l-dopa

m.NPR.org is a well put together little site. You can read the text of stories as you can on the main site, and you can listen to them as well. But rather than mess around with figuring out which mobile phone supports what plug-ins and downloading a big media file over cellular, they invoke a little known protocol called “wtai”, prompting your device to place a phone call which then plays the story to you. The downside is that it costs you minutes, and these days, data plans tend to be unlimited while calling plans aren’t. Also, it leaves iPod touch users and the five people who bought those Nokia n-series tablets out in the cold.

I just did a clean install of Leopard after a hard drive replacement on my trusty ol’ 2003 PowerBook G4 — runs like a champ, actually — and I’ve been seeing these strange CPU spikes. From what I can tell, it’s a bug in syslogd, the logging daemon in 10.5. Until it’s fixed in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5.2 (hope hope), you can do this:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd

…to stop syslogd from spiking your CPU.

~Jeff

I don’t even need to read this article to offhandedly dismiss this company (from the NYT RSS feed):

Whatever Kijiji is — and I suspect it’s mainly an excuse to have more dotted letters in a row than ‘hijinks’ — to be able to compete, you need to be pronounceable. If I can’t lean over the cubicle wall and ask my coworker if he saw it on Kijiji, the naming has failed. At least most people can take a swing and a miss at ‘linux’ or ‘ubuntu,’ but ‘Kijiji’? Forget it.

UPDATE: After completing my trademark ‘Seven Seconds of Research,’ it turns out that the word “kijiji” (pronounced like key-gee-gee) means “village” in Swahili. This name was chosen because it captures the essence of what we are creating - a site where people can connect with others in their community.

…try again.

~Jeff

Not this Alex, however.
Mac OS X “Leopard” comes with a new and quite excellent text to speech voice, “Alex”. It’s the largest file in the operating system, weighing in at 669 MB, and yet, even with the smallish capacity of the iPhone storage, I’d love to have Alex on my iPhone, as it would open up a host of new abilities. Imagine these possibilities:

• Jump in the car and have all your email read to you out loud.
• No more fumbling with the Map function while driving (and I see more and more Blackberry users doing this on the interstate, too) — tap the screen and Alex reads the most recent direction out loud.
• Forget custom ringtones: have the name of the caller announced. I had a Panasonic landline phone that did this, it was genuinely useful, even though text-to-speech typically (and understandably) has issues with proper names.
• Have your RSS news feed read out loud to you during your morning commute.
• Combine text to speech with some basic speech recognition and an “I’m feeling lucky”-style wikipedia search, and you could just speak into the iPhone something you’re interested in, say, “John Coltrane,” and get back the first sentence of the wikipedia entry (”John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967), nicknamed Trane, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.”). Tap the screen for more.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The iPhone is crying out for a way to interact with it in a hands-free fashion, and now that the Mac finally has a non-cringeworthy synthesized voice that works on Mac OS X, there’s no reason Apple should not combine the two.

To further illustrate the utility of this idear,

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.

(complete with typo!), via Alex.

~Jeff

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.

Damn, this is cool.

~Jeff

As I was installing Growl 1.1, I was thinking to myself, “I really don’t love any of the included Growl notification styles.” So I made my own, based around the “Above the Night” style by the excellent folks at mishimo.com.

Download it here.

~Jeff

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

Sept. 7th, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) of Redmond, California is proud to announce a strategic partnership between the “Zune” line of portable media players and the popular seafood chain Long John Silver’s in a initiative both companies are calling “Wireless Shrimps.” Owners of a Microsoft Zune or “Zune”-branded product will be able to enjoy added abilities when they bring their Microsoft “Zune” to any Long John Silver’s Seafood Restaurant:

1. When a “Zune” portable media player is taken to a Long John Silver’s Seafood Restaurant, a new “Glossy Fishstick” icon will appear on the main screen of the “Zune” portable media player.
   
2. Users that press the “Fishstick” icon will have the ability to order the $6.99 Beer-Buttered Shrimp Bites Platter or the $13.99 Flounderoni Pizza Plate directly to their table without standing in line.

   NOTE: Occasionally activation of the “Fishstick” icon will cause a hard reboot and corruption of the “Zune” portable media player operating system. If this occurs, please consult Technote #34222AG in order to reinstall your “Zune” portable media player software using the software provided to you at time of purchase.

   ALSO NOTE: Users that do not reinstall the “Zune” portable media player software during the activation window time of 3-4 hours may experience the loss of all purchased music, video, and beer-buttered seafood. If this occurs, please call the Activation Window Manager/Battered Seafood support hotline at 1-800-442-9830 extension 4877. Please have your “Zune” portable media player Authenticity Certificate and/or register receipt readily available at time of call, as you will need to read the 48-digit Beer-Buttered Seafood Confirmation Code to the support hotline automated caller forwarding system.

3. After the Beer-Buttered Shrimp Bites Platter or Flounderoni Pizza Plate has been ordered to the table, “Zune” owners may then enjoy downloaded and looped 27-second samples of the music of John Secada, or optionally, Norah Jones.

   NOTE: Due to the digital rights enabling technologies of the “Zune”, only one patron per store may enjoy the song samples at any one time. All other patrons must wait until their turn to sample.

   ALSO NOTE: During the time of this promotion, there will be no other music permitted in the Long John Silver’s Seafood Restaurant.

4. LIMITATIONS: The “Wireless Shrimps” promotion is not available to drive-thru customers, patrons under 18 or over 60, or any single person with pre-existing heart or pulmonary conditions. Void where prohibited, or limited by local law — sorry, Tennesee.

~Jeff

So on the whole, I’ve been pretty damn pleased with the iPhone. It’s kind of amazing to have full-on email and web everywhere I go. But I’ve noticed one annoying bug that’s been driving me crazy, and I’ve come to call it ‘the Linksys bug’. You contract the Linksys bug like this:

1. Get tired of the iPhone asking to join wifi networks, and turn that ‘feature’ off.
2. Now, go into public and try and find an open wifi network.
3. Without fail, you’ll eventually find an open one with the default name of ‘Linksys’.
4. Go ahead and hop on the open Linksys network, and perform whatever nefarious wifi task you wanted to do.
5. Eventually you’ll walk by another ‘Linksys’ network. This one, however, will be locked down with a WEP password and will confuse the heck out of your iPhone, because hey! it thought that the ‘Linksys’ network was open, man. You will not know the password, nor will you be able to tell your iPhone to forget about the damn ‘Linksys’ network. If you walk around a lot, you will be prompted to not know the password five or six times per day.
6. OPTIONAL: Be amazed at the number of people who use the default, out-of-the-box wifi network name of ‘Linksys’. Have these people no creativity?

You can fix this, though:

1. Install the iPhone installer.
2. Use the newly installed Installer.app to install “Term-vt100″.
3. (OPTIONAL: Install the BSD subsystem and OpenSSH while you’re there).
4. Run “Term-vt100″ from the main iPhone ‘Springboard’ screen. Input this line and hit return:
   
   rm ~/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.wifi.plist
   
5. Restart your iPhone by holding down the top button. After it reboots, it will have forgetten about all your wireless networks, including the annoying stuck Linksys one.

~Jeff

More examples here.

Megapixels aside, it turns out the best kind of camera is the one you actually have with you so you can get the shot. The resolution of the iPhone could be better (1600×1200), and fixed-focus is a drag, but the color and detail, slightly skewed blue as it is, is really quite nice, and you can email downscaled photos (640×480, or 480×320, depending on orientation) pretty much as fast as you can take them.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is that due to the “portrait” orientation of the phone hardware itself, I’m much more apt to take “tall” photos, versus when I carried a 4:3 Canon Elph I would be more apt to take “landscape” or wide pictures.

~Jeff

So: I bought a new 500 GB NAS from NewEgg to consolidate the 160 GB NAS + 250 GB USB2 drive Frankensteinian setup I’ve been using as a Media Dump — I love the linux-based SimpleShare as a data source for the XBox Media Center, but plugged in external USB drives tend not to want to spin down, generating heat and wasting electricity, so I got a large one to consolidate the big mess into something more manageable, quieter, and hopefully less of an electricity hog.

But here’s the problem — how does one move 400 GB of audio and video around from SMB share to SMB share, anyhow? First I (naively) tried Windows’ “copy” method — this actually got through quite a bit through before dying at a random point, leaving me no clue what was copied and what was left. Then, I tried Mac OS X, which also died midway through the transfer at a seemingly random and unknowable point. So that sucked.

So then I decided to pull out my Cruddy Ubuntu laptop(tm) and try rsync. After I installed the linux smb client:

sudo apt-get install smbfs smbclient


…and figured out how to map my SMB shares to local folders:

mkdir new_media
mkdir old_media
sudo mount -t smbfs //10.0.1.5/Media /home/jeff/old_media
sudo mount -t smbfs //10.0.1.10/Media /home/jeff/new_media

…all it took was one single command (and about 36 hours!) to move about 400 GB worth of data:

sudo rsync --progress -r /home/jeff/old_media/ /home/jeff/new_media/


I’m sure there’s a better way to do this (and if so, let me know!), but I was pretty psyched at how effectively it worked once everything was in place; rsync even moves things in alphabetical order, versus Mac and Windows, which both appear to copy files using some inscrutable, spindly method based on reasons long forgotten.

~Jeff

Texty is pretty neat — you sign up and you get a little chunk of HTML that you then embed into a page. Then you can edit the content of that page via the Texty webpage interface rather than doofing around with HTML.

Nifty idea, but I’d be nervous about using it for anything serious — what happens if Texty.com goes away? I’d feel way better if it was something I could host myself.

~Jeff

Because I couldn’t find this written down anywhere else: to disable the incredibly annoying Windows camera picture acquisition dialog every time you plug your iPhone into Windows XP:

1. Go to “Run” in the start bar and type: SERVICES.msc.

2. In the “Services” box that comes up, click on “Services (local)” then right click on Windows Image Acquisition (WIA).
3. Select Properties.
4. Set “Startup Type” to disabled.

~Jeff

Opera has thoughtfully provided Javascript examples of how to interact with the Nintendo Wii remote on the (surprisingly capable!) web browser for the Nintendo Wii.

~Jeff

One of the questions I get asked quite often is if there is some way to get television shows from the internet without paying 50$ a month for cable*. My answer is that, yes, I have heard, this guy I know told me that there is a way, but it’s kind of hard to explain. But the question comes up again and again and again, so it occurred to me that it might be useful to write it all down once and for all.

To get television off the internet, you need three things:

1. You need to be able to find a torrent file of the show.
2. You need to be able to use the torrent file to download the video file of the show.
3. You need to be able to watch the video file of the show.

Luckily, this process has recently been made a lot easier by three quite excellent Mac OS X programs:

1. Finding the torrent: There’s an app called TVShows that takes pretty much all the sting out of this task. It’s a ruby app that parses the feed from tvrss.net and presents the user with an excellent interface to subscribe to their favorite shows.
   

   One or two clicks and you’ve got the torrent files corresponding to your favorite shows automatically downloaded to your desktop. You can even set TVShows to start downloading the files automatically:

   
2. Downloading the video file: Now you’ve got torrent files, but they just point the way to the video files — you’ll still need to download the video files themselves. There’s an excellent torrent client for Mac OS X called Transmission that can help you do that. It’s lightweight and not over-encumbered with features. This is what will download the video file that the torrent file points to. One of the things I like most about it is if you have a relatively recent router (for example, a “white” Airport Extreme router or later), Transmission has an option to automatically map the port for you:
   

   Without a “mapped and open port”, BitTorrent clients don’t work very well, so it’s handy that Transmission has the option to talk to the router and make this happen auto-magically.

3. Watching the video file: Most television shows on the internet are in a format called “DivX” which is not supported natively in QuickTime, so you’ll need to find a way to open and view the file. There’s a Quicktime plug-in called Perian which can do this, but I find the most foolproof way to do watch downloaded video is via an application called VLC. VLC will pretty much open and play everything. Once Transmission downloads the video file (and this typically will take a while! I’m told!), drop the video file on VLC to play it.

~Jeff

* NOTE: This is probably illegal.

For this very belated edition of the Internet Phenomenon Revue, I found enough of a break from all that silly “school” and “work” stuff to find you ldopans out there something of true and lasting import.

I give you the ultimate product of the internet. Real World: Cats.

Background and how to order here.