Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Just Another Reason Apple Rocks: FedEx Get Your Shit Straight

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 24, 2008
in Journal
. 6 Comments

Apple Inc

It is no secret PolyVector and I are Apple fans. now I wouldn’t go as far as saying either of us are a fanboy (or girl) since we have no problem saying when/where/if Apple has a fault. No company is perfect and they are of course out to make a profit. Yesterday reaffirmed our like for the company though.

On April 14th we purchased a new aluminum iMac for PolyVector. it was set to be shipped on the 15th and arrive on the 17th. So we wait in agonizing anticipation for his shiny new machine. As the morning of the 17th roles around ad we awake to the awesome notification that his iMac is on the FedEx truck for delivery that day we pace around the house constantly looking out the window to catch a glimpse of one of those white trucks pulling in.

To save you a lengthy article, the iMac never came that day…nor the next 3 days (not counting the weekend). In fact, I think this little chart sums it up:

FedEx Delivery

On the night of the 18th we contacted FedEx to inform them that it might be possible the driver has the wrong information or is getting our apartment building mixed up with another (very possible here). FedEx responded asking for our phone number and other identifiable information, but after said info was given nothing was accomplished. We tried contacting FedEx several more times, and we waited till the morning of the 22nd. Thinking it was hopeless the morning of the 23nd we contacted Apple Inc explaining to them our situation in desperation that they might be able to set things straight…or at least send back the iMac if FedEx returned it. Which in an hour from the email (at around 7am) Apple called us explaining that for some reason the driver had no street to send the package too, just an apartment and city. They had made sure the driver was updated and assured us that the package should arrive. And they even gave us a backup plan which included a place to pickup the iMac in the event it never found our place.

I can’t believe after all the contacting we had done with FedEx it took Apple to set things straight within an hour.

What You Can Do for Earth Day

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 22, 2008
in Journal
. 5 Comments

A lot of different sites today are running articles on what each person can do to help move the world in a greener direction, and what better time to start than on Earth Day. I figured I would pitch in and talk about some of the things we are doing here as well as a few things I have seen today.

What You Can Do Around the House

  1. If you are a coffee drinker you should really try reusable filters. It is amazing how much coffee filters cost and can stack up waste wise.
  2. Wash your clothes in cold water. The amount of energy needed to heat the water for a washing machine over a block is immense. There are plenty of brands now providing products for washing clothing in cold water. This not only saves on your energy costs, but cuts down on the environmental impact.
  3. Stop using dryer sheets. There are alternatives to dryer sheets when it comes to softening your laundry. You can purchase rubber balls that are not only reusable, but drastically cut down on the waste during laundry time.
  4. Use Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) Bulbs. Start today switching at least one bulb in your house. It will save you some money on your bill, we’ve been doing it for years.
  5. Recycle! If you live in a house you have no excuse, bins are cheap and easy to separate out at least paper, plastic, aluminum, and glass. I think apartments have it tough when it comes to recycling. A lot of places will not allow you to keep bins on your porch area (or even have the room for it anyways). But give it a try. Once you start it is neat to see how much trash you actually cut down on each week. plus you can make some extra money bringing it down to the local recycling center. My parents on cans alone pay their gas (as in cars) bill each month.
  6. Reusable shopping bags, you know the cloth ones most stores have started to have somewhere around checkout. Even Best Buys have them now. This cuts down greatly on the amount of plastic waste you generate every month. The cloth bags not only hold your items better (completely eliminates double bagging) but is much more comfortable as far as your hands and fingers are concerned for the heavier items. The bags are usually $0.99 a piece, and hold up great. Get yourself some! Of course if for some reason you are allergic (I can’t imagine what excuse some one could possible come up with on why not to get these bags) please recycle your plastic bags. Most grocery stores have a bag recycling center right when you walk in the entrance next to the coin star machines.

Things from Around the Net

  1. Here’s a neat site that will help you reduce the junk mail you get each day. Green Dimes provides a service that helps you take your name off lists with catalogs and other services you might not have known you can stop mail from. They provide a free service which has you identify the services, or one-time fee packages for monitoring and other “you do nothing” filtering for junk. This will cut own on your trash/recycling as well as the environmental impact these companies push from their wasted paper material consumption.
  2. If you are currently in the market for hosting then try looking up places where they use renewable energy. Greenesthost happens to be one of them.

Well, that happens to be all I have right now. Please share what you have done/are doing/want to do regarding staying green.

Gas is Now Over Four Dollars USD

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 21, 2008
in Journal
. 3 Comments

I remember when gas was $0.89. That’s right, once upon a time in the US gas was less than one dollar a gallon. Growing up I have watched the gas prices slowly climb, but within the last 8 years I have been amazed at how fast gas prices climbed. The prices have gone up in the last eight years more than the 17 years before that. Something has gone incredibly wrong…

Gas Prices

This 7-11 is a couple blocks from where Polyvector and I currently live in Ramona, California (USA). We take a walk every morning at around 5am (our hours are currently backwards, so this would be the equivalent of you walking around 5pm) and see what the gas prices are. We rarely drive anymore unless it is to go through the mountains into town to visit friends and family. This morning was the day gas rose four dollars and above.

Now for a little politics. Think about this as you sit down possibly to breakfast. We are told gas prices are high because of foreign oil raising their prices per barrel which in turn makes the cost of importing higher for our gas companies…but why then is the gas and oil companies here in the US making record breaking profits these past years?

Chili Pickled Eggs

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 20, 2008
in Journal
. 4 Comments

I don’t know what spurred on this new obsession PolyVector and I have with pickling. It might have been an episode of “Good Eats” on the Food Network one night. But ever since we have decided our new quest is to find our own version of the perfect pickled egg.

Pickled eggs have gotten a bad rap (did I use the right “rap”), you always see them in bars or imagine these rubbery little slimy eggs. Let me be the first to say, if you like pickles and you like hard boiled eggs, than this is a snack you should give a chance.

Our first attempt at pickled eggs wasn’t an awful one, but we didn’t feel it was one to share. The eggs had an over powering balsamic vinegar taste. Not bad, but it was just too sweet for our tastes. There were other things in there that we thought would contribute to the brine, but all in all it wasn’t what we expected. MegaNice9 was kind enough to give an egg a try and she expressed a like despite our own disappointment with the batch. This time around we think we have a winner.

Chili Pickled Eggs (working title) my friends. We love hard boiled eggs and we make them whenever we feel we aren’t going to make it through a dozen eggs. So we wanted to come up with an alternative snack for this. In comes this recipe.

Chilies

  • 1 dz. hard boiled eggs
  • 2 c. filtered water
  • 2 c. distilled white vinegar (5% acidity)
  • 2 tbsp. salt
  • 2 tbsp. cumin
  • 2 tbsp. cayenne pepper
  • 12 dried small chili peppers

Now, this recipe is still pickling in our fridge at the moment, so it is kind of untested. You should let the eggs sit in there for at least three days. We just made this batch yesterday morning.

Pickles Eggs

I can’t wait to give ‘em a go. Happy pickling!

Update (4/20/2008): We tried our first egg tonight and made some adjustments to the recipe. The brine was not salty enough and there wasn’t enough of a kick. So we added another tablespoon of salt and cayenne pepper. This batch is looking really good and so we will continue our quest to perfecting these spicy little guys.

Hacking the Apple TV

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 19, 2008
in Journal
. 4 Comments

Apple TV

In February PolyVector and I got an Apple TV. I promised a small article on modding it once we had everything all setup. So, here it is! I am going to do a small little walk through on the resources I used and how I managed to get everything up and running. I do want to note the methods used here are after a second round of trying to figure out an easier way to modd the Apple TV after the 2.0.x updates were released. Our first attempt at modding was extremely difficult and made getting any Apple TV updates not impossible, but very time consuming. By the way, this little run down is going to have you hacking your Apple TV without removing the internal hard drive, or taking it apart in any way.

Preparation

Well, the first thing you need is an Apple TV. The new Take 2 versions are completely acceptable. We originally modded a 2.0 and this modding method was a direct result to get the new 2.0.2 software up and running.

A USB thumbdrive that is at least 125MB. I used a 256MB Cigar Pro 2.

An Intel Mac OS X Tiger system restore disc. One that comes with a new Mac, I used my aluminum iMac’s install disc. The disc definitely needs to be newer than the first gen MacBook restore discs, as when I was going through this it did not work properly.

The last thing you need is pretty much a tutorial link. I am not going to walk you through the tutorial myself as I think the one I followed was pretty darn easy and specific enough except for the few notes I gave you above for preparation. All the downloads you need will also be linked to in the following tutorial.

Go straight to iClarified - AppleTV Install SSH with a Take 2 Patchstick. Be sure to follow the tutorial exactly and you will have a perfectly working USB drive that will auto patch your Apple TV so you can SSH (or SFTP) to install plugins.

After the Initial Hacking

So you have SSH (SFTP) enabled on your Apple TV, what can you possibly do with this thing. Actually a lot! You can now access the Apple TV’s file system so this means you can add video and audio codecs. The Apple TV is using a special version of Front Row which means that it uses Quick Time. Playing DivX, XviD and other formats is as easy as installing Perian. To make it even easier, you can follow another iClarified tutorial which walks you through all the Terminal voodoo.

The downside to all this is you still won’t be able to stream DivX etc, files from your desktop. This means you need a way to access the file system on your Apple TV via the GUI you see on your TV screen. This is where ATV Files comes in. It allows you to set folders and an easy way to get to them on your Apple TV for playback. Once again iClarified has a tutorial on installing ATV Files, but the link to the ATV Files download is to an older version that is very difficult to setup. Instead of downloading the version stated in the tutorial you should get the newest version from the ATV Files wiki. Because you are going to be using a different version than the install tutorial, you might need to modify the Terminal commands you use to match the file name of the newer ATV Files version.

Resources

This is the last little bit I am going to go over quickly. Some huge resources you should bookmark regarding hacking/modding your Apple TV are as follow:

AppleTV Hacks - For news on plugin updates, community forums for help, and general Apple TV info.
iClarified Apple TV Tutorial section - Some of the easiest and most up-to-date tutorials for modding your Apple TV.
AwkwardTV - A place to find ATVFiles and a bunch of other plugins to make your Apple TV do more than you probabl ever thought it could.

Done

I hope you enjoyed my tiny walk through. Thanks for reading!

Looks Like RocketDock.com Finally Caught Up

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 18, 2008
in Journal
. 0 Comments

Ah, PolyVector and I can finally kick back and relax. it looks like RocketDock.com is up and running smoothly. The DNS finally caught up and we also got the new RSS feeds (backed by FeedBurner) up and running.

With that out of the way we can continue work on our other projects that have been put on hold while we make sure our RocketDock users have a nice place to share their creations.

Waiting for RocketDock.com to Catch up with the Rest of the World

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 16, 2008
in Journal
. 7 Comments

For the last two weeks we have been working feverishly on getting RocketDock.com back up. Now to some it might seem like a no brainer, we got a new server and so place the existing site we have backed up on this new server for all to enjoy once again. Well, it isn’t that easy.

Our original server hosting RocketDock.com we were afraid was compromised due to a security hole in Joomla. And I don’t mean compromised where everyone’s passwords were stolen, but a hole were spam bots were able to enter and possibly send out spam under the guise that it was us. Thus creating the downtime we had originally regarding the blocked IP.

So RocketDock.com is now backup with a brand new site crafted by PolyVector himself. The only problem is the painstakingly slow transition via DNS. For some reason our Domain service points to themselves when you change the name servers over to something new. before we were simply using their provided name servers and pointing our sites via their server’s IP. But with the new dedicated hosting we have for RocketDock.com we have a new name server. This currently means that everyone looking for RocketDock.com specifically is getting directed over to a domain hosting service instead of Punk Labs or RocketDock.com. It is a shame, and quite annoying.

I have been wanting to make an announcement on Punk Labs, but because of the screwy DNS right now it would be worthless. For those of you that read our little blog, you are the first to know that indeed RocketDock.com is back up and should be functioning.

Burning Atomac’s Feeds

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 12, 2008
in Journal
. 2 Comments

FeedBurner

With our new project on hold I thought about doing some of the nice things we planned for that site and incorporated a few into Atomac. One of which is feed burning.

THis doesn’t sound as destructive as you might think. If you haven’t heard of FeedBurner and you run a site with an RSS feed I highly recommend taking a look. I’ll run down exactly what I am doing with it and how that might benefit you.

FeedBuner basically caches your feed and serves it up using their own resources. now this not only helps take the load off your server (and RSS can eat up some resources if you have a large number of subscribers) but it also allows for some nice statistics tools as well as the ability to show ads (don’t worry I am not doing that here on Atomac). There are tons of other nice options that FeedBurner has regarding your feed. One of these options is making your feed available in a daily email news letter. Believe it or not there are tons of people who don’t use RSS and still use email to gather up their news. I couldn’t believe it either. Since Atomac really is jsut my own personal blog I figured I didn’t need to offer up that option. So RSS only here.

I suppose the big thing I should mention is the RSS links are going to be changed up. Now don’t worry I already have put in place an automatic redirect for those who continue to use the old RSS links. But if you are obsessive compulsive like me and wanna change up your links or if you are a new user here are the good:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/atomac - Articles
http://feeds.feedburner.com/atomac/comments - Comments

All specific article comment feeds will still be served directly by Atomac and not by FeedBurner, so if you are following responses to a specific post there is no need to worry about the URI you are using.

New Plan on Server Switching

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 12, 2008
in Journal
. 0 Comments

Looks like this whole server thing is just one nightmare after another. So here is the new plan regarding site switching and what not…

Everything is pretty much going to stay on the current server we have it hosted on. We were going to cut our service from our provider due to the horrible attitude and support we got regarding our second server we purchased with them. We then realized we are kind of in a bind regarding budget. Fully managed dedicated hosting solutions are pricey and very few reviews are out there regarding services. So with the “new” second server we purchased earlier we are going to keep solely for the purpose of hosting RocketDock.com (which was the original intention anyways).

In short…Atomac is staying put and those of you we are hosting email for will have no changes regarding connection information or service. So enjoy!

New Server Means Atomac is the Guinea Pig

Published
by
Skunkie
on April 11, 2008
in Journal
. 3 Comments

Alrighty, we have decided on a company to go with for our dedicated server and they have already set it up and are ready for us to move on over. It was actually a pretty quick setup. We bought the server before bed, woke up and its ready to go. This means it is now time for us to move on over all our sites. Atomac will be the first to test the new server’s abilities.

For those whom we are hosting email there could be some down time and a bit of weirdness when we change over the DNS to the new IP. I am also going to assume there will be some changes regarding IMAP/POP3/SMTP/Webmail addresses. I will hopefully catch those of you on IM to give you any updated info.

Lets hope this goes smoothly and I will provide any updates along the way.