nick.recoil.org

AppleTV & Ubuntu hacking (0)

I’ve finally enabled SSH on my long dormant AppleTV, and am integrating it into my DVB / Rails / Beanstalk / MySQL system for processing data. I’ve used the Patchstick image available from atv4windows. I ended up unpacking and dd’ing the image from the Mac, but the process remains exactly the same. I now have Perian, ssh and a slew of other things enabled, and all I need now is to attempt the hack to get composite output working. I’ve yet to take the plunge and replace my old CRT with an LCD TV.

Incidentally, for anyone looking to figure out the ssh username and password for your freshly enabled ssh daemon, they are both frontrow, and that user has passwordless sudo privileges.

I also had a minor breakthrough with my x86_64 Ubuntu 8.04 machine. I have a Zyxel G-202 Wireless USB stick, to keep the number of trailing wires to a minimum, but I kept getting an error saying:

1
zd1211rw error ioread32(CF_REG1): -110

Which was exceedingly unhelpful. I eventually tried disabling hi-speed USB from the BIOS, and rebooted to find it sprang into life immediately. Great! What was even more strange that when I rebooted and reset the BIOS back to enable USB 2.0, the G-202 kept working. I’m unsure whether this is due to the device not being cold booted, and I’ve yet to see if it stops working after I power the system off, but so far so good, and I don’t need to resort to NDIS.

Hacking Growl support into SSHKeychain on Mac OS X

After being inspired by Anil, I have also managed to eliminate the incredibly annoying way SSHKeychain creates modal alert boxes which get buried under every other window on your desktop, and prevent you from interacting with it before you dismiss them.

There are two aspects to my hackery. One is to introduce a very simple sleep() call before the application responds to the kIOMessageSystemHasPoweredOn message, which gets posted after a system has awoken from sleep. This stops any SSH tunnels you have defined from being initialised before the system has re-associated with its network properly. This is an issue more frequently encountered with wireless networks, which are slightly slower to respond, and the main reason I started this work. I was sick of hunting for, and clicking away endless boxes informing me that “The tunnel has unexpectedly terminated and could not be restarted.”

I have also managed to hack Growl support in to the application. The new alert panels look like this:

The messages are much less intrusive, and won’t prevent you from restarting any SSH tunnels if you just ignore them, unlike the current NSRunAlertPanel() method.

Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning here that I find SSH tunnels very very useful for being able to send email via SMTP no matter which network you are connected to. I have a permanent tunnel set up from localhost:2525 to the recoil.org servers, and it means I only need one outbound server definition within Mail.app.

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About Nick

I am a freelance technology consultant and developer working in London, with a particular interest in web development and video media.

This site contains my thoughts about technology, the universe and everything. If you would like to get in contact, have a look at the About me page.