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PogoPlug as a Siri Proxy

Posted on by jr / 2 Comments

UPDATE 2012-02-03: I realized I forgot about installing the certificate on the non-4S device. Fixed!

UPDATE 2012-02-04: amanpatel pointed out on the ArchLinuxArm forums that you need to make sure base-devel is installed. I’ve updated the prerequisites section to include this.

My wife got an iPhone 4S recently, which of course features Siri, the virtual assistant. I didn’t think I needed a 4S, but I was pretty jealous of Siri. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify for a discounted upgrade since I got my iPhone4 less than a year ago.

Enter Spire by @chpwn. Spire lets you install Siri on a jailbroken iPhone, but it requires the use of a proxy that lets non-4S devices pretend to be a 4S. I found lots of instructions for getting a proxy up and running as a virtual machine, but I don’t like leaving full computers running all the time. I decided to figure out what would be required to make it work with what we had: a PogoPlug server.Continue reading →

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Arcade

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I’ve been working on restoring old arcade machines as a hobby since 2010, and to document my work better I started a blog called 1up Arcade. Since it doesn’t really fit with the types of things I post over here, I won’t be cross-posting, but if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you might want to check out www.1up-arcade.com. I take lots of pictures and I don’t speak in code! 😉

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TomatoUSB on Cisco Linksys WRT610

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Installing TomatoUSB required first installing DD-WRT, then “upgrading” to TomatoUSB.

Setting up optware:

  • Added an external hard disk formatted ext3, with a 512MB swap partition. Set up an fstab entry to automount the larger partition at /opt.
  • Followed instructions on TomatoUSB website for installing optware

Setting up mkvtoolnix:

  • Needed to install prerequisite libraries via ipkg
  • Needed to build Boost libraries. Downloaded from boost.org onto router, installed build tools via ipkg
  • ./bootstrap.sh –prefix=/opt
  • ./bjam –without-python –without-mpi (LOOONG time, a bunch of errors…)
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Practical Computer Science (Education) with Python

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Yesterday I gave a presentation at the eTech Ohio conference titled “Practical Computer Science with Python.” For the past two years, I’ve been teaching computer science to upper schoolers at Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, OH, and in the presentation I shared some of the reasons why I think Python is an excellent choice for a programming language in an Intro CS course.

I’ve uploaded the slides from the presentation for your convenience – next year, I’ll try to record any presentation(s) and put them online as well!

Slides: Practical Computer Science with Python (eTech 2010)

Links:

Blog

Better 7-zip on Windows

Posted on by jr / 3 Comments

I use Macs and I use Windows PCs. Sometimes I have a choice – sometimes I don’t. Overall, I’m definitely more of a fan of the general “Mac” user experience – focusing on making things “just work” with sensible defaults, and using as few clicks as possible to get things done.

On Macs, there is a wonderful program called The Unarchiver that “just works” for extracting ZIP files. It works very similar to the built-in unzipping functionality, but supports many more file formats. I love it – when I double-click on a compressed file, it expands it in the current folder, and it’s very smart about how to do that. If there’s only one file inside the compressed file, it puts it right in the current folder. If there’s more than one file, it puts it into an appropriately-named subfolder.Continue reading →

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Mobi2Kindle – MobiPocket books on Kindle

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Another year, another blog post! If you’re not interested in reading backstory and just interested in getting MobiPocket DRM-protected books onto your Kindle, check out the Mobi2Kindle page at Google Code.

Not too long ago, I won an Amazon Kindle while attending the CS4HS workshop at CMU (Yay Google and other sponsors!). Perhaps not surprisingly, I fell in love with reading on it. I quickly looked for all the free e-books I could, discovering sites like MobileRead and FeedBooks, with their ultra-sweet Kindle-based book browsers (Click and download right on the Kindle? Awesome!). However, their selections of recent works are certainly… lacking. Only a few authors have really embraced free e-book distribution, and while I do love Cory Doctorow, my brain really craved more.

Continue reading →