iStat Menus

I'm not sure why I haven't written about iStat Menus before. I think it's because it's about the first thing I grab on any Mac I'll be using for more than 10 minutes. Some people do the same with Quicksilver (I have yet to figure out why it would make my life that much better, call me backwards). iStat Menus is the menu bar version of iStat, which is a utility for viewing a number of different meters representing system performance.

While I generally learned pretty quickly that menu bar apps add a whole lot of clutter very quickly, iStat has earned a spot on the second most coveted real estate on my screen. The first is the desktop and nothing goes there 'cept the little hard drive icons.

iStat gives you the ability to view CPU, Memory, drives, network, temp, fans, power, and Bluetooth status. You can throw all of these into your menu, or pick and chose which ones grace your screen. I personally like the CPU, Memory, Network, and oddly enough, date and time.

Date and time? Not exactly a performance measure, is it? Well no, but I happen to like it better than the default option (I hide that one in system prefs) It is more compact when you are displaying the date, and if you click the date it gives you a neat-o pop up calendar.


One thing I miss about my life in the PC world is my PC machines generally had some sort of hard disk indicator light somewhere on them. So when the PC was acting odd, I could always glance down at the hardware and see that the disk was thrashing around like mad. I was slightly clueless when my Mac did the same thing (oh yes Macs are just as capable at sucking as PCs). Now I have a cool blue icon that does the same thing. It's hard to tell from any screen shots, but it even has indicators on the icon to show if the disk is reading or writing.

The other three indicators are pretty much common stuff (you Vista users are familiar with the little desktop gadget that looks like a car instrument cluster and shows this stuff off, everyone has that one.) I have at a glance my physical memory in use, cpu usage and network activity. One cool thing about it is that you can click on one of the indicators and it will give you the top processes using the resource. This was great for finding out that our stupid printer driver goes nuts on occasion and ties up an entire core for no good reason whatsoever.


Sure, most of the stuff the app does isn't exactly revolutionary, there's tons of other apps out there that do the same thing. My favorite thing about this one is that it's a simple heads up at-a-glance indicator that takes up little screen real estate. I can easily click to get more in depth details on what's happening and even launch OS X's native task management software to kill misbehaving processes. The only thing I really wish I could do with this would be to kill an app directly from the menu rather than having to jump over to Activity Monitor.

The price is right at zero dollars, you can grab it at the iSlayer website.

The Great TiVO Meltdown of '09

***Update***
Well... it turns out that my celebration was a little premature. After plugging along for all of yesterday, the TiVo started again. I was actually in the process of pulling shows off of this DVR (I'll post in the future about iTiVo to do this) but I only got a few shows in before it started acting up, wife so not happy. I'm pretty sure it actually is a HDD problem now that I've got it back up and running again and I can see some of the oddball behavior.

The moral I guess is do whatever the internets tell you. But the info in this post is still a handy troubleshooting tip since CableCard problems can, in fact cause weird stuff to happen too.
***/Update***


Alright, so this doesn't exactly count as any sort of free stuff. But the internets pretty much failed me when Googling around for a solution, and if I listened to those lying liars I'd be out a new hard drive. So here's my little story that I figured I might share with my interweb friends so that someone else may not suffer.

Last night, as my wife and I sat down to watch a popular reality show in which punk ass kids ruin famous songs, I was greeted with a black screen and no audio. Yeah, I know it was God saying I should do something more constructive with my time. Basic troubleshooting ensued, and it was quickly determined the TiVO was behaving badly. So as is the tradition with said devices, I pulled the plug to do a hostile reboot.

For those of you keeping score, this was my big daddy TiVO, the TiVO HD with the TiVO Extender attached to our main (and only HD) TV. So what happened next nearly made me weep openly. The TiVO dutifuly went through its bootup procedure (the welcome powering up, just another minute screens) and then the screen went black and started back at the powering up screen, which means the unit had rebooted while powering up. Probably not good. Let it go through another sequence, same deal. Pulled the plug for a couple minutes, tried again, another reboot.

$@*!

Time for my BFF, Google to help me out here. I searched on reboot loops, and was horrified with what I saw. Apparently, constant reboots are pretty much always caused by a faulty hard drive.

Double $@*!

Very near weeping at this point.

I found some info on performing what are called "kickstart" codes that force low level diagnostics on a TiVO . For whatever reason, I couldn't get these stupid things to work, I'm pretty sure I did it right, but I want to say in the back of my mind I read somewhere that the new version 11 software uses a different procedure to do diagnostics. By the time I figured out the kickstarting wasn't going to do it for me a great deal of time had passed, and I was pretty much giving up, but first a few tests.

The first thing I did was power off, then unplug my extender. Interestingly the TiVO booted a little further and eventually came to the "hey what did you do with the extender" screen. At that point I could have hit clear to divorce my TiVO from the extender and try to continue to boot. A viable step save for the fact that my wife had several unwatched episodes of Grey's Anatomy on there, if I deleted those unecessarily, a dead TiVO would be the least of my trouble.

So now what? Well I went with a little more Googling, a few more kickstart attempts, and some abject panic to no avail. I was just about to give up and sacrifice Dr. Grey for the greater good when an epiphany of basic troubleshooting hit me. I hadn't messed with the cablecards yet. For those of you who haven't had the opportunity to deal with them, cable cards are a complete and total pain in the ass and the cause of no shortage of headaches on the road to HD TiVO goodness.

So I pull the plug yet again, open the access door on the front up and pop out the cablecard. I plug the TiVo back in and it goes through startup. Then it keeps going, and keeps going (startup is crazy slow on these things, so this is a really good thing.) After the usual several minute wait, I'm presented not with another reboot, but a screen asking me to configure my cablecards since the TiVo seems to have lost them. This is new and promising. I shove the cable card back in and go to the diagnostics, no signal listed, so I'm not overly optimistic yet. So I decide to cancel out of the cablecard setup menu.

AND THE TiVo GOES TO THE TiVo CENTRAL LIST!!!!! WOOHOO, it's all there, the 3 minutes of Idol it tried to record before its near-death experience, and yes, Grey's Anatomy was there just as it had been left, I get to sleep in my bed tonight!

Ok, but what about the cable? Well, after doing the happy dance, I got greedy and decided I'd like it to continue to record new stuff. I dropped out to live TV and at first the searching for signal screen popped up. Then, something beautiful happened, a TV channel appeared, then I channeled, and another channel was there, then one more and I was watching the Weather Channel in glorious HD (I know, crazy). All seemed right with the world.

Don't ask me what happened, I have no earthly clue. I just need to transfer those Grey's off of the thing just in case it breaks again.

Useful links:
http://www.tivocommunity.com
http://www.wkforums.com/forums/

Turn a cheap router into an easy wireless hotspot (with a few limitations)

There are a few different solutions running around out there if you have some need to run a wireless hotspot. Seeing how this is the free stuff blog, I’ll skip right over the commercial offerings, but know of course there are tons of those out there. We are responsible for providing wireless access for an entire multi-tenant office building. The goal was to have authenticated, but free, wireless internet for tenants and guests and whatnot.

We had been using the ZoneCD hotspot for quite a while. It ran on a virtual machine using a bootCD and a virtual floppy with config files, pretty small footprint, and it was a fairly stable solution. There were a couple of show stoppers with that solution that have cropped up recently. First is that it’s based on NoCatAuth which uses an annoying pop-up window to keep the user authorized against the hotspot and caused no shortage of support requests to get the stupid thing working right on strange laptops running 7 pop-up blockers.

ZoneCD was also configured to use a community authentication and configuration service, which is kind of neat and one less thing for us to worry about. The problem is that at least the free version (publicIP.net as opposed to publicIP.com, which is the paid service) is pretty much abandonware. The e-mail verification system stopped working some time ago, and now it appears the SSL certificate for the login page has expired as of Feb 2009.

Thus begun the search for a suitable replacement access point. There are a few different hotspot packages out there that offer different functionality. I looked at way more solutions than I can possibly recall and tested two different solutions, 2hotspot by Antamedia and CoovaAP.

2HotSpot is a Windows based solution which uses ICS (internet connection sharing) on a dual-homed windows XP or 2003 box. The software supports both free and paid access to your hotspot. If you require a paid hotspot, you’ll have to go through Antamedia’s payment services (paying them a cut of every transaction) or pay a fee if you wish to bring your own merchant services.

As we were rolling out free services, we didn’t require a hotspot that could handle payment options and the added overhead that went with having a deidicated Windows server to manage the hotspot. There were also a few other reasons that kept me looking around, but to be honest, I can’t remember what they were at the moment. Which brings us to:

CoovaAP is a custom firmware that runs directly on certain Linksys and other wirless routers. CoovaAP is based on a couple of different open source projects: OpenWRT for the actual router OS and Coova-Chilli to handle the hotspot duties. Coova-Chilli is the apparent successor to ChilliSpot which is a popular but no abandoned open source hotspot.

The first thing to address when going with a bult in hotspot is to make sure the router has sufficient storage and hackability to actually handle running third party software. Older incarnations of the Linksys WRT54G (revision 4 and earlier) work well for this purpose. However, Linksys downgraded the WRT line several years ago, and anything newer than revision 4 lacks the horsepower (and memory) to pull this off. Fortunately Linksys figured out they could sell the old router for more money so they rolled out the special “Linux” edition, the WRT54GL which has the same specs as the older versions of the hardware. Even the more expensive incarnation of the router can be had for under 50 bucks if you find it on sale somewhere.

The Good:

With the hardware acquired, setting up the software is painfully easy. You basically run the firmware upgrade from the Coova.org site on the router, log in, and start configuring. The firmware offers a number of different hotspot options, you can use the built in coova-chilli implementation like we did, or you can use your own ChilliSpot or WiFiDog servers. Heck you can even use FaceBook or Drupal as your authentication mechanisim.

If you go with the built-in hotspot, you have a number of options for handling user accounts. You can do a basic TOS agreememnt page with no authentication, you can allow only pre-configured users to authenticate, or you can setup a self-service registration page. Similarly, there are a few different options for where your user accounts can actually come from. The simplest option is to use a built-in flat user file, this is where self-registered users wind up. You can also use Coova’s own RADIUS/AAA service, your own Radius server (handy if you have Active Directory, but with a couple of gotchas), or even OpenID.

There are also options in the system to customize the login pages, setp a “walled garden” of allowed sites without authenticating. You can do a number of advanced features like a super-annoying top frame in all browser windows and traffic shaping when the appropriate additional components are added.

The bad:

There’s only a couple of things that really put me off about this solution. The first one is fairly minor, but it goes against completely basic security design. When you click on the link within the admin interface to view the local user database, it shows you a complete list of users with passwords in plain text. Also on the security front, there is an option to use SSL for the captive login, but it only appears to support a self-signed certificate, which means client browsers are going to freak out and throw a certificate security warning. Most providers will probably want to run simple HTTP to cut down on the panic.

The last issue I have with this thing is probably the one that really bugs me the most about a lot of open-source, and particularly Linux-based projects. Out of the box, pass-through doesn’t work for PPTP (read Windows) VPNs. After spending literally the better part of a day Googling on the subject, I gave up in utter frustration ranting about software devloped by hippies. There were two forum posts on the subject, one which was very helpful, but offered no information on how to accomplish the steps required to make this work. The other post was a quote of the first post asking if anyone could provide more info on how to follow the steps… of course there were no replies.

So… if you know the answer to this question by all means let me know, you will restore my faith in open source.

Despite its few shortcomings, CoovaAP is about as simple as it gets when it comes to setting up a wireless hotspot. I also didn’t mention that you also get to add a few advanced features to that little Linksys router thanks to the built-in functionality of OpenWRT. If you need a simple AP, and the villagers won’t hunt you down because they can’t make a PPTP VPN connection, this may be a great solution for you.

Recommendation: Buy (See what I did there, funny).

RD Tabs

RD Tabs by Avian Waves is one of those applications that I have to download before I can even thing about using my work computer to accomplish anything resembling work.

On the surface, RD Tabs is a remote desktop application that gives you a tabbed interface for multiple remote desktop windows. When you have to have multiple remote machines up on your desktop simultaneously, this thing is a godsend.

The application is also packed with other handy goodness for presenting remote windows. You can have your window dynamically sized based on the application window. You can use global settings so that every connection by default will disable audio for example. Settings can also be managed on an individual connection basis. There is also the ability to save connections as favorites, as well as a handy drop down of your most recently accessed remote desktops.

RD Tabs also supports the newer versions of the RDP protocol found in Vista and server 2k8. The application was created by a Windows administrator to handle daily admin tasks. You can grab a copy (or read more) over at http://www.avianwaves.com under the tech section. You can also check out the other applications (I’ll do a writeup on XS BAP in the future) as well as original music written and performed by the developer.

Spiceworks

We actually have a ton of system management and monitoring tools running around at the office, like MOM and some of the GFI stuff. The one we seem to keep coming back to is Spiceworks. It’s the most competively priced (Free) of them and it actually provides a ton of features and a fairly decent reporting interface.

Spiceworks can monitor any number of different things, such as disk space, up time, event logs, pings and so on. Especially on Windows boxes, it has some great inventory capability, and I often use the installed software reports to make sure the user base isn’t installing verboten items. The reporting interface is alright, there are a few things I wish it could do a little better (some of the queries are hard coded, unless you want to write the SQL yourself) and it has limited me in the kinds of reports I wanted to run.

There’s a good sized user community, and is updated very frequently as well. A number of things I’ve taken issue with in the past (such as duplicate machines) tend to go away in future releases.

The free version is ad-supported, but actually runs on your own hardware, so your intimate network data isn’t sent to the mother ship. For shops that take exception to the ad-based scheme, there is a fee-based version that removes all the ads. Either way it’s an excellent choice for a smaller shop with limited resources (that’s pretty much every small shop I think).

Microsoft Live Mesh

You’d think MS wouldn’t have a place in a blog about useful freebies. They actually do put out a number of handy little things, Live Mesh is one of them. http://www.mesh.com

Live Mesh is part of Microsoft’s cloud initiative on the consumer side under the umbrella of the Live brand (cloudy stuff like office applications, e-mail, chat, web sites and so forth.) Mesh gives you a modest amount of cloud storage (5gb) and lets you setup folders to automatically sync to the online “desktop” Not exactly revolutionary.

The cool part (which also isn’t terribly revolutionary) is that you can have multiple machines synchronize not only to the cloud storage, but to each other (See screenie below). Additionally, they’ve added support for the Mac OS. So now I can pretty much have the same stuff on each of my computers with minimal effort (you do have to make sure you set the Mac version as a startup item, it’s not automatic like the Windows version.)

There are other services that offer this kind of thing, but this is free and works with all of my stuff. They keep promising a mobile version as well. I’ll be interested to see if it’s exlusively Windows Mobile, or if they relase an iPhone app.

Screenshot of the Live Mesh Desktop and my computers

Quick mention of fave internet radio

Just for the sake of getting some posts in here… quantity over quality Here’s a quick blurb of some of my favorite internet audio spots…

Pandora I kinda prefer it to Last.fm just because it better fits my sometimes flighty music moods. It takes a little time, but with some training, and the creative use of multiple stations on a quick mix, you can get it to match some pretty oddball musical tastes. (Also available as an iPhone app).

KCCN Is an FM station out of Honolulu playing contemporary Hawaiian music. I’m a huge fan of Hawaiian music, so this is a nice little island retreat

Subsonic’s Disney Theme Park Audio Ok, this one makes me a tad strange, but there’s a couple of different stations on this site dedicated to music and audio from Disney parks around the world. There’s a background music station that plays instrumental stuff. I play this one at work turned down for a little bit of background atmosphere, it works great for that.

Radio Margaritaville A must stop for Parrotheads and people looking for a little audio vacation… This is an online stream of the Sirius/XM station. Plays a mix of kick-back music, classic rock, blues, and of course a ton of Buffett including rare tracks and whole concert replays.

Really Useful SharePoint Designer Workflows

Switching gears to work stuff this morning…

CodePlex is a repository of open source code similar to Source Forge, and features a lot of code projects for Microsoft stuff. One of my favorite things form there is the Useful Sharepoint designer workflow activities (that’s a mouthful) or SPDActivities for short. This extends the built in workflow activities you can select when creating custom workflows from within SharePoint designer (which you’d be using if you were fairly serious about custom workflows, but not quite a developer using Visual Studio).

SPDActivities adds some, well, useful functionality that should be built into SharePoint out of the box. There are several including some Infopath stuff that I don’t really use. There are a few of the activities I just can live without.

My personal faves let you tinker with list item permissions, start a different workflow from within your work flow, and copy list items to lists that aren’t even on the same subsite (or even application or farm).

I tend to get completely lost if I start trying to build workflows on a farm where I haven’t installed these extensions.

http://spdactivities.codeplex.com/

PyTivo

Welcome to my random musings of stuff I find useful, and blissfully cost free Remember, a lot of this stuff involves a lot of time and sweat from real people. You should support these efforts if you find them very useful by whatever method requested by the authors.

I’ll start off the festivities with a little writeup on an app that has transformed my TiVO from a simple DVR to a whole house video jukebox system.

PyTivo is an open source effort that uses a number of different open source tools to convert just about any video format you can think of and serving it up to any Series 2, 3, HD, etc tivos on your local network. When configured, your PC, or Mac, or Linux box will show up on your TiVO in a similar manner to other DVRs. Just select the video you want to transfer, and depending on your network speed and quality settings, either go find something else to do, or start watching right away.

PyTivo can be configured to serve up both Standard Def and HD content, and can even down convert HD content to your old caveman era SD TiVOs eliminating the need for multiple copies of the same content. Most video formats are supported including VOB, MKV, AVI, MP4.

I run PyTivo on my iMac with a USB external HDD. Oddly enough, the original version of PyTivo is actually pretty difficult on the Mac. You have to install the actual PyTivo as well as compiling a version of FFMEPG to run on your Mac (which involves XCode tools and downloading the components from an online repository). It’s pretty intimidating at first, but once it’s up and running its very stable. By contrast, the PC version is a simple single installer and you’re up and running. All versions use a web interface to tweak the settings.

Fortunately, someone has finally stepped in and built a GUI version of PyTivo called PyTivoX. The GUI version is very easy to configure, but does lack the ability to control some of the advanced settings from within the GUI (you can still modify the configuration files to change the advanced settings as you would in the regular version of PyTivo). I ran the graphical version briefly, but as I had my older version up and running with the advanced settings configured, I stuck with that version.

Once everything was up and running, I pretty much only have to fire up the DVD Player when I don’t want to take the time to rip a DVD. The kids wants to watch Finding Nemo for the 43rd time on any TV in the house? No problem, it’s on TiVO.

Useful links:

PyTiVO project: http://pytivo.armooo.net/

PyTiVO discussion forums: http://pytivo.krkeegan.com/

The steps I followed to install the original PyTivo: http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2008/12/01/how-to-install-pytivo-on-a-mac/

PyTiVOX: http://code.google.com/p/pytivox/