Firehed’s Blog

Or my predictions were a lot more accurate than I could have possibly guessed. Looks like the guys at AppleTVHacks.net managed to get the full version of OS X running on an AppleTV. That sure didn’t take long. It doesn’t look especially complicated, either. I managed to snag the required download, but it looks like the YouTube clip already got yanked.

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Caught up now, and on time! Only one entry this month.

My Blue Bawls

Edit - not sure what’s up with the formatting on these things. It must be some sort of weird thing with how the thumbnails are handled. Or, more likely, a combination of that and the theme I’m using. Damned if I could say why.

Another update - fixed it. It was theme-related; if you’ve got the same problem as I had for ten seconds and are using this Mandigo theme, turn on the ‘do not float images’ option in the misc options under theme editor. Yay.

Oh yeah, one more thing - if you ever want one of my entires for a desktop background or whatever (something requiring high-res), just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I can hook you up.

Same deal as the last post.

Trial by Caffeine

Micro-collage:

Better late than never, but I figured I might as well post up my Photo of the Month entries from Bit-tech. View the month’s gallery for all entrants at http://potm.webshaped.com.

A Salty Winter

Frosty Window

Most people are like slinkies. Worthless, but fun to push down stairs.

eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines…

Great stuff! Guy hackers cling to me when I wear your stuff the way that sup4 l33t hax0rs cling to AOL

Memory error in your favor. Collect 512MB.

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Wow did that AppleTV get ripped apart fast. Within maybe a day or so, it had already been ripped apart and fitted with a larger hard drive. And of course, someone ripped the disk image and threw it up on bit-torrent. Then we’re sshing into the thing and loading up Apache and who knows what else (admittedly, Apple’s choice of ‘frontrow’ for a password was a bit weak, not that they weren’t counting on the hardware hackers doing just this and getting otherwise-disinterested people like myself wanting one). Booting off an external USB drive within another day or so. Looks like the video of proper USB support hit YouTube about five hours ago. I just managed to dig up some Quicktime FLAC support (and a plethora of other formats between Perian and XiphQT).
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Having now tested quite a few different blogging apps, I’ve concluded that ecto seems to be the best by a good margin. It seems more full-featured, has a much nicer interface, and overall just seems more professional. Plus it’s for Windows and Mac. Seems to interface with just about every kind of blog in existence as well, not that I’ve got more than one. If you’re looking for a blogging app because you’re sick of the web interface approach (not that I don’t care for it, I just prefer the local approach), I’d suggest giving it a try. http://ecto.kung-foo.tv.

On a supremely unrelated note, leave a comment if you want me to shave my head or do something equally foolish. During that awful Route 9 adventure yesterday, I somehow ended up at a wal-mart where I picked up a pair of hair clippers for $20 (something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while). At the moment, all I have is this funny looking patch above my ankle where I was testing them out :p Pic in full entry

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Somehow, Mass. Rt 9 turned what should have been a 45-minute trip into almost three hours. Of course, it might have had something to do with driving west just before sunset and being completely blind, but the signs around there are just plain worthless. The things I do for books that I know I won’t end up reading just so I can make it look like I’m still paying attention in class. At least I found where the local Walmart is, not that I could find it again nor would I especially like to go near it (but there’s something to be said for having a centralized location for cheap crap - I finally picked up a pair of clippers so I’ve got haircuts for life).

Meaning that I really need to buy a map. Or, better yet, a GPS. By the time I found the damn Barnes and Noble, it was quite dark out so not seeing the turnoff for Wellesley on the ride back sucked, and I only managed to get back to school by lucky guesswork and knowing that I needed to make a right turn at some point. Whatever, I’m back. Lucky me. </sarcasm>

Found a new blogging app, too - ecto. First impressions are much better than MarsEdit, but I’ll reserve judgment until I actually post an entry from it. And it looks like AdSense might actually be useful if I ever get traffic to the blog, not that I especially care. Like I’ve said a few times, if it got to the point of paying off my hosting costs (and with PowWeb, they’re pretty low - hitting the $100 minimum payout once a year would more than cover it), I’d be more than psyched.

Still hoping to figure out something for better torrent performance. Unfortunately, I think the only way I can do it without getting a private internet connection is to do some sort of weird IP spoofing, which I neither know how to do nor know if it can work on bit-torrent. I’m playing around with the new Azureus 3 beta - Zudeo - and the built-in legit content browser is awesome (although the download links don’t work for me). But not being able to download that content is certainly a shame - I quite like seeing movie trailers in 1080p, and as I don’t watch TV anymore, it’s really the only way I’d find out about what’s Coming To Theaters Near Me soon.

Or so says this site: http://tutorialninjas.net/2007/03/26/hacking-the-apple-tv/

From what I’ve heard so far, there’s a lot of promise to the thing. I’m listening to MacBreak right now while reading some articles on Digg about the thing, and it’s going places. Out of the box, it’s nearly useless as far as I’m concerned, at least for people who aren’t iTunes Store whores. But crack it open, swap out the hard drive for a bigger one, and have some fun with the stripped-down OS X that it’s running. Leo’s talking about putting Bit-torrent directly on the thing… sounds fun.

And of course, people have already put some sort of Apache (or full MAMP maybe) install. Which means remote web GUIs for the thing, which you can bet will have some sort of AJAXey uploader like what Facebook has to stick your Xvid content on the thing.

I’m waiting a while before I get one (assuming that I don’t just go with XBMC), but it’s been out for, what, less than a week, and it’s already had an insane amount of hacks created to add some useful functionality. If people have already managed to get WoW running on the thing, I’m quite impressed. But what it really suggest to me is that there are TONS of people out there that will happily rip apart the iPhone once it’s released and get some third-party apps running on it. You know, like Skype :)

You go hackers!

I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression… but it’s not often taken literally. Except by Babson’s professors, apparently. Whatever, it makes the lesson just slightly more interesting.