July 2009 Archives

Do you have an HP printer with an LCD display that is network addressable? Want to have a bit of fun with it? Follow these instructions to get something like this:

Emo printer has feelings too by Joe Attardi, used under license

There's more on the 'hpinsertcoin' tag on Flickr.

All the printers we use at work are HP, but if the office was evacuated because I'd made a printer say it had a radiation leak I probably wouldn't have a job for much longer. Besides, I don't know their IP addresses.

[Via Utterly Boring]

Probably just worth mentioning that this blog is now running Movable Type 4.3, released yesterday. As well as a few new features, it apparently also boasts better performance, which is good.

One of the interesting new features is paginated search results, instructions for which are here. I may well check that out.

Those of you who read this blog in a feed reader or on Facebook will notice that each entry is now appended with a byline stating the name of the entry and where and when it was originally posted. This is just so that I can track where my content ends up and to ensure I'm properly credited for it, in line with the content license. A number of blogs now do this as some sites seem to republish people's content without the correct attribution or a link back to where it came from.

The byline is a simple code addition to Movable Type's default feed template.

ma.tt linked to Jeff Bezos' Amazon reviews, bearing in mind that Jeff Bezos is the CEO and founder of Amazon.

Probably one of the best is for 1 Gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk. Not for his review, but for the first comment, which is hidden by default:

Dana Gilbert says:
this guy is simply being sarcastic, mocking the purpose of Amazon. Go somewhere else please, low life.

Irony is lost on some people...

(Incidentally, it would appear that either Jeff doesn't own the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt or he hasn't got around to reviewing it yet. Or he's ordered a Three Keyboard Cat Moon t-shirt instead)

It's good quality, too. Remember, you can buy it here.

Also take a look at a new design by the same designer, which is up for voting. Monkey Island fans take note.

I've uploaded the first batch of photos from my recent trip to France to Flickr. These are just the ones taken in La Rochelle - the photos from Ile-de-Ré, Ile d'Aix and Poitiers will follow soon. Still, there's 69 pictures there for you to peruse at your leisure.

I haven't given them very descriptive titles and most are missing descriptions at present. If you're friends with me on Flickr, feel free to add to the tags where you see appropriate.

If you're friends with me on Facebook then you will have seen many of these before, however these are at full resolution.

I'm a bit slow on posting about this since it happened in June, but Shareaza, one of the best peer-to-peer clients for Windows has had to change its official web site again due to it being sabotaged by outside forces.

Originally the site was at shareaza.com, with some material hosted on SourceForge (the program has been open source since 2004). The owner of the domain eventually gave it up after a legal challenge and it was bought out by iMesh, a company which used to release an eponymous peer-to-peer client of their own but now sells a 'legitimate' music download application. They then released a program known as 'ShareazaV4', which was actually just a rebranded version of their own iMesh program. As well as stealing the Shareaza name, it used the Shareaza branding as well, and apparently came bundled with spyware. As such, I won't link to shareaza.com and it's notable that searching for 'shareaza' on Google or Yahoo! will not show shareaza.com anymore.

Upon the loss of shareaza.com, the project moved completely to SourceForge, but was later offered hosting at the pantheraproject.net domain and this was adopted as the 'new' home of the official client Shareaza. The owners of shareaza.com, which had now passed to a company called Discordia (which appears to be an international shell company for iMesh) applied to register Shareaza as a trademark at the US Patent and Trademark Office. The official Shareaza project started a legal defence fund; the trademark application has now been published for opposition so hopefully the case will be heard now.

But last month the pantheraproject.net domain was also sabotaged, by a chap named William Shields Erwin, who had gained rank in the project by donating money to the legal defence fund. All of the content on the site was lost and it too ended up pointing at shareaza.com, which offers iMesh's fake Shareaza client. So Shareaza has again ended up back at SourceForge and has had to establish a new wiki and forum with as much content from the old domain as was possible to retrieve.

If Shareaza was an illegal piece of software, this kind of action may be proportionate, but it isn't. While it can be used to facilitate copyright infringement, which generally is illegal, the application can also be used solely for legal means, such as downloading content from sites like LegalTorrents. The company which is allegedly responsible for the sabotage, iMesh, claims to be a legal download service, but it is seemingly engaging in activities which disregard intellectual property, rather than protect it. It just so happens that the intellectual property it appears to want to sabotage belongs to the Shareaza project and not entertainment industry rights-holders.

Shareaza's open source nature means it's unlikely that it will ever disappear - provided there are enough copies of the source code spread about and people willing to keep it going, it'll keep coming back. But to come under such a sustained attack for making something that isn't breaking any laws is morally wrong.

Just got home after work after braving a heavy downpour of rain. It's been raining all day, but, of course, it had to crank it up just when I left work - and it's a half hour walk home.

So now I'm in a spare change of clothes, since when I got in I was wetter than an otter who, having just won a wet t-shirt competition, decided to throw itself into a lake. Even my underwear was wet through.

And then 5 minutes after I get inside, the rain stops and the sun comes out! Obviously I'm in for bad karma today...

(This rant was posted here because it wouldn't fit in 140 characters)

Those of you familiar with the character of Admiral Ackbar from the original Star Wars films will know his most well-known line - "It's a trap!". Those who don't can brush up at Know Your Meme.

Anyway, one of my friends from university has designed this t-shirt:

Ackbarpography t-shirt design @ © SplitReason.com

It's available to buy from Split Reason for $18.95, which works out at around £20 when you include international postage. I've just bought one.

Dave from Blogography has revealed his secret flowchart for writing entries. As I was having trouble thinking of something to write myself, I decided to follow it. And here's what I came up with:

(In my defence, I'm not an artist and I no longer have access to Hari's Wacom drawing tablet - that was drawn with a rather cheap wireless mouse)

(Full disclosure: I am not affiliated to either Apple or Coca-Cola, I just think this is worth sharing)

Over the summer in Britain Coca-Cola is running a promotion whereby you can enter the codes from specially-branded bottles of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero which can be used to buy free songs from the iTunes music store. Considering that a 500ml bottle of Coke is about 99p, and a song from the iTunes music store is also about 99p, you're saving about £1. Or getting a free bottle of Coke with your music purchase, if you look at it that way.

There are, as always, a few catches to watch out for:

1. The offer only applies to specially-branded bottles of Coke, so look out for the ones which say 'Free song on iTunes'. This will only be UK bottles - parallel imports from elsewhere in Europe probably won't be part of this, nor will older bottles still on sale.
2. You'll need to keep the bottle, not just the label or lid. The code is printed on the bottle behind the label.
3. You will need to have iTunes installed and an Apple account (which you'll have if you've ever bought a Mac from Apple online or any media from the iTunes store)
4. You will need a Coke Zone account - register if you haven't got one. The site makes heavy use of Flash.
5. You can only redeem your codes against a few hundred songs. The code does not give you a voucher off any purchase - you will have to use the Coke Zone site to find the song you want to download and then have it instruct iTunes to download it. And there are only around 200-300 songs offered on the site, as far as I can tell. If you can't find the song on Coke Zone, then even if Apple sells it on the normal store you won't be able to buy it.

However, it's not all bad:

1. The songs you download are DRM-free and encoded as 256Kbps AAC files like any other iTunes Plus song.
2. Each code will additionally award you 2 Coke Zone points, which can be redeemed against money-off vouchers for days out, online stores and things. Coke Zone points can be picked off most Coke bottles all-year round. 5 points for example will get you 2 tickets for the price of 1 at Thorpe Park or Alton Towers. 600 points will buy you an XBox 360, although that would mean drinking 300 bottles of Coke.

So far I've picked up 5 songs for free with another 2 on my wishlist. Unfortunately some other songs that I want to get aren't in the limited list offered for free so I'll be buying those with real money.

Though they seem to have died down recently, some months ago I started seeing spam emails sent from friend's email addresses advertising Chinese computer hardware wholesalers. Evidently the spammers had managed to gain access to the user's email account and had used their address book to send the messages - a good trick as many email clients make exceptions for people in address books. A variation is used by Nigerian 419 scammers who fake an email from the account's owner stating that they have been robbed/lost their luggage etc. and to send money to them by Western Union.

I emailed someone today who has a Hotmail address, and received an auto-respond email with a similar spam message. I'm guessing that the person had had their account compromised, and the spammers had set an auto-responder up with their spam message in it. Even though the owner of the address has presumably got control of their account back, they haven't changed the auto-responder.

Remember, never give your email password to anyone, even legitimate looking web sites that want to search your address book for friends. The sooner more sites adopt OAuth, the better.

Although I've been back in Britain since Monday, I haven't yet said publicly that I'm back, so...

I'm back.

There you go.

France was fantastic - we had really good weather for most of the holiday and went to lots of cool places. I'll write in more detail soon although I've managed to return from holiday during a very busy time at work so it'll probably be at least the weekend before I upload anything. I also have around 300 photos to sort through and upload to Flickr.

Those of you who don't follow me on Twitter can read what I've posted while away as a brief overview of what happened on my travels.

It's Monday, so it's time for part three of the Mac Mini Media Centre project entries - the software, or what makes the user interface look different to a normal computer. Remember that I'm currently in France and that this entry was written a few weeks ago.

There are several media centre applications available for Macs under a variety of licenses: open source, free and commercial. All of them have various advantages and disadvantages, but my aim is to choose one that fulfils most or all of the requirements that I set out in week 1.

Plex and Boxee

I'm mentioning these 2 because they're both quite popular, but unfortunately neither are available for older PowerPC-based Macs; only the newer Intel ones. One of my aims is to reuse my existing Mac Mini so these are out of the question.

Front Row

Front Row is Apple's own media centre application, which shipped on all new Macs from 2006 onwards and was made available to all Macs with Leopard; my Mac Mini falls into the latter category. It used to be quite basic but can now play content from iTunes, photos from iPhoto and DVDs. It can also play content from other machines that share their libraries using iTunes' protocol across a network. It doesn't support TV adaptors and can't be tuned to internet TV channels, although it does support podcasts.

MediaCentral

MediaCentral is a commercial media centre for Macs by the same people as the TubeStick, and as I was one of the early buyers of the TubeStick I got a free license for this. It's more customisable than Front Row, and does most of the things Front Row can do except the network support. It does support internet TV but doesn't appear to integrate with the BBC iPlayer, which is a shame. You can use it to watch stuff on YouTube, however. Naturally it integrates with the TubeStick so it can be used for watching TV and it also has support for internet radio, something that can be done with iTunes and Front Row but not very gracefully in my experience. If it provided network support, this would probably be perfect, but it's not quite there.

XBMC

XBMC stands for XBox Media Centre, as it was originally developed for Microsoft's XBox but can be run other platforms too. It supports a wide range of media and can play back DVDs, but has poor iTunes integration meaning having to maintain a separate music library. The Mac version also can't stream from other computers very well. There's no integration with TV adaptors either.

MythTV

I had a look at creating a MythTV system but it looks rather too complicated - it's mostly available in source code form only and I'd prefer something pre-packaged. While I could probably tailor a MythTV system to achieve everything I want, I don't think I have the time or the know-how to do it.

Based on this, it's likely that I will go with MediaCentral as the software but I may give Front Row a fair shot too, especially if I decide not to go with digital TV integration.