First, I confirmed for myself that when I tried to change the Music Player options on my TiVo (by pressing the Enter key in one of the music apps like the Music Organizer), the changes wouldn’t take.

And I saw this error in the log:

ERROR [Acceptor] MusicOptionsScreen - java.lang.NullPointerException: Could not configure music player

If I tried changing the Music Player options through the Galleon GUI, a similar problem occured.

Again, the changes were not saved, and I saw this error in the log:

ERROR [AWT-EventQueue-0] MainFrame - java.lang.NullPointerException: Could not configure server

I suspected something was going wrong when the app was trying to write the settings back to Galleon’s configure.xml file (which contains all the server settings). For example, the line in my configure.xml file related to the Music Player options looked like this:

<musicPlayerConfiguration player="classic" randomPlayFolders="true" screensaver="false"
 showImages="false" skin="/usr/share/galleon/media/winamp/metrix.wsz" useAmazon="false"
 useFile="false" id="1"/>

I could see the date/time stamp on the file was not changing, nor were any of the changed options appearing on that line in the file. One way around this was to manually edit the settings in configure.xml and restart the Galleon service, but I wanted to find out what was actually going on …

I turned on debug mode, triggered the bug again and now saw this in the log:

ERROR [Acceptor] MusicOptionsScreen - java.lang.NullPointerException: Could not configure music player
DEBUG [Acceptor] MusicOptionsScreen - java.lang.NullPointerException
  at org.lnicholls.galleon.widget.MusicOptionsScreen.handleExit(MusicOptionsScreen.java:158)
  ...

Moving deeper, line 158 in MusicOptionsScreen.java:

musicPlayerConfiguration.setSkin(mSkinButton.getValue());

Ah, it had something to do with trying to save the skin option specifically. Looking again at my configure.xml file, I saw it referencing the following skin:

skin="/usr/share/galleon/media/winamp/metrix.wsz"

The problem was I had no such winamp folder under /usr/share/galleon/media! Now notice in the screenshots above that the skin option doesn’t even appear on the TiVo screen and is blank on the GUI dialog. I knew at some point in the past I had seen skins available in this option. Digging some more, I found the following in the ReleaseNotes.txt file:

The project has permission from the author of the Metrix Winamp classic skins (Sven Kistner) to distribute the skins with the Galleon project. However, for copyright reasons, the skins are not checked into the project CVS. The Galleon build script will add any *.wsz Winamp skin files that are in the media/winamp directory to a package build. The Galleon GUI will detect any *.wsz files that are in the media/winamp directory and will allow the user to pick a skin in the music app configuration screen.

So it looked like when the Galleon 2.5.5 release was built, those default WinAmp skins were missing from the media/winamp folder and thus not included in the distribution.

Now to fix this problem, simply download the Galleon 2.5.4 archive from Sourceforge (the Linux one is fine even for you Windows or Mac users), copy the media/winamp folder containing the metrix*.wsz files into your existing media folder where you have Galleon installed and then restart the service. You should now be able to save your settings (notice the skin option is present again on the TiVo screen and populated in the GUI dropdown list).

I’ve logged this in the project bugtracker on Sourceforge here. Hopefully this can be corrected in a future release, assuming there is one. In the meantime, I hope this helps someone fix their Music Player options!

Ideally I wanted the (supposedly) cheaper FI8903W (which is the same camera as the FI8904W except it has fewer IR emitters for a shorter night-vision range) but was unable to find it anywhere domestically. Apparently purchasing Foscam cameras is fraught with peril due to the high occurrence of unauthorized clones. The firmwares aren’t compatible, the interfaces are different, and Foscam won’t support any hardware not purchased from them. So I ended up getting a 2-pack of the FI8904W cameras from one of their authorized resellers (Foscam.us).

The camera is very well-constructed and seems pretty sturdy thanks to its metal body and glass enclosed lens and IR emitters. The rear of the unit has the brass connector for the rubberized WiFi antenna and a single cable (also rubberized) that splits into three ends: a wired network jack, a connector for the power supply, and a reset button. A metal mounting bracket and arm are also included. Here’s a good post about the FI8904W that has some photos of the internals (and tips on replacing the lens with a wide-angle version if you prefer).

Setup is straightforward: connect the camera to your wired network, power it up, then use the included utility to “find” the camera’s DHCP address so you can connect to it via your browser. The web interface, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Like my TrendNet cameras, some of the features require you to use Internet Explorer and ActiveX controls, but other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari (including the iPhone) will work via a separate login link (called, inexplicably, Server Push Mode). The basic options are all present: e-mail alerts, FTP storage of images, multiple user security setups, etc.

Configuring the schedule for motion detection is tedious! Rather than typing in to/from times, you have to click 672 individual boxes that represent 15 minute intervals. You can’t shift-click to enable a whole range at once, you have to click each one individually! I accidentally stumbled on the fact that if you double-click, a whole hour is selected. Still, to enable motion detection 24/7, I had to double-click 168 times!! This is a terrible user-interface design and not described with any detail in the user manual (which, incidentally, is sparse and filled with bad English due to poor translation). Missing from motion detection is the ability to only watch certain areas of the image for motion (so you can exclude, for example, an outdoor ceiling fan) and also the function to record video to a network share when an alert is triggered (you can’t record the video at all, actually, since the camera uses only MJPEG compression). Yes, I could use the FTP function but a) that would require me to set up FTP on my Linux server and b) would only get me still images, which I can get via the e-mail alerts anyway.

Other missing features: the camera has no microphone, so you can’t listen to any audio in the vicinity and there’s also no date/time stamp added to the video stream (unless you’re viewing it through IE with the ActiveX control). Thus, the overlay doesn’t appear when viewing the camera through eyeCam on my iPhone or on the custom web page I wrote that shows me just the video window. Other settings you think would be on the administration pages, like video resolution, color balance, framerate, etc. are all on the “live video” page where an “operator” can change them (there are three user access levels: Administrator, Operator, and Visitor).

Ok, so the interface and setup options are lacking, but how does the camera itself perform? The video is decent (30fps at QVGA or 15fps at VGA), although like my TrendNet cameras, the lack of an infrared filter means some colors are off, especially in bright daylight. The night-vision is pretty good, though, due to all of those IR emitters. The IR LEDs do glow red at night, though, so the camera looks a little like the eye of Sauron. The wireless link seems pretty stable even though it has to go through several concrete block walls (since it’s outside) to connect to my wireless router.

Physical installation is a bit more involved. The camera is obviously meant to be used outdoors which means you need a nearby power outlet. Ideally you don’t want the outlet to be easily accessible otherwise someone could just unplug it. Also, since the factory reset button is on the split cable end, you’ll want to make sure that is hidden away as well. The camera is supposedly waterproof, but my selected placement areas are under cover so the unit won’t be exposed to full-on Florida rainstorms. For my front porch installation, I drilled a hole in the ceiling above where I mounted the camera up into the roof/attic area and then used fish tape to run a heavy-duty extension cord from the outlet in my garage ceiling (for the garage door opener) to the camera. Not exactly the most professional installation, but the best I could come up with for now (and all of the connections are up in the ceiling where nobody can mess with them). I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to wire up the second camera out on the lanai in the backyard.

Bottom line: the camera seems to be well-constructed and up to the task of withstanding the elements (although only time will tell that for sure). The video (both daytime and nighttime) is decent enough for basic surveillance, but the lack of audio/video recording is an unfortunate oversight. The firmware and web-based interface can be frustrating and annoying to use but do get the basic job done. If you’re looking for an outdoor webcam, the Foscam FI8904W is worth considering.

A simple slide of my finger, and it was done:

As you can see from the screenshots, it only took 3 minutes to complete the entire process. I now had the Cydia app store on my device, which opens up a whole new world of applications for the iPhone. These apps aren’t approved by Apple, so they don’t have to follow Apple’s design guidelines and limits on functionality/features.  Just like the App Store, there are free and paid apps in the Cydia store.

One of the first apps I installed was SBSettings, which gives you shortcut access to some common settings. This is a much faster way to turn on/off the different radios rather than having to navigate through the normal Settings app. You can assign different actions (via another cool app, Activator) to bring up SBSettings like swiping the status bar, or doing a short press of the Home button (which is what I use). Also notice in the screenshot to the left that I’ve got 5 icons in my dock! Currently, SBSettings (plus Activator) is the single-most useful thing I’ve installed on my iPhone since jailbreaking.

Another reason people jailbreak is for theming, they want the phone’s interface to look the way they want it, not the way Steve Jobs wants it. For this, you can use Winterboard (which is the newer replacement for Summerboard, which was a play on the Apple’s springboard (the main pages containing the icons of your apps)). Once you have Winterboard installed, you have the daunting task of searching though thousands of user-created themes for your iPhone. Winterboard lets you mix-and-match themes via a priority screen where you order which parts of a theme should override another. It’s a bit confusing at first, and every change requires a quick “respring” (basically a restart of the springboard) which makes it time consuming, but eventually you can get the phone to look just the way you want. After experimenting with different themes, I decided I like the original, uniform look. Plus, with iOS4 you can set your separate lock screen and springboard wallpapers anyway. I did use it to “hide” the text beneath them (it’s supposed to be hidden but apparently the text is just changed to black so it still appears in the dock reflection, which could be turned off as well), change my icon text from gray to white, and also changed my e-mail and SMS notification sounds. To further customize my springboard, I installed Rename II so I could actually change the text of my icons. No more long name icons with the annoying “…” in the middle!

Something else you can do once your iPhone is jailbroken is tether it to your laptop using apps like PDANet or MyWi. This is sort of a gray area since even though you may have the grandfathered unlimited data plan with AT&T, the carrier currently charges extra for the tethering “service.” I gave PDANet a quick try and was able to surf the internet on my EeePC using my iPhone’s 3G data connection. Speedtest.net clocked my connection at about 1.3Mbps, which isn’t too bad.

Ramping up the nerd factor to 11, why not have command-line access to your iPhone? Installing OpenSSH gives you the ability to copy files to and from the phone and connect to it like any other Linux-based device. If you do this, be sure to change the root password! You might also want to use the SBSettings plugin to quickly switch OpenSSH on and off when you need it. I had to use this because while playing with Cydia I accidentally misspelled a package source address which was causing errors. I was able to connect to my phone with WinSCP, download the files I needed to change, edited them on my PC (there isn’t a text editor available via the iPhone’s command-line), and then copied them back onto the phone.

I was apprehensive at first about jailbreaking my phone, but I have to admit that after just a few days I am already pretty happy that I did so, if only just to play around with some of the cool apps people have developed. I’ve only had one strange crash that occurred while I was removing an app, but other than that I haven’t noticed any performance or stability issues. At first I thought my battery was draining faster, but I think that was just because I was using the phone more than usual as I played around with apps and themes. I’ll have to keep an eye on that once I’m back in my normal usage cycle. Finally, I’ve had no problem continuing to use my iPhone with iTunes for syncing, backups, using the App Store, etc. All-in-all, it’s been a pretty satisfying experience. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you’re a tinkerer like me, it can be fun.

One final note: jailbreakme.com is taking advantage of a PDF security exploit in Safari in order to gain root access to the phone for the jailbreak process. Apple says they will fix this hole soon. In the meantime, if you want to protect your (jailbroken) phone from potentially malicious PDF attacks, you can install the PDF Loading Warner from Cydia.

First, though, the good news:

• scrolling through podcasts is finally smooth and fast (no more jerkiness!)
• taking pictures is noticeably faster (although loading the camera app for the first time is still slow)
• folders: I was able to condense my 6 pages of apps down to just 2 … nice!

Now, the annoyances I’ve encountered:

• push notifications (and phone calls) interrupt video playback: this is annoying because I have to dismiss the notification and then tap Play to start the video again. In the prior version (3.1.3), video playback would either continue through a push notification, or resume automatically after I finished a phone call.
• the orientation sensor gets confused sometimes: if I have the my iPhone in landscape mode and go into a screen that is portrait-only (like the podcast directory) without changing the phone’s physical orientation, it won’t go back into landscape mode until I flip it into portrait orientation and then back into landscape. The old release seemed to re-query the sensor and would automatically flip back and forth without the need to physically change the phone’s orientation.
• using my headset to resume playback sometimes starts playing the wrong thing: quite a few times if I’ve had video playing and pressed the Home button on my iPhone to switch to a different app, video playback stops (as it should). Usually I can just click the button on my headset to resume audio playback in the background. With iOS4, though, more often than not, the iPhone starts playing something other than what was previously playing, requiring me to go into the iPod app and manually restarting what I was previously watching/listening to.
• my IMTasks app will no longer sync with my Exchange account: the developer is waiting for Apple to address this, which will hopefully be soon.

I suspect most of the problems I’ve run into are related to how iOS4 handles multitasking and background applications (in a word: poorly). What worries me is that I can’t seem to find other people on the internet reporting these same problems (except for the IMTasks syncing), which gives me little hope these will be addressed in a future 4.x update. Apple has stopped signing the old 3.1.3 firmware so I can’t downgrade, and I still don’t wait to jailbreak, so I’m stuck with iOS4 such as it is. This is the first time since I got my iPhone almost 7 months ago that I’ve been unhappy with it.

Oh well. In the meantime, here are the cool iOS4 tips and tricks you need to know.

I set  up two TV-IP121W cameras and two TV-IP422W cameras at various locations in the house. Both models are wireless, have infrared night vision, motion detection, and e-mail alert capabilities, and support 30fps VGA (640×480) streaming video. The TV-IP422W also has pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) features. In addition to configuring and viewing the camera feed through your web browser (and even over the internet once you set up the proper port forwarding on your router), the cameras come with TrendNet’s SecureView desktop PC software. In addition to viewing multiple cameras at once, you can also use SecureView to record the video feeds.

Configuring the cameras through their web-based interface was relative easy. I connected each one via network cable to my router and let it grab a DHCP address. Once connected to the web interface I was able to change the network settings to connect to my wireless network and then disconnected the cable. The only snag I ran into with the setup is that the motion detection portion requires an ActiveX control so I couldn’t access it in Firefox without the IETab Plus extension. This is fine on Windows, but I was out of luck doing that on my EeePC running Ubuntu (I tried messing with Wine but couldn’t get IE7 working).

Now, as I mentioned I wanted to be able to keep tabs on the house while we were away which meant being able to check the cameras while on-the-go. Typically, Safari on my iPhone wouldn’t display the video stream from the cameras (since the page uses a Java or ActiveX control) so I turned to eyeCam ($5). This handy little app let me add the addresses (and authentication) for my cameras and view the video stream on my iPhone. It even supports the PTZ presets and allows me to manually control the PTZ right from the phone.It supports a wide range of IP cameras and is worth checking out.

Before we left, I set up some motion detection events so that the cameras would send me an e-mail (with snapshots) if they detected any motion in certain areas of the house (near windows, doors, etc.). However, I discovered that with a digital camera, motion sensing is determined by a change of pixels. Thus, as the sun rose and the light coming through the windows increased, it would trigger the motion sensor. As a result, I was getting hundreds of motion detection e-mails a day and eventually had to just shut them all off. Oops! Since we got back from the trip I’ve tweaked the sensitivity of the motion detection and also added a schedule so that the motion triggers only fire at certain times of the day, which makes the alerts more manageable.

Finally, the other problem I had was with quality control: my second TV-IP121W unit was faulty. After getting it all set up and working, it suddenly refused to boot after I had unplugged it to move it to its final location. The orange LED would just stay on and the device would not appear on the network (even when directly connected with a cable). TrendNet support recommended I exchange it, so I sent it back to Amazon. The replacement camera had the same problem so I had to send that one back as well. Finally the third unit I received seemed to be stable (at least, all of the cameras worked during our 10 day vacation). However, since returning from vacation I have seen that third camera exhibit the same problem. Leaving it unplugged for about 20 minutes seems to fix the problem, so maybe it’s heat-related (although once it’s up, it’s pretty stable). I should probably send that one back too, but if I can’t return it to Amazon, TrendNet has a 3-year limited warranty that should cover it.

Despite the setup glitches and the hardware issues, I am pretty satisfied with these cameras. Now I need to figure out a way to “permanently” mount them with the included brackets. The hard part is going to be figuring out how to plug them in and keep the installation clean looking. But that’s a project for another day …

I call this box a server because it hosts this blog, a small Gallery site, some home media applications for my TiVos, and is running all the time, but I don’t need a server-class machine. My past Linux machines have traditionally been older desktops, even a laptop! So the latest crop of nettops seemed like an ideal solution.

After researching products like the Asus EeeBox, the MSI WindBox, and even the Dell Studio Hybrid I decided on the Acer Aspire Revo 3610. This little box packs in Intel’s dual-core Atom N330  CPU (1.60GHz), 2gb of RAM, nVidia’s ION graphics chipset, and a 160gb hard drive. Peripherals and storage can be connected via the 6 USB ports (one of which is used for the included wireless keyboard a mouse), the eSATA connector, and the SD card reader, and network connectivity includes a gigabit network connection and B/G/N wireless. The Revo has no optical drive, but experience with my EeePCs has made me comfortable with booting/installing from other removable media like USB thumb drives, so no biggie there. Also, since I’m not using the Revo as an HTPC I won’t be using the HDMI or digital audio (SPDIF) connections, but they’re there. The Revo comes with Windows 7 Home Premium pre-installed (although I wish Acer sold a cheaper version without it). If you’re going to use it as an HTPC it comes with a mounting plate so you can attach it right to the back of your HDTV.

My plan was always to put the latest version of Ubuntu on the box. Warranties be damned! After unpacking my new Revo, before even turning it on, I immediately cracked it open, thinking I would make an image backup of Windows 7 just in case (since it comes without a rescue disc). Unfortunately, even with my lack of fear for warranty-voiding, removing the hard drive involved more steps than I was willing to take. So rather than wiping the drive and starting clean, I booted Windows 7, did some initial setup, and then shrunk the primary partition so I could dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Considering the current server only had a 30gb hard drive in it (and most of my media is on external NASes), having a 60gb partition for Ubuntu was acceptable to me.

Installing Lucid Lynx didn’t go as smoothly as I anticipated, however. The 64-bit version (imaged onto a 2gb USB stick) wouldn’t even boot correctly and the 32-bit version would start and then complain it couldn’t find the CD-ROM. After figuring out how to manually boot the installer from the command-line, I found this blog post that helped me get through the rest of my installation issues. Shortly, I had my Revo set up as a 64-bit Linux server!

It took me a few days to get everything transferred from the old server to the Revo and then get everything set up and configured the way I wanted. So far I am very impressed with the Revo. It’s very quiet, even when both cores are busy (i.e., folding a work unit and transcoding a video file), and my UPS utilization dropped from 29% to 10%! That’s a serious cut in power consumption. I have noticed a slight performance decrease over the old Pentium 4 Dell, but nothing major and it was expected. It’s well worth the trade-off for the reduced noise and power usage, though!

Out with the old, in with the new!

I did a clean install (from a USB thumb drive) onto my sandbox EeePC 4G Surf that was running an older build of Chrome. Ubuntu now calls this smaller build the UNE (netbook edition) instead of the UNR (netbook remix). It looks basically the same as before, except for the new purplish color scheme.

On my EeePC 900A, I did an in-place upgrade install via the Update Manager:

I had to free up about 200mb on the 900A in order to download the upgrade since the 4gb SSD in that netbook was too full, but once I did that, the rest of the upgrade was smooth and painless.

On my server, I did the normal command-line upgrade I’ve used for the past few releases. Having done this quite a few times now I have excellent notes (if I do say so myself) so it’s relatively easy to put back my customizations and settings where necessary. I did run into two post-upgrade problems, however. First, I was getting blank pages from Gallery and seeing segmentation faults in the Apache error log. I was able to work around this by switching from the ‘mysqli’ driver to the ‘mysqlt’ setting. Next, nut would no longer recognize my USB-connected UPS but I found this bug on Launchpad and was able to download a patch to get it working again.

I already had the HBC installed and working, but the first problem I encountered was during the DOP-Mii step. For some reason my Wii wasn’t able to download the IOS updates/patches from NUS (Nintendo’s Update Servers), the same issue as described here (even though wireless connection was working). I wasn’t able to figure out how to get the required WADs onto my SD card for a local install, and trying to re-run the DOP-Mii step was now causing scary crash messages, so I gave up. I noticed that after attempting this, when my daughter went to play Wii Sports Resort, the Wii re-downloaded a system update, so luckily that seemed to reverse whatever the failed DOP-Mii patcher had done to the IOS.

A few days later I found another guide at WiiHacks.com and decided to give this another shot. This time I had the required WAD patches downloaded locally on my SD card so the DOP-Mii step worked as expected. But then I ran into a problem trying to install the cIOS. After some more Google searching I figured out I had to use the AnyTitle Deleter to clear out IOS249 before the new custom IOS would load properly (it’s possible that this was something left over from my last experiment with homebrew). After getting past all of that, though, I was able to complete the rest of the Lifehacker guide as documented.

For my initial testing, I used an old 40gb laptop hard drive I had laying around connected to a barebones USB adapter (pictured to the left) but I’ve since switched to a 320gb WD Elements drive split into two 160gb partitions (one WBFS, one exFAT).

Using the amazing USB Loader GX app, I backed up all of my games to the hard drive and then had it download the various box and CD cover art. It looks fantastic:

I tested running a few games from the hard drive and they worked just fine (even the online ones like Mario Kart). Sweet! Check out the little video I made below to see it in action.

A helpful note: I kept having problems where the USB Loader would crash. It turned out that while moving the SD card back and forth between my PC and Wii, at some point the lock switch moved down slightly so the card was effectively read-only. Fixing the switch resolved the crashes. Just something to keep an eye out for!

Unlike the desktop version, however, the iPhone app is only for accessing files already on your S3 account. You can delete files from your Jungle Disk, but the only adding you can do is photos taken with the camera. I was hoping for a desktop-like feature that would let me backup my iPhone over-the-air to S3, but I guess I’ll have to continue to rely on iTunes for that.

Now I need to re-evaluate my use of some overlapping apps on my iPhone, namely Dropbox and Air Sharing. I like using Dropbox to easily sync files across multiple devices, so I’ll probably keep that around. Air Sharing, though, I might not need anymore. Since I stopped carrying my 2gb USB thumb drive loaded with portable apps and my documents, I’ve found I haven’t been using them via Air Sharing that much (if at all!). So rather than waste that storage space on my iPhone carrying around stuff I’ll never use, I’ll probably clear out Air Sharing and just use Jungle Disk exclusively.

Based on my previous experience with the Windows Easy Transfer utility, I used WET to backup my documents and settings to an external hard drive. To be doubly sure I didn’t lose anything, I also just copied my entire user profile folder (C:\Users\<my login>) to the same hard drive. I wanted to do a clean install with the upgrade media (and also go with the 64-bit version), so I made sure I had that external drive with my WET backup attached when I booted from the Win7 DVD. From within the Windows 7 Setup, I formatted my entire 640gb internal drive, completely wiping out the RC partition. Since Setup knew about the WET backup, the Win7 activation process was successful and the rest of the install was smooth.

After booting Windows 7 Home Professional 64-bit for the first time and then installing all the outstanding updates, the real fun began. I used WET to restore my files and settings and then began the long process of re-installing and re-configuring all of my applications (64-bit versions where applicable). I had made screenshots of the Programs and Features list before upgrading to facilitate this, so I knew exactly what I meeded to re-install. I had also taken screenshots of my Taskbar and Start Menu so I could put everything back the way I had it under the RC.

So I’m back up and running and have finally joined the world of 64-bit!