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Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 2:09 PM

fmTuner has been updated to 1.1, adding a much-requested album artwork placeholder field, and testing for the latest and greatest version of WordPress.

The upgrade will work seamlessly with your current fmTuner design, but if you visit the fmTuner Settings page, you’ll see that you can now specify a link to a placeholder image, which will be used if Last.fm comes up short on album art. Leaving this field blank (the default) will simply skip tracks without artwork. If you want to get really fancy, there’s even a fmTuner tag that will print out the path to your current WordPress theme, if you’d like different album art placeholders for different themes.

(Comments are closed on this entry — any bugs or other issues should be reported on the original fmTuner page. Thanks!)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 7:28 PM

I’ve just updated Widerbug to 1.5.0, once again up to date with the enhancements from Firebug 1.5.0. If you’re running Widerbug 1.3.3 or later, you should receive 1.5.0 via an automatic update. Or, head over to the Widerbug download page to install it.

I know at some point I should attempt to merge my changes into the Firebug codebase and submit a patch (and stop this Firebug cat-and-mouse game), but my XUL knowledge is still fairly limited. If anyone would like to take on the challenge, though, I imagine your patch would be a welcome addition to Firebug’s core!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 7:32 PM

When setting up a new Windows machine, whether it’s Windows 2000 all the way up through Windows 7, you’ll occasionally run into an issue where you need drivers for a system or PCI device that you just can’t seem to find. To make matters worse, you don’t know which company made the device, so you don’t even know where to start looking for drivers. Should you go to Dell’s site? The motherboard manufacturer? Persistent “Unknown device” entries in the Windows Device Manager are a plague upon even the most seasoned techs. Here’s a tip to get your driver hunt moving in the right direction.

Find out who made the device
Figuring out which company made the device(s) in question is the first step towards getting it working. Start by opening the Windows Device Manager. My preferred quick way of doing this is clicking Start -> Run -> type “devmgmt.msc” -> press Enter. Once there, choose the device in question and right click it, and select Properties. Select the Details tab to see something like the view below:

Note the PCI “VEN” and “DEV” 4-character identifiers. PCI, USB, and many other system devices have Vendor and Device IDs. The Vendor ID is specific to the manufacturer, like Broadcom or nVIDIA. The Device ID is specific to the particular make or model of device you have. These are expressed in hexadecimal (0 through 9 plus A through F), so don’t be surprised to see letters there, as well. Some common Vendor IDs are 8080 and 8086 for Intel, 0A5C for Broadcom, 10DE for nVIDIA, 1002 for ATI, and many more.

Google it
A common way to express both the Vendor and Device IDs in a single string is 1022:2000, Vendor ID first. Combine your Vendor and Device IDs in this manner, and wrap it with quotes: “1022:2000″. Google that, and you should quickly figure out who made your “Unknown device” and what model it is. With this knowledge, you can either find the appropriate driver on your computer manufacturer’s website (Dell makes a good note of which manufacturer’s devices they use for a particular system), or you can visit the device manufacturer’s website directly.

I hope this information can help those looking to simply get their hardware working under Windows.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 10:36 PM

So you’re curious about the contents of iPhone and iPod Touch apps, including artwork, sounds, and more? Here’s how to dig into an application and see what goodies are hidden inside. Standard copyrights still apply.

Sync Your Apps
Assuming you already have the target application on your iPhone or iPod Touch (just “iPhone” from this point forward for brevity’s sake), simply sync your iPhone with your Mac or PC. Doing so will backup your device and transfer any purchased applications in both directions. With the target application now on your computer, navigate to your iTunes “Mobile Applications” folder, where iTunes typically does its own file housekeeping. Under Mac OS X, the default location is:
/Users/yourname/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications

Break it Open
Copy your target .ipa-suffixed application to a different location, ensuring that the original stays in the Mobile Applications folder to keep iTunes happy. To get inside the application, rename its extension to .zip. Open the zip file, and you will have access to the guts of the app (except the source code, of course).

High-res App Artwork
Directly inside the unzipped application folder, you’ll find a file named “iTunesArtwork”, with no extension. A hex editor revealed that the file is typically a jpeg image, so rename it to include .jpg at the end, and you’ll end up with the same 512×512 pixel artwork displayed by iTunes when browsing downloaded Applications. Beauties include:

To get at other resources, open up the adjacent “Payload” folder, and you’ll find a .app file — the application bundle that runs on the iPhone. Right- or Control-click on the .app, and choose “Show Package Contents” to open up the bundle.

Sounds
Sounds are typically found among the many resources directly inside the application, as files with extensions like .mp3, .aif, .m4a. At this point, the organizational structure is up to the application’s developer, so you may need to look around a little. Leopard’s QuickLook feature is a boon in times like this, helping assess a file’s purpose without opening half a dozen applications.

Other Graphics
Also nestled inside iPhone applications are many of the graphics used throughout the app. It’s possible that some may be drawn by code, but complex graphics are generally stored as images. However, viewing the images isn’t as easy as renaming the files as before. This will be a bit trickier, as the iPhone works some magic on the images before finishing the app build process, leaving images in an iPhone-optimized state. Fortunately, the process can be reversed with a little bit of Terminal trickery.

1. Copy all .png images to a new folder elsewhere. Images of other formats (.jpg, .gif, etc.) should be readily viewable.
2. Download David Watanabe’s modified iPhonePNG command-line application, unzip the archive, and open up Terminal from your /Applications/Utilities folder.
3. Type cd (cd space), then drop the iPhonePNG folder into the Terminal, and tap Return to switch to that folder.
4. Type ./iPhonePNG , drop the folder of encoded images into the Terminal, and tap Return to decode the whole folder full of images.
5. The output folder sites beside iPhonePNG, so type open . and tap Return (open space dot) to open the current folder (a dot, in Unix terms) in the Finder. Open the decoded images folder and have a look around.

That’s the 10-cent tour of the inner parts of a downloaded iPhone application for those that are curious about what iTunes handles automatically!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 7:57 PM

Once in a while I come across a technological achievement that makes me wonder, “How the heck did they do that?” GameVee, essentially YouTube for video game videos, now offers a video-capturing service called Grab. Grab exists to automatically capture videos from Halo 3 on Xbox Live and drop them into your GameVee profile, ready to be watched by friends and foes. While YouTube requires users to upload videos from their computers, Grab fully automates the process by reaching into your Halo 3 File Share and capturing your desired video on the server-side, producing a relatively high-quality capture, requiring only a little patience on the part of the user.

Here’s what makes me wonder, though: Halo 3 has no programming interface for accomplishing this feat, nor does Bungie.net, or the Xbox 360 itself. Halo 3′s videos are completely walled off to other computers and automation, requiring button pressing and reading to navigate to videos in players’ shares. Josh Lowensohn over at Cnet talked with the creator and CEO of GameVee, and he was very secretive about the details of how their system works, which makes me all the more curious. While I have no further details on how GameVee manages to automate the Halo 3 video-capturing process, I have an idea as to how I’d go about it…

• Imaginary Setup
  It’s reasonable to expect that Grab isn’t doing something wildly complicated and impractical like capturing and decrypting Xbox Live packets and rendering videos on a computer other than an Xbox 360. Plus, the tail end of their captured videos also show the Halo video controller — a telltale sign that it’s just a computer capturing the video coming out of an Xbox. Starting with a regular desktop PC, a capture card or box would be required to get video input, and some kind of USB controller to send controls to the Xbox 360. Sending “spoofed” controller button-presses to an Xbox 360 console shouldn’t be terribly hard with a little USB controller work, but getting a computer to “understand” what’s happening in-game is a much larger hurdle.
• Software
  If Grab is in fact automated — it could very well just be some guy downloading and capturing videos all day long — the key piece is going to be the software that keeps track of what the Xbox is doing, when a video is done playing, how it’s responding to button presses, etc. Machine vision is a rather complicated endeavor for a project like Grab, but it’s certainly seems within the realm of possibility. Another tactic might be to process only the audio coming from the Xbox, and “listen” for responses to button presses in the menu interface, and to wait for game audio to subside to flag the end of a video. Both are rather fragile, though — any abnormality in the flow could completely confuse the software, leaving a capturing PC stuck until an operator can clear the problem and reset the software.

However GameVee designed Grab, it seems to be working fairly well for them. What are your thoughts on how they might have accomplished something of this magnitude?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.