SuPz.orG

So, my last post was about wishing for a new MacBook Pro. When the new MBP was announced last week, I was traveling for business (in Silicon Valley, none the less), and I was all ready to head back home and buy one, however after being able to let it sink in and read up on the rumor sites some more, I find that the performance on the new MBP is about even with the last update, and in some cases slightly worse. That wasn’t that horrible, since the battery life is supposed to get an improvement and I would still consider buying one… that is, if it weren’t for the fact that now the rumor sites are saying there will be another update in June!

It looks like the current update of the MBP was forced upon Apple, due to Intel trying to phase out the last generation of notebook processors and bring in the new ones, which I guess aren’t all ready for prime time. So, the next update in June is supposed to sport some new Montevina chipset, along with some other improvements.

What does this mean for me? Back in the perpetual state of waiting. It was a mixed blessing though… since the money I had put aside for the MBP now has another couple months to grow, I withdrew some and picked up a PS3. Originally, I had planned to get a Blu Ray player, since HD-DVD is now officially dead (glad I waited out the format war), but given they are priced within $50 of a PS3 with extras, I figured why not get a full gaming system and Blu Ray player, complete with remote control and Spiderman 3 (which is sitting in my garbage can).

So, while on that note, this news gave me the opportunity to re-organize my TV watching apparatus into a more efficient machine. I had my Slingbox IR blaster cables precariously placed atop my TV, such that the slightest gust of wind or earthquake would send them to the ground, rendering the Slingbox mostly useless. I didn’t want to use the crummy double sided tape they provided, so instead I picked up some Elmer’s “Tac ‘N Stik” Reusable Adhesive (how’s that for product placement!) for 95 cents. I stuck some of the clay-like substance to the bottom of my IR blaster pieces as well as to the bottom of my Wii sensor bar and squished it down onto the top of my TV, and it sticks like glue… removable and readjustable glue. It’s likely the best 95 cents I’ve ever spent.

Here’s what it looks like

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!