First of all: Hell, yeah! iTunes Cloud finally removed the pain and anger brought by Apple’s policy of having an iPod Touch/iPhone only linked with one iTunes Library. For me, it has always been a pain to synchronize my music in a smooth way all over my devices (iMac, MacBook, iPhone), especially when it came to MP3s. The fact that iTunes didn’t consider MP3s when using “transfer purchases” took any chance (except of using “Home Sharing”) to get MP3s synchronized all over. With iTunes content I permanently had to go that way: Buy them on my iPhone, connect the phone to my iMac when I was at home, “transfer purchases”, reconnect the iPhone to my MacBook when I was at work, “transfer purchases”, all done. But with MP3s this didn’t work.

Now thanks to iTunes Match and iTunes Cloud, MP3s are being matched to actual iTunes Store content and, if nothing could be found, the MP3s are being uploaded to the cloud, from where they can be streamed/downloaded to all registered devices. Sounds awesome, huh?

Well, actually, it really is awesome. There are some downsides, for example the *very* slow iTunes Match servers for uploading data. I’m not sure if that’s only because of the instant heavy load that recently hit the servers or if Apple just didn’t spend enough money for the server’s to be the dog’s balls. Anyhow, besides of that everything runs just fine so far. Streaming/downloading works with good speed (no endless seconds of buffering, nor interrupts while playing), artwork yet seems to be a little problem since here it doesn’t seem to get synchronized instantly all over my devices and the iTunes Match recognition works okay (only have/had to upload around 1k songs of nearly 5k).

The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that my iPhone actually gets flooded with music and the only way I found to remove recently “streamed” (or “streamed and automatically downloaded) music is by scrolling through my list with nearly 5k rows and swipe-to-remove each song I’d like not to have on my iPhone anymore, so I can use the 16GB for more than just audio.

It would be really nice if someone could point me a better solution to fix that issue or, if there is none, if Apple could please implement a feature that allows me to “clear the least played songs”.

Oh well.

Seen on the german A8.

It’s a hardware-unlocked model I bought from a shop on the first of February 2010, it’s in best condition (as the pictures show) and I even ship it within its original packing plus the bill (so you even have warranty left on it). I’m actually only intending to ship it within Germany. For more information, just read the description of the eBay auction.

Good luck bidding!

Apple Magic Mouse

I’ve been using Apple’s newly designed and named Magic Mouse for around a week now and have to say that I’m actually pretty happy to have bought it and replaced my Mighty Mouse with it.

First of all, the new Magic Mouse has no more scroll-ball, what’s probably the biggest change in the whole redesign. Apple finally found a way to remove the always-broken-due-to-dirt scroll-ball by a multi-touch surface that goes across the Mouse’s whole surface. I haven’t had any problems with scrolling yet, except for my habit that lets me always search for the scroll-ball with my fingers, heh.

Besides the new multi-touch surface, the Mouse became way more flat. It really was a weird feeling to work with it in the first few hours, but I got pretty fast used to it and the only thing I’m still missing are the buttons on the Mouse’s side. I had them configured for application-based Exposé and I know that there are some “Middle-Button-Hacks” for the Magic Mouse available which could be used for such features, but still some real buttons would be more comfortable, in my opinion.

However, I really like the new Mouse, especially since it’s a bit heavier and doesn’t feel like a cheap and shaky plastic-puttogether, as the Mighty Mouse did. Regarding the Bluetooth connectivity, I can’t see any differences yet. I didn’t experience problems neither with the Mighty nor with the new Magic Mouse. As soon as I’ll have some information about the power-consumption of the new Mouse, I’ll update this post – yet, I still run the one-time-batteries Apple provides with their devices and it’s still working pretty fine, at a battery-level of 88%. If the discharge-procedure continues straight-line I’d expect the life of those average batteries to end in around three weeks – at least with my more or less heavy usage. Of course, I’ll replace them by re-chargeable batteries, since I’m not really a fan of the one-time-use.

My conclusion on the Magic Mouse is, that it’s indeed a very high priced mouse but also uses the great multi-touch technology to provide best user-experience at the lowest annoyance possible. I think that, if the actual internal hardware is qualitatively good enough, Apple finally did a good and lasting job on this Mouse. And if you’re not one of those fanboys, that really really really need to always have the latest stuff around, you might be sticking to this Mouse for a long time.

Hope this feedback helps some of you at least a bit on deciding whether to get one for yourself or not. Enjoy!

I’ve never actually been a fan of jail-breaking the iPhone nor the iPod, since it’s totally controversial. Most people who jail-break their devices think “Why should I just use 10% of what I could really use on that device?!“, though they don’t think twice: Why did they buy an Apple product like the iPhone or the iPod Touch? There are three kind of people who buy these things: The first type are the “cool” people. They like to pay the “Cool Tax” just to be cool themselves and impress other people. “Look how cool my new iPhone is!!!111“. Such people might jail-break, just because they’d like to be able to say “Oh well, sure, you got an iPhone, too, but look what mine has, that yours doesn’t!!!111“.

The second kind of people, jail-break their iDevices because they can. That’s it. Nothing more. These people are usually some people with more interest into technology, which just have fun doing such things. “Look, my iPhone runs an SSH session! And look, on my Xbox I have a media-center that looks just like Apple TV but has way more features. For free! And oh, my PSP runs Linux!!“. Those people in general do stuff like this because they enjoy it and don’t really much care of the device’s functionality. They don’t care if they won’t be able to play any games on their PSP anymore, they don’t care if they lose their rest-warranty on their Xbox and they don’t care if they won’t be able to read any e-mails on their iPhones anymore. They just don’t care, if it works properly (without hacking) or not.

What brings me to the third kind of people. Those buy products like the ones from Apple mainly because of one important reason: It simply works! You turn it on, you do what you need to do and then you turn it off. No hacking, no installing, no complex configuration, nothing. It just works.

However, the knowledge regarding IT/computers/devices of those people vary from none to I-could-write-my-own-OS. Those, who really know what they’re doing won’t jail-break their devices or if they will, they’re being kind-number-two. Those who don’t really know but hear from all kind of people (kind-number-one mostly) what cool things would be possible if they’d jail-break their devices, will also jail-break their devices one way or the other. And here the controversiality begins.

Why would someone want to spend the amount of $X on a device that’s totally managed, works exactly as it should and gives you only a number features, which therefor really work and then take highly experimental and nearly unsupported software, put it on exactly this device and try to do things with it that were never be planned to be done with that device.

Those people then realize, how crappy everything started to be, though their devices has an enhanced set of features now. They’re going to be yelling about everything that goes wrong and isn’t working out in a way you’d expect it from an Apple product – but they forget, that it’s not an Apple product anymore. At least not the software. Not all of it.

However, the same thing happens to people of kind-number-one, though the difference is, that those would never complain about their crappy set of new features in public.

Anyway, so as I said, I’m just restoring from the jail-break to Apple’s original. Not that I’m complaining or just tried to be “cool” – I was really interested on two things: First, if I manage it to jail-break it through a Windows XP VM and second, how the jail-breaking stuff evolved till now. I was really curious about the software available for the hacked firmware and the things you could do with it.

Unfortunately it’s still exactly as I thought: It’s nice to play around with, but it’s nothing for a productive, everyday use. The software is too unstable, too untested and totally hacked-together. The programmers didn’t follow any design- or usability-guidelines and in general everything looks too unstable. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that the people who’ve realized this did crap! I admire any hacker who’s contributing to this project. But that’s the exact point of it: Those are usually hackers/developers/freaks who don’t really care about usability-guidelines or stuff like that. Just like those people that were developing UIs for Linux once (and still are).

However, besides this, I didn’t really benefit of the jail-break. I used a cool theme, though my whole iPod got awfully slow because of that. As it seems, the original theme won’t be replaced by a new one, but instead it will be just “overlaid”. At least this was my impression when opening the Preferences, seeing the iPod’s standard theme, waiting some seconds for the iPod to become responsive again and then seeing the modified theme. And this of course also impacted on my battery life: By just listening to music I usually got 3 days of battery-life – and I listen a lot to music! With the jail-break installed, after one day I usually only had twenty-five percent of the battery-life left.

Eh, well. I played a bit around, I’ve seen the jail-break myself and I’ve also seen that it’s far from being called “oh this could really make me use it!“, at least by me. Oh, I guess my recovery has finished….

First of all, let’s have a look at the drive itself. It’s plain. Really plain. No holes, no screws, nothing. How the f*ck shall we open this thing. Let’s take a look under its gum-feet. Nah, not even there. What he hack? So, as it seems, this drive can’t be opened. Wrong! Yes we can!

What do we need therefor?

A cloth, for not scratching the gloss

A strong thread

A modified paperclip

Okay, now we’re all set up. First of all, take the hard drive and turn it upside-down. Place it on the cloth to not scratch its lickable, glossy exterior.

Place it on the cloth

Next, take the thread and try to run it through the holes on the case’s bottom, so that you have something to pull the hard disk out of the case. Now try to bend the sides of the plastic-case out carefully and pull drive out piece for piece. You could also use some credit card or other thin piece of plastic (not metal, it will kill the plastic-borders!) for doing this. Warning, this could cause serious damage to your credit card!

Do the credit card-thing on the front-side, the left- and right-side. When pulled it out some millimeters on each of those side, take all the pieces of your thread and try to pull out the drive to the back (e.g. rotation of 90 degrees around the drive’s back-side). On the back, there’s the button for turning it on and off, so you won’t be able to pull it out vertically. If you’ve successfully managed to pull out the drive, the whole scenario should look similar to this:

Pulled out the drive

Pulled out the drive

Now, you can see the actual hard drive which is mounted to the bottom-part of the whole case. After inspecting the construction you can see that there were to glueing-points or any hooks we broke while opening the drive. This means, that if you’ve done it right, you won’t see that anything ever changed on that drive.

Now, I can finally get myself a 750GB (or even 1TB?) hard-drive and build that in.

Happy trying!

//btw: As you notice, LaCie builds in Hitachi Deskstars on these drives. These drives cost something around 50 bucks nowadays. The complete case is around 90 bucks.

Is it possible, that Apple’s production quality on the newer iMacs really decreased and got pretty frowzy? As I’ve posted some time ago, he had also ordered two new 2GHz MacBooks then ago. On the first MacBook he got the Superdrive was broken and on the second one the case’s quality was pretty meh - every time you put your hands on the right hand rest you could hear a small “click” noise. It seemed like the material was so thin at that part that it curved down the to interior hardware and by that produced a “click”-sound.

Tomorrow I’m going to take a closer look at his new iMac until he has to (again) return it to his dealer and get a new one – which probably has the same problems..? Did anyone experience this sort or similar problems with his newly brought Apple hardware? Please feel free to comment and post problems, I would really like to know whether it’s bad luck or a general problem.

The red block let's you choose.

I’ve been now using Prologue for quite a very long time – I guess longer than I’ve ever used one WordPress theme before – and I’m highly pleased of it. However, even that Prologue has a built-in iPhone/iPod Touch browser-detection which cuts away the sidebar and only keeps the important news-stream in focus, I haven’t been very satisfied by that. The font is still pretty small, nearly unreadable, the links are therefor pretty hard to hit, et cetera.

However, yesterday then Andi showed me some pretty nice little framework he just found, what actually doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress itself, but made me think of a very cool idea. The iWebKit-Framework is a small set of CSS and image files that concentrates on building a website in a way so that it looks just like an iPhone or iPod Touch Application. The whole thing’s appearance is pretty sexy, you can take a look at the downloads and get the framework plus some example HTML files for testing.

My optimized front-page.

So, I took a closer look on the iWebKit stuff and did some (again better, a lot of!) PHP WordPress theme hacking. I think I spent the whole night building that thing – but I also think that it was worth it, heh. And I guess, I’ve created a revolutionary and new WordPress theme aimed for the usage on iPhones and iPod Touches – the only problem I had left was: How to I get WordPress to use this theme only on the tiny Safari, but on nothing else? After some more PHP hacking, which included modifying my Prologue theme but not the actual WordPress (what’s the really cool thing within the whole story), I’ve found a way.

When you browse my WordPress now using your iPhone, you should be getting a red message right on top of the site, which tells you that it has detected the tiny Safari and suggests you to use the iPhone optimized theme. If you confirm by clicking the first link, the whole site’s design should get to look just like on the pictures I’ve inserted here.

My contact information - optimized.

I will extend the theme some more, maybe by building in JavaScript effects or other Eye-Candy, to make it fit even better into the iPhones Look & Feel. I was also thinking of some Cover-Flow’ish effect for my Gallery (which at the moment just links to my Picasa-Site, but thanks to the great API provided by Google it shouldn’t be too hard to implement that right into the page).

Maybe, after some more testing I’ll be able to provide it for download, including a whole documentation of how to make it work. Until then, I hope you enjoy browsing my Blog, especially over the iPhone or your iPod Touch. Please feel free to write me your impressions, feedback and also suggestions for improvement by commenting here or writing me an e-mail. So far …

Have fun!

I...

... hate...

... you...

… @andi.
One day, I will send you such pictures.

Enjoy.

@andi: You knew it, huh? Thanks for this hint.

iPod Stand

This evening I saw the bunch of old business cards I still have from my former employer lying on my table, and I was wondering whether to throw the majority away or what else I could do with them. I still have over fifty of these tiny little pieces of carton here and just experimented a bit… and well, this is what I came out with.

I was searching for quite a long time to get some kind of stand for my iPod, since I’m already using it as alarm clock and would also love to have it running the “Flip Clock” App on my bedside table at night. Of course, there are stands for the iPhone and the iPod, but I’m not crazy spending over twenty bucks on a dumb stand. A piece of wood or aluminum, whose only purpose is to hold a device. Not connect it to another device (e.g. your Mac or your stereo) – just to hold it. 

However, maybe you like the idea and try it out yourself sometime.

Enjoy!

I bought my iPod Touch because I found it a very nifty and cool multimedia device. It’s not too big, it’s thinner than Kate Moss and it provides me everything I need: I can put it into my docking and listen on my HiFi to the music, I can take it with me, I can browse the web thanks to WiFi and it has great software on it which actually pack a complete notebook into one, tiny gadget with 3.5-Inch display and touch-screen.

I really doubt, that I might have bought it, if it would have had a screen size of 7- to 9-Inch (+ some Inches for the borders), because then the actual portability/mobility would be just lost. Of course, it would be a cool internet-tablet for home use, but I really don’t think that anybody would ever carry something like that around in his pocket. It wouldn’t even fit in someone’s pocket.

I’m really curious if Apple will really release such a device. Like I just said, I really doubt people might like to have it as a replacement for the nowadays iPod Touch. I think it would be something in the middle of a Touch and a Net…err.. no, sorry Psion, I mean… Sub-Notebook, what seems to me pretty useless, at least at the moment. But I guess, we’ll see…

Stuntman Mike's watch

Some days ago I was just showing some scene from Tarantino’s Death Proof to my girl, while I noticed Stuntman Mike having a pretty cool wristwatch on his left arm. I searched a bit on the internet and I could find figures of Stuntman Mike, I could find the Sunglasses he wear and even posts regarding his jacket were available – unfortunately I couldn’t find any information about the watch he was wearing. After searching a bit through the net I’ve found out that Fossil has similar watches, like the one showed in the movie. I really like that style and today I’ve decided to visit STR tomorrow, since I’m still having holidays, and take a look in the Fossil shop. Maybe I can put together a watch I really like. Besides, as far as I’ve seen it, they aren’t even that expensive – around seventy bucks for a watch.

So, anyway, now I’ll keep on chilling, enjoying my Corona and maybe watch some movie. I’ve started Planet Terror once, but the first few minutes it seemed to be just another more-funny-than-scary horror with a lot of splatter and a yet-again-cool Bruce Willis, heh. Maybe I’ll just continue watching that Zombie thing. Or maybe I’ll watch some podcast.

Apropos podcast, I’m really wondering when Apple will release their next Keynote and what products will join the Mac family next. Some months ago I’ve heard something about televisions (“iTV”? Maybe the reason why they renamed their current product “Apple TV”, while Steve was still calling it iTV in a Keynote some time ago)…. well, let’s see.

Where the fsck can I get this application?

My new iPod Dock

So, it’s the 24th of December. Again. And yet, people spend thousands of [currency] for buying useless stuff to other people, which usually gets changed into something they could actually benefit from – for example money. Luckily, the gifts I got were pretty cool and actually stuff I planned to buy myself someday. Especially the gift my lovely girl got me was just great: The Apple iPod Dock! Yay. :-) I was pondering for a pretty long time whether to buy it or not… but now I don’t have to anymore.   It’s very cool, it comes with adapters for every iPod available on the market and with an additional Apple Remote, for controlling the iPod from the sofa, the bed or anywhere else. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t ship the Docks including an iPod->USB cable, so the one shipped with the iPod itself has to be used. I was actually hoping that I could take that one as “mobile cable” from now on, but meh. Luckily, I just bought myself an iPod car-recharger, which is contained of an cigarette-lighter to USB (f.) plug and an USB (m.) to iPod cable, which I can just take with me and connect it to any USB-capable computer. However, the Dock works just great, you plug in the iPod, iTunes starts and synchronizes it and you can play all the music from your iPod directly on your HiFi – and the quality isn’t even that bad! The only problem now is, that (if using the Apple Remote that got shipped with my Mac), I’m controlling the iPod and iTunes simultaneously, what of course makes no sense. I guess I need to unpack the new Remote shipped with the Dock and use that one. I hope my Mac ignores it by default. Now I’m drinking some Jack Daniel’s and chilling in front of the computer, waiting for this day(s) I usually dislike to finish. So far, noroc!

NIKE + iPod

Matching the new, pink iPod Nano-Chromatic my girlfriend got as pre-christmas present, I also organized her the NIKE + iPod set, since she’s into that whole jogging thing. However, she tried to get it working herself, but couldn’t really figure it out, so I now just try it out myself. For now, I’m using my Touch, which has an integrated transmitter for the NIKE+ sensor.

So, I just set up the NIKE+ application on my iPod and threw the sensor into my shoes. I know that there are special NIKE+ shoes for that aim, but since I’m not planning to spend over seventy bucks for them I just fixed the sensor beneath my lances – and it works! I calibrated the walking on my Touch and must say that it’s actually pretty cool. I didn’t measure if the NIKE+ app counted the distance I walked right, but I think were approximately four-hundred meters I walked.

Now I know that the sensor actually works and I can grab my girl’s Nano to configure it there. It seems to be pretty cool what kind of information you can get out of the walking measures the app does, e.g. the calories you just burned. I know, that it’s not an exact value, but even this rough value is already useful.

I’m not sure whether I should configure a nikeplus.com account for her running, because I actually can’t see the benefit of publishing the statistics on the net. Has anybody more experience with that whole stuff than me? I would appreciate some feedback on that.

So far, so good.

What else happened. Well, I solved the problem I described some days ago, regarding the Windows XP Sysprep stuff. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way I actually planned it:

The scheduled task seemed not to be ran, because (at least this is what I guess) Sysprep changes the system’s/system-user’s SIDs within the Mini-Setup. So when a scheduled task is being added to the scheduler while running the Sysprep procedure, it adds the task using the Administrator’s current SID – which won’t be the same after the reboot. Because of that, the scheduler then reports the miss of the actual user, under which this task should be ran.

However, I’ve solved it by adding the AutoLogon=Yes and the AutoLogonCount=1 parameters to the sysprep.inf. The first one generally activates the AutoLogon feature, so that the Administrator will be automatically logged on after system boot and the second option defines, how many times the Administrator should be automatically logged in after boot. By setting it to 1 the Administrator will be automatically logged on only after the machine’s first boot – on the following boots no more AutoLogon will be used.

Then, I added a RunOnce key into the system’s registry (within the mini-setup, using the “reg” command), which executes a batch-script. Within this batch script then I was able to do everything I want – unlock the firewall’s port, enable RDP and add the Domain-Group to the RDP-Users. Yay.

It’s quite an ugly hack, but at least it does the job. And it’s the only method I found out to work.

What other things occurred this week… hm… ah yeah. My car. It smells. No, not a joke. Let me go into greater detail: Last Thursday, I went to the gas station and filled up my car with gasoline. The day after, I drove to work and left it there on the parking space, since I had a company car for the weekend. When I returned on monday and sat into my CRX, intending to drive home, the whole car smelled extremely of gasoline. I thought, that it might be, because I left it fully refueled there over the weekend, so I just drove off. The smell didn’t disappear when I reached my home, so I left the sunroof open. When I entered the car again later that evening, it still smelled. The next day I brought it to the garage and had it checked. On Wednesday morning I went there to pick it up, and they told me that nothing could be found: No leaking tube, no holes, nothing. They couldn’t even tell me if this is actually dangerous.

Now I kept the car driving until today, because I wanted to see whether the strength of smell decreases proportional to the fuel-amount in my tank – and of course it does. Unfortunately it only decreases, but does not completely disappear. So now I’m thinking of brining my car in to the official Honda garage hear here and let it checked up again there. Maybe they could tell me more, since they use to have more experience with these kind of cars.

It’s not only that I don’t know how dangerous this situation actually is, but besides it’s really annoying since the smell uses to makes me pretty dizzy after a while – what’s kinda disadvantageous while driving. So I definitely need to get this fixed until my car burns out – either because of some leakage or because I drove it into a tree, due to the dizziness. Hmpf.

And now I guess I should finally go to bed. I’m still a bit sick and I didn’t sleep that much the past few days. Good night everybody.

Therefor, today I’m a bit squashed and wondering what to do on this sunday. I guess I’ll stay in and try to figure out, why I can’t install Exchange 2008 on my Windows 2008 Server. I would really like to set it up and test ActiveSync using the iPod Touch I ordered – assuming it’ll arrive someday. I’m really wondering what the fsck is going on there, I’m now waiting for over one month for my touchy-touchy-fluffy-toy… hm.

Winter '08 began

So, as it seems last night/this morning the winter 2008 just began down here. When I left this morning for shopping I had to search my car in between three big, white snowballs. Luckily I found the right one, heh.

The first thing I did this morning was, to get an appointment at my garage to let them put me (new) winter-tires onto my Honda. I’m already annoyed by just thinking of how my Honda will look with steel wheels, but I think it has to be. I’m expecting this winter to be pretty long, since last year I think the first snow fell only in january or so.

Whatever, after the garage stuff I did some eatables-shopping and was really pissed by the crowded supermarket. Since most supermarkets are open until 10:00 PM, I haven’t been for a long time shopping on a saturday this early. Luckily. But I think I might have forgotten some stuff, so I’ll need to go to the market again this evening anyway.

Yesterday evening I’ve been with my girl at some party a buddy of mine invited me to. He and some of his friends own a bar near here and yesterday they’ve thrown a techno party. Some hobby DJ was mixing some pretty nice Hardstyle/Trance tunes and the atmosphere was pretty cool. Unfortunately I’ve been pretty tired from work yesterday, so we didn’t stay that long. I was surprised, that at around 1 AM when we left, there still was no snow lying on the streets, though I’ve expected it – or to be precise: The forecasts announced huge abnormal extreme thunderstorms with blizzards and ice in big way from around 5 PM, heh. Short offtopic: This announcement made many people, not only in my company, leave work very early yesterday. So, afterwards, I’m laughing about the fact that some weather-stations can cause the economy on a day to slow down quite a lot, just by spreading fear. According to this, tuhl reported a traffic jam on the A8 yesterday at around half past four, what’s funny because usually the traffic jam begins at around 6 PM. But eh, that’s a good example of how people let themselves scared by assumptions or stuff that’s just not true. *wink to america*

Anyhow, talking about america, especially California: My iPod Touch still didn’t arrive yet. I’m really getting impatient, since I’ve ordered it nearly one month ago. And what confuses me, is the fact that the Apple Site is still saying “delivery within 24 hours”. So, I’m really wondering why the distributor I ordered it at – CANCOM – couldn’t deliver it yet. But at least the iWork ’08 I ordered arrived some days ago. Great stuff!

So… I think that’s it.

Sunny Weather in November

Right now, the weather is pretty nice. Constant blue sky, no clouds and the beginning of the sunset – looks really great. 

Unfortunately it got pretty cold in the past few days. At the moment, my weather widget tells me that it has 9 degrees Celsius, though this morning at half past nine it must have had something around 3 or 4 degrees. Not that I would dislike coldness, but my car does. At these temperatures the oil-filed suspension struts feel like having no suspension at all, what’s quite annoying (especially in the morning after I just got up and drive to work). Eh, anyway.

I’m still wondering what to do on new year’s eve. I’m actually planning to do some small weekend trip with my girl somewhere… unfortunately I don’t really know where to go. Maybe somewhere to the Switzerland or to Paris. I don’t know yet. My first thought was to visit this year’s Sensation White in Germany, but it’s A) pretty pricy and B) my girl doesn’t really like this kind of music. So, I guess, it won’t be the Sensation.

Besides all this, my iPod Touch still didn’t arrived. I ordered it on the 30th of October and yet my distributor hasn’t got any information from Apple, when the iPod will be shipped. As it seems, Apple’s production seems to be pretty lagging at the moment, maybe because of the upcoming holidays. I don’t know.

Drinking tea (or coffee) and waiting.

My Linksys WRT54GL - now running OpenWRT!

Today the new hardware for my DSL 3k line arrived and I also installed it already. Everything works out pretty good so far. Now, with the new hardware, my Linksys WRT54GL became available for playing and hacking, so I’ve just started by replacing the Tomato Firmware I’ve had on it by the latest OpenWRT “Kamikaze” release (“openwrt-wrt54g-2.6-squashfs.bin”) available for my router. The whole replacement works out pretty good and fast, using the regular “Upgrade” function provided by Tomato. The OpenWRT documentation said, that image would be installable through Linksys’ regular upgrade-mechanism on the router’s stock interface, so I just tried it out with Tomato (since it’s mostly based on Linksys’ original firmware) – and OpenWRT runs!

The first thing I did was the reconfiguration of the WAN-Port to act as a DHCP-client instead of trying to establish PPPoE connections over it. Unfortunately I’ve seem to forgotten to configure the SSH service availability on that port. Tomorrow I’ll need to reconnect the router directly to my iMac using a LAN port and configure this feature. After that I’ll be able to keep it connected to my new router-hardware, on its LAN port.

I’ll see…

The first Snow, this morning.

When I got this morning, I’ve been pretty shocked when my precious girl happily screamed “SNOW!!!” through the apartment. First I actually did not believe her and though she would just want to fool me, but after taking a look out of the window (yepp, I don’t do that right after I wake up, …) I saw it myself: This morning the first snow for this year just fell and accordingly to that the traffic was chaotic and dangerous. I’ve seen three accidents on the highway while driving slowly to work and really had to pay attention to not involve myself into a fourth one. I guess I really need to buy snow-tires this year.

I was really surprised of the snow, especially with the past few years in mind. In this region of Germany we didn’t had snow until the middle of Januar in the last two years, so I assumed that it’ll be the same this year – which is why I didn’t organize myself some snow-tires till yet. I’m really afraid of tomorrow being even snowier than today.

Anyway, what else happened in the last few days/weeks(/months?). I haven’t been blogging anymore, since I’ve ordered an upgrade of my webspace at Strato (on the 10th of October) and they told me to backup everything I have uploaded on my account. This request made me think “Hm, let’s not write anything anymore, let’s not change content, in a few they the upgrade will be done and I’ll be able to blog again.“… WRONG!* They didn’t seem to be doing anything till now. And besides, they didn’t even answered the mails I wrote, in which I asked for some status info about the upgrade. I’m kinda disappointed of the Strato support on this, because actually I had the support center as a pretty good and reliable contact point in mind. Eh, I’ll just wait and see what happens. At least they didn’t charge me for anything – yet.

What else is new… well. Today my salary arrived, so I ordered a new iPod Touch. But I think this is not worth mentioning, since everyone has an iPod Touch today. Lately I’ve seen the Apple Keynote for October and I really fell in love with these new aluminum (A-LU-MI-NI-UM, dear AE-speakers, not “aluminum” ) MacBooks Apple presented. I think it would be a great gadget for the Norway trip mpain and I’m planning for next year.

However, so far. I think I’ll start up blogging again, until I’ll receive at least some info from Strato.

* Thanks again to Michael for this link! It’s amazing funny.