Neuromanticsnot quite writing, not quite nothing

Now, far be it from me to dare rerun the entire 10 years of my life, but let’s just say I’ve fiddled with a lot of possibilities for “the future” of TV, including attempting a web2.0 startup around that whole gig. Seen and done quite a bit, nothing has quite hit the home run yet.

This makes me pretty picky when it comes to what I use myself to watch TV on, so it’ll come as no surprise that I was a UK TiVo user (one of the few) for years, supplemented by a Phillips Streamium for content, er, acquired from elsewhere.

We didn’t get TiVo upgrades, so it eventually withered on the vine a bit, I had cable and a V+ PVR box for a while with an Xbox360 replacing the struggling Streamium and while quality was good, UI was worse than earlier days.

Now I’m back on the Freeview set of channels (fine by me, didn’t watch much OwlTV to be honest) and immediately felt the pang of missing PVR so bought a Topfield (Toppy) for the tinkering potential. A good job it can be tinkered with too as the UI is not good to start with and the user community improvement MyStuff is better in some ways (++ functionality, capability) and worse in others. The main problem is shoehorning a load more functions into the existing, already very poor remote control.

So, let’s network it, stick a bespoke web interface between me and the mess and use an iPod touch and iPhone as über-remotes. Here is a bunch of notes, steps and links to make this project happen.

1. Set up a convenient network for the Toppy

The Toppy has USB, but only has the connectivity of a dumb storage device so needs a smart box to sit beside it. I bought a Linksys NSLU2 (the Slug) off ebay for £50, and extended my existing wifi network (ZoomADSL box handling DCHP wired to a Time Capsule handling wireless) using an old Airport Express as a WDS remote. This was not easy, but these articles helped:

Apple Support Doc : Using The Airport Express on WDS networks

O’Reilly.com : Taming an Airport Express WDS network

But after getting the WDS network to actually work, speed was very poor. Setting the Airport Express to not allow wireless clients resolved this …eventually.

2. Hacking the Slug

The Slug needs a hacked firmware to turn it into a very small, quiet web/ftp server. One roadblock on the official route (http://www.nslu2-linux.org) – firmware uploading Mac OSX software Upslug2 is only available as a PPC binary, but “here’s the source, here’s macports.org, go compile your own” – oh, please just give me it already. (Thank you Paul O’Brien for saving a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of time and bandwidth.)

Next up, I seemed to have trouble getting the only USB flash drive (512MB) I had to hand formatting correctly on the Slug, so tried a new, larger (4GB) one which formatted as ext3. I’ll also try recycling another old bit of kit by adding a USB SATA enclosure for the Macbook drive I upsized a few months ago.

The rest of the instructions for Unslung and unslinging the new OS onto the flash drive are very clear and straightforward.

3. Connecting to the Unslung Slug

Using a browser to the web GUI of the Slug worked fine, couple of gotchas:

- telnet needs to be reactivated each time the Slug gets rebooted
- turn off the built in FTP server on the Slug from the web GUI
- install ftpd-topfield as documented
- connecting using Transmit worked fine

4. Installing MWI (MyStuff Web Interface)

Following the instructions I installed all the packages. I didn’t quite understand when it came to configuring the mysql install, getting errors instead of running – this was solved by typing the m in rather than copy & paste, so assume it was a line ending or stray character error. Anyway, copying the text in BBedit for the mysql setup worked too. The rest of the config was easily done in vi.

Next issue was getting the files across – sftp needs adding (which I had assumed was added with openssh, but no)

ipkg install openssh-sftp-server

You will also need to change the /dev/null permissions, otherwise you will get an SFTP connection error:

 chmod 777 /dev/null

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Yes, always late to the party but my old code plaything of choice (Director) seems to be at the end of it’s very long road so time to learn some new tricks. Xbee integration is some way off, but on my roadmap. 

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Partly for my own memory, and partly for what seems to be lots of people having Bootcamp problems when installing XP:

Problem: Nice clean Bootcamp partition – Check! Nice clean pukka XP SP2 disk – Check! Install and go… nuts – what is this C: \windows\system32\hal.ddl corrupt or missing you speak of? Ekk! Knowing *nothing* about this level of windows hacking I’m off to a bad start here. Here’s how i got it working on my MBP.

Fixes: Apparently some people have had luck waiting till the setup off CD lets you hit ‘R’ and do some repair from the command line, specifically del C:\boot.ini … bootcfg /rebuild … fixboot

Apparently that has been know to work, but didn’t work for me – this did though: Back in OSX use the Bootcamp assistant to remove then recreate the partition. Then boot off your XP install CD and when setup gets to your disk selector, delete the Bootcamp partition, and delete the 200mb partition bootcamp has also quietly made. Then create a new windows formatted partition from here and install. All should proceed well this time.

I’m not entirely sure why this works but it does and I get to play Half Life 2 now. Yay!

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So I’ve been entirely swamped for most of this year, working a minimum of two freelance gigs at once while keeping tabs on and shepherding TIOTI in the gaps. It has been exhausting and I’m starting to feel it, the breathers I get when I’m actually on top of all the things going on are too infrequent. So it’s time to get organised!

First thing is the hellish .Mac performance these past few months – Sync? You must be kidding. It’s rubbish, and I do rely on iCal to plan as well as record billable days. But its not working, nightmare. After messing with .mac sync once again i’m going to give MySync a whirl and report how that goes. I’m also going to try out OSX Leopard as that has entirely new syncing built in, and it’s retro-fittable to Tiger too. Report will follow.

Ok, so that’s my time, future and past, sorted. Next up, words and ideas. I’m trying out a few notetaking apps at the moment, to make sense of the far too much RSS surfing I do. Omni Outliner looks like the leader so far, but annoyed me by being seemingly unable to alphabetise a list of email addresses. Yo Jimbo looks good, has .Mac syncing of notes and deserves a more robust playing with. I’m also trying out Sidenote which sort of works for me but has a couple of bugs that have irked me already.

I’m going to give them all a week or two longer and see what works for me, but if anyone has suggestions, please tell.

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Just a note to myself and anyone else that gets stuck upgrading OSX, or migrates to a new mac and suddenly finds Director MX 2004 and Flash MX 2004 now failing to start up correctly, characterised by a bouncing icon but never getting to splash screen, requiring a force quit.

This worked for me: run the macromedia hotfix for this issue, repair permissions using disk utility, run hotfix again, open the apps – the 30 day trial will be reset, and you can enter serial numbers at your leisure. I believe the real issue is the hidden files Macromedia used to protect the software and manage the 30 day trial got messed up – the hotfix deletes a Macrovision directory and files related to this, so deleting that manually may have a similar effect.

That little pain in the arse took the shine off an otherwise seamless migration to a new MacBook Pro replacing a tired, battered and well used 1Ghz TiBook. Old laptop will go to a deserving retirement home, the new one is very shiny and very quick – easily the speed of my 2×2Ghz G5 tower. Nice.

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I probably ranted about this way back, but it looks like there is a solution.

I’d like to point out that this is really only relevant to designers, people who happily have hundreds of fonts kicking around, CD’s full. Your average user will be fine with no font management, or just sucky Fontbook.

When Panther arrived, everyone had very high hopes for the new OSX Fontbook. Unfortunately it turned out to suck – really suck, so it was back to the 3rd party applications that never quite matched the elegant joy of old ATM Deluxe on OS9. I never really got on with SuitcaseX and ended up using Master Juggler for ages, although it was still sub optimal and very very slow. I had resigned myself to the situation and ignored it… until in walks Linotype’s new Font ExplorerX.

Font ExplorerX is just exiting beta, is a free download, is cross platform, and just damn works how it should. It can intercept font requests from Quark and Indesign to load up your active fonts on demand if you handle lots of documents from different designers and sources. It offers you the choice of moving or copying fonts from your file system. it has an *almost* great interface – very iTunes… indeed it even includes a Linotype Font Shop online built right in – smart. Very smart. It also seems to handle previews quickly and crash free, unlike the competition.

Best of all … it just works. Only took 5 years to get here, but I’m glad we did.

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Long time, no updates. As usual it’s been a combination of work and life pressures plus it is, like, summer you know? So, topically, let’s hit on some Apple guff first. I did a whole load of software updates as being at least a little wise, one never updates or upgrades a working set up mid-project and we’ve just had a few wind up nicely. I think I skipped a few interim versions, but iTunes 5 is the big one here.

New gradient UI hotness, we like, as do we like the podcasts feature now that there are some half decent ones around. Mixtapes essentially, god forbid I start listening to bedroom DJ types waffling on, christ. Can it handle .zip, .torrent or other podcast filetypes? Can it bugger. So you won’t be getting our hot new mixtape through it then – use iPodder or any RSS newsreader – still there’s always the usual download page. Go on get it, we’ll wait.

Back? Great. Now I’m not sure if my ears are deceiving me, but the sound quality sounds a bit better to me. Could be wrong. So in addition to a big-ish new iTunes we get the iPod Nano… What? It is a thing of beauty. I do declare I want one very much, tape it to the back of a RAZR and it’d still be a better phone than the horrible ROKR thing they brought out the same day. I don’t know, the fuss about this is very undeserving really – doesn’t connect to the store, doesn’t include any unique hardware synergy like a scroll-wheel or just… anything? Am I missing something? It’s just an iPod like UI (except, not) to play iTMS DRM’d tunes on a phone? Phhht, care?

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