Prober E319
The Prober E319 is a cool Car PC. It has built-in 6.5″ monitor, GPS receiver, 20GB drive, 128MB RAM and A 400Mhz CPU. It also does the normal radio stuff with an AM/FM radio, and DVD drive.
I would love them to add:
- Make this “XM Ready”, and support “Connect and Play” XM Tuners with the USB ports
- Change the screen to not require the stylus, but be a touch screen
- Be able to support an iPod control protocol with a usb port
- Built-in bluetooth to be a hands-free headset for a cell phone
- Integrated wifi to allow syncing with music content when parked in garage.
- USB 2.0 for faster transfers
- Larger hard drive
[via Gizmodo]
Technorati Tags: car pc, Prober E319
Skype
At work, we use Skype is used to communicate amongst ourselves. I mainly use AIM, but I finally got around to installing Skype.
Now I have contacts on Google Talk, AIM and Skype. I am hoping that someone will integrate these into a client. Maybe Apple will do this, with the rumored iChat update that will include voice calling.
Technorati Tags: AIM, Google Talk, skype
Sound of html
The MAKE: Blog has a post on the World’s Largest Band page. This site will generate a midi file based on an html page.
Here is the mp3 file for the main page here.
(I really like the drum beat)
Technorati Tags: html, midi, WLB
music on Amazon S3
I mentioned ways to share music between multiple computers, so I did an experiment to see how storing music on Amazon’s S3, with JungleDisk. I copied a bunch of music on to the disk, and then added the tracks to iTunes. When those tracks were played back, there was a significant delay before playback.
When an file is accessed from S3, with JungleDisk, the whole file is downloaded to a local cache, before the file is returned to the caller. It should be possible to still use Amazon’s S3 for this purpose, but the client on the computer would need to not do any caching. It should be possible to pass the file descriptor directly from the http client to the file system.
Technorati Tags: Amazon S3, JungleDisk, music
Mac OS X security hole
The Alastair’s Place has a post mentioning a security hole in Mac OS X, where is is possible for an arbitrary application to get the admin password. Once this happens, it would be possible for it to execute arbitrary code. This hole allows any application to present the Admin Authentication dialog and make it look like it is coming from a trusted application.
Alastair reported this to Apple in 2003, but Apple hasn’t responded. I am not sure what they can do, since any application can make a dialog appear like an authentication dialog, even without using the standard system call.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to easily determine if an application is using this trick. It looks like the process name that is displayed in top and ps is the value from argv[0].
[via The Apple Blog]
Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, security
converting hex to binary
I can never remember the syntax to convert numbers between various bases with bc, and end up looking at the man page.
Here is an example of using bc to convert a hex number to binary.
bash$ bc bc 1.06 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. ibase=F obase=2 01EA 110111101
Technorati Tags: bc
virtual file systems for music
I have written a couple of pretty convoluted scripts to manage audio tracks across our computers (script 1, script 2). This is not really how I would like to manage my music.
What I want to be able to do is store music on any one of our computers, and access it from every compuer. Ideally the path to access a track would be the same on all computers. When a track is added to on one computer, it would automatically be added to all of the others.
In some ways what I am looking for is a distributed file system like Coda. This would allow music to reside on some server, but be accessible by a bunch of other server. Coda also allows disconnected operation. (But I don’t think that this works well with large media files, as each disconnected computer would need to keep a cache of all of the content.)
AudioManage is a windows application that lets you do this as well. It creates a virtual file system where you can drag your media files. The files system then contains the meta information for the tracks, as well as the reference to the actual file themselves. This allows you to create views into your music, that cross multiple file systems. When you actually want to access the contents of the files, then Windows follows the file systems reference for the contents.
remote AppleScript helper
While I was in the process of writing the scripts to copy tracks on to and off of my laptop, I noticed that there didn’t seem to be a way to programmatically choose a remote application from an AppleScript.
But then I saw the Remote Management Scripts have a library script that takes care of this for you. With this script, you modify it with the ip address or Bonjour name of the remote and local name, and the user name and password for each.
This library would make it a lot easier to run my scripts. I am unsure about actually including it, as I don’t know what licensing terms the scripts are distributed with.
Technorati Tags: AppleScript, Doug’s AppleScripts, iTunes
Add missing tracks to local iTunes
I have been getting bored with the music selection that I have on my iPod. Since my laptop only has a subset of our total music collection, the iPod only has music from this set.
I wanted to make sure that the iTunes Library on my laptop had access to all of the music on the Mac mini, so I wrote the following script. What it does is:
- Iterates through the iTunes library on the Mac mini
- For each track that is a MP3 of unprotected AAC file, checks with the local iTunes to see if a track with the same title, artist, and album exists
- If no track exists, it adds a link to the remote file mounted via afp.
This script is not is not optimized, but it works. And I am only planning on letting it run once.
reveal hidden window
Every once in a while, on my Windows XP computer, a window opens up completely off the screen. I can maximize the window, but when the window is maximized, it can’t be moved. These steps work for me to restore access to this “hidden” window.
- Right click on the icon in the Taskbar
- Select move
- Use arrow keys to move the window into view
Technorati Tags: Windows XP
