Keyboards

I've got the keyboard-bug.

It started a while ago when I started reading about mechanical keyboards (sometime last year when I was looking for components for a new PC). Back then, I was debating whether I should get a Das Keyboard Ultimate or a Razer Blackwidow Ultimate. I opted for the latter and am using that at home right now.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to buy a Das Keyboard after all and use it at work. I went with the "Ultimate Silent" model (blank keycaps and quieter brown Cherry MX switches).
Both keyboards are a delight to type on.

I discovered geekhack.org, a forum for keyboard-nuts. It's crazy what's out there!
Some pics: [pic 1] [pic 2] [pic 3] [pic 4] [pic 5] [pic 6] [pic 7]
(most of these have custom keycaps, meaning some of the original keycaps were switched out for different ones)

Many years ago, a friend would often have visitors from Asia over at his house. When I saw their laptops, I loved the Chinese characters that were printed on the keycaps underneath the latin characters. I was reminded of that when I saw a picture of this keyboard on Geekhack. This one is sold in the US, but, of course, without the Chinese characters. And all the shops I checked only had it with Cherry blue switches (a Cherry red version supposedly exists as well). Luckily, someone going by the name of "qtan5370" runs an online-shop (he also sells on eBay) where one can get the Chinese version of that keyboard. Ordered! :) (with black switches)

Some helpful links / online-shops:

- The ultimate keyboard and switch guide
- Cherry-compatible keycaps on eBay (cheap and OK-ish quality, but nothing fancy)
- Elite Keyboards
- WASD Keyboards (custom keyboards and keycaps)
- Deskthority (another forum)
- Keyboard Lover
- Pimp My Keyboard
- Fentek
- Keycaps Direct

On the watch-list:

- KBT Race 75%, with white LEDs and black or red Cherry switches
- Vortex Pure 60%
- Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2

Money and the App Store

Article found on Gamasutra:
Money and the App Store: A few figures that might help an indie developer

Anonymous' attack tools

Article on arstechnica.com: High Orbits and Slowlorises: understanding the Anonymous attack tools

Emperor workstations

These are some really nice workstations made by MWE lab, called "Emperor 200" (45000 USD, yes those are three zeros) and "Emperor 1510" (6200 USD).
I'm looking into getting an Rseat or Obutto workstation soon. Not as fancy as the Emperors, but definitely more affordable.

Windows 7 x64 installation on MacBook

Installed Windows 7 Ultimate N today on a MacBook from 2007 (the white one).

2 problems:

1. Booting from a "normal" Windows 7 DVD would just give me a message saying "Select CD-ROM Boot Type". The solution to this can be found here.

2. Installing the Bootcamp drivers for Windows from a Snow Leopard DVD wouldn't work, it would always tell me that it can't run under x64. Bullcrap. It can run. Here or here is how.

New rig

I decided to build a new PC with enough Ooomph to run current games and do some video-editing with Vegas or Premiere. It's been a while since I had my last desktop PC (only had MacBooks in recent times). So I spent some time in the last weeks reading articles on tomshwardware.com to get some inspiration. Their "system builder marathons" were especially useful. They seem to do them every 3 months and they build out systems for 500, 1000 and 2000 $ each time. My target was 1000 $, I ended up going slightly over that, but that's okay. :)

Here's what I picked, placed the order yesterday:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=16722405

I bought the case, the CPU cooler and the motherboard at Fry's since their price was the same as Newegg's after shipping (the CPU cooler was even cheaper at Fry's). And I added two 200mm fans for the case.

A thing I didn't expect to spend much time thinking about but still ended up doing so is a keyboard. I was first gonna go for a Logitech G110 or G510, but then a couple of articles about mechanical keyboards caught my attention. At Fry's, they had a Razer Blackwidow Ultimate on display and I tried it. It felt fantastic. Right then I decided I'd get one of those and I was debating between a Das Keyboard (possibly the Ultimate version, without labels) or the Blackwidow Ultimate. I ended up going for the latter because of the backlighting and the fact that Newegg had a 30$-off coupon for it.
I might still get a Das Keyboard at some point in the future (maybe for work?) and I'm also thinking about getting one for my dad as a surprise.

Heat problem in MacBook Pro solved... NOT!

Update at the bottom.

I've had this annoying heat problem with my 15" MBP (it's a "Sandy Bridge" model from August 2007). If there's heavy load on the CPU (for instance when importing/editing/exporting footage in iMovie), the CPU temperature will go up to 100°C and stay there. The fans will then kick in and rev up to 6000 rpm (the maximum), but it doesn't bring the temperature down. (I assume it helps keeping it there, though, otherwise the laptop would probably catch fire)
I've already tried putting the laptop on 4 little plastic-bottle-caps to make the air-flow underneath the laptop easier, but it doesn't make any difference in terms of temperature. The MBP doesn't have fans underneath, so that was kind of expected. But I still like to use this method to keep the extremely hot bottom of the device away from the desk, it can't hurt.

This is really annoying, since a side-effect of the high temperature is that the CPU will clock itself down (thinking it will bring the temperature down). That means that, besides the high temperature (which certainly isn't good for the parts inside) and the noise, I have less CPU power than I normally would, at the time I need it most.

So yesterday I tried running an iMovie-import after taking the battery out (still using the 4 bottle-caps).
And lo and behold: Problem solved!
I could have sworn that I tried this before, but apparently I hadn't.

Without the battery in and with the CPU at full load, the temperature stays just under 60°C. At that temperature, the fans don't even go over 2500 rpm. (barely over idle-mode) If I manually turn the fans into Typhoon-mode (6000 rpm) with smcFanControl, the temperature goes down to under 50°C.

That's incredible, given that usually, with the battery in, my MBP runs at about 60°C (idle, that is).

Update: I noticed a couple of days later that performance was really bad when playing Flash-videos (YouTube HD, etc.). I did some digging and apparently all Apple Laptops automatically clock themselves down if they run on a power adapter without the battery being inserted. (my processor is a 2.2 GHz and it clocks itself down to 800 MHz, I think) There are tools out there that can circumvent this, but I really don't feel like fooling around with this. So back in goes the battery and up goes the temperature. :(

New virus targeting Iran?

Reports of a new virus, "Stars," hitting Iran: son of Stuxnet?

Anonymous vs. HBGary

Here's an article that sums up what happened last month with the whole "Anonymous vs. HBGary"-thing.
Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary, pisses of Anonymous, they teach him a lesson and, in the process, find a lot of juicy material and make it public.

Also:
Article on BoingBoing entitled "How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory"

Ruby programming for beginners

Found this article on Lifehacker about Hackety Hack, a Ruby programming/learning tool for beginners.

In the comments of this article, someone mentioned Why the lucky stiff, the person behind Hackety Hack, and pointed to this article that tells a bit of background information on him.

R.I.P. delicious.com

Yahoo decided to shut down delicious.com soon, so to be on the safe side, I was looking for a way to export all my bookmarks. Here's a how-to.

rsync & backups

I've been using this backup-method for a while now and it works well for me.
After upgrading OSX to Snow Leopard, though, rsync would start to do its thing and then it would get stuck at
/var/vm/sleepimage
for no apparent reason.
After looking around a bit, I read that the version of rsync that OSX brings with it is fairly old and a newer version might behave better. Using this tutorial, I installed/compiled rsync 3.0.7 and it solved the problem.

Some articles on the same topic that are interesting as well:
http://www.lartmaker.nl/rsync/
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2143497&tstart=1
http://www.lbackup.org/developer/overview
http://help.bombich.com/faqs/troubleshooting/what-makes-a-volume-bootable

DIY PC build

Kotaku has a nice article about building your own PC vs. buying it pre-built.

Ubuntu Upgrade to 10.04 - Problems with MKV playback

Today I decided to upgrade my HTPC from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. (The Update Manager has been offering me to upgrade for a few months now)
I figured that, as 10.04 has been out for a while now, the little annoyances and bugs had probably been worked out and I should be able to run everything that I need (XBMC for MKV video playback). Turns out I was wrong. Never *EVER* touch a running system! You'd think I'd have learned that by now.

The upgrade completed successfully but it turned out that HD video playback of MKV files does not work so well with Ubuntu 10.04 on my Acer Aspire Revo AR1600. XBMC started fine, but HD video playback was choppy as hell.
I searched around a bit and while other people have the same problem, there doesn't seem to be a solution. I think the problem is not XBMC, but either Ubuntu or the Nvidia drivers in conjunction with Ubuntu. Either way, it's screwed up now.

I'm now backing up the files I need from the box to an external drive so that I can do a re-install of Ubuntu 9.10 and have everything just like it was 2 hours ago.

Make XBMC run emulators

Turn Your XBMC Media Center into a Video Game Console (lifehacker.com)

Password Security

How I'd hack your weak passwords (Lifehacker)

Free people search

HTPC / Media Center - Acer Aspire Revo AR1600 w/ Ubuntu & XBMC

After looking at different HTPCs, I bought an Acer Aspire Revo AR1600 (200 $, comes with keyboard and mouse (wired), Atom N230 CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 6 USB ports, eSATA port, HDMI port, ethernet (no WiFi) and nvidia ION LE graphics).

According to several reviews and reports I read, this model was said to be sufficient to watch even 1080p MKV videos. The load is taken off the CPU and put on the GPU, which reportedly allows the playback to work flawlessly, without stuttering or lagging.
There is a newer model of this nettop, the AR3610, which comes with a newer and faster CPU (N330), 2 GB of RAM, WiFi and wireless keyboard/mouse and costs 330 $. I was tempted to get this one at first, but then I thought that if the older model does the job, it's really a steal at 200 $.

I downloaded Ubuntu 9.10, put it on a USB stick (using unetbootin), booted from it, installed it on the HD (using the option "wipe the whole drive first").
Ubuntu booted without problems, the only thing that was (and still is) weird is that the outer pixels of what should be displayed on the screen are cut off. I tried different settings on the computer as well as on the TV, but it doesn't help. It's a bit annoying but it's not a dealbreaker. I probably won't notice these black bars when watching movies. (Update on that: The problem is caused by my TV, not by the computer. If I hook up my laptop to the TV's HDMI port, the problem is the exact same.)

I then ran the system update. (System --> Administration --> Update Manager)
Then I installed the nvidia drivers. The system asked me right from the start if I wanted to install the proprietary nvidia drivers, which I did. (System --> Administration --> Hardware Drivers)

The XBMC documentation says that compiz visual effects should be disabled in order for XBMC to work properly, so I did that. (System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects. Make sure "None" is selected.)

Then installed the Flash Plugin 10.1 beta release which supports the GPU (important for watching HD videos on Youtube for instance, without putting all the load on the weak CPU).

After all that was done, I installed XBMC:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-standalone
sudo apt-get update

(how-to found here)

This worked like a charm. XBMC has a very sleek and sexy interface and 1080p MKVs do indeed run without problems.
All in all: Thumbs up! 200 $ for a media center, small, quiet, nicely designed, I couldn't have asked for more.

Super small NAS server

Addonics Bite-Sized NAS 2.0 Reviewed: Lightweight Contender
(Gizmodo review)

Hack a wireless WEP connection

iPhone: DFU and Recovery Mode

I got confused between DFU and recovery mode on the iPhone while trying to restore a custom 3.1.2 firmware.

So here's the breakdown:

Recovery mode:
To put your iPhone into recovery mode, first disconnect your iPhone from USB cable and power off your iPhone. Then hold the Home button and connect USB cable again. Keep holding the Home button until you see a dock cable pointing to the iTunes icon (or yellow triangle for older version of iPhone or Steve Job logo for pwned iPhone). Now you are in recovery mode.
(found here)

DFU mode:
Connect the phone to the USB cable and turn it off. Then hold the Home and Power buttons for 10 seconds. Then let go of the Power button but keep the Home button pressed for another 10 seconds. If done right, iTunes should start automatically and tell you that the phone is in DFU mode and that it needs to restore.
(found here)

In order to restore the custom 3.1.2 firmware I had created using Pwnage Tool, I had to use Recovery mode. In principle, DFU mode should have worked as well, but I always got an error from iTunes when trying that. Recovery mode worked, though.