Why is the rum always gone?...
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 Just yesterday Netflix released their much awaited iPhone app (or I should say, Apple approved and published their app to the iTunes store). So far I’m pretty impressed with it.
The application allows you to obviously browse your instant queue, watch whatever you like and resume where you left off should you change directions on them. One thing I was surprised to see when I first logged into the application was that I was using all six of my licenses. Very much akin to the iTunes “authorized computers” schema. I was directed to their website where I had the option to kill devices, some of which I had not streamed on in quite some time. The message on that screen said that devices can be added and removed pretty much at will, so no big deal there.
So, back to the app. The video quality is very good, comparable to a downloaded movie from the store (or one you ripped). WiFI was very fast obviously, but 3G wasn’t really too far behind it, took a few moments to load and buffer, but solid after that.
I’m really glad I stuck with my grandfathered unlimited data plan with AT&T, I could see how getting an application like this approved would benefit them greatly financially as users on a limited data plan burn through their megabytes and gigabytes without a second thought. Careful out there, oh limited bandwidth users. Everyone else, burn it up! Cheers.
Back in June, movie rental giant Netflix promised an iPhone app this summer. So far, no app, no word. So, what’s the deal, summer is certainly coming to an end, and very soon. Apparently, in addition to not monitoring their official blog for spam, they’re also not commenting on the status of their iPhone app. Is it coming, or isn’t it?
Thanks again to LifeHacker, I’ve been playing around with Geek Tool. It’s a tool for OS X that can do a bunch of things,  I’m using it to create some desktop widget type things. I got the code to display the current weather conditions from this post and decided to play around with adding some additional code.
So after mucking around with the graphical interface and figuring a few things out (which really isn’t difficult to do) I came up with a little routine that checks latency to the inside interface on my firewall. It’s really nothing special but I kind of like seeing it up there.
You can paste this into the command window in Geek Tool or put it in a file and call it as a shell script. Here’s the code (replace YOURIP with your real IP address obviously). You may need to modify the script slightly if your ping output isn’t the same as what I’m using.
ping -c 1 YOURIP | grep -i icmp_seq | sed -e 's/64 bytes from YOURIP: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=/Wireless lag: /'
I set the refresh rate for 60 seconds and have the status feedback image enabled, if the little green bubble turns red then it’s skipped a beat. I found a bunch of other really useful posts about scripting too, here’s a couple to get you started if you’re interested:
Found this today on LifeHacker, it’s a do-it-yourself job that this fella cooked up to control the air conditioning unit over his home network. If you’re handy with electronics and computers, just wire in a logic board (or in this case a network addressable snmp aware relay board) connect it up and you’re hauling the mail. Well, after a little work.
Sure does look like it’d be a lot of fun to build, but not at the cost that board is going for. I’m sure one could find something similar at a cheaper price. Worth checking out though.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading online, trying to find which personal VPN service would be best for me to use. The concept of using a non-work VPN is a little foreign to me, but now that I’m finding myself connecting more and more to the internet away from home and through public wifi access points (or wireless at work) I though it might be high time to invest in a little security.
Right now I’m evaluating (and by evaluating I mean I paid for a month of access) VPN services by the folks over at HideMyAss. Now, for the record, I hate the name and think they should call their professional VPN services by another name, but I guess what really matters is how the service functions.
So, for about $12/month (less if you pay for a longer subscription) you get to choose from 28 different VPN endpoints in nine different countries. Pretty handy I suppose if you’re in the UK and wanted to watch video that is restricted by region to the US. Not what I need it for, but the functionality exists.
I’m a Mac user and installation was really easy, even though I’m running an older operating system (10.4.11). They have a client you can use that autoconfigures, or you can use PPTP VPN tunneling built into the OS and be up and running in minutes.
So far, so good. Speeds are really good. I can’t really see any notable difference in my connection speed while connected or disconnected. I’ll continue to play with it for a while, but will still be looking around for more options.
So, what say you, got some experiences or reviews you’d like to share? Jump in and leave a comment..
So I was laying in bed this morning, it was still dark out, so I know it was early. My wife had gotten up to use the bathroom, and on her way back to bed she stopped and picked up the alarm clock, put it under her arm and walked off. Once the power cables pulled loose, she stopped, looked at it and said ‘Oh’ and sat it on the floor by the foot of the bed.
Without missing a beat, she crawled back into bed, head at the foot of the bed and fell back asleep. Not remembering a bit of what just happened. You’ve just gotta laugh sometimes.
For those of you not aware, we’re providing RadioReference with audio feeds of both the Hampton Police Division and Newport News Police department broadcasts. If you’re interested, see the links on the right side of the page.
The machine streaming the audio got in a funky state and started handing of some very choppy and unreliable audio and needed a swift kick, which it got. Things are back up and running now, hopefully for a while.
Well, it’s been a while since I updated the site, and I think it’s partly because of the method in which I put the thing together … almost all static pages written cryptically in perl. While I love programming and mucking around in the code, it got old going in and editing indexes, and adding links. So… introduce wordpress to alleviate my pain.
This site has been a lot less active over the years that youtube took off mainstream, I used to get 99% of my inbound traffic from folks looking for the Bud Light Radio Spots I host, but they’re available so many other places now that things dwindled and I took less of an active interest. It happens I suppose..
Hopefully I’ll be a bit more diligent in updating it now (ha!) but at least it’s much less cumbersome than before, and to top it all off, I can get spam just like all the other comment enabled blogs!
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