04.09.07
Truely Hackable AppleTV
Ever now and then a new product comes out and you would swear that the company designed it to be hacked and there is the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” going on. The new AppleTV is one of those products. They could have sanded the chips, encapsulated the boards and hardened the drive to keep prying little fingers out but, nooooo, the only thing between you and a hacked AppleTV is the rubber mat on the bottom and several Torx screws.
Which brings me to my first item. Why do people have to butcher their AppleTV just to open it? Look, it’s a RUBBER mat. Someone needs to make a mask showing where the holes are for the screws and a few minutes with some brass tubing and whack, whack, a rubber mat hole cutter is born. Lay the map over the mat, whack, whack, nice shiny holes over the screws and you are good to go and the mat is still in place but you have free access. MAKE magazine which normally has high quality hacks really dropped the ball on this one by showing the typical low-brow pull and scrape removal technique.. philistines..butchers.. the AppleTV cries for a more elegant solution than such a barbaric job.
My own AppleTV will be violated soon, once I get some quiet times away from the girls who would want to help dad take it apart. A three year old with a screw driver is a truly frightening thing to behold 
Nothing is safe, not the TV, the radio, the blocks, the boxes not even the dog. My very first task is a bigger hard drive. It is beyond me why Apple is selling this with such a measly hard drive when the Video iPods have 60gig. The good folks over at AppleTVhacks.net have a nice piece on how to do just this without very much pain. They also have a good piece on enabling SSH which I plan to do AND there is a beta of a plugin from the folks at blog.twenty08.com for adding RSS feeds to the Front Row menus.
I gotta get me one of these!!!
04.01.07
Blue Teeth and Docking
Blue teeth? oh yeah, it’s Blue TOOTH I got a Motorola H700 Bluetooth adapter for my cell phone but it works very well with my Powerbook and my iMac. As a test, I configured the headset in bluetooth and then I power up my EVDO card and logged into the internet in the Santa Monica mountains. Great view by the way Then I logged into Skype and configured Skype to use the headset for audio in and out. Voila!! I was able to make a very usable call from my Powerbook over EVDO using the headset and walk away for about 20 feet without any issues. The only thing was to remember that the paring code was 0000 for the headset.
I did the same on my iMac and made a call to a friend in England using Skype and the headset. The voice quality with the H700 is very good, the audio speaker in my ear is a bit weak and the headset does pick up surrounding noise very easily. But, it works well and the price is right for the cordless freedom.
I also found a cool piece of software from Stunt Software called “overflow” which is a dock extender. I tend to accumulate icons in my dock since I “need” everything at the ready and I dislike having to dig down in the application directory for the application. But then sometimes I find an app I had forgotten about.
I really like this app over some other extenders because it is very, very easy to use. It also is very non-intrusive unless I need to use it unlike some of the paged docks I’ve seen. The price is right, not free but at 14 bucks, it’s very reasonable for something I use daily and it does not cause me any problems.
Another app I have been using and getting accustomed to using is called “Goodpage” which is a webpage editor. Now, I know there are LOTS of editors out there abd I normally use TextMate to do my editing but I had a need to edit a site with way too many tables and not enough time to redo it all in CSS. Goodpage is an interesting editor that gives two panes, one large pane and one flyout pane and either can show the rendered page, code, layout, nested tables in a graphical layout etc. This flyout with a way to highlight an element and then have Goodpage find and highlight the code was a lifesaver in this table madness. While I like it, it is pricy at 90 dollars so I am not sure if it’s worth it or not. But, it does not cost you anything to run the 30 day demo.
04.25.07
Why I love my Mac
Posted in Commentary at 7:09 am by hackamac
I have not written in the past two weeks, not because I am feeling anti-social but because I had to pull a couple of 24 hour plus days due to a 0 day attack on our Windows network. Yes, like many Mac users, I have to work and live in a Windoze world much to my annoyance but it does pay the bills. In this case, we got slammed by the current unpatched DNS RPC hack which had Rinbot as a payload. The POS came in via one of our VPN connections in China and hit the DNS servers, whack Symantec (not a big fan, even less now) and went nuts.
It took a few days to work out just what had happened and I spent more then a few hours in the windows registry working out a bandaid solution which involved renaming files and putting dummy RO files in place which would break the worms. Microsoft STILL does not have a patch they have been less than helpful over the entire mess. Symantec was rude and nasty until I read the C++ crash report which named their stupid software by name. Then it was “we will get back to you”. They never did with anything helpful. It took Symantec over three days before they had an update that could even SEE the RinBot nasty and even then the version of AV engine we were on was, shall we say, weak. It turns out that their vaunted AV Corporate server software which we had till the virus whacked it, does not update the EXE file, it has to be uninstalled and then reinstalled manually. What a POS.
So during all of this “fun”, my trusty Mini just kept working away while my boss’s laptop died, my co-workers workstation died and most of the servers died. I did figure out about day 2 that the worm was yapping away on port 1025 and then I built some IPsec filters for the Windows servers to block that port. That calmed things down alot as did installing the free AVG software on all 1600 desktops because Symantec could not see the worm but the free AVG could. Now we have to work out which AV solution to settle on because as much as I like AVG, it is not a real enterprise solution, well, neither was Norton as it turned out.
The real life saver came from one of the companies we had just bought several months ago and who are using Cisco’s CSA product. They did not get a single infection though the servers were getting beat on by the worm. CSA saw and blocked it all before we even knew we had problems. So we promptly put CSA on most of our servers and we have plans to roll it out to key desktops and remote users in the near future. Thanks for nothing Microsoft, you are costing us a boatload of money due to your crappy programming.
A side note, some of our older and neglected servers were not affected by the worm until we put CURRENT patches on them, then it was WHAM BAM. So the flaw that Rimbot uses was not present until you installed Microsoft patches from around SP1 for 2003 server. Sp2 is swiss cheese to the worm.
So now we are going back to our regularly scheduled Mac musings. In the coming weeks, I have a new cheapo 200 watt strobe kit I just bought off eBay, I have the Huey/Panatone monitor color adjustment tool and a few other new cools things to play with. I love my AppleTV and the kids have become addicted to “The Incredibles: on it
They also love to watch themselves on a photo slideshow. I just picked up some new books from Sitepoint for CSS and tableless web design for a current project and I will be writing about them soon.
Did I say that Windoze sucks? For the amount of time lost and money spent trying to protect our Windows boxen, everyone and I mean EVERYONE in the office could have had top flight Macs on their desktop. And yet, people refuse to admit that in some if not many cases, Windows is not the best solution. ::sigh::
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