-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

I had been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 at work for about 6 months. It was truthfully a pain in the ass to use because the package management is based around rpm and a Red Hat tool called up2date. The default repositories up2date looks at are pitifully lacking substance. I'd found a useful repository of RPMs, but I found changing a bunch of .conf files to point to the new repo was still painful. Then recently my configuration tools like up2date, the screen settings, and the print settings wouldn't launch. For those of you in the Windows world, all of my "Control Panels" were unavailable. So, my desire for a nice GUI update/package manager combined with the non working control panels lead to one conclusion: scrap RHEL4, install Ubuntu. I decided to add another graphics card and monitor to my setup at this point too, hoping the Ubuntu install would pickup on the hardware and automagically set up multiple monitors. Unfortunately I was wrong.

Quick and Dirty secrets of xorg.conf
My Ubuntu install went off without a hitch, but the second monitor never came on. To be clear, I have a main AGP graphics card, and a much older crappy PCI one. They both connect to their monitors (two of the same model of Dell LCD) via VGA. It turns out the problem is with the X server, which is the thing that is the basis of every GUI on Linux, be it GNOME, KDE, Xfce, whatever. Configuring X is the first step in getting multiple monitors with the proper resolutions, color depths, etc. There is this file /etc/X11/xorg.conf that does the magic. If you have the right configuration settings here, you can make wondrous things happen. The first thing I thought was "Hey, Ubuntu probably has a really nice GUI multiple monitor configuration!". Turns out it doesn't so that means that I'd have to modify xorg.conf by hand. At first I tried setting up something called Xinerama using a forum post I found. No luck with this, even though I am convinced I did things exactly like they said. After digging around some more, I came up with the following, and it pretty much works. Where the Debian configuration of X failed to find and set up the second monitor, X's own configuration of itself does not. Try the following:

Reboot into a failsafe shell/single user mode. This keeps X and your desktop environment from running. You need to do this to configure X (can't configure itself while its running). Failsafe mode usually involves stopping your boot loader by pressing some buttons during bootup, then picking the appropriate option. Note that you'll be root, so be careful.
Make sure all graphics cards and monitors you want are hooked up and ready to go.
Do a "X -configure". This gets you a local version of a configuration file called xorg.conf.new
Now try it out: "X -config /root/xorg.conf.new". You should be greeted with some test patterns on both screens! The mouse will move back and forth across both screens too. Simple as pie.
Now quit X: ctrl+alt+backspace. If you didn't get the test patterns...abandon all hope, I know not what else to do.
Backup your working xorg.conf just in case: "cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.working"
Copy over the new config file to where X expects its configuration file "cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf"
Do a "reboot"

There you have it, you should have two desktops! If it didn't work, you'll get some scary output...no fear if this happens. You'll be in a root shell, so just replace the file with your backup ("cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.working /etc/X11/xorg.conf") then "reboot".

If it worked, this gets you a fresh, working start to editing xorg.conf. The two Desktops are still distinct and have no way of moving windows between them at this point, so one last thing to enable that is to open up your xorg.conf ("sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf") and add the following line:
Option "Xinerama" "true"
To the "ServerLayout" section. Save the file, then do a ctrl+alt+backspace to try it out! Remember if you screw things up, just go back to the backed up file you have. You might need to edit the "Screen" section some to support the display modes you want, and maybe comment (#) out the HorizSync and VertRefresh parts of the "Monitor" section. You can see your backed up copy of xorg.conf for the formatting of the display modes.

Final Thoughts
It's not Windows. It's not easy. It's kind of a pain to set up. Oh Ubuntu, why don't you make a GUI tool to make this configuration nice and easy, and why oh why don't you include it as a System->Preference option? I guess they're working on it for 7.10. But I hope I have saved you some of the trouble I came across when trying to configure multiple monitors. Happy editing!

Thoughts on some HBO HD broadcasts : 810i ?

2007-08-08T19:12:00.000-07:00

I was watching HBO HD the other day, and Flight of the Conchords came on. I noticed that although this was a 1080i broadcast, and the aspect ratio of the show appeared to be a regular 16:9, the whole show was windowboxed top to bottom, left to right:I know this is Entourage (which doesn't display like this), but you get the idea. The gray colors are for emphasis, you most likely see black all the way around. You might have noticed the same thing about HBO HD commercials too. My Sony TV has a "zoom" feature that zooms in on a 16:9 shaped box right in the middle of the screen, so that the letterboxing is perfectly offset and I have fullscreen. This got me to thinking: what effective resolution am I getting out of this ?

Some Quick Calculations
The whole frame is 1920x1080. Its pretty clear that the lighter gray box is a 4:3 box maximally fitting the larger box. The height is 1080, and if it is in a 4:3 proportion, then the width of the smaller box is 1080/3 * 4 = 1440. So we're down to 1440x1080. The content itself is 16:9, maximally fitting in THIS box. So if the width of the content is 1440, the height is 1440/16 * 9 = 810. So we're finally down to 1440x810.

Keeping in mind that the original broadcast was interlaced, we could easily call this resolution 810i (even though this isn't a broadcast standard). So when I use my TV's zoom/scaling feature, what I'm seeing is broadcast 810i. Pretty interesting...companies like HBO probably use this little shortcut to get away with putting out a broadcast comparable in quality to 720p, while saving on bandwidth over a 1080i channel.

Conclusion
Who knows, its just a random thought I had. Feel free to comment with your thoughts...

uPnP server for PS3

2007-08-06T08:35:00.001-07:00

This is just a brief roundup of what I have found, and what has worked for me for streaming to my PS3.

The XP side of things
I've had luck with the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/devices/wmconnect/default.aspx
I personally don't trust WMP11, I use WMP10, so I had to find the standalone version of Windows Media Connect that works with WMP10. Some googling did the trick. Note that Hi-def program stream stutters over 802.11 connection I am using.

On the Mac side of things
I found this:
http://www.applesource.com.au/how-to/how-to-stream-media-to-a-ps3-from-a-mac/210/
This basically is how to setup the FOSS package called Mediatomb for use on your Mac. If you already use the Fink package management system on your Mac, this is a lot easier. If not, this still walks you through.

Sorry for the short post, but I figure this will help some people out.

The Truth about Upconverting DVD Players

2007-08-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

HD and related technologies aren't that well understood by the general public. We've all seen the hype about "true HD" displays and about "upconverting/HD compatible" DVD players, and not many people care about or understand what these things mean to their viewing experience. I had a friend recommend that I get a 1080i compatible DVD player instead of getting BD or HD-DVD right now while I wait out the format wars. He claimed his DVD picture was as good as HDTV. I've read advice that says that for fixed panel displays, upconverting DVD players match the native pixel count of the display, and thus provide a better picture. I'm here to say this:
all of the above is bull. Whether we're talking about interlaced vs progressive, upscaling DVD or not, its all fancy marketing terms to get you to think you can get a better picture. The truth is, both of these rely on real-time interpolation, and its a question of which device has the best algorithm.

What is interpolation?
It is any method of guessing at information you don't have. For example, we all know that an interlaced signal shows you all the even lines of one frame, and then all the odd lines of the next. For a CRT, the phosphorescence lifetime (the time it stays bright) of the pixel plus the phenomenon of human visual perception called the persistence of vision effectively blur the picture to where we don't notice we are seeing half the data for any given frame. But for any fixed resolution panel display (LCD, PDP) this wouldn't be the case. These each have a native resolution (usually 1920x1080 or 1280x720 pixels), and what you see on the screen is in this resolution, ALWAYS. For example, I have a 1920x1080 display. When I view broadcast 1080i HD from my cable box, somewhere along the path from where the cable enters the cable box to where image gets rendered on the screen, the picture has been converted to 1080p. Period. The cable box could do the conversion, or the TV could. In my case, the TV does it. It performs a deinterlace. It separates the even and odd lines of the pictures, then guess at the missing pixels, then shows you the two frames back to back. What about native 720p content from my cable box? In this case, my cable box is set to upconvert this to a 1080i signal (so my TV isn't always switching modes from channel to channel). How does it do this? Interpolation. It takes the pixels it has, spaces them further apart (with unknown pixels in the middle), then guesses at the unknowns. The 1080i signal gets to the TV, where it is deinterlaced (again by interpolation) to give me my 1080p display. DVDs? Same thing. A regular DVD player outputs 480p. This gets upconverted by my TV to display at 1920x1080.

Wrong Focus in the Consumer Market
So while people are worried about upconverting DVD players giving a better picture, they don't realize that their TVs do the same scaling themselves. What they should be worried about is HOW each device does its interpolation. There are various algorithms for interpolation (zero-order, bilinear, bicubic, all sorts of proprietary adaptive ones based on identifying motion, etc). Consumers should want to know the details of how each one works, and a side by side comparison. This comes up for my regular old DVDs: do I let the PS3 playing the DVD do the scaling/upconverting to 1080p, or do I let my Sony TV? The answer is "whichever one is better at it" but at this point it is impossible to find comparisons such as this available to consumers. You might think that with them both being Sony, they should be the same, but the truth is there is no way of knowing other than side by side comparison. I suspect the PS3 has more raw DSP capability, and my tests confirm that getting the PS3 to do the upconversion gives a visibly better PQ.

The bottom line is this: there is a fundamental idea in information theory that says that no algorithm can recover 100% of missing information for all inputs. So a particular algorithm might do really well for some inputs, but MUST fair horribly for some others. It is all about what devices have the best algorithms for the type of signals we feed them, namely moving pictures. And this is something you have to decide with your own two eyes.

PS3: recorded HDTV playback update

2007-08-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

As opposed to a few days ago, now I know that captured HDTV (MPEG2) playback is a problem with the PS3:
http://www.redkawa.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64
http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=5227297

I'd REALLY like my PS3 to play my recorded HDTV. I'm outraged that they could make such a crappy decoder. Oh well, maybe one day they'll release a decoder that isn't buggy as hell (one can only hope they'll do a multicore/CellBE enabled port of VLC, but this will never happen :-).

In related news, Sony wants me to send in my PS3 for repairs because it won't play MPEG2 correctly. That's right, instead of admitting what is a common problem others are facing, they are accusing my hardware of being faulty. I've sent them several e-mails, even linked to a file demonstrating the problem, and asked them to forward it to a technical person to look at it. The first two rounds of e-mail went like this:

Raj: My MPEG2-PS files aren't playing correctly on my PS3.
Sony: The Playstation only supports (other formats) and MPEG2-PS. Make sure that is what you are playing.
Raj: Yes dumbass, that's what I said. Here is a link to a file for you to test, and for you to debug your MPEG decoder against.
Sony: Sorry, I can't answer that question on e-mail. Please call us.

Of course phone support gets me nowhere (transfered back and forth between SCEA and Sony corporate). Then I get the dreaded "are you using the most updated system software?" I just want to file a bug report, is it that hard!? A valid input file to your decoder isn't rendered properly, so you should fix your decoder. It is that simple. I'm sick of being disappointed with this thing. The only thing keeping me from returning this 380W space heater is Ninja Gaiden, and the promise of buying a Blu-Ray movie or two to test this thing out.

If anyone downloads the offending file from above and tests it on a PS3 vs. on a PC, please leave a comment. It is a VERY brief HD clip from the television series Entourage, and is for debugging purposes only, which I believe constitutes fair use under US copyright law.

I was wrong about Transport Stream Audio on PS3

2007-07-31T07:17:00.000-07:00

I'd recently written that sound playback is screwed up on PS3 for MPEG2-TS files. It turns out I was wrong...its a "feature" not a bug. I got the following from Sony:

The PLAYSTATION(R)3 computer entertainment system will only support video files saved under the the
following formats.

- Memory Stick Video Format (MPEG-4 SP (AAC LC), H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Main Profile AAC LC)
- MPEG-1 (MPEG Audio Layer 2)
- MPEG-2 PS (MPEG2 Audio Layer 2, AAC LC, AC3(Dolby Digital), LPCM)
- MPEG-2 TS (MPEG2 Audio Layer 2)
- AVI (Motion JPEG (Linear PCM), Motion JPEG (u-law))
- AVCHD (.m2ts)

Notice that Dolby Digital audio is supported in program streams, but unsupported in transport streams. So that is why my TS files are missing audio occasionally. This STILL doesn't explain why some valid MPEG-2 PS files are choppy and not working. I have posted a clip to Sony...hopefully they will take a look at it and find the bug that causes the playback to suffer. I'll keep updates posted here.

Backing Up files from your DVR (and why its not pirating if you do)

2007-07-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

Since yesterday's post, I've gotten some readers who seem to think that copying content off of your DVR is illegal, and somehow piracy and/or copyright violation. The FCC, in late 2003, ruled that all cable customers with HD set top boxes should have functioning Firewire ports on them (see paragraph 24 on page 12, and paragraph 36 on page 17). They say this is so that "Digital VCRs" will interoperate properly with HD set top boxes. That's right, the FCC, a government agency, ruled that we were allowed to connect digital VCRs to our Hi-Def cable boxes. Clearly they're tricking us into thinking that it is legal, so they can bust down our doors! Engadget has written about this, so I'll spare you even more details.

What is DVB?
Digital broadcasts over cable, called DVB-C, come down the pipes as an MPEG2 Transport Stream. This is a stream of packets not unlike those sent over IP networks. Each packet is part of the video stream, the audio stream, or a part of some other meta-data stream (sub-titles, program info, etc). These packets are interleaved in time, and the receiving end identifies each one by a PID number, and demultiplexes the data using these PID numbers. The receiver then decodes the streams into signals your TV understands, and sends them on their merry way via HDMI, component, or whatever you use.

Capturing DVB
So we want to capture the transport stream. The essential idea is to capture a raw transport stream over Firewire as it plays by making your computer emulate a D-VHS recorder. This is not unlike a PCAP dump for you networking folks, essentially a packet trace, a log of all the packets that are coming fromt he cable company. I stress again that this constitutes fair use and is explicitly allowable BY THE FCC according to the link above. Wikibooks has a good collection of resources, so read on there if you want to do this. In short, this overcomes drive size limits on your DVR. I have a Motorola box from Comcast, and it has a 160GB drive. I DVR things onto the box, then play them back while recording them onto a 500GB external USB drive using my MacBook. Then, delete off my DVR box as necessary, and lo and behold, I effectively have 760GB hard drive for my DVR. These transport streams aren't playable by many players, but I know VLC can demux and play them. Connect my Macbook to the TV via DVI/HDMI, and there we go.

Re-Multiplexing/Transcoding
One last note, sometimes VLC will choke on the TS files. In this case, I suggest ProjectX, a free/open-source MPEG tool. I'll do a tutorial about using the latest version in the future. Or, you can use VLC's transcoding options to go from TS to PS, which is what you want. I was hoping my new PS3 would play these files correctly, but my last post was about my tribulations with making that work. More on this later. Any way, happy DVRing!

Why the PS3 is NOT a HD media Hub

2007-07-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

I just bought a Playstation 3, my rationale being that it is "three revolutionary devices all in one" (sorry Steve): a Linux PC, a gaming device, and a Blu-Ray player. And after the latest price drop, it was more attractive than ever, who could resist? I certainly couldn't, I wanted something to really show off what my new 1080p TV can do. It turns our the Playstation isn't the box to do the things that I want when it comes to HD.

1. Linux is nerfed.
So I get the box home, get Ubuntu 7.04 on there, open up Synaptic, and download VLC. I try some 1080i MPEG2 content from a USB external HFS+ formatted drive I have. These recordings are direct, uncompressed digital rips of DVB-C MPEG2 recorded from my Cable Box via Firewire. When the picture looks grainy and the framerate is about 10fps, I remember that the Linux kernel is running on top of a hypervisor that restricts access to certain parts of the hardware, namely the badass mother of a GPU. Without access to the graphics hardware (and without a custom kernel and apps designed for the additional six availiable SIMD cores), there is no hope of being able to decode a 1.5MB/s MPEG2 stream. So I give up on Linux as my solution.

2. The Playstation3 OS supports no modern filesystem on external media.
As they might say on Law and Order, Linux is OUT. So I try the next logical step, booting up the PS3 OS and seeing if it will support my files. I connect my HFS+ drive...and nothing happens. As a sanity check, I connect a FAT32 drive I have, and it shows up as a USB device. After some google-ing, I read that the PS3 OS will only support FAT on external drives. This KILLS any hope of using it as a HD media hub. Why? Because FAT32 only supports files up to 4GiB in size. While this is okay for 1080i content under about 45 minutes, it is USELESS for movies. I have several 9GB and 10GB rips of 1080i broadcast movies, and I know there are plenty of people out there who are starting to rip 20GB and 30GB copies of their HD-DVD and BD-ROM movies. No dice for you if these are on drives that support large file sizes and you want to use them with the PS3. Hell, the Xbox360 supports HFS+ so that it can play music off of your Mac formatted Ipod. The PS3 needs support for SOMETHING modern that PCs use, either NTFS (Windows), EXT2/3 (most Linuxes), or HFS (MacOS).

3. Even when all else is right, playback can suck!
There is a small piece of good news: the Playstation3 OS can play raw MPEG2 TS, something which was unexpected. This should mean that if you are recording from a cable box via firewire, you don't have to perform a remux to a program stream. Of course it doesn't mean this, because of a bug in the TS playback. It for some reason cannot identify the audio packets in streams that VLC on a computer has no problem with, and doesn't demux them properly for playback. The end result: no sound for some TS files. Okay, so I remux to PS, and playback. Bear in mind these are all 30min TV show files under the 4GiB limit, transferred using a FAT32 drive. Hey, I have sound, I have 1080i video!...I have jerky motion, frames skipped...and this is the best, frames filled in from about two seconds back! Thats right, the scene has cut to the next shot, and I'm seeing randomly interspersed frames from about two seconds ago. Looks like the decoder hiccups and goes crazy when the scene changes drastically but before an I-frame comes up. This problem only happens with content recorded from certain channels, and not with others. Either way, it is a bug in the video playback, with no convenient bug reporting system. Give me bugzilla, and I would post a clip to Sony devs proving that the MPEG-2 playback can choke on regular files that play fine on a computer with VLC. They are no help on the phone, Sony Entertainment pawning me of on Sony Corporate, and vice versa, with no one listening to my complaint. I finally sent an e-mail...I wish I could talk to a developer or engineer.

4. Video File Format Support?
Its nice that the system supports MPEG-4 AVC and SP, somewhat cool for people who have things that were already converted for their iPods. I tried some of my iPod compatible videos both 320*240 AVC, and 640*480 SP, and they worked...but what joy is there in watching these on a 1920*1080 display? The advanced simple profile, however, is not supported, meaning that any DVDs you might have encoded with DivX or Xvid won't play, as these are MPEG4 ASP. I tried a few CDs with 700MB Divx/Xvid files, with the PS3 saying "unsupported format". And anyway these would look like crap on my display.

In conclusion, they shouldn't try to bill it as a HD media hub. It plays games well, and it plays Blu-Ray...but not much else useful.