I have moved back and forth between wanting to sell my original an iPhone and upgrade to a 3G, and just wanting to stay where I am.

Originally, Rogers data prices in Canada were too high, so I was going to stay put. Then they announced good pricing, so I listed my iPhone on eBay — it ended at $330, which is almost as much as I paid for it new. But the guy never sent the money… and then Pwnage 2.0 came out.

Now I’ve decided I really am satisfied with my first gen for another year. See Pwnage can jailbreak both the 3G and the original iPhone, but it can only unlock the original iPhone. The 3G remains carrier locked — which means a 3-year contract with Rogers if I want one. No thanks!

So now I have somewhere between the best of both worlds. I’m on a local carrier, but with no lock, and complete freedom to go elsewhere (although, there’s no in-country competition right now.) Location services suck on the original iPhone, due to the lack of real GPS, but everything else is pretty much the same now that I have the 2.0 firmware. And boy, am I glad I have it.

• If you haven’t jailbroken yet, its pretty easy (although not as easy as 1.1.4) and totally worth it — especially for first gen iPhones. Check out Lifehacker’s Pwnage links and tips here.

The AppStore is awesome. Its truly great. I thought they’d have a hard time showing up Installer.app and the jailbreak community’s efforts, but I was wrong. There’s a ton of fantastic content on the App Store (and some crappy stuff.) Each unique little App I get makes my iPhone that much more delightful — and I haven’t even downloaded any of the non-free apps (although there are a few I’ve got my eye on.) Here are a few of my favourites:

• WordPress is great. Buggy, and low on features, but a solid first release. I love that I can blog pictures from my phone now!
• Remote is SO cool. I can’t wait until some more AppleTV 2.1 hacks are done, so that I can upgrade that and control it from my phone!
• The Google app has some very neat interaction with Location Services.
• Singing that song you can’t think of the name to on your iPhone and having Midomi find it for you is really cool.
• LifeChurch’s YouVersion Bible contains not only multiple versions of the Bible, but it lets you see other people’s thoughts on different verses and makes for a pretty neat experience.
• And Bubbles and PhoneSaber keep our 1.5 year old son entertained for minutes! That’s pretty amazing, given his attention span.

I really think Apple has something here. Its always been obvious that the iPhone would revolutionize handsets, and even push stubborn carriers into the future a little bit (visit ruinediphone.com to see how the backlash forced even Rogers to grow up a bit). But this application delivery model is very solid, despite the iPhone’s flaws, and I think RIM and Microsoft (never mind Palm) will be hard pressed to follow suit.

As a follow up to my previous post, here’s how to do the same thing, but from a web browser (say, on your iPhone) — it assumes you’ve already written a shell script, as discussed earlier.

• Configure Apache to run PHP on your Mac (these instructions are for Leopard, but similar ones are out there for Tiger)
• Configure Apache to run as your own user, instead of the WWW user — a serious security risk. Only do this on an internal network! The WWW user won’t have adequate permissions to do what we need to.
• Put this .php page in your /Library/WebServer/Documents/ folder as RestartMedia.php — you’ll need to supply your own image file in the same path as well.
• Visit http://yourcomputer.local/RestartMedia.php from a browser. Clicking on the text or image will execute a shell script located at: /Applications/Automation/RebootMediaServers.sh

Obviously you can customize this at will, including file locations. This was just a quick hack that does the job for me — and the webpage is optimized for Mobile Safari.

Both my media serving devices (a NAS, and a Mac Mini) are using TwonkyVision Media Server to share media using uPnP. It works great, but as I mentioned earlier, I needed a script to make it start back up in the morning.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that my AppleTV freaks out a bit when this happens, and as a result, needs its own reboot. Restarting the Finder helps, but streaming still gets weird, so a full, daily reboot is in order. Using the same iCal-alarm-firing-an-AppleScript trick, I updated my Twonky restart script to also tell the AppleTV to restart. But it wasn’t that easy.

• First of all, you need to exchange keypairs with the AppleTV so that you can login over ssh without a password. However, the process is a little different, since the AppleTV only supports ssh1. This wiki page explains the process, and the slight tweak to it for ssh1.

• Second, you need to set the AppleTV up to allow you to sudo without a password. This is harder than it sounds, and requires modifying the /etc/sudoers file on the AppleTV. The only way I found to do that was to sudo cat > ~/sudoers the file (which dumps the contents of one file to another, which you can access more easily), copy it over to my Mac, edit it, copy it back, set the permissions, and sudo mv it back over-top the original. You’ll need to add this line to the bottom of the sudoers file:
frontrow ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
• Make sure you change the permissions (0440) and ownership (root:wheel) on your new sudoers before you replace the original, or you’ll screw yourself out of sudo!

To test those things, you could go to Terminal on your Mac and try something like:
ssh -1 frontrow@appletv.local 'sudo ls-l'
If you’ve setup everything right, you shouldn’t get prompted for a password to login OR to get a directory listing. Once that works, the AppleScript is easy and looks like this:

do shell script "ssh -1 frontrow@appletv.local 'sudo reboot' &> /dev/null &"

At some point, I’m also going to attach this to a PHP script (somehow) so I can use Safari on my iPhone to do a reboot from the couch if needed. I’ve only found two other ways to reboot the AppleTV — yanking the power cord, or using the remote to put it in recovery mode. Neither seems as elegant as my solution.

Derived from this forum post that solved the problem for me.

Sometimes (most of the time) the limited configuration for TwonkyVision that the MiniNAS config pages gives you isn’t enough. Trying to go to http://yournas:9000 results in the red error page. Apparently LaCie thinks they know better than their users.

To enable TwonkyVision config, upload this signed patch file (mirrored here, in case the original source goes away) in the Configuration page of the MiniNAS config, as an update.

Tested with 1.1.2.1 of the MiniNAS firmware.

So last night, after 4 passes, I finally got the AppleTV hacked to my satisfaction. I had to give up on a few features in the name of keeping things stable and easy for the family to use, but it does everything I really wanted it to, and runs smoothly…

This morning, they released the AppleTV 2.1 Update.

I did manage to get Nito TV’s Smart Installer and Turbo’s Kext Loader running in 2.0.2, but the result was a system so jam packed with stuff it wasn’t supposed to do that video play-back suffered badly. Here’s the steps I took, in case anyone else wants to try it:

• Do a clean restore on your AppleTV. Any previous failed hacking attempts will confuse the installer.
• Patchstick
• Copy over the Nito TV Installer and run it
• sudo bash then mount -uw / to get write access
• Run Nito TVs Fix Permissions script: sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/nitoTV.frappliance/Contents/Resources/fixPerm
• Make a directory called Documents in ~/
• Copy the 10.4.9 Combo Update into that folder
• Install Turbo’s Kext Loader via the Nito TV UI on your AppleTV
• Run the Smart Installer
• Assuming it succeeds, now download and run this guy’s script to fix AFP
• You’ll probably also need to fix permissions on the AppleShare stuff
• Then try a manual mount: mount_afp -i afp://user:password@192.168.1.110/media /Users/frontrow/Movies/
• If that works, you’re in business! Reboot to clear that mount, and check out Sapphire to load content from your mounted folders.
• Finally, install the MPlayer Codecs from the NitoTV UI

Also, I do not recommend installing Perian via the Nito TV menu (its irreparably screwed up playback on me every time, and I’ve had to restore and start over!) Copy over your codecs from an Intel Mac if you can — including Flip4Mac, DivX Import, AC3 Import and the AC52 Audio Component.

Now about 2.1…

Running the 2.1 update did clean-out my hacks. I was hoping it was an install-in-place sort of deal, and it wouldn’t mess with anything it didn’t need… too bad. Here’s what I tried:

• Re-run the Patchstick: Success!
• Install Nito TV: Fail — puts the Finder in an endless start-up loop
• Restore to 2.0.2 re-run the Patchstick, run the update to 2.1: Success
• Install Home MediaCloud: Partial Success… the Finder menu item shows up, but accessing it causes a Finder reboot.

So, for now at least, I’ll have to wait for 2.1 update (and the ability to control my AppleTV with my iPhone) but I guess that’s alright.

Update on 2.1

• Still no luck with Home MediaCloud, and no luck contacting its author. However, NitoTV is updated and working in conjunction with Sapphire Browser. Its cludgey, compared to the uPnP approach, but I’m working on how to refine it.

In our house, a Mac Mini serves at the content library and retreival machine. It runs a Torrent client, iTunes, and TVShows to collect and organize all our media. At night it runs a number of scheduled tasks to keep things orderly and fresh, and when its done (at about 4:00am) it goes to sleep until 8:00am when my wife will want to use it again.

TwonkyMedia server, which is delivering our non-iTunes content onto the AppleTV (via the MediaCloud uPnP client) has a problem with this. It doesn’t recover well from sleep.

The solution is to run an AppleScript every morning at 8:01 to re-start TwonkyMedia. This little AppleScript will access Twonky’s built-in shell script to shut down any running instances, and start-up a fresh one:

do shell script "/Applications/MediaServer.app/Contents/MacOS/twonkymedia.sh &> /dev/null &"

The “&> /dev/null &” sends the shell script’s output to oblivion so that AppleScript doesn’t hang waiting for the server to start-up.

The only annoying part about this is that every time TwonkyMedia starts up, it wants to take you to its home page in your browser. Follow these directions to make TwonkyMedia start-up silently (last post on the page.)

• Useful bash commands:
  sudo the whole session:
  sudo bash

  mount file system as read/write:
  mount -uw /

  remove a whole directory recursively (be careful!):
  rm -r /folder

  modify Hosts file to prevent the AppleTV from reaching the Update server…
  sudo bash -c ‘echo “127.0.0.1 mesu.apple.com” >> /etc/hosts’

• Don’t bother trying to get AFP or SMBFS working in 2.0.2. Even if you put in the missing executable from a Tiger install, and the missing library files, it still won’t work. Turbo’s Kext Loader runs, but the kexts won’t work in 2.0.2.
  Just live with SSH and SCP. A front-end like Fugu will make things a little easier. Will need an uPnP server to get content from another source.
• Although its possible to build a Patchstick without a Tiger install, its not worth the effort. Install Tiger (on an Intel Mac), and make sure you update to 10.4.9 — otherwise you’ll be missing components the Patchstick creator needs.
• Built a working Patchstick using these directions from the AwkwardTV Wiki.
  I used a 128MB USB key — tried using an old iPod Shuffle (512MB) but it wouldn’t boot.
  Execute createPatchstick with no switches to find with disk# to use for my USB stick.
• Trying out NitoTV as an additional media player — most stuff works, some doesn’t on 2.0.2.
• Trying out MediaCloud as a uPnP media finder. It works great.
• Most of iClarified’s AppleTV tutorials are out-of-date/work for 1.x only
• Need to get the audio component of the AC52Codec into /Libary/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components to get those high quality DivX rips working with sound.
• Twonky Media is a decent multi-platform uPnP server for getting content from a Mac onto the AppleTV. Costs about $30.

Just for kicks, I dusted off the old OS/2 Warp discs…

OS/2 was supposed to be the next DOS, developed in co-operation between Microsoft and IBM. Microsoft dropped their end of the deal when Windows 3.0 gained popularity. For awhile, and because they’d shared APIs, IBM was able to run Windows apps within OS/2 Warp, but the compatibility plan wasn’t really in their best interests.
IBM did go on to continue to improve on OS/2 with Warp coming out in 1994 — before Windows 95 was out, adding pre-emptive multi-tasking, improved memory management, and a solid networking stack. But by then Microsoft’s FUD was in effect, and most consumers waited for the next version of Windows.
OS/2 did hold a fair bit of ground in banking and in embedded systems (like ATMs) and although its no longer supported by IBM, a product called eCommstation continues its development and technologies.

Alas, it does not work in VMWare, as they long ago decided support wasn’t worth it. Works fine in VirtualPC, however. This guy has some tips, and you can copy the floppy images right off the CD and use them (without conversion) in VirtualPC.
Once I gave up on VMWare (won’t boot past the second floppy, no matter how I configured the VM) this was one of the easier virtual machines I’ve built. Video was decent at SVGA, sound worked pretty well (the installer likes making funky noises.) Still messing with networking.

Hit the jump for some screen shots…

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