REverberations - Computers

TwinHan Remote under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:46:37 -0500

Years ago with one of my DVB TV tuner cards cards I unexpectedly also received a little USB IR receiver and remote. In common with almost all peripheral hardware, it was designed for Windows but can with a little effort be made to work with a linux machine, such as my MythTV machine.

I made it work by hand years ago, but then had no use for it for a while, and a few months ago wanted to make it work again. It turns out that Adam Pierce has a good set of instructions. But, like all other commenters on that blog post, my setup broke when upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04.

Grrrr.

I have finally found a working combination that hopefully will help others - the suggestions in the blog post were good enough to set me on the right track, but not good enough to make it actually work.

Here's the items that I had to modify by hand over and above my (upgraded) Ubuntu 10.04 setup:

It turns out that nothing makes the directory /var/run/lirc/, which is where lirc needs to put its socket. So, I have modified /etc/init.d/lirc to add this code block at line 109:

if [ ! -d /var/run/lirc ];then
log_success_msg "/var/run/lirc/ is missing, creating"
mkdir /var/run/lirc
fi

lircd should then be able to start and create a socket called lircd within that directory.
Nothing creates /dev/lirc. This may not be needed but certainly some of the lirc testing tools expect to find it, so:

cd /dev
ln -s input/by-id/usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-if00 lirc
Nothing creates /dev/lircd. This may not be needed, as it is the legacy equivalent of /var/run/lirc/lircd, but I suggest linking it:

cd /dev
ln -s /var/run/lirc/lircd
You need to modify /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/20thirdparty/lirc.fdi as per Adam's blog entry.
As other commenters have noted, the USB ID has changed and lirc needs to be aware of this, so modify /etc/init.d/hardware.conf to contain:

REMOTE="Custom"
REMOTE_MODULES=""
REMOTE_DRIVER="devinput"
REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/input/by-id/usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-if00"
REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF=""
REMOTE_LIRCD_ARGS=""

TRANSMITTER="None"
TRANSMITTER_MODULES=""
TRANSMITTER_DRIVER=""
TRANSMITTER_DEVICE=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS=""

START_LIRCD="true"

LOAD_MODULES="true"

LIRCMD_CONF=""

FORCE_NONINTERACTIVE_RECONFIGURATION="false"
START_LIRCMD=""
REMOTE_SOCKET=""
TRANSMITTER_SOCKET=""
Lastly, and this is the bit that had me stumped, I needed to take the header block from the released lircd.conf.devinput, remove unnecessary sections, and modify it with the keycodes published by Adam's commenters, installed as /etc/lirc/lircd.conf:

# generated by devinput.sh (obsolete 32 bit version)
begin remote

name devinput
bits 16
eps 30
aeps 100

one 0 0
zero 0 0
pre_data_bits 16
pre_data 0x8001
gap 132799
toggle_bit_mask 0x0

begin codes
FULLSCREEN 0x0177
POWER 0x0164
1 0x0201
2 0x0202
3 0x0203
4 0x0204
5 0x0205
6 0x0206
7 0x0207
8 0x0208
9 0x0209
RECORD 0x00A7
0 0x0200
FAVORITE 0x016C
REWIND 0x00A8
CH+ 0x0192
FORWARD 0x009F
VOL- 0x0072
PLAY 0x00CF
VOL+ 0x0073
RECALL 0x0198
CH- 0x0193
STOP 0x0080
PAUSE 0x0077
MUTE 0x0071
CANCEL 0x00DF
CAPTURE 0x00D2
PREVIEW 0x016A
EPG 0x016D
RECORDLIST 0x018B
TAB 0x000F
TELETEXT 0x0184
end codes
end remote

The key names in the above file line up nicely with the ones in my mythtv lirc config, and are all-caps versions of what is actually printed on my remote.

All that, and just in time for my Logitech Harmony remote to arrive and have to start again.

Lucid (Bad) Dreams

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:52:35 -0500

For years now I've loved linux. I've met and spoken with Linus Torvalds. I've even made a pilgrimage to where he wrote it. For servers, and many desktop uses, there's nothing quite like it.

The core linux system is a beautiful thing. Through uni studies, attending several linux.conf.au events over the years, and personal interest I've studied multiple parts of the code, and even fiddled under the hood myself at times.

And yet every time it comes to upgrading my highly-customised home server, one or more things breaks horribly, requiring much of my time to fix. These days the distribution I run on the server is kubuntu - a legacy from when the system was also used as a desktop. This upgrade will hopefully be the last for years, as the latest 10.04 release "lucid" is a Long Term Support release, meaning it will be kept safe and stable for years to come. Good thing, given it's taken me a few weeks to get this far. Here's a log for those who are interested.

X would start, but with only a small white window with no useful content. Looking into the logs, it turns out it was far from happy with the status of /usr/lib/libGL.so. Googling around and looking at symlinks, it turns out that the system of symlinks for such things has changed, only one package didn't get the memo:
```
reverb@trane ~ $ sudo apt-file search /usr/lib/libGL.so

libgl1-mesa-dev: /usr/lib/libGL.so
```
Fixing this, there's a similar mess for libGL.so.1. All this NVIDIA-related rubbish is most annoying, but this server isn't going to get any new hardware for years at the current rate, and as such it has to work. It sure did just fine before the update.

My IR remote control no longer worked. What a mess this was. Nobody online had this one sorted, and until last night neither did I. I think I'll post that separately so it can be of assistance to others trying to make this work too.

Linux is an amazing thing which is capable of complex setups well beyond that which most users would have, and all for free. That just doesn't mean that the complex stuff is easy when it breaks in new and creative ways. It would be a full-time job to keep up with the changes that have happened with this release. I've had to find this out after the fact and spend time patching it all up. I had hoped Canonical (maintainers of Ubuntu/Kubuntu) would be doing this for me, and on the vast majority of hardware-software combinations out there they do very well. I can just see as time becomes more and more precious in years to come that a service doing all this custom work for me would start to look very attractive. Especially when your setup looks like this:

Dual-core intel something or other, 4GB RAM
RAID5 using four 750GB partitions across 2x750GB, 1x1.5TB and 1x808GB SATA drives
Custom-compiled afpd shares the RAID to the Macs in the house
Backup to external USB hard drives, rotated off-site
Uplink is ethernet to Airport Express which extends the Airport Extreme network at the other end of the house where the DSL gear is
Downlink is to a network-attached APC UPS (through my ancient USB Ethernet adapter, no less!), which gets its address from the server using dhcp
USB IR receiver receives commands from a Twinhan remote
Two DVB tuners are connected via a powered antenna splitter
A SVN build of MythTV schedules (using Shepherd) and records (from the tuners) live TV
A SVN build of MythTVfrontend (although I've been trialling xbmc) displays recorded shows controlled by the remote out through DVI and SPDIF optical audio to my Onkyo HDMI receiver, then on to the 1080p TV.
Mythweb (with modified PHP and apache configs) runs to allow TV scheduling from a web browser
Boinc runs in the background searching for aliens and cancer cures. Seriously.
Lots of other things like mail, NFS, etc. that a server normally does.

Should be simple to upgrade, right?

Fully Sick

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:05:42 -0500

We're all feeling rather ill with cold-like symptoms (Liz is quick to point out they are not flu-like, and having dealt with suspected swine flue cases in quarrantine at her work I guess she'd know).
This has brought a return to the horrible nights of no Phoebe sleep, although worse because she screams for her mum who herself needs about a week of sleep.
We're mostly through this, having had Phoebe sleep through from 7:30 until 4am today, which is a huge improvement so we aren't complaining (much). Unfortunately we've missed a few occasions due to not wanting to go anywhere to spread our nasties around - sorry those we had to cancel with.
There are recent pictures added, with more coming soon (especially now that my new Macbook has a built in SD card slot, and I'm having a great deal of fun with the new 35mm 1.8 Nikkor lens ! ).

iPhoto Libraries in mythgallery (mythtv)

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:19:46 -0500

Here's some information about a personal coding itch I scratched recently, on the off chance that it helps someone else out there. Certainly my Google skills didn't turn up anyone else who had solved the same problem.

Problem Description
You have a Mac somewhere where you use Apple's excellent iPhoto to manage your huge digital photography collection.
However, you don't have (and most likely don't want) a spiffy but locked-down and feature-light Apple TV to display them on your TV, instead preferring the excellent and far more versatile open-source mythtv.
Mythtv has mythgallery which displays pictures from a normal filesystem reasonably well, but the poor thing has little to no understanding of the complexities of Apple's "iPhoto Library" on-disk layout. I'm talking Albums basically, plus an understanding of "Originals" versus "Modified". I just want it to be how it looks in iPhoto, but on my big LCD screen in front of the couch, controlled with my myth remote. Is that too much to ask??!

Research/Analysis
Can't find anyone else with this issue so figure "how hard can it be?". Not very, it turned out, at least to get something working, if ugly.
The perl Mac::iPhoto looks like a good place to start, but since it hasn't been touched since 2003 it certainly doesn't do anything much useful on my current (7.1.3) iPhoto Library.
It uses Mac::PropertyList to do the parsing of the xml file, which doesn't seem to work either. After much fiddling it looks like the AlbumData.xml file in the iPhoto Library actually is invalid - it doesn't have the proper header. First hack Mac::PropertyList to accept the dodgy header, but later decide to keep that standard and put the hack into my script instead.

Design
Decide to make a directory next to the iPhoto Library which is full of symlinks pointing into the actual library. Directories in this tree will correspond to Albums in iPhoto, and the links will be named such that the alphabetical order used by mythgallery corresponds to the order in iPhoto.
Try and get this working on the linux box and also via Samba but in the end it's simplest to run the code and create the symlink tree on my mac and then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree across to the linux box.
Don't use samba, it stuffs up the annoying ":" that iPhoto uses in paths, at least for me. rsync handles it fine, it's not even that Mac-specific one to my knowledge, just whatever is on my Ubuntu box.

Code
You'll need Mac::iPhoto 0.1-timg, which is the modification of 0.1 available on cpan to work with iPhoto 7.1.3, and Mac::PropertyList 1.31 from cpan. I guess I should put my code on CPAN, but just wanted to get it all up here for now.
Once that's available, you will of course need the actual iPhotoToDirectories script. It's all hard-coded - but you wouldn't have made it this far if you couldn't edit it to work in your situation :)

Operation
You'll need the same directory structure on both the mac and the linux box as the symlinks get created on the mac but are de-referenced on the linux box.
Once it's all in place, run iPhotoToDirectories on your mac whenever you want. It takes a long time, so I wouldn't script it. Maybe an overnight cronjob if you keep your Mac on all night. I don't so I just run it when I remember.
Then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree to the linux box.
Finally, chmod -R a+rx the linux directories if the uid on your mac is different from your myth user.
And then, assuming mythgallery can navigate to that symlink directory, it should work and the browsing should be significantly more useful than it was before browsing the raw directory.

Known issues

Mac::iPhoto's parsing is amazingly slow, ie. ~30mins for me
hard-coded paths
ampersands (&) in album names break things
empty albums should be not put into output
sorting could be much improved
would be nice to understand Events too, hmmm...
lots more UNknown issues, for sure. Let me know!

But hey it works! And with a full-time life that's enough for me right now.

Phoebe Tests Flickr Video

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:16:48 -0500

Mac-free

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:01:10 -0600

Since day one, the DVD drive on my macbook has been pretty flaky. Doesn't read commercial DVDs properly, nor burn reliably. This never really bothered me, as a I have an external (faster) burner, and a DVD player on the home theater.

However, for a few months it has also had a nasty fan sound - the type that persists for a while but you know will eventually lead to fan death.

Between dealing with a new child, renovating and work I haven't found the mental space required to give up the precious device for the inevitable return to manufacturer for repair, since I use it for everything at work and everything at home. Sometimes it has been used every waking moment for several days.

But now, the fan has died it's death, and some monitoring sensor or other has decided that this means running the CPU for any length of time (>10 minutes or so) is not a good idea, and as such, the machine turns itself off.

So, it's off to meet it's maker, and hopefully be reincarnated better than it ever was.

But, that means I'm Mac-less, so email, contact info, IM, photos, the lot are all on hold for a while. Perhaps ring my mobile if you really need me.

Wii

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:23:46 -0600

So, despite not intending to get each other anything for Christmas, Liz and I ended up buying each other half of a Nintendo Wii.

This little gadget is an amazing amount of fun, advertised all over the TV and most people have heard of them by now so I won't blab on much except the controllers are great fun to use. So much so that we both have sore arms from frantic Tennis-ing and Mario-ing between screaming baby time.

Even the older, non-gaming generation get in to it very easily, having a hit of tennis and understanding the instinctive control methods immediately. And nobody has yet commented that "the graphics aren't as good as the other current consoles." They're too busy having social fun instead.

Funniest yet though goes to Meaghan and Dave boxing the proverbial out of each other. For your amusement:

Things

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:15:32 -0500

Well, you can probably guess from the slackness in blogging I'm showing here that life has been busy. The most obvious reason is of course the baby who is showing all signs of being healthy, and arriving early December. The midwife thinks possibly earlier, but we'd rather it not because she is away until the end of November.

There's modern cloth nappies galore here now, and buckets for dirty ones, plus of course clothes, wraps, furniture, car seat, pram, you name it. I've heard it described as the biggest consumer spend a couple goes through (after housing), and it's truly scary what some companies tell you that you 'need' to have.

We've been to birthing and parenting classes and spent countless hours reading stuff online so apparently we now know all, true experts in the field. Except it will of course have no bearing on the reality of actually having a child to look after 24 hours a day.

It was interesting to compare out situation to others in the class though - we're much better off and more prepared than several others, so that gives us a bit of hope.

Trying to organise a couple of short holidays before the due date too.

Some other quick point-form news:

Rain. Yay.
I did the Spring Cycle and home again, personal best time. Then we slept most of the afternoon.
We have a new home phone, this one is VoIP from MyNetFone. Pretty amazing deal, recommended.
Renovations are all done, except we need some new blinds now. Thanks to our parents for helping out with bits and pieces.
The car had it's one year (and first!) service, no problems found. We also have some fuel containers to stop us trekking out to Marrickville all the time. It's going to get a lot less use now that Liz has finished work.
Had a fair few gigs with both bands recently, two of which have been the best gigs we've done with the respective bands. There's few more before the end of the year (and my free time!).

iPhone!

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:20:02 -0500

The world has gone iPhone crazy, with a peak of four stories per day iPhone related on the Sydney Morning Herald. Note the Sydney part - you can't even buy an iPhone outside of the US! In fact, as a write this now, there's still four stories linked there!

Being well known as a lover of Apple technology, you might expect me to be salivating over the new shiny toy, and perhaps even flying over the US just to get one like some people have.

No.

Here's Why.

I bought one of those instead. It's here, now, works on Aussie networks, and doesn't require a USD70 per month data plan at a minimum just to use it, locked in for two years.

And, as the link says, it has a whole lot more features.

But it isn't quite as shiny. I'll admit that.

Do Not Call Register

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 08 May 2007 11:31:44 -0500

In case you haven't found it yet, Australian citizens are expected to opt-out of receiving telemarketing calls by going to this website and registering phone numbers that they don't want to receive such calls at.

How does the register work?
Under the Do Not Call Register Act 2006, telemarketers can check their calling lists against the Do Not Call Register. If a telemarketer calls a number on the Do Not Call Register, they may be in breach of the Act, and may face penalties.

I firmly believe that it should be the other way around (ie. register if you do want to receive such calls), but that would of course offend big business. As it stands, there's plenty of exceptions on there they can use to call you anyway.

Still, better than nothing I guess.

One-man bands

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 23:32:23 -0500

This story at SMH reminded me that I haven't posted anything about the conversion of the room off our kitchen from a "random storage of boxes" room. Into something far better. A music room.

Behold!

I'm still working my way through most of the technology, but the guts are in place and it's now at the point where I can't blame lack of anything for my lack of musical output recently.

Long-time readers (I've had a web presence since 1997 or so - guess I should have an anniversary or something but I don't know exact dates) may recall I used to have a music page available, with all sorts of information on bands I was in, MIDI files I'd created, my instruments and influences, fun stuff like that. Perhaps I'll get around to resurrecting that if my output increases, although it seems that all the cool kids are on MySpace these days.

Catchup Blogging

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 17:46:44 -0600

OK, News time. It's been a while.
I've uploaded some photos to my Flickr account which have titles showing a pictorial version of what we've been doing recently.
There's some from Adelaide (1 2 3 4), some from our recent weekend back up to the Hunter Valley to celebrate our wedding anniversary (yep, it's been over a year now...) (1 2), and even an ugly product of our veggie patch.

Margaret's house has been on the market for a while and is now sold, she's looking for a place to buy and has a few in mind. She may be moving in with us during the change-over period.

So we've re-organised the house a bit. We've now got a separate (small) room devoted to music. It's good to have everything out and in the one place, and I've been inspired to do some recording, helped out with a computer audio interface I found cheap on eBay. Still trying to decide what software I want to use with it though.

The junk that used to be in that room has now sort-of migrated to the spare room, but it could be consolidated to make room for Margaret should the need arise.

Around the house, I've been cleaning out gutters and getting things organised in preparation for the arrival of our water tanks. The fact that it's been raining a lot recently has been annoying us, thinking of the wastage. It looks like we'd have to vote capital-L Liberal to get the government to do something about water recycling, so becoming as detached as possible from it all is appealing.

Put some of the wine from our Hunter trip (came back with three cases!) under the house in a sort-of cellar arrangement. The conditions are good but it's hard to get to. Should be good for medium-long-term storage though.

We headed off to the Whiskey Experience again a few days ago - a great fun evening which we figure is just to raise brand awareness. Not that many people around us were aware of things around themselves by the end of proceedings!

One of Liz's birthday celebrations this year was a trip to the Löwenbräu Keller, something I haven't done for years and an evening we thoroughly enjoyed. The band there seems to do the same show every night, but it's very entertaining. Plus we get to drink great beer and practice our German.

... Which is good, because Sebastian Schnelle (whom we stayed with at least three times in Europe 2002-3 and caught up with again early last year) is back in the country to do his PhD in Brisbane. He and his girlfriend Jana flew into Sydney last week and we caught up a few times. She's still in learn-English mode, so we had a few conversations with me speaking German and her English, and my lack of skill there seemed to give her more confidence.

Oh, and I buggered my knee badly about a month ago, which is the worst it's ever been. I've had plenty of days working from home and far less cycling. I have a specialist appointment next week, so hopefully I can get something done about it.

Another Jersey Kerb gig happened last Friday - the first with Jono playing keyboards and me back on bass after Ed left for England. We played pretty well I thought, but the crowd was both thin and lacking energy. I think we have a job for our manager to get us sorted in a new venue or with some more aggressive advertising. Still great fun though.

Surely that's enough topic-hopping for now. Congratulations if you made it this far!

linux.conf.au 2007

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:42:28 -0600

I'm out at New South Wales university this week for linux.conf.au, a tech-oriented conference. This is the fourth time I've been along to one of these (they run every year), and this year it's being held in Sydney, back where the first one was that I came to in 2001.
The free software culture is generating some amazing things - one of the highlights for me has been the talks on the One Laptop Per Child project - these guys are really thinking how to bring technology to huge numbers of people (their target market is one billion children in the world), which involves quite a lot of rethinking existing ways of doing things. One telling statistic is that 60% of the children in the world have no power at their place of residence, so requiring a device to be able to draw power off the grid just was never going to work.
Plenty of talks more related to my work as well, the details of which I won't bore my mostly non-technical audience with! Suffice to say it's a nice break from work in the pleasant campus surroundings.

For Sale: Powerbook G4 15"

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:21:01 -0600

My old faithful Powerbook is up for auction on eBay.

Drop by and bid if you are interested!

Gadget Lust Strikes Again

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:46:19 -0600

I held out for longer than most around me expected - but the shiny things got the better of me in the end. I've just ordered a new MacBook, stacked to the hilt with good bits.
My poor Powerbook has been working nicely for a while, but the combination of wanting a smaller machine to cycle most days with and the slowness of the current one mostly due to lack of RAM meant that I've been looking for a while at what was on offer.
The fact that Apple has made the RAM upgrades much cheaper now, along with bunging in the latest Core 2 Duo processor (finally) meant that I'd run out of excuses.
Even the tax situation will work out as I've pretty much finished writing off the current machine.

I was thinking about the MacBook Pros but the new prices for those are crazy, and I can't justify the $1000 difference vs. the Macbook for what amounts to a bigger screen (that I don't want), marginally faster CPU, a Firewire 800 port (that I've never used) and a better graphics card. I have another machine for playing games on, so the awesome graphics card in my current laptop has been completely wasted since I've had it.

Anyone want a pre-loved-by-Mac-addict Powerbook before it hits eBay?

Low-voltage home wiring

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:09:04 -0500

I was talking with the two most clever electrically-minded people I know about the idea of running a low-power DC voltage around modern homes a couple of months ago, as everything from your PC to your mobile phone takes the 240v from the wall and converts it down to 3.5-12v, loosing power and heat in the process.

So imagine my surprise today to see that Google is promoting the same thing. Must have been a good idea after all. Go Google.

Greener Apples

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:19:13 -0500

Just to prove that I don't blindly love Apple's stuff, here's Greenpeace's campaign to get Apple to clean up its act in terms of nasty chemicals used in the production of their hardware.

Like you didn't know already

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 21:28:35 -0500

I'm a geek.

Broken FIFA

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 02:58:24 -0500

Any good suggestions as to why FIFA's live match thingy only works on a Mac if you use Safari, not Firefox? That's pretty ugly.
Oh well, watching the game anyway - bring on the next month!
Have a nasty cold so haven't slept and feel horrible. Not sure how late I will last.

I hate things that spin

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 13:53:13 -0600

Grrr. Woke up this morning, came into the computer room and heard a nasty grinding whirring noise. At first thought it was the fan on the laptop, perhaps gone bad with a dodgy bearing as they some times do.
Next, noticed it wouldn't get out of screen saver. They crash sometimes, so no worries really. Then noticed I couldn't connect to it in any way from my other computer. Also not too bad.
So, power it off, leave it for a while so that the fans won't have to run, and then start it up. Uh oh, this time a very sad looking "No home folder" icon flashing. Not good. By now some of you may have guessed that my laptop's hard drive has in fact crashed. I've tried target disk mode onto both my linux box and Liz's laptop but no luck there. The linux box shows me:

[292836.278829] ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
[292836.278980] ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023

Eeeck. So, I'm going to have to grab another disk, pull the thing apart and perform some surgery. Luckily, I backed up the contents of my home folder to a computer at work this week just gone, so I shouldn't loose too much.

It's amazing how costs spring out of nowhere when you think you have a budget for a wedding and travel all organised.

Google Earth + GPS = Bliss

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 18:08:50 -0600

Google Earth really rocks our world. It is the killer app - especially since I stumbled across a non-official Mac version :)
Before Liz and I left for our trip to Europe last time, my over-kind work mates gave me GPS. This was a fun toy to carry around the place, but the true value has only just been made apparent to me.
You see, anywhere we were, we could make a waypoint, kind of a "we were here" mark in space. Now, many years later, I managed to get my brain in gear enough to work out how to get those waypoints over to the ultra-fantastic tool that is Google Earth.
The results are totally engrossing - witness here the original photo of where Liz and I sat on top of Mount Errigal in Ireland, and as we had enough fore-thought to make a waypoint to prove that we actually made it, here's how it looks in Google Earth (kmz).
Homework for the reader - use that kmz link (which should load in Google Earth), and fly around, comparing it to pictures before and after the one of Liz and I linked above (use the arrows above each picture). Remember that the highest-resolution data isn't even available for this particular location - others look far better.
We can do this for so many places we stayed, climbed, visited or just wanted to remember that it is now amazing seeing this information overlayed on the planet.
Edit: Sorry, comments disabled on this post due to spam. I guess that's the price of being noticed...

Finger Frenzy

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 08:19:03 -0600

Can YOU beat 3.95 at Finger Frenzy? Only 2 seconds faster and I'm in the big league :)

3.95 seconds

Edit: I'm down to 3.13, but Ed fluked a 2.8 and apparently Penny can get 2.2 due to some weird freak keyboard thing. All natural QWERTY-powered here, my friends.

ThoughtThing 0.4

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 21:20:56 -0500

It's been a long while since the last update, but I've just released version 0.4 of my toy software project ThoughtThing. You can read more about what it does here.
In the great spirit of Open Source software, someone else did most of the work by changing my code for his purposes, and then sent the changes back to me so I could share them with everyone else. A bit of polish and everyone benefits.
He actually used the software to track the organisation of a conference with other people - it's quite nice when something I developed as something to do while looking for work when first back in Sydney has helped someone on the other side of the world organise a conference.

Optical Illusions

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 23:27:51 -0500

This page of optical illusions totally rocks. Lots of time-wasting potential.

Flickr

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 21:55:18 -0500

I'm playing around with Flickr, an online photo-sharing site.
All of my photos are stored in iPhoto, and there's a great plugin you can load into it to give it the ability to upload photos to Flickr from right within iPhoto itself.
So, it happens that about an hour after I had finished a gig with The Honeymakers today, I uploaded a couple of pictures and within five minutes other people somewhere had viewed them. You can find photos based on "tags", so for example I tagged these photos as "jazz", "music", "saxophone", etc. Anyone who searches for these keywords will find my photos, along with those of anyone else who has used the same tags.
Also, if you scroll down this page and look on the left you'll see the latest three photos I have put up on Flickr, without having to leave this page.
If you already track my RSS feed, you may also like to add this one, which will give you an entry every time I upload a photo.

Men At Work

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 13:57:48 -0500

From somethingawful.com

Men at Work

Skype

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 21:59:51 -0500

We now have a machine semi-permanently set up running Skype. If you do too and feel like a chat, Skype us at "tim.gould". It's free for both us and you.
Being able to call out to the world for not a lot of money is rather useful also. I'll be playing with that for the while, as I have purchased a bit of SkypeOut credit. This means you can call normal telephones anywhere in the world for very very reasonable rates.

Clean-out time

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 02:16:16 -0500

Liz is working nights and I'm trying to stay up so our clocks are at least vaguely synchronised.
As such, I've had time to place my Dreamcast on eBay. Didn't have much success last time around on eBay so here's hoping.
May whack a few more things up there while I'm at it. I'm forced to admit their listing fees are quite a bit more reasonable that I remember.
Edit: The Gameboy Advance we purchased while in Ireland is up there now too.

Google Maps

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:49:55 -0500

If you love maps and want to loose huge amounts of your free time, check out Google Maps.
Satellite images of the entire world are now online, and depending on where you are the resolution can be good enough to spot the gazebo in your back yard. Like for our house, for example.
Liz and I spent a few hours locating interesting landmarks of our trip, such as the Colosseum, Eiffel Tower, our places in London, Istanbul, etc. There's cars on the road and planes at the airports.
I just keep think it's like SimCity all over again, except it's real out there somewhere. Slashdot has some good finds to get you started.
Or how about all of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites?

Yahoo! Creative Commons search

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 00:05:00 -0600

I noticed that this blog is the number one result for "reverberations" over at Yahoo!'s new Creative Commons search.
Not entirely sure how this works, but as you can see from the right-hand column down there, I have tagged this page as being licensed under Creative Commons, so they must understand that somehow.
If you, however, don't understand what I'm going on about, go have a look at this page which explains that CC is basically a well-defined and easily understood way of defining copyright on my work here. It ends up giving a bunch of common-sense and quite fair rights to anyone else who wants to do things with my work like quoting it or linking to it, and is the polar opposite of people trying to restrict your fair use rights.
It's the first time I've ever come out as the top result for any web search (as far as I know). Wonder if it will ever happen again?