Twitter hashtags

Great way of tracking events:

• http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags
• http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/10/22/twitter-hashtags-for-emergency-coordination-and-disaster-relief/

Wii Modchip

I tried to order a D2Sun V3 SPI pre-soldered to a Wii-Clip V12. It sounded like a good deal for a little over 80 euros and included a tri-wing driver. Unfortunately, the Polish company, console24.com, is less than reliable. I never got my order. Currently, I'm waiting on the refund they've promised. I'm crossing my fingers.

So, back to the drawing board.

What to order?

• Wasabi V3 or Zero

Where to order?

And cross the fingers again.

UPDATE 1/7/09: I was hoping the chip would have arrived by now. We left for the holidays and I was desperately hoping that it would arrive in the mail. It hasn't come. I only hope that it will either come soon after I email the company or that they will refund me. Why the hell is it so hard to get a chip sent here?

UPDATE 1/9/09: Looks like my chip got sent to Maui. The seller sent the chip to the address I had in Paypal for security reasons. Since my parents are in Maui, they are having their mail forwarded from Princeton. I talked with Dad last night and he confirmed that he had an envelope from Canada with something lumpy in it. Nice. Looks like they got it! I hope I have a tri-wing driver bit somewhere.

Updating Resource Docs in ANGEL Presenter Instances

I'm an editor for an ANGEL Group that features a number of Adobe Presenter files. I was asked to update a DOC file that was consequently used in a number of presentations. I tried to re-publish ZIP files of those presentations, but realized that when I uploaded the updated ZIP the docs were the old files. I didn't even bother to try to figure it out since I'd have to go back into Parallels. So, I went into ANGEL's "Group File Manager" in the "Manage" Tab and began to manually add the updated versions of the documents directly into the "resources" directory of each presentation.

At one point, I had an empty directory in the Group File Manager and realized that the only way to delete it was to convert it into a ZIP and then delete the ZIP file. Kind of silly, but it works.

MKTG 301 Presentation w/ Video Preparation

These are the steps I need to take with Darren's presentations:

1. Create PDF Notes for the presentation
   
2. Copy the PPT to Parallels
3. Put PPT into a new directory
4. Put Notes PDF into the new directory
   
5. Duplicate title slide 4 times
6. Paste "Presentation Instructions" on each of the four new slides
7. Import video through Adobe Presenter using High Quality (700 kbps)
   
8. Adobe Presenter: Slide Manager:
1. Presented By: None
2. Navigation Name: [name for each slide]
3. Advance by User: Yes
9. Adobe Presenter: Presentation Settings
1. Choose the charcoal-colored theme
2. Deselect Auto play
3. Duration: 0.0 sec.
4. Attach handouts
5. Include Slide Numbers in Outline
   
10. Publish
11. Check which images didn't survive
12. Save as picture... for each image
13. Re-publish presentation
    

Sharing Data between Windows and OSX Leopard

John the Ripper

Article: How can I reset the password?
Article: How to crack Mac OS X passwords
Article: Cracking Unix password files for beginners
Article: How Mac OS X Implements Password Authentication, Part 2
(Forum: Leopard Password Hash Files, semi-repeat of above)
Article: Mac OS X Single User Mode Root Access

Securing MAMP

I'm quoting this post to insure I don't loose this information:

Installing MAMP
To install MAMP, download the latest disk image file and mount the image and copy the “MAMP” folder to your Applications folder. Note that MAMP MUST be installed in the Applications folder to work properly. Once the copy is complete, the installation is complete and ready to use. MAMP in a freshly installed state is not safe to use in a production environment. The next few sections will explain how to secure your installation of MAMP.
Securing MySQL
If you are going to install a PHP/MySQL based application, the first thing to change is the MySQL root password. Open the terminal and type the following:
/Applications/MAMP/bin/mysql4/bin/mysqladmin -u root -p password NEWPASSWORD
Instead of NEWPASSWORD use the new password you want.
Afterwards, you also need to change the password for phpMyAdmin and other scripts which are running under MAMP. You can change the password for phpMyAdmin in the following file:
‘/Applications/MAMP/bin/phpMyAdmin-X.X.X/config.inc.php’
Be sure to edit this file in a plain text editor such as BBEdit or TextWrangler.
The password is set on line 86 of the document and by default is set to “root”.
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'root';
Change ‘root‘ to the password set previously in the terminal. Now you can close and save config.inc.php and phpMyAdmin is now using the new MySQL password you set.
The next script we will change is located at /Applications/MAMP/bin/mamp/index.php
$link = @mysql_connect(’:/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock’, ‘root’, ‘root’);
The second instance of root is the password the script is providing to MySQL. Change this to your new root password. Once that is changed, you can save and close the file. Thanks for the catch Alexandre!
The next thing we will change is the stop MySQL script MAMP uses to stop the MySQL process. The file we are going to modify is located at ‘/Applications/MAMP/bin/stopMysql.sh’. The contents of the file is as follows:
# /bin/sh
/Applications/MAMP/bin/mysql4/bin/mysqladmin -u root -proot --socket=/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock shutdown
You will notice that the script saves the MySQL user id and password in the file as -u root for the userid and -proot for the password. We are just going to change the password for the script so when we quit MAMP, MySQL will also quit.
In order to change the password, in the section that is -proot change this to -pNEWPASSWORD where 'NEWPASSWORD' is the password set previously in the terminal. Close and save this file.
If MAMP is running, go to the phpMyAdmin page and see if you can access the databases. If you are able to, then phpMyAdmin is configured correctly to use the new password. Now try to Stop the servers for MAMP, if successful, both servers should stop. If MySQL does not stop, check the stopMysql.sh script again and check the password.
Securing the Admin section of MAMP
You may have noticed that the ’start page’ for MAMP is located at ‘http://localhost/MAMP/’ and this is where you can administer your databases and other settings for MAMP. If anyone figures out you are running MAMP, (identifiable by the favicon), they would be able to go straight to the phpMyAdmin section and drop entire databases. This is a security hole that needs to be fixed. For this solution, we will use .htaccess and an .htpasswd file to secure the folder. The .htpasswd file is what will hold the encrypted password for Apache to authenticate. The .htaccess file is what tells Apache to look at the .htpasswd file to authenticate against. Go to Dynamic Drive’s online .htpasswd tool to create an .htpasswd file and corresponding .htaccess.
The first section wants a username that you will use to access the protected folder. This can be anything you want. The second box will want a password that is valid for the user you just input. This can also be anything you want. In the second section, this is requesting the path to the .htpasswd file. We will put these files in ‘/Applications/MAMP’. Once these file are in place if you try to navigate to http://localhost/MAMP/ you will be presented with a dialog box requesting userid and password. Type in your corresponding userid and password and you should then be granted access to the start page where you can then administrate your databases.
I hope you find this tutorial useful and if there are any corrections or additions you would like to see added, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.
UPDATE 02-23-06
I’ve added Alexandre’s tip to the article and have fixed an encoding error which made the code bits messy and incorrect. Hat tip to Joshua! Thanks for the tips!

Drupaling

I'm just beginning to play with Drupal and have got one running in MAMP Pro, but I'm having some issues with setting up multi-sites.

• My Drupal Site
• Creating Multiple Sites On a Local Computer
• Creating multisites locally using mamp (mac os x)
• Running multiple sites on a local PC (localhost) from a single codebase, using Windows

Downloading Embedded Video

Legality of Recording Meetings

http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations
http://www.rcfp.org/taping/

I've recently downloaded "Recorder" for my iPhone and was happy that I could shelve yet another electronic gadget: my digital voice recorder.

I'm often so busy in meetings trying to understand some of the high-level topics, that it's difficult to take notes on all the details. Using a voice recorder was great in this regard. To be honest, I would just turn it on during meetings and review my recordings later to see what I missed.

I'm not really sure what got me thinking about the ethics and legality of doing so, but there's a lot out there that really put the breaks on for me. There are a lot of issues out there that need some careful thought and the plethora of digital options only makes the waters murkier.

What about recording sessions with Adobe Connect?
What about recording meetings with a Pulse Pen?

I'm going to think twice before I hit the red record button the next time. And I'm going to go through and delete any of the recordings I had made previously.

LionShare

I just found out that PSU has P2P capabilities and IM. I should really go through and try and catalog all of these technological resources.

Sending video to my Tivo

Hyunjoo and I need to catch up on episodes of Heroes, but I am getting sick of having to plug my laptop into the back of out Samsung HDTV to watch things. I don't want to have to buy a "network media player"... I don't have the cash.

Thankfully there are others whom have asked and have answers to my very same question:

• http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=278385
• http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=264363&highlight=winavi&page=2
• http://dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=58447
• http://forums.oztivo.net/showthread.php?t=973
• http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2007/12/13/how-to-enable-tivogoback-functionality-using-visualhub/
  

Changing the "Adobe" logo in Presenter

VNC Servers and Clients

This particular post is primarily focussed on Windows options, however I can't help but mention Mac ones as well since there will almost always be a Mac involved in the equation if I have anything to say about it.

Windows

• Tight VNC - free; other software allows one to broadcast their screen to a network of computers
• RealVNC - free and paid options available for premium-level support
• UltraVNC - free with lots of plug-in options available

Mac

• just use Screen Sharing
• useful hints for using Screen Sharing

Wiki on the Buffalo NAS

Mac's Rule the Day (yet again)

Well, maybe it should be... Vista blows yet another day!

I hope I don't get fired for this, but apparently there's a VPN problem here at PSU that relates to 64-bit systems:

Currently, there is no Cisco VPN client (a type of software that creates a secure connection over the Internet) available for these 64-bit operating systems.

All I can say is, glad I have a Mac.

PSU@UP VPN config

I have to admit that I'm not exactly sure why I need a VPN, but I think it has something to do with UP's new wireless security here at the Outreach Building. I have the notion that we're just catching up with other networks on main campus.

I had some problems connecting initially. I realized that I was having troubles since I didn't have WiFi active. Once that was on and I was connected to "pennstate", everything went well.

So many options

I don't even know what we want to do any more, what we can do. There are so many options for sharing media across all the platforms in your house. One really has to be careful about what you choose, because there could be something out there that does it better. Internet research is so important now days.

I'm going to have to answer these questions for myself soon because I'm going to want to play vob's I have on our HDTV without hooking up a lot of extra AV units. All we really have hooked up is our TiVo, Wii, and PS2. There's so much more we can do! But I really can't spend any more money on anything for like five years!

phpESP

One of the best things about running your own server is the flexibility to add tools that you would otherwise have to pay money for.

I've been experimenting with phpESP, a survey tool that I hope we can use here at CE@UP to handle our own surveys without having to go to Marketing Research. They are fantastic there and are great for large-scale surveys. But, I wanted to have a tool that we could use here as well.

After I was able to install it the first time, I lost access to the account because of a bad password, or something like that. I'm giving it another try. I use a different set of install instructions and I hope I got it right this time.

The server seems to be holding so far. The survey site is available here. Now I just have to populate it with a basic survey.

Buffalo LinkStation Live

I've been trying to solve this problem of how I can share all our documents, music, photos, installers, etc. across our network and when I'm at the office.

Previously, I had to use my MacBook as a file server. Given it's relatively small drive, I had to hook up my two external hard drives to it directly. It ceased to be portable. I couldn't use my G4 PowerMac or PowerBook, so that left me with my MacBook.
I took the plunge for a NAS last week and it's up and running. It looks like a great system that can serve up our files and provide backup options if I hook up an external drive to it.

My biggest problem right now is getting our files on to it. I've got over 350GB of files and transferring them via ethernet is going to take a while. If it were only that, I could wait. In fact, we'd probably be finished now. The real problem is that my Mac isn't copying all of the files. I'll leave it and then return to find that the copying process has halted and I don't really know what has and what hasn't been copied.

I should probably write the MacCast and find out what they have to say, because this is really frustrating.

Seesmic

Larry just stopped by and introduced me to this site. It's a videoblogging site that emphasizes threaded discussions. Looks like it's Flash-based and free. Could be an interesting tool for online and blended courses.

Oracle to iPhone

There isn't much out there, but I did find this pretty cool way that will potentially allow me to at least pull my Oracle calendar into Apple's iCal so that I can sync events that way. I found this article from a different UIC webpage on general Oracle use.

Smartpens

It's been a while, but I've got a cool one to pick up on: smartpen technology.

One of the most common are the Fly Fusion pens, but I wanted to start off with the Pulse by Livescribe. Very cool. I'm jazzed that it'll record audio sync'd with your notes. That'll be useful for meetings. They say we'll be able to print our own sheets of paper as well, but that's not going to be available until the end of 2008. It doesn't do text capture yet, but again that's something that's supposedly coming by the end of the year. Big downsides for me are that it won't run on a Mac, even when using Parallels. I'll have to whip up a Windows partition now. The 2GB version also goes for $200. Ouch. I'm also concerned about the battery in these things. I hope we can at least send them back to the company if we need to get a new battery.

Maxed-out at 128 GB?

Apple Discussion

OWC Helpdesk Info

Portable PC Apps Options

100 Top Mac Apps

Open Source Multimedia Studio

White Box iPhone Bug

Two days ago, I went to sync my iPhone and was a little surprised that the one photo I remember taking wasn't appearing when I launched iPhoto. It wasn't a super-important image, so I let it slide.

Then yesterday, Hyunjoo and I went for a hike on Mt. Nittany and tried to take images there. That's when I discovered that the camera wasn't taking pictures. I was almost certain that it was a software issue.

I just hopped on the internet and lo-and-behold... it's a pretty well documented bug.

I used the Method #2, but maybe should have waited to read further down to the "f1b43d3b3ecf259a3626c13a8b0cebd8ba513117.mdbackup" solution. That's OK, I'm beginning with a new slate.

Apple's new iPhone (kinda)

Well, Apple did it. I dunno why they didn't do it earlier, like at Macworld. I waited until the 17th of January to buy my iPhone because I was holding out for a 16GB model and they just released it two days ago. Nineteen days, geesh. Well, it would have been $100 more than I had paid which in itself is enough to warrant patience. But, now that I've been using the 8GB model I'm OK with the capacity since I'm syncing about every day anyhow and I can't go through 8GB of video, podcasts, and audio. But the prices will come down and when Hyunjoo gets one, she'll get the bigger one for sure.

iPhone, so easy a baby could use it

Installing Leopard without a DVD

Eye-Fi SD card sends images directly through network

Streaming video to iPhone

The iPhone Remote software is awesome! Unfortunately I've been having problems streaming video. I tried to stream a recording of "Dirty Harry" I got off my EyeTV. The sound will drop out and it's difficult to navigate forward or backward to resume play. It'll stop every minute or so and then start up again without sound.

EyeTV to PSP FAQ

I'm not using my PSP for video playback anymore, but good information none the less.

Good Article on all the In's and Out's of Video on an iPod

PDF to Website

1. Convert PDF to JPG

2. Import text to XLS 

Page 001

3. Set fixed deliminations

4. Fill rows down

5. Series to 100

6. Save as Tab delim Text

7. Open in TextEdit and clean up text

8. Paste into DW

How the iPhone has changed my life in 4 Days

• It is so much easier to keep on top of heaps of emails.
• I don't have to carry my cell phone and Palm TX anymore
• I can watch TV that I record using my EyeTV
• I can schedule my EyeTV to remotely record
• I can get map information that's more up-to-date than the most recent version available through my Garmin GPS
• I can stay in contact with everyone far easier than before
• I can finally begin to sort out my music and finish adding my "star" recommendations
• I can take pictures again after my digital camera kinda died
• It's much easier to update my address book and calendars now
• I can check out new music on the road through the iTunes (mobile) store
• It's a lot easier to check out YouTube videos and share them

There are some things I'd like to see...

• When a website claims that it has a dedicated iPhone website, that's not necessarily a good thing - they usually limit what you're able to do compared to a desktop
• Flash compatibility when surfing
• Deleting multiple emails
• The ability to make basic edits among your pictures before sending them out
• Taking video clips
• Making voice memos
• Full To-Do lists
• Free Skype functionality
• SD card support
• ability to edit docs in Google Docs
• more onboard storage

Birthday present: iPhone

First off, thank you to everyone who chipped in to getting me my iPhone:

Mom and Dad

Abonim & Oughmonim

Hyunjoo

Scott & Hyunjung

Nayoung

Winston & Julia

I haven't actually gotten my iPhone yet, but that's because Macworld begins in a few days. It would be silly to buy one before finding out what the new changes in Apple's offerings are.

I'm not interested in the next iPhone version. I'd just like more memory.