Completely Useless Info For You

My Itunes Most Played... Sorted by play count and then selecting only the top track from each unique artist (Intergalactic was actually ranked #43 overall).

Not what I expected at all.  Completely surprised that The Flaming Lips didn't crack the top 10.  I've got Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots on a pretty steady rotation.

1. Fire of Heaven / Altar of Earth - Matisyahu
2. Hiroshima (B B B Benny Hit His Head ) - Ben Folds
3. Now's The Time - Miles Davis
4. One Week - Barenaked Ladies
5. Ships With Holes Will Sink - We Were Promised Jetpacks
6. Hanging Around - Counting Crows
7. Stinkfist - Tool
8. Set It Off - Audioslave
9. Hurt - Johnny Cash
10. Intergalactic - The Beastie Boys

Enabling Emoji on Your iPhone

You know those cutesy smilies and symbols all cool kids are using these days?  Oh, you don't.  Well you should.  They're called "Emoji" and it's basically an extra set of characters that you can use to add meaning to your posts, text messages, and tweets.

We've come along way from the simple smily :) to a full suite of useful characters.  Starting with iOS5 your iPhone, iPad, or iPod is now capable of sending and receiving emoji characters.  To enable them, follow these steps:

1. On your phone tap Settings
2. Select General
3. Select Keyboard
4. Tap International Keyboards
5. Tap Add New Keyboard... 
6. Scroll down and select Emoji

 

Now that emoji is enabled, you can access it from your on-screen keyboard by clicking the International Keyboard icon (Globe) at the bottom of the screen.

 Read more from Apple HERE

Dealing with iPhone App and iOS Freezes

These solutions for dealing with your iPhone freezes are well known among iPhone and tech enthusiasts, but I still find myself answering related questions for everyday users that need help with a locked up iPhone or iPhone app.

There are basically three conditions where you may need to reset an application or phone to resume from an error or lockup.

I.  App Not Responding - Home Button Works

 

In this case, the app you're using may have stopped responding or locked up.  Or, it may simply be stalled on the "Updating..." screen endlessly without ever continuing or even failing.  If pressing the home button returns you to the home screen from where you can see the icons for your apps try this:

1. Double-tap the Home button.
   
   
2. From the app switching ribbon at the bottom of the screen, hold your finger on the icon for the offending application until it wiggles.
3. Click the red circle in the upper-left corner of the app's icon to force it to close.
   
   
4. Press the Home button to return to the home screen.
5. Re-launch the app.

II.  App Not Responding - Home Button Not Working

In this case, not only has the app stopped working, but pressing the home button has no effect.  In this case:

1. Hold the Lock (Top) button on your phone until the "slide to power off" option appears.
2. Release the Lock button.
3. Hold the Home button until the application closes.
4. Re-launch the app.

III.  Phone Not Responding

If nothing else works and the entire phone is unresponsive:

1. Hold the Home and Lock buttons at the same time until the Apple logo appears.
2. Wait for the phone to reboot.

Passwords and Mortality

When you ultimately expire, will your passwords die with you?  It would likely be beneficial if some of the important passwords (banking, insurance, wi-fi, email, etc.) could be shared with your trusted survivor(s).  The question then is, "How can you still protect the integrity of your passwords while you're alive if you don't want to share them until after your final logoff?"

Matt Yoder's "Death Envelope" presentation from Defcon 16 presents a simple option.  You give a tamper-evident physical envelope (or USB key) containing your passwords to someone you trust with instructions to open it only after you pass.  Ideally, this could contain only your master password to whatever scheme you use for organizing your passwords.  I use LastPass, but there are other good alternatives like 1Password, KeePass and others.

An idea i like is to use Shamir's Secret Sharing.  If you recognize the name, it's because he's the "S" in "RSA".  In this scheme you distribute pieces of the key among friends, family, attorney etc.  Then, a pre-defined number of key pieces (but not all) are required to re-construct the master key/password.  The upside here is that a number of your trusted key holders would have to conspire to access your info pre-dirt-nap.  The downside, there's some math involved in reconstructing the key from just a few pieces.  But, that's a one time exercise that surely they could get through.

A third option is the Dead Man's Switch.  You periodically receive an email from a service.  When you stop responding (presumably because you've gone to the great crypto farm in the sky) the service can send instructions and passwords via email to your designee(s).  There are paid services that can set this up for you or you could configure something on your own.

In life, it's important to remember to use different passwords for everything.  That way if one of your passwords is compromised, the damage is limited to just the site it was stolen from.  Make sure your passwords are complex enough to not be easily guessed and follow standard password best practices.  Of course, making your passwords hard to guess can also make them hard to remember.  That's why I use LastPass.  But, a system like this means that your master key is the "key to the kingdom".  Breaking this one key then gives an adversary access to ALL your other passwords.  Accordingly, this master password (better yet a pass phrase) should be complex and secure to the point of paranoia.  Pretty much every password management program comes with generator that can generate unique, strong passwords.

Evolving and Expanding the Home Theater Setup

Since writing about Nearly Subscription Free TV, we've moved and that meant not only re-installing all the components of the home theater system, but even re-arranging them a bit.  The Mac Mini got moved from the smaller LCD TV to the larger Plasma TV in the family room.  But, since this is also the television that hosts the XBox360 there's the matter of "resource contention"... i.e, the wife wants to watch Dancing with the Stars while I'm playing Rocksmith.

She's perfectly happy to watch on the LCD television in the guest room, but the problem is that the only device in there is the AppleTV and it won't stream from the Mac Mini / Plex Server that's located in the family room.  The initial attempt at a solution was to get another Mini DisplayPort to HDMI cable so she could access Plex from her laptop and display it on the LCD television.  While this works, it's a bit clumsy and requires taking over her MacBook Pro while she's watching anything.

Roku to the Rescue

In my quest for finding a device that would stream from the main Plex media center, it looked like a Roku was the way to go.  For $80 at Best Buy I picked up the XD model that streams 1080p.  It was dead simple to hookup; AC and HDMI.  Create a free Roku account.  Install the Plex "Private Channel" and voila!  Access to the Plex library with a simple remote control and fairly intuitive user interface.

The only issue (and it's not a Roku issue) is that Movies that we ripped from our DVDs as Video_TS folders will not stream.  This is the same issue we get when using the Plex app on iOS for the iPad or iPhone.  Apparently it has to do with licensing MPEG2.  It looks like the "solution" is to convert those Video_TS rips to MKV files.  We've got about 500 movies on the Drobo, so that's no simple undertaking.  I found a script online but it's not working for me... looks like from the comments that MacTheRipper may be the reason.

I'm still working out whether I'll convert them onesy-twosy with the MakeMKV GUI or try to write my own script.

Update on Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 9:57AM by R Keith Smith

I finally got around to writing an Automator workflow to convert our DVD (VIDEO_TS) rips into MKV files.  It took a bit of trial and error to get it, but it definitely saved a tremendous amount of time versus selecting each DVD file manually and waiting for the conversion to finish.