It’s Just Poison…

Last night I spent some time rewiring my entire sound system so that I could do something pretty awesome. I live in a duplex (2 story apartment) and I throw parties every once in a while at my place. Something that’s always bothered me was that I didn’t have a solid way to get the same music playing on both floors. I know I could just run speaker wire, but I have two separate stereos (1 for each floor). So how do I get them to play the same music in sync?

I ran across This Article on LifeHacker.com and it made my day. I was so giddy that I immediately started working on it when I got home from work.

In essence, it not only allows me to have the same music playing through both stereos, but I can also control the whole thing with my iPhone! How bad ass is that?! (oh, and I already had all the required pieces, so it cost me nothing =)

In the end, here’s what I did:

First I flashed my Linksys router with the Tomato firmware and set it up as a distributed wireless router (I also boosted the signal strength from 45mw to 100 =). Next, I found my Airport Express and configured that to link to my router. This stuff was pretty simple and worked the first time through.

To get the music to my stereo upstairs (where the airport express is), I was going to have my old Powerbook stream music through iTunes to the Airport Express router, which is hooked up to the stereo. iTunes allows you to connect to multiple “speakers”, so I streamed it, and I also plugged in a cable to the headphone jack of the laptop. This cord then connected to the stereo downstairs.

This took me a bit to get working (couple of hours), because the HDD on the Powerbook was fried and wouldn’t book. To get around this problem, I disassembled the casing of the laptop and disconnected the HDD. Put it all back together and then install OS X on an external HDD. BTW, to install OS X on an external HDD, it has to be connected via FireWire. USB will NOT work. I had an old 80gb external FireWire drive, so I just used that. Once OS X was installed I copied the contents of my iPod to the HDD so all my MP3’s were on the laptop. Should I want to upgrade later, all I have to do is copy over the OS to a new, larger FireWire HDD. Man I love OS X!

The last step was to hook my iPhone up to the iTunes on the Powerbook to control it wirelessly over the WLAN. Super easy with the Remote app.

That’s all there was to it! Now I can choose songs / playlists, skip through songs, control volume to both stereos with one fader… all from the phone in my pocket! ROCK!

Tags: Hacks, OS X, Tech by .: Adam
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And the hacking begins!

I finished off my day of work and headed to the airport to take off for Vegas for the weekend. On my lunch break I checked into my flight and expected to print out my boarding pass. The option was there, but there was another option. One that I’ve never seen before: Save to your mobile device. ?!

Hell yeah, I’m down to try this out. What it did was email a link to my iPhone. When you click on the link, the browser opens to a page that displays a barcode, and all my flight details (see the image below).

When I arrived at the security checkpoint, the little Indian man asked for my boarding pass and I showed him the webpage on my phone. He balked a little about needing a paper boarding pass with gate information, but I firmly insisted that this was all that was necessary… and he let me pass. Social Engineering Tactic #1: Success.

My next interaction was the security lady that was to check my boarding pass with my ID. When I showed her my phone, she smiled and told me how she’d heard about these but never got to scan one. I was her first. Awww. I hope she remembers me :). Anyway, after scanning my phone she didn’t even ask me for my ID. She just handed me my phone and said I could go through. I asked if she needed my ID and she said that it was verified through the scan. Ummm…what? I dunno if I’d call that an SE tactic, but definately got around security (without even trying). Success?

Next I as to strip down and walk through the metal detector. When I walked through, the security guard asked for my boarding pass. I told him thy it was on my phone. Deer in headlights. “let me see boarding pass”.
“Umm, I don’t have a paper one. I have an electronic one on my phone,” I said.
“you must carry boarding pass with you to give to me!”
“ok. Dude… It’s on my PHONE! I can’t carry a phone through the metal detector!”.
“oh. Ok. Go ahead”
?!
SE #3? Success I guess. (oh. Still no request for my ID.)

When I arrived at my gate they had just begin boarding first class. Great timing! Next they announced boarding for Elite Members. I’m not an elite member, but it’s a full flight to vegas and I’m sitting in the first row. This means I’m last to board and there will be no room for my bag and it’ll have to be cheked. Crap.

So I board :).

The ticket taker asks for my boarding pass and I handed him my phone. He looked back at me and told me that they were only boarding elite members right now. So I told him that I was an elite member, but that the status wasn’t on the phone pass thing.

I boarded.
SE #4… Success!

On to Vegas baby!

Tags: Browsers, Hacks, Tech, Travels by .: Adam
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While playing with the iPhone and all of the third party apps, there have been numerious occasions where either the app dumps or the phone does.

FYI: when I went to publish this blog with the Wordpress app, the app took a shit =)

With some of the developers, they got a little whitty with there error controlls. Here’s a couple that I liked:

Tags: OS X, Rants, Tech by .: Adam
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Apple just released the WordPress app into the App store today. Looks pretty cool so far. Will definately help in my mobile blogging effort

Tags: General, OS X, Tech, Web Sites by .: Adam
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Tags: Humor, OS X, Rants, Tech by .: Adam
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Came across a new extension today… CPIO

First, I was like WTF?

Then i figured out that it’s a compressed image file. So, i googled and i got this:

# cpio -idmv < [filename].cpio

then I nearly SMP… it worked!

.: Adam

ps. I just learned SMP too

Tags: Tech by .: Adam
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While looking into ASP.NET caching techniques, I ran across this little gem on IIS page compression using gzip.

IIS 6 has a built-in capability of compressing pages and / or content through gzip before sending it to the requesting client to cut down on bandwidth usage and overall network performance.

It’s also a smart process. First, there’s two types of compression that it will do. If it’s a static file (no dynamic content), it’ll zip up the file and store it in a temp space to send every time the page is requested. This way the CPU overhead is very minimal because it only has to compress the page once. The other is for dynamic pages. For these, it’ll compress the page as requested on the fly. This has a higher CPU usage, but worth it overall.

On top of that, it also checks the users browser for gzip compatibility before it even compresses the file. If it’s compatible (IE, Firefox, etc), it’ll send the compressed version. If the browser can’t handle compressed content, it’ll send the non-compressed version. Rock!

The downer is that it’s not very easy to setup (kinda). Meaning that there’s no checkbox anywhere to enable this and configure it. The guy over at AngryHacker.com (article above), wrote a great batch file that enables it and sets it up in one quick swoop. Make sure to save the BAT file in C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts

IISreset.exe /stop 

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/parameters/HcDoDynamicCompression true
cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/parameters/HcDoStaticCompression true
cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcFileExtensions "htm" "html" "txt" "ppt" "xls" "xml" "pdf" "xslt" "doc" "xsl" "htc" "js" "css"
cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcFileExtensions "htm" "html" "txt" "ppt" "xls" "xml" "pdf" "xslt" "doc" "xsl" "htc" "js" "css"
cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcScriptFileExtensions "asp" "dll" "exe" "aspx" "asmx" "ashx"
cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcScriptFileExtensions "asp" "dll" "exe" "aspx" "asmx"
cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcDynamicCompressionLevel "9"
cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcDynamicCompressionLevel "9" 

IISreset.exe /restart

If you’re not familiar with IIS, this script will stop your web server while it implements this and then start it back up once it’s done. Also, the default compression level is 0 (0-10), and this script sets it to 9. I have mine set at 9 and didn’t really notice much difference in CPU utilization.

Good stuff eh?

Tags: ASP / .NET, Tech, Web Sites by .: Adam
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I was installing Visual Studio 2008, when all of a sudden I saw him. Wait, let me back up. You know how when you install an app, and you are shown all those lame screens of people smiling at work and a little blurb about how awesome the app is that your installing flip by. Well, whoever this guy is takes the cake. It’s just not natural…

Tags: ASP / .NET, General, Tech by .: Adam
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1. Data Detectors in Mail - These things are freaking amazing! It recognizes patterns in human speech (text really) that correlate to dates and when you hover over them, it asks you if you want to create the event in iCal. It also recognizes phone numbers, addresses, and more for inputs into Address Book.

2. Instant Preview - Not sure what it’s really called, but when you’re browsing the file system (Finder) in any view mode, you can click on a file and just hit the space bar to preview the file. It doesn’t actually open the application. It just loads it into this nice floating window and lets you browse through the pages of a doc, view a movie, listen to an mp3, etc. Awesome!

3. Spotlight is usable now. A.K.A., I don’t need quicksilver any more. I do miss the quicksilver plugins, but spotlight is nice. Who needs 2 indexers running anyway.

4. The Dock is pretty. And you can change it too.

5. The menu bar is subtly transparent and sleek. Nice =)

6. Mail now has RSS feeds support. This is nice in that it streamlines all my newsfeeds / mail reading into a single app. When you view a feed in Safari, there’s a link on the right side to click and save into Mail.

7. Finder now has support for “Search For” folders and Shared devices (networked computers with open shares). the Search For folders and items are basically Smart Folders

8. Finally(!) there’s a Path Bar in finder to show your full path. To turn it on go to View > Show Path Bar

9. Transparent menu drop-downs are a nice touch and they’ve rounded the corners as well. Overall a nice visual piece.

10. Time Machine rocks! Best / Easiest backup method out there for any OS! It’s been well advertised, so you know the gist of it, but here’s two things you may not have known: Time Machine will work with a partition on your current drive, and it also can go back in time to restore (certain) application states. So, if you have a laptop (like me), you can’t really rely on an external drive for your backup needs. So I partitioned off a 20gb chunk and dedicated it to Time Machine backups. Then I just excluded the backup of everything but the places that I need backed up =). The only applications that I’ve seen this work for so far are Address Book and Mail.

11. iCal has been improved, and finally displays the correct date on the dock icon even when the app is closed. WTF took so long on that one?! (The little blue dots under an app signify that it’s launched. See the mail app below)

12. iChat has been upgraded a lot and is a satisfactory replacement for Adium if you don’t mind no skinning. The Video Chat thing with the Chroma Key-esque background thing doesn’t really work too well (see below). But it’s fun to play around with.

13. Spaces. I laughed my ass off when I heard Jobs pitch Spaces as this revolutionary thing that linux has been doing for about 10+ years. But it’s implemented very well, helps out a lot, and has that nice Apple functionality that you’d expect. Definitely a plus, and helps out a lot.

14. Web Clips are neat. When you’re browsing safari, you can take little clips of a webpage that you’re looking at and turn it into a dashboard widget. The part that I like is that the selector tool is smart. It will snap to elements of the webpage. Check out the widget I made below of the newest forum topics on BodyMod.org:

15. The Dictionary App is pretty useful now. It has an nifty autocomplete feature, and it lets you query Apple tech terms and Wikipedia.

16. The Preview app is a lot cooler now too. It will let you do some basic image editing (Resize, crop, etc) and save to various formats. Great when you need to to some quick edits to an image to post to a blog =)

17. A lot of the Utilities have been updated with some new features and icons. Some that I’ve noticed are Activity Monitor, Airport Utility, Boot Camp Assistant (now not beta), Directory (new), Network Utility, ODBC Administrator Utility, Podcast Capture, and Terminal (quite a few updates in this one, including “Themes”)

18. The coverflow view in Finder is pretty cool. For things like documents, movies, and web pages, it’ll actually show the contents rendered on the icon.

19. The Network Preference Pane in System Configuration is a lot nicer. Makes working with your settings a lot more manageable.

20. The spring loaded dock icon thingies are pretty cool. The fan view is neat, but not as helpful as the grid view (shown below). You can choose which one you want it to show as. To add new ones, you just drag a folder onto the dock. I also like that it shows thumbnails of everything in the grid view. Even documents and web pages. What I don’t like about it is that the icon on top (on the dock) for each item is the last thing that was put in it. So it makes it a little difficult to distinguish which folder is for what.

Well, those are my 20 favorite things about OS X 10.5 Leopard. I really don’t see how anyone can use a PC anymore (this coming from a guys who’s been a pc fanatic since he was 8). This just blows all other operating systems out of the water. Vista is such a joke (a bad one at that) compared to this. If you’re a mac user, you need this update. It’s so worth it and will make you all giddy inside playing with it =)

Tags: OS X, Tech by .: Adam
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