SuPz.orG

Everybody loves to speculate about Apple product releases and damn it I want to speculate too…

Well… I’m not going to speculate… I’m just going to flat out say what I want in my next notebook, and hope it magically comes into existence. If it doesn’t, I’ll be in the area in a few weeks, so I’ll pay Steve Jobs a visit and give him a piece of my mind… or maybe a piece of some cake, if I happen to have some on my person. I like cake… especially yellow cake. I know, I know… it’s cheap and low class, but it tastes so good, especially the Entenmann’s chocolate covered yellow cake. Man, that stuff is good.

So anyway, I’ve read quite a number of articles suggesting that Apple will soon be coming out with a new MacBook Pro. Since I’m looking to upgrade my current 1st gen MacBook and I will never ever ever get my small form factor MacBook Pro, I may as well go for whatever new 15″ is coming out, and here is what I want:

• A video card capable of handling Unreal Tournament 3. Every other game I would want to play would require no where near the performance of the aforementioned, so ya.
• New processors. Give us some of that lower power usage and higher clock speed love the MacBook Air got, even though it doesn’t deserve it
• Hybrid hard drives. SSD is overpriced and pointless… unless you happen to run highly concurrent databases on your laptop computer, and require amazing random seek performance. HOWEVER, I read about some drives proposed a while ago that would have a few gigs of flash and many gigs of platter, that would let you live off flash when you don’t need to access anything that requires spinning, and any time you need to dump the flash to platter, power up for a few seconds to do that, then go back to sleep. Good idea and I want that.
• Who cares about multi-touch? I don’t think it’s really a big deal on a laptop, but if Apple wants to throw it in, I’d be glad to disable it in my System Preferences.

That’s it, I guess. I hope whatever is coming out, comes out soon, since I want to spend spend spend. No saving! Just spending!

It’s a bit too late to be posting this, but if somehow Obama is able to pull off some amazing post-super Tuesday win, this video here really shows why he is so infinitely superior to Hillary, who to me is just George Bush in women’s clothing. Yes… Hillary is the devil, and to be quite honest, if she is who the Democrats decide to run for president, I will be very tempted to vote Republican, regardless of who they run… and if they run McCain, then no way is Hillary getting my vote.

Also, I want to give some props to Apple and the awesomeness of Time Machine. After about 24 hours of running Disk Utility trying to repair my disk, due to numerous files that magically became unlinked (e.g., deleted), I gave up and popped in my Leopard DVD, and hopped into Time Machine restore mode, which was able to get all of my files back in place and working with really no difficulty at all — except the Mail had to re-index my email or something, but that’s fine with me. Everything else is running smoothly.

I just really wish that Apple would finally ditch crappy HFS and go ahead with ZFS, so that I wouldn’t have had this issue in the first place.

Also, some side props to SuperDuper, which allowed me to boot into a working copy of OS X, from my separate functioning backup disk — something Time Machine does not allow. I also found out today that SuperDuper is now 10.5 compatible… not entirely sure how, but the release notes say so!

I picked up a Slingbox Solo the other day. It’s a cool device that let’s you do what they market as “place shifting”… pretty much, you stream your cable box or Tivo or whatever through your broadband connection to anyplace you may be, that has an internet connection.

It’s funny that I even spent money on it, since I had written something that did the same job using a TV card under Linux, and ffmpeg’s ffserver to stream content from the TV card using V4l and xawtv to change channels, etc. It did a pretty good job, however since it was a bit of a hack job it had it’s issues. It was all web based and fun. Slingbox takes out all the work and puts it all into a nice appliance, with no associated service fee — w00t!

So anyway, I installed the software on my MacBook, and went through the setup assistant and everything, until I got to the last step where it tells me its registering or something, at which point it crapped out and gave me an error saying it couldn’t register. So, I said whatever, I’ll try launching SlingPlayer to see if that will work. SlingPlayer also gave me the same crap, with some associated nondescript error message along the lines of “We’re really sorry but the application must quit. You can restart and try again later.”

This wasn’t cool, so I tried over and over again, but to no avail. Re-ran the setup assistant, and it gave me the same error… so being a resourceful hax0r I busted out Wireshark (which is now available in a Leopard all-in-one package) to see if it was trying to get something over the internets or what… I found that yes, indeed it was, and it was opening an HTTP connection with 157.22.2.7 (spas.slingmedia.com), and sending an HTTP GET for mac_register.php?VersionNo=1.0.4.214&uuid=<removed>&OS_Identifier=SP_MAC&FinderId=<removed>

The problem is that this HTTP GET never got a response… after about 2 minutes, it eventually got a FIN from the server, and the connection got torn down, at which point SlingPlayer complained and told me I had to restart the application. So, I went ahead and modified my /etc/hosts on my Mac to resolve spas.slingmedia.com to 192.168.0.1 (my server’s IP), instead of the real IP, and then I created a dummy PHP script on my server called mac_register.php that simply returned the posted data. After doing this, SlingPlayer started up just fine, and was able to stream and do all of that fun stuff.

Of course, a while later it eventually started complaining that my copy of SlingPlayer hadn’t been activated, so I went and reverted the /etc/hosts changes, and fortunately by this time, SlingMedia had fixed their mac_register.php script to work again, so it was able to register and activate and all that fun stuff… but while it wasn’t functional, I wasn’t oppressed by the man! Huzzah!