schlingel.me

On the interwebs, everyone seems to make fun or ridicule conservatives. Not that I find that a bad thing most of the time. For example:

Conservatives: We want to control and censor the Internet!
Us: These idiots don't understand the web, change/new is good!

Conservatives: We don't think gay people should be allowed to get married!
Us: These idiots are afraid of things being different.

And so on. 

But the second something in our holy internet world changes, we become conservatives right away. Whining and bitching about something to change like our lives would depend on it.

Most recent example: Twitter

It seems Twitter found a way to move on. To monetize their platform and to make it more appealing to the general public. They release a new version of their iPhone app, and refresh the Web site, and again we idiots start crying like babies. We start to yell at them, because we don't think DMs are as accessible as we want them to be, we whine because we don't see a need for a "Discover" tab. As before with #fixreplies we moan about the change and want things to be the old way (yes I moaned too). And of course, the user interface of the app is different. How dare they?!

For fucks sake, wake up. Change happens! We are changing the world every day and require others to embrace the change we come up with, but are unable to cope with DMs moving to another spot or the fact that Twitter tries to focus more on stories?

Face it: Twitter offered us a great service for years, free of charge without a business model, but still paying their people, servers and bandwidth. Now with "Discover" they might have found a way to inject sponsored messages into your Twitter experience. So what? TV does it. Youtube does it. And your favorite blog probably does it as well. Why for heavens sake is Twitter not allowed to change and start to generate revenue?

Take a closer look at "Discover" for a while. I already found bits of interesting stuff and new interesting people to follow. Now think about people new to Twitter, suddenly they have easier access to trending/popular topics.
For me, Twitter always was about getting information and comunicating with people, and while the communication part didn't change, getting information just got easier.

Oh and in case you are just whining about the new look, functions or whatever of the new Twitter iPhone app, there are tons of developers standing there with open arms, ready to welcome you to a world of a Twitter client that might just do exactly what you want.

So please stop whining, stop being conservative and live the future (also in technology), because the future begins. Right. Now.

Many of you might have noticed that TuneSwitch doesn't work on OS X Lion any more. That is because the method I used to access the keychain doesn't work any more on Lion. I had plans to port it over but then I came across an app that does the same thing as TuneSwitch, but from the menubar and it it Lion compatible. It is also free if you were wondering. The only downside is that it doesn't use the keychain but its own (probably proprietary) storage format (maybe it is just CoreData), but there is no saving passwords in plain text if you were worried.

So without further ado, I announce TuneSwitch to be discontinued and refer you to http://www.appletips.nl/itunes-account-switcher/

Thanks to Alex from http://www.iphoneblog.de for telling me about iAS.

UPDATE: I discontinued TuneSwitch, see more at http://schlingel.me/tuneswitch-on-os-x-lion-discontinued

NOTE: I am getting quite a few reports about iTunes crashing or passwords being improperly filled. I am unable to reproduce these errors. If you encounter this behavior, please leave me a note in the comments, with your iTunes and OS X version. (thanks to Morten for this!)

As seen on Reddit there is a possibility to switch between iTunes Store accounts using AppleScript. 

While I liked the Idea, I didn’t like the way it was done. You had to store the password in plain text in the script and you needed one script for each account. Instead I wanted a solution that took advantage of the OS X Keychain. 

So I built TuneSwitch. Upon first launch, it will offer you the possibility to create a Keychain entry for your first account.

Read the rest of this post »

EPIC!

A while back, I posted a bit about how to use Pandora without a VPN and it worked sort of. From time to time, I’d also like to use other services like Hulu.com or whatever service thinks I am not american enough to use it. So I finally subscribes to BlackVPN. It gives you a US IP by providing a VPN connection that also has some kind of anonymization without plastering your face with ads like HotspotShield does, but it costs 5€/month. (If you want to sign up for BlackVPN, use my offer code TRSHNHG, it’ll give you 2 extra months free.)

So here was the problem again: I don’t want to send all my traffic over the VPN so I started searching and asking people on Twitter. My friends @Loredo and @wnetoa finally showed me how to properly set up static routes.

In essence what has to be done is to create a file (or modify it if it already exists) called ip-up in /etc/ppp

It’s contents need to be

#!/bin/sh

# pandora
/sbin/route add 208.85.40.0/21 -interface ppp0

This will install a new static route for every IP from 208.85.40.0 to 208.85.47.254 (that is roughly the iP range Pandora uses) over your VPN connection everytime you connect a VPN. Please also make sure the file is owned by root and chmod it to 0755.

That also means, whatever VPN connection you establish, this route will be set. You could add an if-statement to check if the correct gateway is selected but as the BlackVPN gateway changes all the time I just didn’t care. Furthermore routing this IP block through other VPNs wouldn’t matter as it would just not work as it does without the VPN.

Make sure that in OS X you a) use the built in VPN client and b) DON’T send all the traffic over VPN!

Why didn’t I do it for e.g. Hulu? Well, while finding out the IP range for the site might be easy, their data comes from akamai and this will most likely turn out to be a PITA. So I just created a second VPN connection in OS X that routes everything through BlackVPN.

This will most likely also work on Linux, and if you have Windows: do a format c: and install a proper OS like e.g. Ubuntu :)

If someone intends to buy MS Office:mac 2011 that will be released in October, I’d suggest buying Office:mac 2008  now. If you buy it from now on, you’ll be eligible to upgrade to 2011 for free. Even better: you buy the normal home & student version and get a 2011 familiy pack, that contains 3 licenses and would retail for about 149€ (equals $857495,12)

The best deal I found for germany was actually on amazon: http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/asin/B0010QTCKM/digital0c-21

For the US: http://www.softwaremedia.com/microsoft/office-suites/office-2008-for-mac-home-and-student.html

Where to get the free upgrade and all the Terms: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/office-2011-upgrade.mspx

Hey guys, I am a little out of ideas here.

At home, I need to re-connect to my wifi every five minutes, because my internet connectivity is gone. 

I still have an IP address, and I don’t need to reset my router or so. It is just disconnection from the Wifi in OS X and reconnecting. At the office, I have absolutely no problem but at home, I do. At first I thought it was my old Airport Express as it is over 5 years old. So I got an Extreme today, set it up completely fresh but no luck. Same problem. 

This happens with all the machines in the household, also iPhones and is pretty annoying. 

My setup: Airport Extreme, connected to a router/DSL-Modem in the basement. I didn’t replace the router so far as I don’t have a spare one. Would a it make sense that this issue comes from the router? (The Airport Extreme is in DHCP Bridge mode BTW). 

I always get an IP adress within seconds. Weird.

Any other ideas than replacing the router?

Google did all to prevent non-US residents to get a google voice number. But there is a way.

• At first you need a Google Voice invite (I have three left if you are interested) and this might be the hardest part.
• You need a US IP address, this can be done by using HotspotShield from http://anchorfree.com. Install the software, connect and go on.
• Now you can sign up for Google Voice. Choose your number wisely, because changing it costs $10.
• It will then ask you for a real US Phone number to verify (and redirect) your calls.
• Get yourself a free number over at http://www.virtualphoneline.com
• In the Virtualphoneline settings, redirect your Number to your Skype acount.
• Go back to Google Voice, enter the VPL phone number and let them call you
• Your Skype will ring and you have to enter the two digit code to confirm the number
• Done.
• If you happen to have registered a Gizmo (http://www.gizmoproject.com) account a while back you can add Gizmo as a phone number (http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115122)
• Maybe you can simply download Gizmo from e.g. versiontracker.com and register an account inside the app.
• You still can’t add non-US phone numbers to your account, but you have a free US phone number and as you might know: GV even gives you the possibility to make free US calls e.g. using Gizmo (http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115123).

So, why not just going with the Virtualphoneline number?
They only have longer numbers for free. The call quality is rather poor. The service is good but a little weird. No customizable voicemail. No free outbound calls.

Any Questions?