MikeyP.com

LinkStash Buttons for Opera / Win7 64-bit

2009-11-09T02:37:00Z

LinkStash [linkstashbuttonsforoperawin764bit, linkstash] is still my favorite bookmark management tool. And Opera is still my favorite web browser. I’ve previously provided LinkStash buttons for Opera in Windows XP. They also work fine in the 32-bit version of Windows 7. But if you are using LinkStash and Opera in the 64-bit version of Windows 7, you’ll need new buttons.

Here they are:

View LinkStash Bookmarks

Grab URL (Add Bookmark)

Note that these assume you installed LinkStash in the default location.

From Linux to Mac

2009-10-05T00:33:00Z

I have a server at home that handles a variety of tasks, such as DNS hosting/caching, media serving, home automation, printer/scanner sharing, and security camera control. I’ve been running everything on an old P3-733 Linux Box [spockpowerusage, spockserverspecs] for over 8 years. This summer, in the interest of making a major upgrade as well as preparing for an eventual hardware failure, I decided to upgrade the hardware. Instead of building a new Linux box, I replaced the server with a Mac mini .

The Mac mini is incredibly powerful, small, quiet, and energy efficient. Check out the size difference between the mini and my old Linux server. These pictures barely do justice to the monstrous size of the Linux rack.

I bought the “low end” Mac mini and replaced the hard drive and added more RAM. The process was simple. There’s even a handy video on YouTube that illustrates each step.

Thanks to macports.org and Apple’s inclusion of the GNU tools, getting my server daemons up and running on the Mac was only a minor pain. I also installed the latest version of VMWare Fusion , where I’m running a Linux server on the Mac in a virtual machine. The mini is a great host for VMs. In retrospect, I wish I had set up the Linux VM first and kept my server daemons on Linux instead of going through the hassle of getting them to run native, but in the end, I like the resulting flexibility.

Some tips:

The CUPS setup scripts (cupsaddsmb) on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) are broken. See this link for a fix if you want to share a printer with other machines on the network via Samba.
If you need a USB –> serial port adapter, buy this one from Keyspan . It’s the only one that really works. Believe me, I tried a bunch of them.
Want to play WMA Lossless music files on the Mac? Get the mplayer binaries from here.
Rudix is a great place to get precompiled *nix binaries. (Sourceforge link to package history: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rudix/files/)
RealVNC Viewer is the only Windows VNC client that seems to allow for high-performance remote desktop connections to the Mac. Others work, but are much slower. Note that I run the Mac mini “headless,” and control it exclusively via VNC.

It’s hard to imagine a better piece of hardware for a home server than a Mac mini.

Apple Mac mini

Streaming WMA Lossless from a Mac to a PlayStation 3

2009-09-14T05:42:00Z

While the PS3 has native support for playing standard WMA music files, it does not support the WMA Lossless format. My music library is ripped to WMA Lossless, so I wanted to find a way to stream the collection to my new PS3 Slim. Fortunately, the open source PS3 Media Server project makes this almost painless.

Although I rip my CD collection on a Windows machine, the collection itself is stored in a shared folder on a Mac mini. I run a slightly modified version of the FireFly Media Server (aka mt-daapd) on the Mac to serve this collection to any computer running iTunes, as well as a few Roku SoundBridge devices in the house. Since none of the clients support WMA Lossless, I have FireFly configured to use mplayer [mplayer, mplayersilent] to transcode the WMA Lossless files to WAV files on the fly. This scheme works great, provided you have a build of mplayer that can decode WMA Lossless. I use the build from here: http://stefpause.com/apple/mac/mplayer-os-x-10rc1-and-mencoder-binaries/

Installing and running PS3 Media Server on a Mac is a simple and painless way to serve media remotely to a PS3. And it too uses mplayer to transcode audio files. However, when I tried to serve WMA Lossless files from PS3 Media Server to my PS3, I got an “unsupported format” error.

It turns out that (as of this writing) PS3 Media Server includes its own build of mplayer, and that build does not support WMA Lossless. Fortunately, this is easy to fix if you have another version of mplayer installed. Just open a Terminal window, head to the “osx” directory within the “PS3 Media Server.app” resources directory, and create a symlink to the correct version of mplayer.

Here are the basic steps:

1) Install mplayer from here: http://stefpause.com/apple/mac/mplayer-os-x-10rc1-and-mencoder-binaries/

2) Start the Terminal app, and enter the following commands in order:

cd /Applications/PS3 Media Server.app/Contents/Resources/Java/osx
sudo mv mplayer mplayer-old
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mplayer mplayer

That’s all there is to it. PS3 Media Server will automatically serve and transcode WMA Lossless files for the PS3.

Keeping it Cheap and Steady

2009-08-23T05:14:00Z

I’ve always wanted to get a proper SteadyCam or a Manfrotto Fig Rig to help stabilize non-tripod shots with my video camera, but both options can be a bit expensive. While a SteadyCam tries to isolate vibrations from the cameraman through gimbals and counterweights, the Fig Rig uses two-handed leverage to dampen them. It’s simple, effective, and easy to emulate, so I decided to build my own “DIY Camera Stabilizer”.

Before I started, I found a great post on dvxuser.com from someone who made their own stabilizer. His design was so elegant that I decided to try it. He simply used a piece of L-shaped aluminum for a crossbar, and in a brilliant example of genius, used garden hose nozzles for the grips. The genius of the garden hose nozzle is that it includes a rubber grip wrapped around a brass pipe with a threaded end point. There’s no need to fabricate a custom hand grip!

I have a benchtop drill press which made construction simple. I bought two hose nozzles and a length of 1.5 inch x 1.5 inch x 1/8 inch thick L-shaped aluminum bracket at the hardware store. Using a hacksaw, I cut the bracket to 22 inches long, and drilled a hole in the center for a standard 1/4 20 camera mounting bolt. The threaded end on the hose nozzle was a bit more than 5/8 inches wide, so I bought a fat 5/8 inch drill bit, drilled holes 1 inch in from each side for each nozzle, then filed the hole a tad wider until the holder would set in place. I gave it a quick polish and cleaning, and that was that.

The finished product is amazingly effective. Videos are very smooth and steady. You can fake some nice crane shots, and by doing the “groucho walk,” you can get nice dolly-like SteadyCam flying. I’ll post some videos after I practice a little more.

I’m pretty sure I paid less than $15 for all of the parts, not including the fat drill bit (which was also around $15.)

Comcast Speed Blast

2009-08-09T02:52:00Z

Comcast has rolled out a faster cable modem network in my area. I thought I was going to need to buy a new DOCSIS 3.0-compatible cable modem to take advantage of the new “Blast” speed tier, but I guess not:

Wow.