Archive for the 'Apple & OS X' Category
PeerGuardian and Leopard
Monday, October 29th, 2007If you rely on PeerGuardian while torrenting and have recently installed Leopard, you’re hosed. The PeerGuardian.app crashes, with an error in libcrypto.
The good news is that if you have installed XCode and are relatively familiar with it, you can easily rebuild it and it seems to work fine. Hopefully they’ll get this done and make it available for everyone since it’s fairly trivial.
1. Download the source .zip from Phoenix Labs.
2. Unzip it and follow the instructions in the “How to Build” file (getting the Growl framework and 7za.)
3. Replace libcrypto.0.9.dylib with libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib
4. Build.
5. From the command line, run distbuild.sh to create a nice little .zip package just like you’d download from the web site.
6. Install like normal and enjoy.
If any of the above confuses you, you probably want to wait until the official build is available.
Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, os x, p2p, PeerGuardian, torrent
iPhone SDK coming in February
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007It’s official: Apple will be providing a full SDK for iPhone and iPod Touch developers in February ‘08.
Nice move Steve! All I want is to keep my eBook reader.
iTunes & Amazon: Competition is good
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007Hot damn! Apple is dropping the price of their iTunes Plus tracks from $1.29 to $.99, probably in direct response to Amazon’s MP3 store, which also offers DRM-free tracks at $.89 to $.99. I know I first check Amazon before getting something from iTunes - with no DRM and a cheaper price, it’s a no-brainer.
At least now the playing field is leveled slightly.
iPhone 1.1.1 jailbreak released
Thursday, October 11th, 2007Last night I finally got 3rd party apps running on the phone again after the disastrous 1.1.1 update. I used Niacin’s TIFF exploit to get write access to the filesystem, and then followed the directions from the iPhone Dev Team (detailed here) to get SSH and AppTapp installed.
It’s still a very manual process, but way easier than the downgrade to 1.0.2 then update to 1.1.1 nonsense. But now I have my eBook reader and IM client running again. Summerboard doesn’t work, and neither does Sketch or Customize(apparently Customize does work, thanks Brian), but for the most part, everything runs just fine. A list of common applications and their compatibility can be found on this iPhone Dev Wiki page.
If you’re going to try this, remember that this doesn’t get you the carrier unlock, just 3rd party apps. Unlocks are still coming, though there have been reports that the IPSF stuff still works. Apparently it was the only software unlock that didn’t brick the iPhone with the 1.1.1 update. Naturally, it costs $60.
Now to wait for the inevitable breakage from Apple’s next update. Sigh. Can’t we all just get along?
Update: Looks like they decrypted the ramdisks now.
FreeDroid universal binary
Thursday, September 27th, 2007
FreeDroid 1.0.2-1 has been posted. The only change from 1.0.2 is that it is now a universal binary.
Bridge Construction Set goes universal!
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
Finally - the addictive building game gets an upgrade to a universal binary. The old PPC version ran ok on my Intel box, but some of the more complex bridges got REALLLY SLOW during simulations.
You owe it to yourself to get a copy of this game. Also check out Bridgebuilder-game.com to find tons of pre-built bridges and some nice solutions to the more tricky levels.
Technorati Tags: Bridge Contruction Set, games, os x
Toppler Updated to Universal Binary
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
I’ve updated Toppler to a universal binary, using the same source tree as the previous 1.1.1-1 version. This, unfortunately, requires it to be run under 10.4.x. If you’re still running 10.2.x or 10.3.x, you can still download the previous PPC version (works great under Rosetta as well) from the same page, just under the main download link.
One quick thing to note - if you have any high score files left over from a PPC->Intel conversion, these won’t read properly with this version. The high-score code is very endian dependent, and I didn’t update it to properly handle all cases. No biggie, but if you see some strange high scores in there, get rid of your /Users/
I’m getting ready to post new binaries for Fillets and Freedroid as well, so stay tuned.
Update: One more update to 1.1.3-4 to include some language fixes and new levels. Check the toppler page for details.
NBC/Universal Can Suck my Schlong
Friday, August 31st, 2007What a bunch of wankers - if Apple’s press release is correct, these arseholes wanted the price of their single-episode shows to be $4.99. Five dollars. Give me a fucking break. They’re just looking at an out to get people to use their own Hulu service (no link - they don’t deserve it.)
WTF is Hulu? A POS YouTube competitor with their own embedded player. So I guess actually watching shows on the television or on a portable player is right out.
Guess the money they got out of me will end. Back to BitTorrent. At least there I get what I want and can use it how I want.
Fuck ‘em.
Update: WTF? NBC says their launching yet another site with “free” content - with commercials you can’t skip. Nice - make it even less useful guys!
Elgato turbo.264 - partial turd sandwich
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
Well, I picked up the Elgato turbo.264 a week ago at the local Apple store. I was hoping to use my now aging G5 iMac to help encode some of the video I’ve been pulling from my old DVDs and use them on my Apple TV. To save you some pain (and another trip to the store to return it) let me tell you where this little device will help - and surprisingly, where it’s actually a detriment.
What’s a waste of time
To start with, running the thing on just about any Intel-based Mac is a complete waste of time. The ONLY situation where it will save you time is if you’re still stuck using Quicktime to encode. Using anything else, such as Visual Hub or Handbrake, encoding times with turbo.264 are almost identical. Of course, it sort of frees up your processor (though still running at 80% of 200% in most tests), so if this is important to you, you can still get somebenefit from it. However, see the What’s Craptastic section for situations where it Just Doesn’t Work.
What’s Craptastic
On both the Intel and G5 platforms, I ran into some video where it just totally bogged down the hardware, getting three frames a second. I thought it was just a data transfer limit, but similar sized videos didn’t have the same problem. This happened pretty consistently with videos already in “higher”-def H.264 (960×540, 2900 kbits/s), and oddly enough, playable on the Apple TV. It was still faster than Quicktime (but slower than Visual Hub on either platform.) So don’t expect everything to be speedy.
Again, on both platforms, using the turbo.264 to select and encode unencrypted VIDEO_TS video resulted in some strange behavior. On both platforms it ran at near real-time (22fps on average, just a little slower on the Intel platform using Handbrake, much, much faster than the G5’s 3fps.) But on every damn video, it doubled the run time shown for encoding. For instance, a 1:24:30 video showed up as being 2:49:00 long. It appears that this is a problem with multiple audio tracks. With a single track, everything showed up correctly. This didn’t seem to affect the actual encoding time, nor the resultant movie.
In addition, on the G5 platform I did discover that on certain DVDs, the turbo.264 would have BAD audio drift. At the 60 minute mark, it was off by seven seconds. When I saw this occur, there was also a point in the movie where the video went to hell, being completely scrambled. What was weird about this was that when I re-ran the encoding on the same video, it worked, no audio synch issues or video problems. Nice. Using the same files run through Handbrake it worked every time.
What Works
The only place where I could find where I would potentially use this thing was as a speed-up for encoding stuff from EyeTV. Since EyeTV uses Quicktime for encoding, it’s unnecessarily slow, even on the Intel platform. This thing brought their encoding up to par with Visual Hub. However, at least for me, $99 isn’t worth it since I can easily just drag the raw .mpg files to VisualHub manually.
Really, very little works well enough to be relied upon. On the G5 platform, most video (see above caveats) encoded pretty freaking fast, at least compared to just using the main processor alone. On average, I’d say it was consistently five times faster. However, don’t expect to get any work done while it’s encoding - the main processor was pegged at 100% usage at all times, unlike the Intel platform.
But the random encoding problems with DVD video, the slow encode times with certain video types, and the general unreliability of the platform just made me wish I didn’t spend the $99 on this. It went back to the Apple store.