In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440×900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.

Here’s a screenshot:

The code is all in github. If you’re looking for a similar utility, and are brave enough to try my first-ever Obj-C app, you can download it here. But the freshest version will probably be in the github project.

As an aside, I was surprised at how easy it was to cobble this together having never written ObjC before. I found some good examples that I mostly ripped off, but it was still remarkably easy to have the app listen to iTunes for track changes, etc.

Last week I returned from my first trip to Walt Disney World. We had a great time, and I figured it might be helpful to relay some of the things that helped make the trip better.

• Walt Disney World with Kids 2011 – I had my doubts about this book but it had lots of good info for someone who’s never been to Disney World before, like which rides are best for kids. If you’ve never been to Disney World, this is worth reading. I didn’t know Fastpass existed until I read this.
• Disney World Wait Times Free iPhone App – GPS-integrated iPhone app with wait times reported by other app users. Very helpful.
• Disney’s own mobile phone site – Disney’s smartphone page. They have wait times here, but I found them to be pretty inaccurate. E.g. the page may say a wait time is “see now” (i.e. no wait) but there’s actually a 15 minute wait. However, this page was very useful for finding character locations and Fastpass availability.

The best tip for maximizing park enjoyment is to get there as early as possible. We got to Magic Kingdom at 8:30 AM, which was already kind of late compared to the book’s suggestion of arriving 30 minutes before the park opens, but the lines were pretty moderate and we got almost everything we wanted to do (Dumbo, race cars, Philharmagic, Buzz, a few others) done by noon and spent the rest of the day walking around exploring.

Update: I forgot to mention that if you stay at Disney’s resorts, there is no wifi internet. This was a big shock to us, since the hotels we stayed at on the way down (and up) all had free wifi. Disney’s resorts charge $10/day for internet access, which is available through a single ethernet port in each room. There are usually a couple of ethernet ports, but only one works for data (the phones use RJ45 connectors as well). This was pretty annoying because we had two computers and only one port, and the 3G signal in our room was pretty weak so I would have liked to connect my phone to wifi. If you want wifi at a Disney resort, I suggest bringing your own router. I’ve been having good luck with the TP-Link TL-WR841ND Wireless-N router, which Amazon usually has for under $40. I haven’t tried this at Disney so I can’t say for sure it works, but it’s worth a try if you want wireless.

Some people may not be aware that photos taken with the iPhone camera have the GPS coordinates of your location embedded in the EXIF metadata of the file. This means that when you post the picture online or send it to someone, you’re letting them know where you were at a certain place and time. If you’re ok with that then there’s no problem. But if you want to disable it, it’s pretty simple.

The procedure is basically the same as the one I described in this post about enabling Facebook Places. The difference is that once you’re in Location Services you’ll want to make sure “Camera” is disabled. Photos taken from that point on won’t have GPS embedded in their metadata. If you want to turn it back on, just set Camera to “enabled” in Location Services.

I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.

I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) – it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).

But the thing that iTunes does that is so annoying it prompted me to write this whiny rant is:

iTunes 'Song Not Found'

If, for some reason, my M: drive (where the Samba share is mapped) is not connected when iTunes starts, every song in the library gets this “!” exclamation point of doom. If I attempt to play any of these tracks, I am given the option to locate the file. Nice in theory, but locating all 4000 tracks isn’t realistic. If I quit iTunes, reconnect the M: drive, and reopen iTunes, the ! persists. The only solution I’ve found to this is deleting the entire library from iTunes and re-adding it, which as I said, takes an extremely long time.

I have other reasons for hating iTunes, this is a blog, not a book.

I decided to see how “Places” stacked up with Foursquare. I reactivated my Facebook account and reinstalled the iPhone app. Went to “Places” and clicked “Check In,” and… nothing. It mentioned something about turning on Location Services. I know I already have that enabled because other apps are using it without problem. Turns out you need to enable Location Services explicitly:

First, go to the Settings app and select General:

Settings -> General

Select Location Services:

Location Services

Make sure Facebook is enabled (On) if you want to use Places. If you want to disable Places, make sure this is set to Off.

Make sure Facebook is 'On' to use Facebook Places.

Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:

• AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
• If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?

This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.

This was a lot more work than I expected. Then again, I am a newb. And lazy.

• yum install streamdvd – This is what I used to rip the DVD to a VOB file. I played around with a few other utils, including vobcopy and dvd::rip, but this was the only one I tried that ripped the DVD to a single VOB file AND started the movie at the right place. I’m sure there’s other ways to do it, but streamdvd > whatever.vob worked well for me.

• You need to recompile ffmpeg with AAC support. I followed this great walkthrough; you need to install a bunch of libs but when I was done I ended up ffmpeg supporting everything I needed:

  [evan@evanfc12 ~]$ ffmpeg -version
FFmpeg version SVN-r22963, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
built on Jul 11 2010 11:48:47 with gcc 4.4.3 20100127 (Red Hat 4.4.3-4)
configuration: --prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --datadir=/usr/share/ffmpeg --incdir=/usr/include/ffmpeg --libdir=/usr/lib64 --mandir=/usr/share/man --arch=x86_64 --extra-cflags='-O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=generic' --extra-version=rpmfusion --enable-bzlib --enable-libdc1394 --enable-libdirac --enable-libfaac --enable-nonfree --enable-libfaad --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --disable-static --enable-shared --enable-gpl --disable-debug --disable-stripping --shlibdir=/usr/lib64 --enable-runtime-cpudetect
libavutil 50.14. 0 / 50.14. 0
libavcodec 52.66. 0 / 52.66. 0
libavformat 52.61. 0 / 52.61. 0
libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libavfilter 1.19. 0 / 1.19. 0
libswscale 0.10. 0 / 0.10. 0
libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
FFmpeg SVN-r22963
libavutil 50.14. 0 / 50.14. 0
libavcodec 52.66. 0 / 52.66. 0
libavformat 52.61. 0 / 52.61. 0
libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libavfilter 1.19. 0 / 1.19. 0
libswscale 0.10. 0 / 0.10. 0
libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
[evan@evanfc12 ~]$

• Used WinFF to encode the VOB file to .m4v, with these preset settings (conveniently included in the Windows version of WinFF):
  

  -r 29.97 -vcodec libx264 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -crf 21 -bt 256k -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_method full -me_range 16 -subq 5 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp8x8 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -level 30 -trellis 2 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -s 320×240 -aspect 4:3 -acodec libfaac -ab 112kb -ar 48000 -ac 2 -vpre default

That created the .m4v, I loaded it into iTunes and it synced to the phone and plays perfectly. Hooray!

I thought this would be a pretty straightforward task. It was, though it took several minutes to track down the CSS library needed for decryption of the DVD. All I want to do is copy Talking Words Factory to my phone so my kid can watch it in the car if needed. It looked like Brasero was the tool for the job, but I got some error about needing a plugin for it to be able to decrypt it. I found libdvdcss here and after installing the RPM, everything worked. Now I just need to encode it with ffmpeg.

Hooray! This was strange though:

[root@ehoffman yum.repos.d]# yum install libmobiledevice
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Install Process
No package libmobiledevice available.
Nothing to do

[root@ehoffman yum.repos.d]# yum install libiphone libiphone-devel ifuse
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Install Process
Package libiphone is obsoleted by libimobiledevice, trying to install
libimobiledevice-1.0.1-1.fc12.i686 instead

...

================================================================================
 Package                     Arch        Version             Repository    Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 ifuse                       x86_64      1.0.0-1.fc12        updates       20 k
 libimobiledevice            i686        1.0.1-1.fc12        updates       73 k
 libimobiledevice-devel      x86_64      1.0.1-1.fc12        updates       59 k

“There’s no such thing as libmobiledevice… no wait… there it is.” http://libimobiledevice.org/

Edit: I see it now – it’s libimobiledevice.

I was stuck somewhere the other day wishing I had the full movie “Cars” on my iPhone. Surprisingly, this is not something you can presently do through iTunes. After some searching I figured out an easy way to do it for free. The two programs you’ll need are good old DVD Decrypter and WinFF. Put DVD Decryptor in IFO mode and set it not to split the .vob files by size (so it rips them to one huge 6+ GB .vob file). Then drag the .vob file onto WinFF (making sure to use the proper preset for iPhone/iPod) and click “Convert.” It’ll take a while but it works. With my first attempt there seem to be some audio/video sync issues but I’ll play around with it.

Also, see this previous post for more info about WinFF and iPhone-compatible video.

Guess we’re moving.

I’m reading about iPhone development. Doesn’t look terrible.

I’m considering a MacBook. This is about 85% motivated by my desire to try writing an iPhone app, and apparently the SDK requires a Mac. I was thinking of a Mac mini but a laptop seems to have more utility.

I’ll have to think this over for several more weeks I guess.

Oh, and Starcraft Protoss mission 7 is quite annoying.

After a lot of searching for an easy way to do this, I stumbled onto WinFF, which is a gui wrapper around ffmpeg, a GPL’d MPEG encoder. It worked pretty well out of the box, but for all of the AVIs I’d recorded with my old camera (Canon Powershot A540) it would fail immediately with this error:

Audio resampler only works with 16 bits per sample. patch welcome.

After some searching it seems this is related to a known bug which was apparently fixed in February 2009. I set out to find a newer ffmpeg.exe (which is what WinFF calls to do the actual conversion). I found some Win32 builds of ffmpeg here but found that they all claimed to not know the “libfaac” codec. After some more digging I learned that libfaac (the audio codec for MP4 for iPod/iPhone) is no longer considered free software and was dropped from the repository in mid-April. Fortunately there were older builds available, and I grabbed the one dated 2009-04-01, extracted the ffmpeg.exe into my WinFF directory and voila, it worked.

Old ffmpeg.exe:

C:\Documents and Settings\Evan>"C:\Program Files\WinFF\ffmpeg.exe" -version
FFmpeg version SVN-r15986, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --extra-cflags=-fno-common --enable-memalign-hack --enable-pthr
eads --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libxvid --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora
--enable-libspeex --enable-libfaac --enable-libgsm --enable-libx264 --enable-lib
schroedinger --enable-avisynth --enable-swscale --enable-gpl
  libavutil     49.12. 0 / 49.12. 0
  libavcodec    52. 6. 0 / 52. 6. 0
  libavformat   52.23. 1 / 52.23. 1
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libswscale     0. 6. 1 /  0. 6. 1
  built on Dec  3 2008 01:59:37, gcc: 4.2.4
FFmpeg SVN-r15986
libavutil     49.12. 0 / 49.12. 0
libavcodec    52. 6. 0 / 52. 6. 0
libavformat   52.23. 1 / 52.23. 1
libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
libswscale     0. 6. 1 /  0. 6. 1

New ffmpeg.exe:

C:\Documents and Settings\Evan>"C:\Program Files\WinFF\ffmpeg.exe" -version
FFmpeg version SVN-r18306, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --enable-memalign-hack --prefix=/mingw --cross-prefix=i686-ming
w32- --cc=ccache-i686-mingw32-gcc --target-os=mingw32 --arch=i686 --cpu=i686 --e
xtra-cflags=-fno-common --enable-avisynth --enable-gpl --enable-zlib --enable-bz
lib --enable-libgsm --enable-libfaac --enable-pthreads --enable-libvorbis --enab
le-libmp3lame --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libtheora --enable-libspeex --enable
-libxvid --enable-libfaad --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libx264
  libavutil     50. 2. 0 / 50. 2. 0
  libavcodec    52.22. 3 / 52.22. 3
  libavformat   52.32. 0 / 52.32. 0
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1
  built on Apr  2 2009 03:25:40, gcc: 4.2.4
FFmpeg SVN-r18306
libavutil     50. 2. 0 / 50. 2. 0
libavcodec    52.22. 3 / 52.22. 3
libavformat   52.32. 0 / 52.32. 0
libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1

This also works great for encoding videos to XviD, which shrinks them to about 10-20% of their original size, making it much faster (in some cases, possible) to upload them to sharing sites.

I’d resolved to get an iPhone a while back. It seemed to be the hands-down winner for online web browsing. My BlackBerry Pearl lost its trackball around 8 or 9 months ago and due to that experience I wanted a phone with no moving parts. I’d narrowed it down to the Nokia E71x or the iPhone. Well, I got an E71x after determining that the iPhone’s battery life to be too short.

As it turns out, AT&T added so much garbage to the E71x (as compared to the unlocked E71) that I felt like I didn’t even own it, despite paying $100 for it. There were at least two GPS-related apps that I clicked on that informed me I would be charged a monthly fee (one was $2.99 and the other $9.99 monthly) unless I went to some URL on my PC and cancelled. I attempted to delete these apps from the phone but that was apparently forbidden, even through the Nokia PC suite app. Another bother was that the inbox only showed 4 items at a time. On the E71 you can change it so that each inbox item only takes up 1 line, but on the E71x that option was missing. It was also difficult to know which connection each application was using – 802.11 or the 3G network.

Well anyway, to make a short story shorter, after one day I returned the E71x and got an iPhone.

I got my phone in April 2007 from LetsTalk.com. I got a good deal — a BlackBerry Pearl and 2 Motorola RAZR V3rs for… free. No rebates or anything, totally free. LetsTalk screwed up the account creation but I got that straightened out with Cingular.

The BlackBerry served me pretty well until around September 2008 when the trackball got so gunked up I couldn’t use it. I keep my phone in my pants pocket and not in some protective case, so I guess the lint and finger grease got to be too much. I dealt with it like this for a couple of weeks until I decided to try cleaning the ball. It’s pretty easy to remove the clip and take the whole apparatus out, and it was indeed very gunky in there. I went at it with a can of air (computer dusting stuff), a Q-tip and some rubbing alcohol. I got all the gunk off, put it all back together and it was pretty good for about a week or two. Then it was back to its old self – spinning the trackball didn’t do anything and I couldn’t navigate menus or use almost any of the features of the phone. Plus – this is the best part – the plastic clip that kept the trackball apparatus in place had apparently lost tension or something and would pop off, and by the end of 2008 the trackball had fallen out completely and is now lost to the ages.

Fortunately at some point before the complete failure of the trackball, when it still functioned intermittently, I had gone into the configuration and set the left-side convenience key to go to my inbox and the right-side button to go to the web browser. These two apps are navigable using the keypad, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. So my phone still has email and basic browser support, but if a dialog box pops up that doesn’t have hotkeys for “OK” or “Cancel” I have no choice but to hit the “go back/cancel” button, so e.g. I can’t accept many SSL certs.

This whole experience has soured me on the BlackBerry. I’m not buying a phone with a trackball again, and I’d like to buy something with no moving parts if possible. I had high hopes for the BlackBerry Storm – I love the BlackBerry OS – but the week the Storm was released I went to a Verizon store to play with it and I found it horrendous. The reviews that came out about the Storm since then have said pretty much the same thing – the phone is a dud.

After reviewing the options it looks like my two best choices for internet phones are the iPhone and the Nokia e71. A guy at work has the e71 and loves it, but even he has conceded that the iPhone has a superior browser. I’m not a fan of touch keyboards but the iPhone still seems like the most advanced phone available today, even almost a year after the 3G iPhone’s launch.

My contract is already up but I don’t know what I’m going to do. There’s supposed to be an AT&T-subsidized version of the e71, the e71x, coming out pretty soon that’s rumored to cost around $100, but it’s been “real soon now” apparently for several months. I’m leaning toward the iPhone but I hate to spend $200 out of pocket when until now I’ve never paid for a phone.