Did you know that you could easily convert recordings from a Dreambox sat/cable receiver using HandBrake to watch them on your iPad or iPhone?

Here’s the preset I use on my DM800 HD. It should work for all recent Dreambox models like the DM500 HD and the DM8000 as well. The preset is optimized for standard definition (SD) recordings and takes care of deinterlacing if needed using the decomb filter in HandBrake. To import the preset open the Preset menu in HandBrake and select Import. After importing you’ll find the new preset in the preset window (use the Toggle Presets button to open it).

Download HandBrake iPhone/iPad preset for (interlaced) Dreambox standard definition (SD) recordings.

To convert HD (720p) recordings make sure you use the built-in iPad or iPhone presets in HandBrake.

Apple just started canceling iPad 2 orders in the U.S. that ship to freight forwarding services or international addresses. This is the email you receive from Apple if you try to order an iPad 2 via nybox.com:

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for your recent Apple order.

While we appreciate your interest in iPad 2 and iPad 2 accessories, we
are unable to process your order. Apple is unable to fulfill orders
that exceed the quantity limit per customer, or that ship to an
international, freight forwarder, or an APO/AFO address.

Your iPad 2 order has been cancelled, and you will not be charged.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Team

It seems only iPad 2 orders are affected, Apple store orders shipping to freight forwarders for accessories like JAM by Apogee are still active.

I’ve been looking for a solution to stream recorded or live video from my Dreambox DM800 sat/cable receiver to my iPad for a while. I was able to stream recorded video using an uPnP server on the Dreambox and an uPnP client on the iPad, but the iPad app involved was somewhat limited.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon an iPad app named “Dreambox LIVE”.

Read more »

I just updated my Dreambox DM800 cable/sat tuner to Gemini Project 3 (GP3). There’s a detailed installation how-to available on how to install GP3 on the more recent Dreambox models, which include the DM500 HD, DM800 (HD/SE), DM7025 and the DM8000. GP3 is a major step forward because you don’t need to flash the Dreambox every time a new GP version is published. GP3 is independent from the DMM base image (well, with some limitations regarding the kernel version) and can be updated in the “Blue Panel”. To start, you’re best off if you flash an original Dream Multimedia image. Don’t forget to backup your channel lists and bouquets.

After installing GP3 you’ll probably notice that no software CA modules (a.k.a. softcams) are available in Blue Panel. Read more »

You probably already know Apple is bringing GarageBand to the new iPad 2  (it probably works on the old iPad as well).  But did you know you can also plug a real e-guitar into the iPad and use all the guitar amps built right into GarageBand? How awesome is that!?
All you need is the Apogee JAM.

Read more »

My RSS feeds on trick77.com don’t get refreshed in my Google Reader account anymore. Usually, new posts on my site show up in Google Reader within minutes or hours. It looks like the problem started in February 2011 and my site isn’t the only site affected, according to this thread and another thread in Google’s support forum. New posts are automatically submitted to Pingomatic from WordPress and are visible in Feedburner. The feed also passes W3C’s feed validation. I don’t do any shady SEO stuff and I don’t spam Pingomatic with updates. What gives?

This site’s feed does have a couple of Google Reader subscribers, would you mind leaving a comment if you see this post showing up in your Google Reader? Thanks a lot!

Update 3-3-2011: Google is caching a completely outdated version of the front page of this site. It dates back to the beginning of February. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, it must have something to do with my feed not updating in Google Reader. Interestingly, newer posts can be found in Google’s index, it’s just the main page that seems to have some kind of an update ban on it. Weird!

Update 3-4-2011: A closer look at my site’s Google Webmaster Central report revealed that this site served almost two thousand 404 “NOT FOUND” HTTP response codes for pages in the gallery area. The gallery pages look fine in a web browser though. Googlebot gets the 404′s while at the same time in my web server’s log file a HTTP 200 “OK” return code is being logged. An outdated flickr photo gallery plugin is responsible for these errors, the plugin isn’t compatible with the latest WordPress version anymore and obviously does some really weird stuff with the response headers. My theory is that the ratio of good and bad (not found) pages seen by Googlebot was so bad, that Google decided to flag my site. I fired the outdated flickr plugin and installed another flickr gallery plugin called slickr-flickr. So, over time, everything should be back to normal, even though that’s probably gonna take a while. To speed things up a bit up I requested Google to remove the old 404 gallery links from the index so Googlebot won’t crawl those non-existing pages anymore.

Update 3-9-2011: Everything is back to normal, Google Reader caught up all missing posts just a few moments ago. Looks like I was spot on with my assumption.

AFP network connections to many Linux-based NAS units aren’t working in Mac OS X Lion 10.7 developer preview. After hitting the connect button a message pops up saying:

The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported. Please contact your system administrator to resolve the problem.

The Time Machine backup feature present in many NAS obviously isn’t working as well because it’s based on AFP too.

You may say that this is a developer preview, things will change for the final release. That’s obviously true. But my source also says that this connection problem most likely has to do with Apple discontinuing support for DHCAST128 (or DHX) authentication in Lion because it was considered insecure. Instead, the successor of DHCAST128 should be used: the more secure DHX2 user authentication module. DHX2 is supported since Mac OS X 10.2 and supports up to 256 characters for passwords (hell yeah, that should be enough). It relies on CAST-128 in cipher block chaining mode for encryption.

I checked my QNAP NAS for available afpd/netatalk UAMs and DHX2 isn’t present, so it most likely wouldn’t work with Lion. Well, if it weren’t for Time Machine, I could always resort to SMB.

[/usr/local/etc/netatalk/uams] # ls -la
drwxr-xr-x      1024 Jan 31 23:08 ./
drwxr-xr-x      1024 Feb 25 20:14 ../
lrwxrwxrwx        14 Feb 25  2011 uams_clrtxt.so -> uams_passwd.so*
lrwxrwxrwx        18 Feb 25  2011 uams_dhx.so -> uams_dhx_passwd.so*
-rwxr-xr-x     10959 Jan 31 23:08 uams_dhx_passwd.so*
-rwxr-xr-x      5304 Jan 31 23:08 uams_guest.so*
-rwxr-xr-x      6996 Jan 31 23:08 uams_passwd.so*

AFP authentication might work if a uams_dhx_2_passwd.so authentication module was present and configured. It may not be a bad idea to raise this issue with your NAS vendor if you plan to use Lion in the near future.

Rumor has it that some NAS vendors intentionally disable DHX2 in netatalk because it’s a lot more CPU intensive. This could lead to longer login times when accessing AFP shares on NAS’ units with slow CPUs.

Update 2-26-2011: It has been verified that Lion is able to connect to a Linux host running netatalk 2.1.2 supporting the DHX2 UAM in afpd.

Update 7-15-2011: Check out this post for a status update on Time Machine support in OS X Lion 10.7.

A 100% reliable source sent me this output from the System Information utility (yep, it’s not called System Profiler anymore) in the Mac OS X Lion 10.7 developer preview.

APPLE SSD TS128C:

  Capacity:	121.33 GB (121,332,826,112 bytes)
  Model:	APPLE SSD TS128C
  Revision:	CJAA0201
  Serial Number:	        902A515CK0YK
  Native Command Queuing:	No
  Removable Media:	No
  Detachable Drive:	No
  BSD Name:	disk0
  Medium Type:	Solid State
  TRIM Support:	Yes

Yes! While this doesn’t mean we actually get TRIM support in the disk driver, it’s certainly a strong indication that Apple is finally implementing TRIM support in its upcoming Lion operating system. It’s about time.

Hey, I just brought my Apple TV 2 back from the living dead. After a botched firmware update all it did was flashing the white LED fast (about 3 times a second).
I followed the official reset instructions using the Apple remote but that didn’t help at all. Then I came across a few posts that said that by hooking up Apple TV 2 to a Mac using just a micro USB cable, you could actually restore it in iTunes. Those posts explicitly said that you have to disconnect HDMI and power and just plug in the USB cable. Read more »

It’s pretty straightforward to (incrementally) backup all emails in a Gmail account to a QNAP NAS. There’s a QNAP NAS solution using Getmail but it comes with some limitations. I prefer to use Gmail-Backup. It doesn’t need any configuration files and it doesn’t have a 100 messages per session limit. It stores all mails in the .eml format, which not only works on Windows PCs but is compatible with Apple Mail as well. You can even restore deleted emails using Gmail-Backup from the NAS back to a Gmail account.

Here’s how I installed Gmail-Backup on my QNAP TS-439 PRO II+. This tutorial should work with all Intel-based QNAP TS-* models but obviously I only have the 439 to test with. I’m looking forward for your feedback if it works on your QNAP NAS model as well. Please make sure you enabled IMAP in your Gmail account settings. Gmail-Backup works for “Gmail for your domain” (it’s part of “Google Apps” now) accounts as well.

The tutorial is divided into three parts. The first part shows how to install the Optware QPKG on the NAS. This package installer is needed in order to (easily) install Python on the NAS. The 2nd part deals with the installation of Gmail-Backup and the third shows how to automate the backup using cron. It probably is helpful to have some command line skills. Read more »

Here are a couple of popular camera-settings related mishaps when using pop-up or studio flashes. The result is always the same: the flash visibly fires but the image is either way too dark or too bright.

Pop-up flash fires but photo way too dark/underexposed?

For this post I’m assuming you already know the limits of a pop-up flash (e.g. you probably can’t properly light a subject 20 feet away with a small flash). Here’s list of camera settings to go through. I’m using a Nikon DSLR body with a built-in pop-up flash, so the settings’ names may be different on your camera. Read more »

Are you’re still waiting for SSD TRIM support in Mac OS X? Well, it won’t come in OS X 10.6.7. Here’s some output of my 2nd generation MacBook Air Serial-ATA System Profiler page:

APPLE SSD TS128C:

  Capacity:	121.33 GB (121,332,826,112 bytes)
  Model:	APPLE SSD TS128C
  Revision:	CJAA0201
  Serial Number: 80PB54G7K1WK
  Native Command Queuing: No
  Removable Media: No
  Detachable Drive: No
  BSD Name:	disk0
  Medium Type:	Solid State
  TRIM Support:	No

As there’s no TRIM support for Apple’s own SSD technology obviously there won’t be support for it for my Intel SSD in my Hackintosh rig. But just to make sure:

INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GN:

  Capacity:	80.03 GB (80,026,361,856 bytes)
  Model:	INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GN
  Revision:	2CV102HD
  Serial Number: CVPO942300DA080BGN
  Native Command Queuing: Yes
  Queue Depth: 32
  Removable Media: No
  Detachable Drive: No
  BSD Name:	disk0
  Medium Type:	Solid State
  TRIM Support:	No

Nope.

I just combo-updated my Hackintosh rig to Mac OS X 10.6.7 (dev release 10J860) and everything is still up and running after the mandatory reboot. As usual I had to reapply the custom AppleHDA.kext in order to get sound back. From an ASUS P6T standpoint, this update should be considered safe.

Can’t use the new “multitasking” finger-swipes on your iOS 4.3 beta iPad? That’s probably because you updated your iPad in iTunes. You have to restore it in Xcode’s Organizer and click “Use Development Mode” to get the new four and five finger-swipes. You need a valid iOS SDK developer account to do this, it’s not enough to have the iPad’s UDID registered with someone else’s dev account. Read more »

Most major NAS (Network Attached Storage) manufacturers claim their NAS units support the Time Machine backup feature for Macintoshes. What they usually don’t tell you in advance is that this support is somewhat limited – at least if you plan your NAS to backup multiple Macs with Time Machine. Read more »