l-dopa

I’ve created a .map file for the Keyspan Express Remote that works with Front Row. You can download it here:

Download.

… or just add this ugly chunk of text to the end of your existing Keyspan .map file:


APPL Front Row

ACT STOP KEY 0000351b 0800 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT PLAY KEY 00023120 0080 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT PREV_TRK KEY 00007b1c 0100 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT REWIND KEY 00007b1c 0000 500 150 10 75 OVR
ACT FAST_FWD KEY 00007c1d 0000 500 150 10 75 OVR
ACT NEXT_TRK KEY 00007c1d 0100 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT PAUSE KEY 00023120 0080 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT VOL_UP KEY 00027e1e 0080 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT VOL_DN KEY 00027d1f 0080 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT ARROW_UP KEY 00027e1e 0080 500 150 10 75 OVR
ACT MUTE KEY 00023120 0080 0 0 0 0
ACT ARROW_LEFT KEY 00027b1c 0080 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT SELECT KEY 00023120 0080 0 0 0 0 OVR
ACT ARROW_RIGHT KEY 00027c1d 0080 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR
ACT ARROW_DN KEY 00027d1f 0080 500 150 10 75 OVR
ACT CYCLE KEY 00023009 0180 0 0 0 0
ACT MENU KEY 0002351b 0080 -1 -1 -1 -1 OVR


Then you map the script mentioned here to the little star button on the remote so you can activate or deactivate Front Row with a button press.

It would possibly be easier if Apple would just sell us the damn software, but after actually using it the past few days (to watch episodes of the West Wing with my girlfriend, but only the episodes written by former crack smoker Aaron Sorkin), several things about Front Row have become apparent:

• If you have movies in iPhoto, they’re not playable via Front Row; in fact, the whole “movies I’ve downloaded via iTunes are in iTunes, movies from my digital camera are in iPhoto, movies from my DV camera are in a folder in ~/Movies” thing is awfully confusing, and somewhat dumb.
• The titles of songs and movies need to scroll (iPod style) when truncated on screen. This is a no-brainer.
• It would be nice if some sort of notifier appeared “over” the Front Row interface, for example an incoming IM or email popped a little scrolling bar at the bottom with information regarding the incoming message.

~jeff

A new feature of OS X 10.4.3 and the new PowerBooks is a deeper sleep setting called “Safe Sleep”. Essentially, like “Hibernate” on Windows and linux, it writes the contents of your Mac’s RAM to the hard drive and then shuts down your mac entirely. It’s detailed in this Apple technote and on this mighty useful page right here.

The big news is that “Safe Sleep” can be activated on some older macs as well as the new Powerbooks; Matt’s page as mentioned above has the particulars and some shell scripts. I thought it might be slightly more mac-friendly to wrap up those shell scripts as an E-Z AppleScript, so I’ve done so here:

Download.

…but, hey, listen, this is a totally unsupported hack, so make sure you examine (and perhaps print out) Matt’s page which has details on how to reset your machine should things blow up. “Safe Sleep” has worked for me (first-gen 1.25 GHz aluminum PowerBook — I don’t get the cool waking display animation shown in the Apple technote, however, just a dark screen), but it’s still not known which machines “Safe Sleep” works on and which machines it doesn’t, so caveat emptor.

NOTE: To test “Safe Sleep”, type this in a terminal window :

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1

then sleep your mac; if everything has worked, then it should then “Safe Sleep”. To go back to the normal sleep, type this:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

~jeff

This guy is no Jon Klein, but his computer-generated abstract art (and the nifty flash-based web site!) are very, very cool.

(Congratulations, by the way, to aforementioned ldopa contributor Jon, who has just gotten a sweet-ass job working for these guys; they designed the visuals for a little application you might have heard of, called **iTunes**).

~jeff

The Bluth clan of Fox’s ratings-challenged “Arrested Development” is also headed for the exit after Fox cut the third-season order on the Emmy-winning comedy to 13 episodes.

…

There is a possibility that the show will be shopped around, but its high cost is expected to be prohibitive for a cable network.

Link.

Anyone want to try testing this? Improvements since the last time:

* Launchd script installed at /LibraryLaunchDaemons/
* goofy new icon for .app.
* version numbers changed to 1.0.
* documentation cleaned up.

~jeff

The Leapfrog Fly is a computer inside a pen. All output is audible in the form of tones, samples, and voice synth.

And all input, get this, is in the form of writing on a piece of paper. It uses paper with little dots on it that the pen’s built-in scanner looks at to remember what’s at that unique location. Apparently, it can remember 1.8 million square miles of paper.

So you draw a calculator, tell it where the buttons are, and it works.

Make has promised an article on hacking it in the near future - apparently, there’s no readily available programming language for it or anything. But you could fucking draw a flowchart on a piece of paper and make that be the program, in theory.

Me, I don’t have a hundred bucks, really, so I’m gonna wait until the things show up at Job Lot after Christmas for $20.

**BLUE LEDs ARE BETTER THAN ANYTHING**
*a one-act play*
*by Jeff Hobbs*

*(SCENE: a briefing room filled with reporters and a podium. On the right from behind a red curtain, JEFF enters the room, the MODERATOR nods, and JEFF takes the stage.)*

MODERATOR: Hello, please be seated. Mr. Hobbs will read a short prepared statement, then he will take questions from the press. I’ll pass the podium over to Mr. Hobbs.

JEFF: Good afternoon. *(rustles papers)*. Ahem. Blue LEDs are better than anything.

AUDIENCE: …

JEFF: I will now take your questions. Janice?

JANICE: Janice Fleur, Mount Washington Daily Press. When you said “Blue LEDs are better than anything”, isn’t it true that there are some things that blue LEDs are not better than?

JEFF: No comment. You, sir?

STEVE: Steve Walters, Chicago Military Reader. Have blue LEDs been found in Iran?

JEFF: No blue LEDs have been found in Iran. YET. Next question –

BILL: Bill Walters, New York Post. Are blue LEDs better than this nation’s growing unrest with troublesome domestic issues?

JEFF: *(takes mic off podium and walks into the audience)*.

JEFF: *(lays hand on Bill’s shoulder)*.

JEFF: Of course they are, Bill. Blue LEDs are better than anything.

BILL: What about –

JEFF: ANYTHING.

*(JEFF suddenly pulls a blue LED shoddily wired to a switch and a 9-volt battery from his pocket. He turns it on, and BILL and STEVE’S faces are illuminated by the high-tech blue glow. With the benefit of the soothing blue light, we see that they are, in fact, long-lost twin brothers — they stare at each other for a second, then they start making out. JANICE joins in)*.

JEFF: HOT. OK, no further questions. *(drops mic to ground with SFX: THUD and walks back behind red curtain)*.

FIN

~jeff

I take the ability to access the files on my mac from anywhere for granted, but it occurs to me that the process for getting the ability to do so up and running is difficult and circuitous at best, so I thought I’d take a moment and document the process. In a nutshell, you need to make your mac discoverable over the internet, and then you have to enable the services you want to discover and access:

1. First, on the machine you’re going to want to connect to, you should have a persistent, always-on internet connection, i.e. cable or DSL. If you don’t have a persistent internet connection, you won’t be able to connect from work to home without calling home and telling a loved one to dial-up to the internet every time, and that just sounds like a tedious and embarrassingly clunky social interaction. Also, make sure your mac is set not to go to sleep. If your mac goes to sleep, the network connection will sleep too, making your entire machine unavailable to remote access.
2. With a persistent, always-on internet connection, most internet providers use a system called DHCP, a system which gives you a new IP address every so often. This is not so good for what we want to do; this is analogous to me wanting to call you up on the phone, but your phone number changes each night. It would be a pain, is what I’m saying, so to alleviate this issue you’ll need to run client software for a dynamic DNS service. I like DynDNS; it’s free, and reliable, and they have great client software for both mac and PC.
3. Sign up for the DynDNS service.
4. Pick a good hostname for your mac. Keep in simple: don’t use spaces, and instead of underscores, use dashes — I’ll explain why later. Click on “Add Dynamic DNS”, choose a hostname, choose a suffix from the drop down menu, and write this info down. For this tutorial, I chose “home-mac”, and the suffix “dyndns.org” which expands to the fully qualified hostname “home-mac.dyndns.org”.
5. Download, install, and run the DynDNS client software.
6. When asked to “Add User”, input the username and password you entered at the DynDNS site. When asked to “Add Host”, input the fully qualified hostname for your mac you wrote down a little while ago — in the case of this example it would be “home-mac.dyndns.org”.
7. If you are connected directly to the internet (no AirPort, router or other kind of NAT gateway), select “Default Interface” from the drop down menu below. If you are in fact behind an AirPort, router or other kind of NAT gateway, select “External” and proceed to the asterisk below.
8. Click “Add” when satisfied.
9. Click on the “Active” checkbox. If you’ve done everything right so far, the status will be changed from “Not tested” to “OK”. You’ve now got your machine able to be discovered remotely on the internet!
10. Open your “System Preferences”, select “Sharing” and check off “Personal File Sharing”. For the sake of consistency, change your “Computer Name” to the first part of the name you have picked (just the first part, i.e.”home-mac”).

…AND YOU’RE DONE!: Now when you want to access your files and you’re away from home, just hit “Command-K”, put in the fully qualified hostname you wrote down a while ago (”home-mac.dyndns.org”, replacing “home-mac” with the name you chose for your mac), and you’ll be prompted for your username and password. After that, you can mount your remote mac’s drive like a network share and get access to all your files from anywhere!

NOTE: If you’re within your own home network, accessing your files this way is actually slower than usual, because all your data is going out of the home network, onto the internet, and back. In that case, use the Bonjour DNS convention and enter “home-mac.local” in the command-K network box (replacing, again, “home-mac” with the name you chose for your mac); this will bypass the remote lookup and allow you much faster access to your local files. That’s why I said earlier to not use underscores in your host name, as Bonjour doesn’t allow for them.

EXTRA CREDIT: Install OSXVNC and use Chicken of the VNC (or RealVNC for PC) and you’ll literally be able to “see” your mac’s desktop from any other computer in the world! Wowza!

~jeff

*If you are behind a router, you’re going to have to set up both a static IP for your mac, and forward port 548 (the AppleShare IP port) to the client mac. Sadly, the methods for doing this are way different for each router (this link might help), but here’s some quick and dirty instructions for Apple’s Airport line of routers:

1. Copy down the TCP/IP info your client is currently set to. Copy down the DNS server addresses that are present in the Airport Admin Utility.
2. Open your Network System Preference pane, select the Airport interface, select TCP/IP, then change “Configure Via:” to “Manual”. Manually set your client computer’s IP address to 10.0.1.200. Then put in the subnet mask and router info from your old client settings. IP addresses in the 10.0.1.200-255 range are statically addressed even when using an Airport in its normal DHCP (self-addressing) mode, but because you’ll not be using DHCP any longer on the client, you’ll need to manually input the DNS settings. Put in the DNS settings you pulled out of the airport admin utility. Click “Apply Now”.
3. Use the Airport Admin Utility to forward port 548 to 10.0.1.200. After the router resets, all incoming requests for port 548 should be sent to your client mac; if you use BitTorrent on your client mac, forward ports 6881 through 6999 to 10.0.1.200, and if you use VNC, forward port 5900 to your client mac as well.

Here is an excellent introduction to “TurboGears“, which is sort of the Python equivalent to “Ruby on Rails“.

It’s a good, quick overview, although I wish the author got into more of the particulars as to why someone would pick one over the other; I suppose it boils down to which language you actually know.

~jeff

Karlheinz Stockhausen was widely quoted in late September, 2001, as calling the destruction of the World Trade center a “piece of art.”

It turns out that what he was saying was much, much better:

His general lack of communication no doubt has something to do with the press battering over his bizarre comments made shortly after the September 11 attacks in New York, in which he likened the World Trade Centre atrocity to “Lucifer’s greatest work of art”.

Though he claims to have been misquoted (he apologised anyway), like most journalists before me, I ask him if he could clarify what he actually meant. His unintelligible response borders on the bizarre: “Lucifer is still leading his rebellion against God and mankind. The problem is that almost nobody believes in the existence of Lucifer.”

Sie sind die verrückte Hiebscheiße, Karlheinz.

CNN has this dinkus little presentation on future wireless technologies. Of greatest interest to me are the soccer ball and telephone: they both represent new ways of interacting with objects, though the soccer ball doesn’t quite do what I’d hoped: report its position constantly

(editor’s note: this is where the entry ends, at “report its position constantly”. What Josh means by this is unclear; but what we do know is this soccer ball would most certainly be the single most annoying piece of sports equipment ever invented. More on this story as it develops.)

While I was writing the music (”I Love You and I Love Robots”) for my latest animation, I liked it so much that I also created a much longer, 23:46 long version. It’s really good to bike or jog to, I’ve noticed.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

here.

~jeff

About two months ago, my girlfriend and I spent a day at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a.k.a. “Mass MoCA“. It’s a wonderful museum, in a gorgeous part of Massachusetts, and well worth a visit.

While there, I took some video, and I finally got around to editing and animating it last week. Here is that video:

View (requires QuickTime 7 or VLC).

~jeff

This patent application illustrates several points:

1. Apple is going to ship Intel-based systems that will fully support booting into Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux in 2006. I bet the bootloader will be very pretty.
2. Apple’s Intel hardware will read a serial number from hardware upon boot. This might be the existing serial number on every modern Mac (option-click the version number in your “About This Mac…” dialog to find yours) or it might be a simplified description of the vaguely eeeevil TPM chip often rumored to be in the new Intel Macs.
3. In the new systems, there will be some support for virtualization, which is to say, you will probably be able to run two operating systems concurrently. This is very exciting idea for nerds; for nerds, this is like getting to drive an Italian sports car and a cement truck at exactly the same time, as both vehicles are a lot of fun, but in very different ways.
4. In the patent, there is a lot of emphasis on the phrase “tamper-resistant”, which suggests Apple will try to arrange the boot/runtime environment to keep the various operating systems from destroying each other. This is probably a good idea, because my Windows XP box often destroys itself by just sitting there.
5. People who write patent descriptions/applications are clinically insane.

~jeff

Holy shit this thing is cool. I consider myself someone who likes cool things, but dear God, this is just too cool.

I broke down and bought one two days ago. I am upgrading from a 3G (b&w) iPod, and doubling the capacity (60 gig), so I was bound to be impressed. The screen is incredibly clear. I figured there was no way I would want to watch TV or what have you on a screen that small, but I must admit I watched an episode of Lost (let’s hear it for cross-marketing!) last night and it was great.

Added bonuses include the ability to listen to music! Who knew? The fact that I can look at album art and read lyrics to currently playing tracks is also very cool. I used iTunesCool to pull down album art for most of my collection, and used pearLyrics to collect and import lyrics.

The screen is big enough now that using the calendar and address book features actually makes sense, and if you have upgraded to 10.4.3, your contacts will include their pictures from Address Book as well.

All in all, I am pleased. My only complaint is the loss of FireWire. Now if someone would just make a good case for it.