BitTorrent on the Apple TVEven though it has its shortcomings, I really like my Apple TV. Since t’s always on, I also use it as a torrent client. My preferred solution is rtorrent, and I previously described how to install rtorrent on your Apple TV. I even have an RSS-to-rtorrent solution that I still have to share with the world running on my Apple TV (I’m working on it). However, if you prefer a richer BitTorrent experience, you may want to check out this tutorial by Danny Ruchtie that describes how to run Transmission on your Apple TV! Update September 29, 2010: There is now a much better Transmission for Apple TV Instructions on how to downloads torrents via RSS are also available
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BitTorrent on the Apple TV

Even though it has its shortcomings, I really like my Apple TV. Since t’s always on, I also use it as a torrent client. My preferred solution is rtorrent, and I previously described how to install rtorrent on your Apple TV. I even have an RSS-to-rtorrent solution that I still have to share with the world running on my Apple TV (I’m working on it). However, if you prefer a richer BitTorrent experience, you may want to check out this tutorial by Danny Ruchtie that describes how to run Transmission on your Apple TV!

Update September 29, 2010:

Back to Nuevasync

After some comments from Jon Skeet over at SuperUser.com in response to my praise of Nuevasync, I tried Google native syncing methods for getting my contacts and calendars from the cloud to my iPhone. It all seemed to work well, until I noticed that certain contacts kept duplicating. After making sure there was no other sync service operational (I have tried a few), I was pretty sure it had to be something between the iPhone and Google.

So, I went back to Nuevasync, and all has been well since. By the way, the Google Calendar Sync was working just fine, but I can only set up one Exchange sync on the iPhone, so that went back to Nuevasync as well.

Update Aug 23 2009: Switching back to Nuevasync didn’t make the duplicates go away. I guess it’s something else. Will investigate further.

Update: I eventually switched to Google Sync permanently.

Nu.nl: A Bad Way to AdvertiseLeading Dutch news site Nu.nl thinks ads are more important than their own content. When you open a page (an article or a list of articles) in the music section, an animation slides over the main content like this:As you can see, the article is partially obscured by the ad. The content I want to see is blocked, I am forced to look at an ad before I can read the article that I came to the site for. Advertising like this makes me feel unwelcome to the site. Every browser has popup blockers built in, and now major sites are starting to build popups into their pages? Bah.
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Nu.nl: A Bad Way to Advertise

Leading Dutch news site Nu.nl thinks ads are more important than their own content. When you open a page (an article or a list of articles) in the music section, an animation slides over the main content like this:
As you can see, the article is partially obscured by the ad. The content I want to see is blocked, I am forced to look at an ad before I can read the article that I came to the site for. Advertising like this makes me feel unwelcome to the site. Every browser has popup blockers built in, and now major sites are starting to build popups into their pages? Bah.

Sports & surgery: When does it become cheating? Today I read about Simona Halep’s alledged breast reduction. It reminded me of stuff like Tiger Woods’ LASIK treatment and reports of improved pitching ability of baseball players who had undergone elbow surgery. It even made me think about the metal in Lance Armstrong’s shoulder. So many people are talking about doping and blood controls, but apparently it’s common practice to resort to surgery that improves your performance in a chosen field of sports. And it’s not only to fix you up quicker after an accident. Somehow I can’t see anything wrong with the use of metal to speed up the recovery of Lance Armstrong’s broken collarbone. It’s meant to return him to the ‘state’ he was in before the accident. It’s “healing”, just like his recovery from cancer. Let’s not get into the details of drugs that are used to improve healh that can also be used to improve sports performance just yet. Lance can compete in the Tour de France with some metal screws in his collarbone. In Tiger Woods’ case, there can be little doubt that the LASIK surgery improved his golf game. His natural ability to see was improved by surgery. What if it had been possible to give him bionic eyes to improve his eyesight even further? Would he have been allowed to compete after that? I think not. The same goes for Simona Halep. It’s a shame that even with the help of Google it’s hard to find a non-sexist story about the subject, but it seems that her natural physique (big breasts) limited her tennis performance. So, she had surgery to make her breasts smaller, and the world seems to pay most attention to what people that like big breats think. But we are talking about surgically altering an athletes body to make her perform better. I suppose it might not feel like not cheating because the surgeon removed part of her body. What if something was added to the body? What if she had surgery to make her muscles stronger? Would she have been allowed to compete in professional tennis again? Surgically enhancing muscle strength is not too strange an idea. Some believe it is already happening. According to Wikpedia, American parents go to doctors asking them to perform Tommy John surgery on healthy kids, with the idea that these kids will become better pitchers. A procedure intended for healing, now (mistakenly?) believed to improve your game. Let’s suppose this is so (and if it isn’t so, I’m sure there are or soon will be surgical procedures that not only heal you but make you stronger than you were before). An injured player gets Tommy John surgery and is able to pitch better than before because his elbow works better. What’s the difference between that and using drugs to improve muscle strength in order to to pitch better? How is undergoing surgery to improve sports performance different from taking performance enhancing drugs? Let me know what you think! I’m especially curious to hear the opinions of athletes!
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Sports & surgery: When does it become cheating?

Today I read about Simona Halep’s alledged breast reduction. It reminded me of stuff like Tiger Woods’ LASIK treatment and reports of improved pitching ability of baseball players who had undergone elbow surgery. It even made me think about the metal in Lance Armstrong’s shoulder.

So many people are talking about doping and blood controls, but apparently it’s common practice to resort to surgery that improves your performance in a chosen field of sports. And it’s not only to fix you up quicker after an accident.

Somehow I can’t see anything wrong with the use of metal to speed up the recovery of Lance Armstrong’s broken collarbone. It’s meant to return him to the ‘state’ he was in before the accident. It’s “healing”, just like his recovery from cancer. Let’s not get into the details of drugs that are used to improve healh that can also be used to improve sports performance just yet. Lance can compete in the Tour de France with some metal screws in his collarbone.

In Tiger Woods’ case, there can be little doubt that the LASIK surgery improved his golf game. His natural ability to see was improved by surgery. What if it had been possible to give him bionic eyes to improve his eyesight even further? Would he have been allowed to compete after that? I think not.

The same goes for Simona Halep. It’s a shame that even with the help of Google it’s hard to find a non-sexist story about the subject, but it seems that her natural physique (big breasts) limited her tennis performance. So, she had surgery to make her breasts smaller, and the world seems to pay most attention to what people that like big breats think. But we are talking about surgically altering an athletes body to make her perform better. I suppose it might not feel like not cheating because the surgeon removed part of her body. What if something was added to the body? What if she had surgery to make her muscles stronger? Would she have been allowed to compete in professional tennis again?

Surgically enhancing muscle strength is not too strange an idea. Some believe it is already happening. According to Wikpedia, American parents go to doctors asking them to perform Tommy John surgery on healthy kids, with the idea that these kids will become better pitchers. A procedure intended for healing, now (mistakenly?) believed to improve your game. Let’s suppose this is so (and if it isn’t so, I’m sure there are or soon will be surgical procedures that not only heal you but make you stronger than you were before). An injured player gets Tommy John surgery and is able to pitch better than before because his elbow works better. What’s the difference between that and using drugs to improve muscle strength in order to to pitch better?

How is undergoing surgery to improve sports performance different from taking performance enhancing drugs? Let me know what you think! I’m especially curious to hear the opinions of athletes!

Lost Login Items

After the usual boot ritual (Mac boots, I make coffee) I logged in and I was missing something. Rather, I was missing a lot of little somethings that are supposed to appear in my Menu Bar. A quick peek into my User Settings confirmed my suspicions. All my Login Items were gone.
 
It made me think of my Windows years, where you never knew whether or not your profile would be intact after logging in (especially not an a laptop with a roaming profile that was used in- and outside of a corporate network).
 
Anyway, I decided to just click my way through Time Machine to yesterday afternoon, found ~/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist, restored it, logged out, logged in, and all way right with the world. Don’t know why or how it happened, but unless it happens again, I can’t be bothered. If stuff can be fixed faster than I can drink my coffee, it’s OK with me.

iPhone localhost bluetooth

After changing iPhone settings (for example, to enable Tethering) your iPhone bluetooth identifier may change to localhost. Since that is not a very descriptive name, you probably want to change it. You can do it by following these steps (they may be overkill, but it worked like this for me):

  1. Remove the Bluetooth device localhost.
  2. Connect your iPhone to iTunes.
  3. Wait for it to sync (if you haven’t set it to automatically sync, you can skip this step).
  4. In iTunes, find your iPhone in the left sidebar. Click the name of your iPhone once. It will become editable.
  5. Change the iPhone’s name to something else (I just appended the letter ‘x’). Press Enter. Your iPhone’s screen will very briefly show “Synchronizing”.
  6. Change the iPhone’s name back to its original name. Press Enter. iPhone screen will again briefly show “Synchronizing”.
  7. Start Bluetooth, connect and configure your iPhone, it will show the name you gave it in the previous step.
That’s all, nothing to it.

iPhone 3.0 default calendar and Nuevasync

Today I noticed that changes I made to my iPhone Calendar did not show up in the connected Google Calendar. After some research, it turned out that my default iPhone calendar was set to a read only calendar I also subscribe too. So, apparently my calendar settings had changed after I upgraded to 3.0. I don’t know if this was the 3.0 update or the fact that I tinkered with some settings.

After settings my default calendar on the iPhone to my primary Google Calendar, everything was working again and updates showed online and in iCal.

Your iPhone default calendar can be found in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > (scroll all the way down) Default calendar.

A proper rtorrent install for Apple TV

Update September 29, 2010:

NOTE: This article assumes you have ssh access to your Apple TV, and you are interested in using it as a bittorrent client. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it’s (for now) meant for people that kind of already know this stuff, but need an extra tidbit of info to make it work. I’m open to all kinds of feedback on how to improve it.

DISCLAIMER: If you break or brick your Apple TV while doing this, don’t blame me. I cannot guarantee this will work, however, it’s working for me. Still here? Let’s get to work!

Since your Apple TV is always on anyway, you might as well use it as a bittorrent client. The simplest way to do this is to install rtorrent. However, the basic Apple TV rtorrent package is lacking some finesse. Nothing that 2 simple files and a few words form the command line cannot solve. Ready? Here we go.

Step 1. Install rtorrent Get the latest version from Google Code and follow instructions. It’s the usual upload-and-run-the-install-script. You should be fine. After installation, you should see rtorrent (an executable) in /usr/local/bin on your Apple TV. You can launch it if you like, to see if it works.

Step 2. Install screen screen is a very nice Unix tool (a multiplexer) that can do lots of useful stuff. Read more about it on Wikipedia. Alas, this nifty program is not installed on your Apple TV.However, once upon a time someone made a verty nice plugin for Apple TV 1.0 called ATVTorrents. Basically, we will try to rebuild the backend of this ATV 1.0 plugin, and we need the screen binary. You can extract it from the ATVTorrents package, or just get it here (I extracted it for you). Now, on your Mac (or PC if that’s your poison, but you’ll have to find an scp program yourself), go to the command line, change to the directory that holds the screen executable and type this:

scp screen frontrow@appletv.local:~

You should see a response that tells you the file was transferred successfully. Now, ssh into your Apple TV and type this (the password you will be asked after the sudo command is frontrow).

sudo mount -uw /
mv screen /usr/local/bin/
chmod 777 /usr/local/bin/screen
echo export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin > /etc/profile

The last command creates a default profile that automatically has access to the new stuff we install. If that interferes with your setup, you might want to create a profile for the frontrow user only. OK, we’re done here, now on to the next step.

Step 3. Install the LaunchAgent Now we have screen and rtorrent and we want to make them play nice. If you know ho wto work screen, you can probably figure out how to start rtorrent with screen. However, that’s not what we want. We don’t want to do anything, we just want it to start whenever the Apple TV does. So, what we do is, we take this file and we will place it in /Library/LaunchAgents. The file is a modified version of the plist that originally came with the plugin mentioned earlier. That’s why the name is still referring to Awkward TV (seems fitting). This file tells the Apple TV to launch rtorrent in the background (using screen) after it has been successfully booted. Which means rtorrent will always be running, which is good (for a bittorrent client). Transfer the file to your Apple TV (same as the screen file above, use the scp command). Then ssh into your Apple TV and type the following command:

mv org.awkwardtv.rtorrent.plist /Library/LaunchAgents/

If you get a message about a read only file system, repeat the sudo mount command you did before, and try again. You should not have to chmod this file, since it is not an executable. Now reboot your Apple TV (sudo reboot), get yourself a cup of coffee or whatever you feel like, and when the Apple TV is up and running, ssh into it and type screen -rd at the command line. You should see a nice empty torrent screen. Type Ctrl-A Ctrl-D to exit.

Step 4. Configure rtorrent (optional but recommended to prevent it from clogging your connection) Main thing to do is set limits for upload and download bandwith. Edit the file /Users/frontrow/rtorrent.rc on your Apple TV (it’s invisible because its name starts with a dot, but it’s there). Edit the lines that look like this:

# Global upload and download rate in KiB. "0" for unlimited.
download_rate = 200 upload_rate = 20

How to edit this file?

Method 1: mount your Apple TV using afp and edit the file as if it were on your Mac.

Method 2: install nano (follow the instructions for installing screen) and type /usr/local/bin/nano .rtorrent.rc.

Done! Your Apple TV is now a bittorrent machine. How do you make it do stuff? Simple. You drop torrent files in the folder Torrents (located in the frontrow user’s home directory), and when the torrent is done, the result will be placed in your Movies folder. Want to check on rtorrent? ssh into your Apple TV and type screen -rd at the command prompt.

Automatically download TV shows to your Apple TV

Update September 29, 2010:

It took some time to figure it all out, but it has been working like a charm for the past 2 months. The bash script is stil not a work of art, but I guess I could make some people happy by sharing how to do it. So, I will post instructions on this blog on how to modify your Apple TV. The first part will deal with getting rtorrent to work, and will be up soon! Stay tuned!