Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

A while ago I did a post when we got our AppleTV.  I promised a followup after I had played around with it for a bit, but fell out of the habit of updating this blog.  Well I’ve certainly had plenty of time to play with the AppleTV and I thought now that I was trying to update this a little more frequently I’d follow up on some posts of the past, and this one seemed like a good one to start with.

After playing with the AppleTV for a little bit it was time to get down to the business of hacking it so that it could play a multitude of video formats as well as allow the attachment of an external storage device.  There are lots of instructions online for rolling your own hacks on to a USB key, but out of laziness, and the fact I’m willing to let better qualified people do the work for me, I went with the guys at aTV Flash.  They frequently update the software which is especially helpful as some of Apple’s updates to the units firmware can tend to break the things you so meticulously went about hacking.

The 160GB internal storage of the AppleTV wasn’t going to cut it once I started making digital copies of my DVD’s to transfer to the device.  We ended up hooking up a 1TB external USB drive to it, which was a snap.  I formatted it as HFS+ Journaled, plugged it in to the AppleTV, and it was immediately recognized.  I was able to FTP in to the unit and copy files over to the external HD.  After the finished copying the were accessible through the AppleTV’s menu - specifically in the “DVD” section of the expanded menu that appears after initially hacking the unit.  For ripping the video I find that Handbrake’s default settings work quite well - a great compromise between file size and quality of both picture and sound.

One of the other benefits that came from hacking the device is access to Hulu (along with other services)through Boxee.  I’ve watched some old episodes of ALF for nostalgic purposes as well as a few other gems (Airwolf and Knight Rider in particular).  It’s hit or miss with newer episodes of some shows through Hulu, but I use it more when I don’t know what I want to watch as opposed to stay current with series I follow.  More recent series I’ve slowly been acquiring from the Apple Store.  Following the series that I do as well as purchasing a couple I haven’t seen in awhile works out to the same, if not a little cheaper than the cable bill had been.  Boxee has also enabled me to have access to every episode of South Park that has been made thus far - something I take frequent advantage of.

The AppleTV has been working great as a replacement for live TV.  Yes, I do miss popping on the occasional football or hockey game, but I can always go to a friends house or one of the sports bars in town to see those.  I certainly haven’t felt any less transitioning to this digital centered, cable tv free lifestyles.

I used to have an offsite machine where I could easily sync backups off my laptop to (I like to have both local and offsite backups), but since that server is no longer in play I had been going for awhile without offsite backups.  While poking through some home inventory forms (you know, in case there is some home disaster), I realized that I no longer had any of my data offsite so I began looking at some various options for backing up data to an offsite location.  Right now I am playing around with Mozy.  It’s been one of the most reccomended services that I could find.  I’m playing with their free account which allows me to backup 2GB’s of files.  It runs in the background on my machine and backups up files from selected folders when any changes to them are made.  Eventually I want to backup all my photos as well but that will require something more than 2GB’s.  Fortunately I can upgrade the Mozy account to one with unlimited storage for only $4.95 a month.  Tht’s pretty hard to beat.  I’ll play around with the free account for awhile to see if this is the service I want to go with.  Feel free to comment with your Mozy experiences or any other backup service I should take a good hard look at.

While skimming through my list of RSS feeds (god, how I love RSS aggregators) I stumbled upon something that peaked my interest. In the latest update to Ubuntu (8.04, Hard Heron) they added a new feature called ufw which stands for ‘Uncomplicated Firewall’. If anyone has worked with a firewall before, especially via the command line, they know what kind of hair pulling experience it can be. Even setting up something fairly simple would take a lot of poking, prodding, and most importantly forethought and planning in to how you were going to set it up. ipfw, or ipchains certainly aren’t known for their usability. I’ve applauded both Microsoft’s and Apple’s forays in to making firewalling an easier experience even if both of them fall short in several areas. At least they’ve given it more effort than the entire linux community. However Ubuntu seems interested in creating a firewall that can be setup quickly and with a few simple commands have it up and running. In fact it took me under 60 seconds to enable it, allow access to a couple of ports that I wanted to use, and deny access to anything else. Because it uses the /etc/services file instead of trying to remember the port number for a specific service you can simply use the services name. Adding a new rule is as simple as “sudo ufw allow ssh”. As one might guess that command tells the firewall to add a rule that will allow ssh. You can, as with any other firewall, limit access further by only allowing a narrow band of IP addresses to access the machine. You can deny individual IP’s or entire blocks of them as well.

For a good primer on using ‘ufw’ check out this website.

Generally for posting to this blog (and for that matter, LiveJournal) I simply use the web interface. For awhile I’ve been considering working with some offline editors - so this morning seemed like a good time to do some research and narrow down my options. The two editors I’m going to be giving a shot to are Ecto (the beta version as development on the 2.x seems to have dried up last year), and MarsEdit. Neither of which are free, sadly. I did a quick test of a couple free options and they were wholly unusable - in the case of when it kept posting the same LiveJournal entry multiple time which was pretty damn annoying. Fortunately both of the editors I’m trying out have a full featured evaluation period so I can see if either are worth giving my hard earned money to, or if it’s back to the web interface I go. I figure in a week or so I’ll do a nice little head to head write up with my experiences on each of them.

I’ve moved posts over from the old server to the new one as well as getting the formatting back to the way that it was. I’ve also made a few changes and there will be a few more minor ones on the way.  Using the new server it’ll be a lot easier to do some of the things that I want, rather than before where I would have had to bash my head against the wall (so to speak) a fair amount of time.  Things are a lot more streamlined now.

At the moment I’m torn between setting back up a web gallery on this site, or just paying for a Flickr Pro account.  Decisions decisions.