Wow!

I just realized that the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality is using Coda‘s logo to point out that various traffic cameras around the city are powered by green energy. I am guessing Panic does not know about this and this is clearly unauthorized use.

It’s interesting how the Municipality does not share this traffic data publicly via an API and says that “any unauthorized commercial use of the data be it on a website, a vista gadget, etc will be pursued in courts”; but has no issues using the logo of a prominent application that is the trademark of a corporation. I’m guessing they have never heard of the phrase practice what you preach.

PS: In order to enter the traffic control center web app, you need to click the top menu item on the left that is labeled as Yoğunluk Haritası since the direct link is being redirected to this entry page for some silly reason.

All my current machines have backups of backups be it via Time Machine and/or full images via SuperDuper! in various locations, but my rather large media archive had been sitting on a bunch of external drives plugged in to my Plex media server box. Over the past year I’ve grown quite tired of this bunch-o-externals situation and I decided that it was time for a NAS device to join the network in order to provide efficiency as well as a piece of mind against drive failures. I have looked at various devices from Netgear, Qnap, Promise and Thecus for an all-in-one solution, but after seeing the prices as well as the downsides; the tinkeringwithin swayed me in the way of DIY as it always does. :)

I had a whole lot of components lying around  from previous endeavours that I wanted to use. Hence, much of the stuff listed below were not purchased new. The reason I decided to use unRAID instead of other solutions is easy. Actually the FAQ section in the unRAID wiki lays it down. My favorites are bold:

No striping, so safer for multiple drive failures; parity protection, so resistant to single drive failure; flexible, can mix and match drive brands, sizes, and types, easily add additional drives, etc…

Each drive is an independent file system. An unRAID array can be thought of as a parity protected JBOD. If the array fails, the individual drives are still accessible, unlike traditional RAID arrays. Spin down can be controlled per drive, so a drive with rarely accessed files may stay off (spun down) for months, saving power costs, and possibly increasing its life. With standard striped RAID arrays, the entire array must be spun up or down, so generally stays spun up.

The server is now built and functioning gloriously with a total of 6.75 TB of space. It is connected to my APC UPS via apscupsd and it cleanly shuts down in the case of a power outage. All of the hardware and software components are listed below:

unRAID OS: 5.0-beta6a
MOBO: ECS A780GM-A (V1.1)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual 5000+ 2.6GHz ADO5000DOBOX
CPU Cooler: XIGMATEK HDT-D1284
RAM: 2X KINGSTON 1GB 800MHZ DDR2 CL6 MEMORY KVR800D2N6/1G
Case: Dark Arena 4 HotSwap
Power Supply: Seasonic S12II 80+ Plus Bronze 520W
UPS: APC BE700GR Back-UPS ES 700VA
Expansion Card: Digitus PCI-X DS-30103 (JMicron 363)
OS USB Flash Drive: SanDisk Cruzer 4GB

Parity Drive: Seagate ST2000DL003 2TB
Data Drive 1: Western Digital WD10EACS 1TB
Data Drive 2: Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB
Data Drive 3: Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB
Data Drive 4: Seagate ST2000DL003 2TB
Data Drive 5: Seagate ST3750330AS 750GB

Installed packages: preclear_disk.sh, unMenu, apcupsd, bwm-ng, DS_Store and ._ file cleanup script, unMENU Image Server, iStat, mail and ssmpt, unRAID Status Alert, Monthly Parity Check, pci utils, Clean Powerdown, screen, WebGUI and Simple Features, infozip

Since I use my server in an OS X/AFP only environment I did not want the SMB shares broadcasted. The SMB shares are broadcasted via avahi even if the SMB service is turned off. To accomplish this I added the bit below to my /boot/config/go file as per this thread on the unRAID forums

 #disable avahi smb broadcast
avahi-daemon -k
rm /etc/avahi/services/samba.service
avahi-daemon -D

On my Plex media server box, the shares are mounted using autofs that is built into Mac OS X. There are other ways of auto mounting the shares suchs as adding the share to the Login Items or using third party applications such as Mountwatcher, but using autofs gives me transparent re-mounting of interrupted shares at the system level. There is a cool tutorial by Poldi on the Plex Forums if you are looking to implement it.

UPDATE – July 14, 2011: Upgraded to 5.0-beta9 from beta6 and in order to disable the SMB shares on this version, you need to make a change to the go file:

#disable avahi smb broadcast
avahi-daemon -k
rm /etc/avahi/services/smb.service
avahi-daemon -D

The file that the /boot/config/go file is removing at boot used to be called samba.service. Now that the netatalk subsystem is upgraded from version 2.0.5 to 2.1.5 in this new beta9; it is now called smb.service.

This Mac mini concept from Victor Anselme‘s Apple Addicted blog looks fantastic. Now that an impending Mac mini update is more that just a rumor, I am really wondering how it’s gonna look. It will definitely follow the new design language that started with the iMac and followed by the Macbooks and this concept conforms to that language beautifully.

Victor designed another concept sans an optical drive, which I would very much prefer. Thanks to Plex I am done with optical media. In addition to Plex, the new mini will make a decent gaming machine as they will be equipped with the same NVIDIA chipset that can be found on the new Macbooks. The Mini Display port is the biggest issue though as Mini Display -> HDMI cables are hard to come by, but I am sure that will change when the new Mac minis are introduced in January.

The demo video I did for Plex with Aeon skin is also part of the paper as the featured video for CenterStage+Plex.

You can get it here.

This new skin was released for XBMC a couple days ago. MediaStream by Team Razorfish is a community effort that has been going on since October 2007. It’s is a very polished piece of work as you can see in the video and need nearly no configuration and tinkering to get it working right.

This skin has replaced my other favorite Aeon for now. One other skin that I am looking forward to is the new default Plex skin. The Plex team has teamed up with the CenterStage team to bring a default skin for Plex in the coming weeks. Judging by the preliminary demos and screenshots, it is going to be a cracker.

To watch it in HD, just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

Plex is an indie fork of the popular Xbox Media Center for OS X Leopard. Aeon is an outstanding skin in alpha stages for XBMC. You might have heard about both of them and you might have also seen many galleries and screenshots.

Well, I’ve got a video demo. And it is in HD if you wish to watch it that way. Just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

This video which is not as smooth as the real thing, probably due to the screen casting software; showcases the system I’ve been using for the past 3-4 months. I have a Mac mini hooked up to a Sony Bravia and the experience has been nothing short of fantastic. So much so that I have deleted Front Row.

I am currently using the Movies, TV Shows and Music components of Plex. I use the Music component only to listen to Shoutcast radios–especially Dinamo 103.8 and Soma–and Last.FM stations since Plex developers haven’t gotten round to integrating iTunes and iPhoto yet; but judging by the speed they’ve been crunching at, it is just a matter of time. Plus, I have about 17,000 songs in my iTunes library and trying to navigate them with the remote is a big pain.

Plex scrapes IMDB for movies and TheTVDB for TV shows and grabs the director/writer/cast listings, ratings, genre, year, runtime, plot overviews as well as posters. There is also support for various python scripts developed for the original XBMC. I especially like The Apple Movie Trailers script which provides streaming trailers to nearly 2000 movies within the Plex interface.

There is support for the Apple Remote as well as Harmony Remotes, Universal Remotes and XBox360 controllers.

The Plex community and developers are ever helpful over at the Plex forums. Get yourself a Mac mini and head on over to Plex to meet Elan and the rest of the team as well as Barkley. ;)

This video has been floating around the web for a while. I realized that some peeps were looking for a subtitled version. Well, here you go..

Info: After much taping, editing, deleting, drinking and swearing we are proud to present… Sales Guy vs. Web Dude! A mashup of true and mostly-true stories from IT hell. If you’ve ever called tech support and wondered what the hell they are doing down there… well, this should answer some questions for you.

thewebsiteisdown.com

Adium: A multiplatform chat client. Skins and plugins galore. Don’t need to look anywhere else, this is the app you need.

Growl: A system notification thingy. Windows don’t growl. Get it and set it.

Disc burning: Toast for kamasutra, Disco for quickies.

Fission: A quick, but clean audio editor by Roque Amoeba. If you’re into audio, you should definitely check their stuff out.

Flip4mac: Windows media codec. You need this to watch or listen to Windows Media content with Quicktime.

Perian: One of the first things I install. It adds native support for popular video formats like xvid, divx, etc to Quicktime.

VLC: There isn’t a media life without VLC. Doesn’t matter which platform you’re on.

VisualHub: This is your hub for quick video conversions.

ffmpegX: This is what you need if you are serious about video conversions.

iStat: System resources widget or menubar thingy. Take your pick.. My pick is iStat Pro. Get it and watch what your Mac is doing while you are trying to figure out how silent it is compared to that POS you left behind..

Little Snitch: Think of this little biatch as an outgoing firewall. If some software is calling home, this baby will let you decide if it may or not..

UnrarX: Run of the mill rar/par thingy.

The Unarchiver: Run of the mill archive extraction thingy supporting many formats.

MacPAR deLuxe: If you’re into usenet and parity files, you need this..

Split & Concat: Kinda like HJSplit.

Textwrangler: Text editor on steroids.

Max: Audio converter. If you wanna rip that cd or convert that file to your preferred format, you need this. Also check out AudialHub.

MP3-Info CMM: This finder plugin lets you right click on an mp3 file and peek into its tag.

Skitch: Quick image editor, screenshot grabber, image sharing app and webservice combo. Lovely!

Pixelmator: Even if you are a Photoshop guru, you still should take a look at this image editing app.

Speed Download: Download Manager. First thing I bought when I switched.

Transmission: Into torrents? This is your client.

TV Shows: You don’t need to manually download torrent files for TV shows anymore. New version coming soon..

Yummy FTP: There’s a few ftp clients out there for the Mac but this was my choice..

OS X XBMC: If you think you will miss Windows Media Center, you are mistaken. Or if you have an Xbox with XBMC running on it, now you can do HD thanks to the OSXBMC project.

Appzapper: What if you install these and don’t like some of them? Yeah, yeah.. We’ve all heard it before.. In OS X, you can move the application you wanna delete to the trash folder and that’s it.
No it isn’t.

If you do that, a bunch of other files like preferences files, etc stay behind. Zap ‘em with Appzapper so that the app and the related files are history..

There’s something odd about reviewing a camera that just works: There’s not that much to say. Sony’s former Minolta team has hit on a design with all three of the latest cameras that is so easy to approach and use that it’s hard to come up with anything clever. It reminds me a lot of the switch between PC and Mac. I used to love tweaking MS-DOS and Windows to eek out a little more speed, but the Mac just worked, and worked well. Suddenly I had to focus on getting stuff done with my computer, rather than messing with settings to make a window pop up faster. The consumer Alpha cameras are a lot like that.

-Shawn Barnett of Imaging Resource

Sony Alpha 350 DSLR Review

The default Firefox 3 Mac theme does not show favicons for bookmarks you’ve added to your Bookmarks Toolbar. This is probably a decision that comes with mimicking the Safari theme which doesn’t display favicons either. Put simply, it sucks!

Thanks to Daniel Einspanjer, who wrote a Stylish style called Mac bookmark toolbar favicon, you can have all your favicons back in Firefox 3 with all their glory.

The Smart Bookmarks Bar extension which hides the names of bookmarks showing only the icon is currently not compatible with Firefox 3 Beta 5. It runs with the help of Nightly Tester Tools extension, but it is not very good at hiding the names of bookmarks. Even though it restores favicons on the Bookmark Toolbar without the use of the Stylish style mentioned above, it doesn’t work when it comes to hiding the names of bookmarks. You would have to go in to Organize Bookmarks and delete the names of bookmarks manually. You could just install the Stylish extension and delete the names manually, but you have control over the spacing between the icons with Smart Bookmarks bar.