dirtystylus

Streaming from Mac to PS3

Took a stab at setting up media streaming from the Mac to the PS3 and found it to be relatively straightforward. There’s a few options for doing this, the first being Elgato’s EyeConnect and the other being Twonky Vision. EyeConnect appeared to be a little more polished and installs as a System Preference Pane, so I tried that one first. Unfortunately, while I could browse my media just fine, playing the media usually didn’t work. Occasionally I would get a song to play or mp3 to load, but most of the time I ended up with a generic network error message. I’ve noted a few online forum messages that imply that the latest firmware update (v2.0) to the PS3 seems to have broken things for EyeConnect, so hopefully this is just classic blip in the relatively new space of media streaming and they’ll have that patched up quickly.

In the meantime, I’ve installed the Twonky Vision media server, which runs quite well. Management is done via a web panel, and so far playback has been pretty solid aside from the occasional hiccup. Resetting the media server’s client table usually solves those issues. The drawback is that for some reason AAC files (even unprotected ones) don’t play – they’re listed as “Unsupported Data” in menu listings. Thankfully most of my music is in regular old mp3 files, but it’s still a bit disappointing given that the PS3 actually can play AAC files just fine. EyeConnect supports unprotected AAC, but of course getting it to actually play the files without constant network errors was impossible.So this solution works ok for now, and I’m going to ride out the 30-day demo on the Twonky Vision software while keeping an eye out for EyeConnect updates before plunking down for one of them. It’s nice to be able to route my media to the home system without using an iPod dock (or an AppleTV).

Google Apps

I’m now hosting my email via Google Apps, switching over from the default hosting with my webhost. I switched mostly to get a better handle on spam, since Google’s spam filtering on the server level is really good. I’d been using Spam Sieve to do client-side spam filtering, and it does a great job there. But I found that accessing my email via the web was a mess, unless I left my home machine on to filter email during the day.

I didn’t think seriously about a switch until Domani moved over to Google Apps — I had a GMail address, but really wanted to keep my own domain email. I don’t know how much else I’ll be using from the Google Apps suite, but the email functionality alone was worth the half-hour I spent this morning switching everything over.

Google’s decision to make IMAP available was the other factor – even with Google email for my personal domain, I was still hesitant to switch because I’d grown used to the convenience of IMAP. Once I saw IMAP was available, I rolled up the sleeves and got it done this morning.

The other not-so-minor effect of all this is that an iPhone just got more attractive. I had previously deemed the Mail app on the iPhone to be a bit problematic, since I was doing all my spam filtering on the client side, and of course there’s no Spam Sieve (or equivalent) for the Mail app yet (the developer SDK next year may change that). Now that Google’s doing the heavy spam filtering on the server side, however, the whole equation has changed. I’ll be keeping an eye out in the Spring for the expected first iPhone revision.

Flash CS3 Components and WMode

I recently ran into an issue with the Flash CS3 ComboBox component – it doesn’t render when you set the wmode for the movie to transparent. I was at a loss for a solution until I saw Sex Panzer’s comment on this post.

Following his advice I added a stage.dispatchEvent(new Event(Event.RENDER)) line to my code, which basically kicks the code in the pants and gets it to render the component properly.

I tested a few other components and they all seem to be affected by the wmode bug, so hopefully the solution above works for all of them.

The Beat Goes On, The Money Keeps Flowing

New iPods? About time. The scrollwheel on Jordan’s 1st generation mini stopped working, so she’s been using the mini a friend graciously gave me after my own iPod got lifted from a hotel in North Carolina.

My big question is whether we’ll see a multitouch widescreen iPod, and whether it’ll simply be the iPhone sans phone (but with WiFi and the interwebs functionality), or just the iPod portion. I’ve said before that I didn’t really care much about the phone part of the iPhone, just the iPod and internet device parts. Jordan and I could’ve certainly used the convenience of the Google maps app while touring Seattle and Portland.

Wireless Networking as Black Magic

More proof that wireless networking is a new form of alchemy: I spent a good amount of time this past weekend wrestling with a recalcitrant wireless router (a DLink DI-634M). I had changed some of my cable services with Time Warner Cable, and they reset my internet connectivity in the process. My cable modem worked fine, but no matter what I did the wireless router wasn’t getting assigned a proper IP address.

After a few hours of modem/router resets, power cycles, and trips through the DLink config “wizard”, I found this post on Jeffrey Zeldman’s site which described a situation much like my own - direct connection from computer to modem ok, modem to router pfft. A few of the comments on the post helped me zero in on the possible issue, however. It seems that my ISP (Earthlink via TWC) wasn’t assigning an IP address to my router because it didn’t recognize (or like, or whatever anthropomorphized ISPs do when eyeballing MAC addresses) the MAC address of my router. So I reset both the modem and router to clear out the MAC address memory, fired up the modem again, connected directly to the modem with my laptop, and looked up my laptop’s MAC address for the ethernet adapter. That in hand I stepped through the router config again, but this time I explicitly assigned my laptop’s MAC address to the router. After the router rebooted I connected the modem to the router, held my breath, and there it was - a proper IP address assigned to the router.

Now, my router config sequence has a “Clone MAC Address” feature that supposedly will grab the MAC address of the computer you’re using to configure the router. Unfortunately, it was grabbing the MAC Address for my laptop’s wireless adapter, not the hard-wired ethernet connection. Now I’m wondering if all this could’ve been avoided had I configured the router by plugging into one of the LAN ports instead of doing it over the air. Now that it’s working I’m not going to mess with it to find out. I still feel like looking at the router the wrong way will break our tenuous technological armistice.

Predictably, tech support from Time Warner Cable during this whole episode was the typical scripted runaround - and as soon as the tech found out I had a third-party router he simply stated that it wasn’t their responsibility, since the modem (their hardware) was working fine. Not that I expected more, but I have a feeling that this is a fairly common situation, and just hearing “check the MAC address your router is using” would’ve saved me a bunch of time.

The downside of all this is that I almost had the perfect excuse to junk the DLink for a new “N” wireless router, but I suspect that I would’ve simply run into the same issue even with new hardware.