cmdline

For all readers out there on a mac, here’s a nifty little tool for you.  GeekTool (http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/) is a preference pane that lets you embed the output of terminal commands, images, and text files to your desktop.  With a knowledge of unix, applescript, and aesthetics anyone can easily sexy up their desktop, like mine.

The preference pane itself has some cool features.  Each element of your desktop can easily be turned off or on, and groups of elements can be made for different situations.  Like if there are certain logs you need to monitor at work, but an iTunes updater is the least of your worries.  With GeekTool, its easy to switch between two groups whenever you find the need.  The appearance of your text is completely customizable, so making it look pretty is easy.

Here are just a few ways to bring the coolness to a desktop near you. 

Monitoring CPU and memory usage can be done using the output of top.  For the former, make a new shell entry, and add 

top -l 1 | awk ‘/CPU usage/ {print $8, $9, $10, $11, $12, $13}’

which outputs…

Adding any output of the top command can be done in a very similar manner.  Just replace the /CPU usage/ part with any titles of the statistics at the top of the output, then play around with different numbers ($8, $9, $10) to get the final display you want.

To update iTunes information, download this simple applescript and copy it to the directory of your choosing.  Make a new entry in GeekTool and type

osascript /whatever/path/you/used/itunesinfo.scpt 

That’ll give you an extraordinarily attractive notifier on your desktop.

To monitor space on your hard drive(s), use the command

df -H -l

which gives you…

Using the ‘cal’ and ‘uptime’ commands both give you very useful information without any further configuration.

That’s my basic intro to GeekTool.  Its amazingly expandable, so continue playing with and you might find some really cool uses.

–jjhappypants

Ever since January of this year, I have been waiting for the second book in the Wizzywig series to be ready for distribution. The first volume, subtitled “Phreak” follows a young kid named Kevin Phenicle who goes by the handle Boingthump. Let me say, this isn’t some drab piece of writing you would find in the discount bin at your local book outlet. These are graphic novels, containing anything but a boring story about some kiddie hacker acting out a stereotype. This first book I read about Boingthump was a definite, and somewhat unexpected, treat. The bulk of the story was composed of little snippets of this character’s doings. From his first experience with blueboxing to social engineering pizza, the story is rife with creative scenarios that paint a vivid picture of an anykid in the golden age of phreaking. Suffice it to say I was impressed by just how much fact went into the story, and was curious to see where it would go… or where it would take me.

Fast forward to November. I stumbled across Ed Piskor’s website after forgetting about it for a little while. I found out that the second book had been completed and was ready for purchase, so I quickly snagged myself a copy, which arrived in the mail quickly after my purchase. Upon reading the book, I was happy to see much of the same structure as was present in the first. The story bounced back and forth between present day (Kevin has been incarcerated) and his younger days when he started experimenting with computers, and became immersed in a new, exciting, and scary world found through his phone lines.

The story found in these books is not your cookie cutter hacker epic. Take your Hackers, your Die Hard 4, your Swordfish, and throw them out the window. Ed takes careful attention to detail, nothing here is a stretch of the imagination and you can see he has done his homework in the creation of these novels. Reading along, you’ll be able to see all he has done simply by what is alluded to. No Hollywood garbage trying to make hacking seem glamorous or news stories spewing out tales that this underground world is full of all kinds of dangerous people who can make a computer explode. Ed gives the honest, gritty perspective the genre has hardly ever been represented by.

Summing things up, I don’t know anyone who is showing the world of phreak/hack culture in this fashion. Ed has truely honed his craft, and the fact that he himself is only an admirer of this culture, and not a participant only ampliphies his qualities. If you liked the first one, you probably already have the second, and are waiting patiently for the third and fourth. For those of you who haven’t jumped on the wagon yet, you can purchase both books directly from Ed at his website. There are also previews of both of the books, so you can read a few panels before deciding.

Also, I happen to be “in” the second installment as an angry fellow on page 10.

-Famicoman

As some may know, a while back, Moonlit and myself took on the task of creating an archive of iptv shows using Stage6, the now defunct divx/xvid streaming site. Unfortunately for us, Stage6 closed up shop only a few weeks after the founding of this project, and since then, we had been in a state of paralysis. There were at the time very few sites that offered decent quality streaming.

A small time after Stage6 went down, I opened two accounts on video sites. One account on Vimeo and another on Blip.tv with the intent of testing each service. Both of them perform admirably, however I couldn’t see an IPTV archive surviving long on Vimeo; it just didn’t seem that type of site. Blip on the other hand gave me a Stage6 vibe with the interface and an (I’m still toying with this) ability to stream videos with different codecs. It also allowed for the download of videos in their original form, something sites like youtube lack.

So I’ve uploaded a few videos with the intent to upload more, and mold the channel info into something other than a blank template. You can see the fruits of my labor as they involve below. I’m trying to see if multiple accounts can be chained to a common channel.

-Famicoman