Last night we had our OC WordPress Meetup at Zeek Interactive in Huntington Beach. I streamed the event live using uStream and then posted the files to YouTube. As like with my previous recordings this one had some faults too… the main one was Auto Focus.

The recording went very well and I’m impressed it looks as good as it does using what I was using. Someday I’ll end up “recording to tape” instead of just grabbing the highly compressed version from uStream the day after. I posted about some of the changes I want to do in a previous post, feel free to go there and check that out.

I have a 20″ iMac 5,1 it’s the late 2006 model with 2.16ghz core 2 duo processor that I’ve upgraded and tweaked and fangled as much as I could to get my money’s worth out of it. Back in 2007 I bought the computer with the intention of switching all the computers in my house to apple. Since I’m cheap I opted for a refurbished iMac and waited for the plain cardboard box that it came in to arrive in the mail. Once the machine arrived it started to kernel panic over and over, I called Apple and they told me to take it to an apple store at which time they replaced the main board. A two years later I had a problem with the harddrive which started clicking and finally failed, luckily I had a Time Machine backup which saved me. Apple replaced the hard drive under my AppleCare warranty. After that I upgraded the ram in the machine to 2gb, which later found out I could upgrade to 3gb. Just a few months ago I replaced the internal hard drive with a 1TB model to store my multimedia files. As you can see this machine has quite a bit of mileage and has served me well but I’d like to squeeze a bit more life out of it. You see earlier this year we bought my wife Jen a MacBook Pro since the kids are using the Mac Mini more and more. They fill the thing with iOS apps, music and iOS backups and fighting over occupying it 90% of the time. Since we just got Jen a new Mac I want to hold off on getting myself one for a bit and see if I can use this one until the wheels fall off, so here is my plan to extend its life for another year:

• Replace one of the 1 gb sticks currently in there to a 2gb so I end up with 3gb or ram
• Purchase an optical drive bay replacement to house a SATA drive
  http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=842548
  http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_27&products_id=260
  http://newmodeus.com/pics/caddy/why-newmodeus.html 
• Purchase a SSD drive to put in the optical drive slot replacing the SuperDrive. Who uses CDs and DVDs any more?
  http://macsales.com (any suggestions as to which one I should go with?)
• Later buy an enclosure for the SuperDrive for those times where I may end up needing one.
• Install OS X Lion on the SSD and set it to the boot drive.

My goal is to speed the machine up as much as I can, by housing the OS and applications from this SSD drive and use the normal internal drive for file storage and such, the extra gig of ram will help some too. Luckily this machine is a 2.16ghz core 2 duo so that helps.

What are your thoughts on this? For just under $200 I’m extending the life of this poor machine I should have “flipped” a few years ago.

This is a playlist of videos recorded from the OC WordPress Meetup in Huntington Beach California on 6/27/2011.

Links to OCWP related pages:

• OC WordPress Meetup page
• OC WordPress on Facebook (closed group, ask for an invite)
• Tweets during OC WordPress using the #ocwp hashtag
• A great round up from Dave Cole regarding this particular meeting.

Here are a few things I’d like to do a bit different next time:

Did you benefit from the stream? Do you have any suggestions for my next attempt? Let me know in the comments below please!

When I got my first iPod Touch Jailbreaking was just started up. The device was new and shiny yet we wanted more… jailbreaking allowed the adventureious geek to disable the built in security of the device and “root” it allowing them to login via an ssh connection and access the shell. See, I live by the idea that there is always something more to do with a device or technology then what it was really intended for. There was a lot of slick apps being added to the iPod Touch (this was before the official Apple App Store existed) and I was having fun adding new all sorts of cool stuff to the device. At the time my favorite was being able to add a wallpaper  springboard where the icons lived. Apps like Winterboard really made it so you could customize the device however you saw fit.

Later I sold my iPod Touch and got an iPhone which again I jailbroke but was very cautious in what apps I added to it. This was my primary phone and I didn’t need it rebooting in the middle of a phone call or something. When I purchased my iPhone 3G I tried my hand again at jailbreaking and had decent results but some instability problems. One day my iPhone outright died and I had to take it to the Apple Store to see about having it fixed or replaced. At the time I had “Make it mine” app installed which allowed me to have “TUCKER” displayed instead of “AT&T” as the carrier text. Luckily he couldn’t get the phone to boot so he gave me a new iPhone 3G. From that point I didn’t jailbreak my iPhone 3G but I did go home and restore from backup, it ends up that the carrier modification that Make it Mine did stays in the backup so I continued to have “TUCKER” and the carrier text even though it wasn’t jailbroken. Fast forward to 2010 and I have an iPhone 4 32gb that I’ve been itching to jailbreak due to the faster processor and more memory I had this feeling that the instability issues would be minimal on this more powerful device.

Before doing the jailbreak I mapped out my plan of attack:

• No UI customizations needed for me. I didn’t really care about modifying the aesthetics of the UI, now that iOS4 allows someone to add their own Lock Screen wallpaper and SpringBoard wallpaper I’m fine with just that.
• Find a way to get rid of the annoying popup notifications in favor of some non-intrusive notification method ala Android and WebOS.
• Disable the WiFi only restrictions that Apple (and AT&T) put in place.
• Enable the ability to create a WiFi hotspot.

Added Bonus:

• Add additional functionality to Copy and Paste action menu.

I found all the jailbreak only programs I needed to make the above happen then researched how to go about jailbreaking the iPhone 4. As of this writing iOS Version 4.1 (8B117)  is the current firmware and quite a few jailbreak apps have come out: pwnagetool, limera1n etc. I tried pwnagetool and ended up with a non activated iPhone 4, a iPod Touch if you will. I started from scratch and tried limera1n with much more success. I do hear that there may be some battery life issue with using limera1n and I’ll be looking into that in the next few days.

So, what apps did I install from Cydia?

• Action Menu
  Expands on the Cut Copy and Paste menu by adding additional features to it:
  Copy All, History, Lookup, Tweet, TinyUrl, Open Path, Search and much more
• Activator
  Activate apps via gestures, buttons and shortcuts. I’m mainly using this to activate Notified Pro so I can swipe from the top of the screen down to show my notifications.
• Cyntact
  Shows profile pictures in contact lists, if you have pictures of all your contacts it’s nice, if you use the iPhone Facebook  app enabled avatar sync and enjoy the new pictures.
• Mobile Terminal (iOS4)
  Allows me to access the shell on the iPhone
• My3G
  This app tricks applications / iOS into thinking they are connected to WiFi instead of 3G. Facetime, iTunes downloads, Podcast Downloads and high quality YouTube to name a few are all enabled when using this app.
• Notified Pro
  Notified for iPhone is a notification app it allows users to have more of an Android-style notification system. Something I’m surprised that Apple hasn’t improved on yet. 
  • Statusbar Notification
    When a new notification comes in instead of the popup being displayed (once disabled using Popup Blocker below) it displays the notification on the top status bar until clicked.
  • Popup Blocker
    Allows you to control just about every popup that you could get on an iPhone and/or iPod touch. Once installed, you can get to the app in your stock Settings application. Here you have the options to enable/disable the application, Block Away Items, turn on/off Wake On Alert (this turns on your screen when you receive an alert) and set Alerts. My favorites here are disabling the popup when the iPhone is in an active state (being used, playing a game) and disable that annoying popup when I plug my iPhone into an “unsupported dock”.
• SBSettings
  SBSettings is not like the regular iPhone app that can be launched from the home screen by tapping on its icon. To launch it, you have to swipe on iPhone’s status bar or tap the status bar using two fingers. Once SBSettings is launched, you’ll see various toggle switches that are available in the Settings app such as Wi-Fi, 3G, EDGE, Bluetooth, Brightness etc.
• MyWi
  This is an extremely powerful application that allows you to create a wifi hotspot (currently only Ad-Hoc is available, Infrastructure coming soon). This is something that is pretty popular in the Android community primarily with the Android Evo.

In later posts I’ll review each of these apps so you can see what justified me jailbreaking my device. Let me know if the comments what JB apps you use.

Thursday night 10/14 I’ll be doing another event with OCMMA (Orange County Multimedia Association) but this time it’s the main event… STREAMING VIDEO FROM AN RC HELICOPTER! The folks from f-Stop Aerial Video will be bringing out their helicopter setup rigged with an HD camera. It will be transmitting video as well as recording HD video locally on the camera. I’ll be receiving the transmitted signal and streaming it out on ustream.tv.  Come by my site at http://jasontucker.us/live to join in on the action.

From the Web – Video Crossroads blog:

A monkey wrench was thrown into our plan to fly a remote control helicopter in the New Horizon’s parking lot in September. Our demo team was called to North Carolina for a paying gig flying and videoing a convention using their aerial art. We were able to switch topics for our September and October meetings thanks to Jason Tucker, our podcasting expert from our August meeting. He gave us a very detailed lesson on live-streaming, thereby, becoming the first person to give back-to-back awesome presentations. He is also booked to do the live-streaming of the rc-helicopter’s video signal at the October meeting.

Our HD video shoot from a remote control helicopter will now take place at a lighted baseball field a few minutes from where our meeting will start at New Horizons. The buzz about this event is huge!

If you can’t make it to New Horizons in Anaheim on 10/14 watch my twitter account @jasontucker and I’ll be posting when the live stream will begin! (I may even do a two camera setup like as time!) More info on the event can be found over at the OCMMA website.

Mike McGready made this animate gif of me

Since I got my iPhone 4 my single most frustrating issue with it has been with iPhoto stalling and not syncing photos and videos from the iPhone 4. When I connect the iPhone 4 OS X kicks off iPhoto and tell it to scan the iPhone and prepare to download photos from it. When I tell it to proceed it pretends to start syncing then just drops the ball and stalls. Sometimes rebooting the iPhone would fix it and sometimes just closing the iPhone apps that are running would solve it too. One time I even rebooted both my iPhone and the Mac and had it begin syncing the photos fine. Today I took a bunch of video using the iPhone and wanted to post them on online but iPhoto starting doing the stalling thing again. I gave up and looked on Apple’s Discussion forums for help. I found a post that stated the following:

Quit iPhoto Open Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.app)
In the search window at the top right, search for PTPCamera
Click on PTPCamera in the list of results to highlight it
Click on Quit Process (the red stopsign icon in the upper left of Activity Monitor)
Choose “Quit” If you don’t already see “Image Capture Extension” in the list, search for it in the search box.
Click on “Image Capture Extension” in the list of results to highlight it Choose “Quit”
Go to Macintosh HD > System > Library > Image Capture > Devices and open PTPCamera.app back up
Unplug and re-plug the iPhone 4.
iPhoto should open, if you’ve set it to do so when a camera is plugged in.
Otherwise, open it.
You should see your media available for import from the iPhone 4 when you click on the iPhone 4 in the devices list. [Forum Post]

I hate doing manual processes such as this and wrote a quick Applescript to do the above:

tell application "iPhoto"
	quit
end tell

set app_name to "Finder"
set PTPCameraRunning to (do shell script "ps ax | grep " & "PTPCamera" & " | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'")
if PTPCameraRunning is not "" then do shell script ("killall  'PTPCamera'" & PTPCameraRunning)

set ImageCaptureExtensionRunning to (do shell script "ps ax | grep " & "Image Capture Extension'" & " | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'")
if PTPCameraRunning is not "" then do shell script ("killall  'Image Capture Extension'" & ImageCaptureExtensionRunning)

Like with any code there is a 101 ways to do the same thing and any code I’d write I’d imagine you can write better feel free to leave a comment with your own Applescript suggestion