Wow…..what can I say….First Jobs, now Ritchie…..I don’t like October anymore

…

Well, just finished listening to the full ISAM release by Amon Tobin on SoundCloud. Wow, dynamite. If you like electronic music, you really should check this out. The one aspect that stood out for me was his use of SoundCloud’s commenting system to create a commentary captioning “trail” throughout the performance. This got me thinking, why can’t we have a system that allows music file “links” be posted to twitter and then have the backend service cull all the people listening to that piece of music and grab their comments via hash tags/RSS in real time and interleave it for all the “participants” in each of the “shared” music spaces. Neato, new term…..”Shared Realtime Collaborative Music Experience”. Time for someone to “make an app for that” . BTW, major credit to Create Digital Music for pointing the way. More details on the Tobin performance here.

Just got back from NAB2011 in Vegas and this year lots of crazy/fun stuff happened. We setup our booth on Saturday and a bunch of us decided to go for BBQ in the desert, so we rented a car packed up our two crappy coolers and headed out to Red Rock Canyon.

The Canyons were as awesome as usual. We had a late lunch/dinner and (surprisingly) ended up seeing a lot of wildlife around the place.

Next, we went through NAB, which is always fun. On thursday (last day) we took off around 2:30pm and started our trip around the sierras. We had intended to get to Tonopah, NV by around 18:00′ish, but had a bit of run in with a flying carpet on I-95 North. This thing flew off the back of the pickup (in picture) and shattered/cracked the front windshield. You can see the glass shards on the dashboard. It all turned out okay, we stopped the guy, got his info, went back to the car rental and swapped the van. We got to Tonopah around 21:00 and pretty much had dinner and slept right through the night.

Next day (Friday), we drove up to Mono Lake, CA. One of my favourite places of all time (aside from Yosemite and Bryce NPs). I’d been there before a couple of years ago, but this time there was snow in the mountains and the lake was really calm. Since it was a nice sunny day with lots of puffy clouds in the sky I figured I try my luck with some HDR images, for that “out of this world” look.

We then left Mono Lake and since the Tioga Pass into Yosemite was still closed, we drove all the way up I-395 to Minden, CA. Next morning (Saturday) we left there and headed south-west on I-88 and eventually made it into Yosemite through the west entrance via CA-120.

We left Yosemite and stayed the night in Oakhurst, CA. On Sunday we drove through the foggy Sequoia NP.

We stayed Sunday night in Bakersfield and headed out the next day (Monday) with the intention of visiting the northern parts of Death Valley. We kinda made it down to Baker, CA and decided it might be a wiser idea to drive straight to Vegas (It was really windy and dusty), stay the night and drive back to Death Valley early in the morning. That was a great idea since the next morning was sunny, hot and slightly breazy, but no dust . We drove through the northern part all the way to Scotty’s Castle and drove back to Vegas for the last day of the trip.

As usual the complete flickr set can be found here.

Absolutely hilarious parody video of iPad2……Gooo Team COCO

aka. the coolest kinect hack I’ve seen to date. Very cool demo.

From the pages of Make magazine……Absolutely awesome homebrew. >16,000 frames at 2.4 seconds per frame…..simply brilliant

Ran into some problems earlier today in trying to bring up a SSL enabled virtual site along side my existing (non-ssl) name-based virtual sites. I needed the SSL enabled vsite for a installation of phpmysqladmin. I ran into a lot of documentations describing how to get the IP based setup working, but almost no info on name based setups. This how-to is geared towards Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS and higher. The very first thing you need to do is get your SSL certificate generated and setup. Without this step nothing works. I’m gonna show you self-signed certificate route. Your milage may vary…..Here is how:

openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 9999 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

I did this on a semi-secure server in /tmp directory (I cd’d to /tmp before I issued the above commands). You might want to do this in roots homedirectory (or in /etc/ssl directory). The process above will — once completed — provide you with three files (server.crt, server.csr, server.key). You need to move server.crt to /etc/ssl/certs and move server.key to /etc/ssl/private. Once that’s done you can get rid of server.csr file.

Now that you have your SSL setup and for the sake of getting a flawless installation of phpmysqladmin, you need to get the mcrypt extension for php. Use the following command to get it installed (otherwise you keep getting a annoying warning on your login screen about mcrypt extension being missing).

sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt

Now we need to get Apache all figured out. I’m going to assume here that you understand the relationship between /etc/apache2/sites-available and /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. Basically for each virtual site you need a conf file in sites-available folder with a appropriate symlink in sites-enabled folder pointing to the config file in sites-available. In my situation I had already created 7 non-ssl’d name-based virtual sites and needed to add a ssl’d name-based virtual site to my setup specifically for phpmysqladmin. Two things to keep in mind before we go on:

• Apache’s decision as to whether or not the connection is SSL is made by port number (80 vs. 443) early in the process. If Apache decides that the connection is SSL (ie: port 443), it presents the site certificate.
• For a non-SSL host, Apache 2 will default to the first VirtualHost it finds in its config, if it can’t match the incoming name to a specific virtual host. For an SSL virtual host, the rules are the same, except that it only considers the VirtualHosts on the SSL port.

First we need to enable SSL module in apache. You can do this manually if you like by creating 2 symlinks in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled pointing to /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf and /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.load OR you can use the command below:

a2enmod ssl

You also want to check the file /etc/apache2/ports and make sure it looks like this:

Listen aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:80
<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    Listen aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:443
</IfModule>

Where aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is the IP address of your server. This makes apache listen for non-ssl connections on port 80 and ssl connections on port 443.

Phew, okay theory apart, here is a simple recipe that got me going:

1. In your “default” virtual host file at the top you should find the “NameVirtualHost *” directive and change it to say “NameVirtualHost *:80″. Then add “NameVirtualHost *:443″ on the following line.
2. Add a “default” SSL virtual host early in your default config by using “<VirtualHost *:443>”. You can decide whether this should return a 404 or do something useful. Mine simply returns a 404.
3. All your Non-SSL VirtualHosts config files are probably set up as “<Virtual Host *>”. Change this to “<VirtualHost *:80>”.
4. Create a Final config file for your SSL enabled virtual host. In my case this is the virtual host that presents phpmysqladmin interface. I’m including my config file here:

   <VirtualHost *:443>
       ServerName secure.site.com
       ServerAdmin admin@secure.site.com
   
       SSLEngine on
       SSLOptions +StrictRequire
       SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/server.crt
       SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/server.key
   
       # DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your
       # documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but
       # symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations.
       DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs/phpmyadmin
   
       # if not specified, the global error log is used
       ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error_log
       CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access_log combined
   
       # don't loose time with IP address lookups
       HostnameLookups Off
   
       # needed for named virtual hosts
       UseCanonicalName Off
   
       # configures the footer on server-generated documents
       ServerSignature On
   
       # Optionally, include *.conf files from /etc/apache2/conf.d/
       #
       # For example, to allow execution of PHP scripts:
       #
       # Include /etc/apache2/conf.d/mod_php4.conf
       #
       # or, to include all configuration snippets added by packages:
        Include /etc/apache2/conf.d/*.conf
   
       # ScriptAlias: This controls which directories contain server scripts.
       # ScriptAliases are essentially the same as Aliases, except that
       # documents in the realname directory are treated as applications and
       # run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the client.
       #
       # This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to.
       #
       <Directory "/srv/www/htdocs/phpmyadmin">
   
   	#
   	# Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
   	# or any combination of:
   	#   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
   	#
   	# Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
   	# doesn't give it to you.
   	#
   	# The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see
   	# http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#options
   	# for more information.
   	#
   	Options FollowSymLinks
   
   	#
   	# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
   	# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
   	#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
   	#
   	AllowOverride None
   
   	#
   	# Controls who can get stuff from this server.
   	#
   	Order allow,deny
   	Allow from all
   
       </Directory>
   
   </VirtualHost>
   
   <VirtualHost *:80>
       ServerName secure.site.com
       ServerAdmin admin@secure.site.com
   
       # don't loose time with IP address lookups
       HostnameLookups Off
   
       # needed for named virtual hosts
       UseCanonicalName Off
   
       # configures the footer on server-generated documents
       ServerSignature On
   
       Redirect Permanent / https://secure.site.com
   </VirtualHost>

Notice that I’m putting the SSL virtual host first and then create a “fake” non-SSL virtual server under the same name on port 80 that redirects you back to the secure site. Also note the SSL engine being turned on with appropriate paths to the certificates and keys we created earlier on. Make sure you also assign the virtual server the appropriate ServerName and ServerAdmin. Note also that the non-SSL “fake” Server does NOT contain DocumentRoot or anything like that.

That should do it. Stop and Start apache and you should be off to the races.

More and more people use youtube now-a-days to get access to instant music. Be it at parties, in the office or on mobile platforms. The hard part is the constant searches you have to do. You want to listen to some 80′s tunes. How do you go about creating a playlist……do you even remember the name of those one hit wonders. Well, worry not, Tubeify is here. Tubeify is a new mashup of Last.fm, Billboard and YouTube.

The site allows users to search for, discover, play and queue video clips in any web browser. The advanced search capabilities and outstanding usability makes it without a doubt one of the best YouTube jukeboxes around. One of the true gems is the Billboard “timetravel” feature, allowing users to pull up the Billboard chart for any week since 1964 and listen to the tracks that were leading the charts then. You can grab the top100 songs of any week from Billboard and tubeify will create a nice playlist for you using videos from youtube. Hop over to tubeify.com, sign up for a invite (don’t worry it shows up instantly — atleast for now), and start rocking to your favourite tunes from the past 45 years. How long before some label or other company shuts this down? No idea, but enjoy it now.

If you’re a mac user you’re gonna love this little gem. Grab a copy of Evom and prepare to be amazed at how simple video encoding can become. This little app from the “Little App Factory” is literally the definition of a OSX app….simple and powerful. Just drag a video over the drop zone, choose your output and you’re off to the races. It also has advanced features such as controlling the number of threads (so you don’t melt your spanking new 12 core Mac PRO ). Other notable features are the ability to download your favourite internet videos with just a click and being one the only “simple” apps I’ve see that allows you to extract audio from a video file and save it as a separate mp3 file. All in all a really nice little tool to add to your arsenal. The App is free (and in Beta) right now and hopefully it will stay that way (free) .

Not that you should really care too much about this, but I’ve moved nerdlogger.com to wordpress platform (from blogger). This will hopefully give me more flexibility in order to provide more services.

Sad but true…..

This little guy supports 3 CF cards and can be used to make a relatively cheap SSD card out of everyday CF cards. That’s a quickie 96GB SSD for about $450 (plus $192.57 for the adapter plus shipping) given current on-line prices. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than a 64GB SSD card for around $1000. So go grab a couple of these and make your laptop run like lightning.

There is a great article over on Cnet.uk talking about Format Wars. So you want to know what would have happened if BeOS didn’t cost $400 million….Well maybe “it would make BeOS the operating system of choice for Apple Macs. It would also prevent Steve Jobs from returning to that company. In turn, this would put an end to all that silly iPod business and make MiniDisc the dominant force in portable music.”

Gotta love what if’s

The credit for the discovery of this one I guess goes to the anonymous poster who commented on our “Wii Controller Hacking” post.

Anyways, what the heck is a Guitar Heronoid, you ask? Well, It’s a “Guitar Hero Humanoid”, I guess. A neat project brought to you by GarageGeeks members Rafael Mizrahi and Tal Chalozin.

So Iphone is all the rage now and if you don’t have one you’re not cool….right? Well, not exactly. You see there is this whole movement out there that believes your phone should be YOURS, not Apples, not MS’s, not anyone elses. I believe Nokia is getting there with the N800, but they are not quite there (ie: N800 is not really a phone). Well fear not, the people at Openmoko are taking that challenge on. A totally opensource GSM 2.5G world phone. You buy it and it’s yours to do with whatever you wish. It runs linux, but since even the processor is pretty much open, you can write your own OS for it (ok, so maybe that’s a bit far fetched). The standard phone and dev kit costs $300, or you can buy the hacker pack (includes a debug board, second battery, case) for $450. No contract, no limits, no locks. I just can’t figure out the Matrix reference (Neo) and it’s relation to 1973 (was that a good year?)…..

Thought this might be useful for someone:

Install the libraw1394 and libavc1394

If you want to be able to stream from a DV camcorder, then you need to install the libraries libraw1394 and libavc1394:

If you use a Fedora Core distribution then you just need to install the libraries using:

%yum update
%yum install libraw1394 libavc1394

If you want to install the libraries from the source then you must download them from the libraw1394 and libavc1394 from their projects website. If you have a distribution that uses udev, then you must add/change the following line to the file 50-udev.rules in your /etc/udev/rules.d directory.

%vi /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules
# IEEE1394 (firewire) devices (must be before raw devices below)
KERNEL==”raw1394″, NAME=”%k”
KERNEL==”dv1394″, NAME=”dv1394/%k”
KERNEL==”video1394*”, NAME=”video1394/%n”

The following sections assume that you have a working linux installation with the IEEE 1394 (Firewire) libraries installed, either manually from the source code or through your distributions upgrade mechanism.

Stream with DV

Connect the DV camcorder with a Firewire cable to your computer, and check the creation of the file /dev/raw1394.

Run VLC with the following command line :

% vlc -vvv dv/rawdv:///dev/raw1394 -dv-caching 10000 –sout ‘#transcode{vcodec=WMV2,vb=512,scale=1,acodec=mp3,ab=192,channels=2}:std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,url=:8080}’ –sout-transcode-fps=25.0

where:

• dv/rawdv:// is the DV input and /dev/raw1394 the device file
• dv-caching is the delay is miliseconds (ms) (start with a high value, 10s or so, and lower it later)
• sout is the stream output chain that is used to stream the DV camcorder as a multimedia stream over the network. The transcode syntax is explained in the chapter about transcoding. The example as given above generates a multimedia stream that is compatible with Windows Media Player
• sout-transcode-fps is the number of pictures per second 25.0 that the transcode module should generate of the requested audio/video codec.

Ok, here is test1 for email posting using N800 as the device