Tivo upgrade questions

12 years ago
Dear Lazyweb, the drive died in my DirecTivo and I bought a new one preloaded with 6.4a. This was relatively painless (a completely acceptable trade of money for time), and things are mostly working. The two bits that are not are:

  1. I can't download videos via TivoWebPlus 2.1.b3 any more (same version of that that I was running before the upgrade). The page for a show has links for "view", "tmf", "ty" and "asx", and in the past, the only one of those that would give me an actual downloadable file that I could play with VLC was the "ty" link. But after the upgrade, the link to "http://tivo/{SHOW}{EPISODE}{CHAN}{NNNN}.ty" is 404. How do I make it not be 404? (The other links try to use a tivo: protocol URL, which nothing understands.) I gather the 6.x OS supports the "home media option", is that what I want to be using instead to get access to the raw MPEG files?

  2. I'd like to install sshd and disable telnet. I had that working before, on the 4.x OS, using the sshd from here, but after re-installing that, sshd gets a segfault any time it tries to allocate a pty. ("ssh -T" works, "-t" kills it.) /dev/pty* looks sane to me.

Any ideas?

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Ume

12 years ago
5 Comments
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Location: 37° 45' 37.20" N, 122° 25' 3.00" W

What Happens When You Stick Your Head Into a Particle Accelerator

12 years ago
"Ra-di-a-tion. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense."

Bugorski was a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino.  Specifically he worked with the Soviet particle accelerator the synchrotron U-70.  On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment.  As he was leaning over the piece of equipment he stuck his head through the part of the accelerator that the proton beam was running through.  Supposedly, he saw a flash that was "brighter than a thousand suns" at this point.  Interestingly, he did not feel any pain when this happened.

The beam itself measured 2000 gray as it entered Bugorski's skull and about 3000 gray when it exited on the other side.  A "gray" is an SI unit of energy absorbed from ionizing radiation.  One gray is equal to the absorption of one joule of radiation energy by one kilogram of matter.  An example where this is commonly used is in X-rays.  For reference, absorption of over 5 grays at any time usually leads to death within 14 days.  However, no one before had ever experienced radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of light.

As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski's head and came out around his nose.  Shortly after this happened, Bugorski's left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition.  He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.

Although the skin on the part of his face and back of his head where the beam hit eventually peeled off over the next few days, Bugorski did not die as they thought he would.  The beam also burned through his skull and brain tissue along with the afore mentioned skin.  However, ultimately he came through it all surprisingly well.

Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before.  The few negative health drawbacks he did experience were not life threatening either.  He lost the hearing in his left ear and experienced a constant unpleasant noise in that ear from then on.  The left half of his face slowly became paralyzed over the course of the next two years.  He also gets significantly more fatigued with mental work, though he did go on to get his PhD after this incident.  The remaining side effects were occasional absence seizures and later tonic-clonic seizures, though these didn't show up right away.

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WTF, iTunes?

12 years ago
Dear Lazyweb, why is my iTunes spending so much of its time with a hypnowheel under aeProcessAppleEvent?

It seems like, for the last 4-6 months at least, iTunes goes completely out to lunch ("Not Responding", 100% CPU) dozens of times a day for minutes at a time. When I take a sample with Activity Monitor, the backtrace always looks like this, under aeProcessAppleEvent → dispatchEventAndSendReply, suggesting that it's sending an AppleEvent and hanging waiting for a reply... or maybe sending repeated events like crazy.

I've tried quitting every other app that might be trying to interact with iTunes (Last.FM, etc.) and it still happens. I'm not sure how to tell what app it's trying to send this event to, if that is in fact what's going on.

Any ideas?

2179 RunApplicationEventLoop
  2179 ToolboxEventDispatcher
    2179 SendEventToEventTarget
      2179 SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
        2179 DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
          2179 ToolboxEventDispatcherHandler(OpaqueEventHandlerCallRef*, OpaqueEventRef*, void*)
            2179 SendEventToEventTargetWithOptions
              2179 SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
                2179 DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
                  2179 0x12516b
                    2179 SendEventToEventTarget
                      2179 SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
                        2179 DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
                          2179 ToolboxEventDispatcherHandler(OpaqueEventHandlerCallRef*, OpaqueEventRef*, void*)
                            2179 SendEventToEventTargetWithOptions
                              2179 SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
                                2179 DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*, HandlerCallRec*)
                                  2179 TEventHandler::EventHandler(OpaqueEventHandlerCallRef*, OpaqueEventRef*, void*)
                                    2179 HIStdAppHandler::HandleEvent(OpaqueEventHandlerCallRef*, TCarbonEvent&)
                                      2179 AEProcessEvent
                                        2179 AEProcessAppleEvent
                                          2179 aeProcessAppleEvent
                                            2179 dispatchEventAndSendReply(AEDesc const*, AEDesc*)
                                              2179 aeDispatchAppleEvent(AEDesc const*, AEDesc*, unsigned long, unsigned char*)
                                                2179 0x13a52f
                                                  2179 0x13a60c
                                                    2179 0x13a693
                                                      2179 0x360e28
                                                        2179 AEResolve
                                                          2179 iAEResolve
                                                            2179 InternalResolve(ObjRecord**, short, unsigned long, AEDesc*, unsigned char*, AEDesc*, unsigned char*)
                                                              2179 InternalResolve(ObjRecord**, short, unsigned long, AEDesc*, unsigned char*, AEDesc*, unsigned char*)
                                                                2179 iCallAccessor
                                                                  2179 TryAccessor(HandlerTable*, iCallAccessor_EnvRec*)
                                                                    2179 0x360986
                                                                      2179 0x360484
                                                                        2179 0x361e82
                                                                          2179 0x3814aa
                                                                            2179 0x36218f
                                                                              2177 0x362463
                                                                                1299 0x38cb41
                                                                                  1264 0xf9100
                                                                                    772 0xf914a
                                                                                      653 0xf936d
                                                                                        470 0x5e815
                                                                                          197 0x56d47
                                                                                            99 0x2ddc
                                                                                              95 __bzero

Previously.

19 Comments
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Cronensofa

12 years ago

Previously, previously.

3 Comments
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Gang of 2

12 years ago
6 Comments
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Location: 37° 47' 1.80" N, 122° 25' 58.20" W

Manly Mannequins, Doing Manly Things.

12 years ago

Previously, previously.

2 Comments
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jwz mixtape 098

12 years ago
Please enjoy jwz mixtape 098.

This mixtape hits a record, I think: this time I had to omit five videos that I wanted to include because there is no embeddable version of them anywhere on the Youtubes. And even after checking all the others for embeddability, there are still three videos in here that just silently disappear, even though there is an embed code provided on their page. WTF?

Dealing with this bullshit is frustrating enough that it makes me want to stop doing these entirely. What a complete pain in the ass. I make a list of videos to include, organize them sanely, and then I have to go back and figure out which ones can't be made to work at all, which takes almost as long as constructing the list did in the first place.

I'm not even going to tell you what videos I had to leave out, because fuck those guys. Dear bands in question: you signed on to a major label, so welcome to enforced obscurity.

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The 2011 SXSW torrent is out.

12 years ago

792 tracks, 4.49GB.

2 Comments
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Sockpuppet Army

12 years ago
Your daily reminder that it is The Future: Turing Tests are a part of our daily lives now.

HB Gary Just Keeps Giving

Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.

To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile (satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.

Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas

Previously.

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