Need a "car".

Yes, an update after some time. You may think that after getting my driver's license a while back, I've killed or at least badly injured myself. Didn't happen, I was just lazy to update this friggin' blog. 

And that's kinda the point of this post. After I got my license, I've been driving cars we have at home, a bunch of cars that my friends own , but in the end they are all the same. You get it, fire up the engine (like it was an obvious thing that should occur), select the D on the automatic transmission and that's about it. Of course, if you feel sporty, you just slam the throttle through the floor or fiddle with those paddles under steering wheel. But I feel that's not the thing that will teach me how to drive. And if anything happens the MMI or iDrive will tell you "Your brake pads are worn and shall be replaced in 3000km".  It will tell you about everything, seat-belts, open doors, lack of windshield washer fluid, when you run of gas, where buy it and even engage the parking brake when you turn off the engine. 

That's all very nice but the whole car then feels like GTA or Need for Speed game. You board your safety bubble and cruise around. Those cars will do anything but teach me to drive and understand how a real car works. So after seeing the TopGear: 100 pound car challenge, I think that's the way to go. I picked the price range of around $500/£250 because there are simply no street legal cars for £100. What I'm asking you, is to donate. C'mon, this is the internet, people have been donating to a guy who bought a Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 and smashed it. Along with our donation, you can make a suggestion, but things like "remove all the seats and turn it into rally car" or "smash it against wall like Jeremy did" - they will go last when I get bored of it ;)

Below you can finance my boredom ;)

Tasty review.

Today we’re going to look at a spectacular piece of human invention called the chewing gum! Not only that it’s making your breath adopt nice and fresh smell, which can score you some serious credit at ladies, but it also makes your jaws go on and on, keeping them in motion and your mouth producing saliva. All this leads to healthier lifestyle and I strongly recommend it to everyone.
My pick is the Wrigley’s Orbit with Spearmint aroma. It’s pleasingly fresh but yet not making a hurricane in your mouth like some strong mint chewing gums do. The one’s I have come in special edition “can” which contains 50 pieces for just 40CZK. For comparison, regular pack of 10 pieces runs you about 13 to 20CZK, depending on place of purchase. The only downside that I found is that they become very very soft and maybe even a bit uncomfortable to chew very quickly, not loosing the taste. That makes you reconsider if you’re really about to spit this one out and have a fresh piece. Other problem is, by chewing chewing gums, the production of saliva raises and the stomach begins to “expect” some food soon, so you’ll feel really hungry after chewing for 3 hours and walking around a shopping mall.

How to install the iPod Classic-like firmware from Mac.

Let's say you want this iPod Classic interface for 5th Gen iPods. And your iPod is Mac formated and you're actually running on Mac. No iPodWizard here, but dont' cry, this guide is here to help you ;)
This guide assumes you know how to use terminal a bit...knowing how to copy and paste may be fine but if you run into problems, sorry mate ;)

$ sudo su
Password:

And here we are, at the root shell. Now let's see what drives are connected to this computer.

# disktool -l
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s3',Mountpoint = '/Volumes/Ondra's iPod', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'Ondra's iPod')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0s2',Mountpoint = '/', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'PowerGeek HD')

Okay, so our iPod is at /dev/disk2. We'll list the partitions on it so we know what to patch. Press "P" to list partitions and then quit by hitting "Q".

# pdisk /dev/disk2
Edit /dev/disk2 -
Command (? for help): p

Partition map (with 2048 byte blocks) on '/dev/disk2'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map partition map 62 @ 1
2: Apple_MDFW firmware 64197 @ 63 (125.4M)
3: Apple_HFS disk 39005820 @ 64268 ( 74.4G)

Device block size=2048, Number of Blocks=39075371 (74.5G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Command (? for help): q

So the firmware is on /dev/disk2s2 and the partition is almost 128MB big. We'll dump the whole partition, first cause we'll be patching it and if we fail, we can upload it back and have working iPod.

# dd bs=1048576 if=/dev/disk2s2 of=ipod.firmware.backup
125+1 records in
125+1 records out
131475456 bytes transferred in 208.553903 secs (630415 bytes/sec)

So we've got the backup of the firmware of our hard-drive, now let's cook the new firmware. Make a copy of the iPod Classic firmware for 5G iPod (the backslashes are there to escape the spaces).

# cp iPod\ Classic\ for\ 5.5G ipod.firmware

and now we append the rest of the firmware we've backed up from the iPod. This will go slow cause we're using just 1k blocks. If you're using other version than 1.0.2, get the filesize of the ipod.firmware file and divide it by 1024

# ls -ls ipod.firmware
27152 -rwxr-xr-x 1 ondra ondra 13899776 Oct 14 16:27 ipod.firmware
# bc
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
13899776 / 1024
13574

So now we know how many blocks to skip so we'll run this timely procedure.

# dd bs=1024 skip=13574 seek=13574 if=ipod.firmware.backup of=ipod.firmware
114820+0 records in
114820+0 records out
117575680 bytes transferred in 1921.707499 secs (61183 bytes/sec)

We have everything ready, so upload the modified firmware to the iPod. Upload to the iPod using this command, but modify it so it matches your iPod's connection. You could easily wipe some external hard-drive or something, so chech twice and type once ;)

# dd bs=1048576 if=ipod.firmware of=/dev/disk2s2
125+1 records in
125+1 records out
131475456 bytes transferred in 208.553903 secs (630415 bytes/sec)

That's about it, disconnect your iPod and enjoy. If it fails to boot for some reason, either play with these commands it or upload the firmware backup.
# dd bs=1048576 if=ipod.firmware.backup of=/dev/disk2s2

New iPods arrived, so how about the names ?

In the times before yesterday, there was really simple iPod line-up. As Apple started making iPods more available to general public by making them cheaper, it always affected the features. First the mini, it was only 4GB (later 6GB) so it was kinda limited compared to "the iPod" (I'll get to this later). They they made the shuffle, again, no display, flash only memory. Tell me it was aimed at different target group but after all it was limited compared to his big brothers. "The iPod" then gained photo support, cool color display and mini was still there, black and white. Later on, Apple decided to kill the most successful iPod of the time, the mini as they introduced the nano and iPod video. But video was only nickname. It was still called "The iPod". It was on top them all. Nano could do the photos as the iPod with color display...but 5th generation brought in video support and it had plenty of storage compared to nano. So again "the iPod" was on top of them all!

That all changed yesterday. They had to give "classic" attribute to "the iPod" which was generally just upgraded with cooler OS and twice the storage.

"The iPod" is GONE!

Admit it, there's just no prime iPod that would be superior to any others...see, the touch has sleek interface, mostly everything the iPhone has but the storage is limited to 16GB. The iPod classic has tons of space, endless battery life but you can't pinch your photos or browse the web on it...the nano is the classic with smaller screen and less flash memory...but same otherwise, it can even import photos with the iPod Camera Connector. And that's a thing the "touch" can't do! WTF ? Why not?! Click the link to see for yourself...

Summary? You can't be "cool" and "on top if it all" with just one iPod today.

>P.S.: Apple just killed the original color of iPod yesterday. No love for white anymore :(

LOLCat caption contest...

Just a quick one...yes, yet again ;)


We've got a LOLcat caption contest, if you know what that is and you has teh toelz, u can joint. if you're using a mac and you a miss the perfect skitch, just drop me a note to soukupondra on gmail (dotcom, yes ;) and u can has invitez




tis be teh sours for u

---

by Matt Holland

---

by Nik Fletcher

---

by me

And now some from ones that don't understand this kind of art...

by Nathan Makan

---

by Sam Critchlow

---

by Graham Gilbert

So WTF are you waiting for, hop on for some skitch invites or lolcats ;)

How HD Photo will (not) catch up.

End of rant. It will not catch up, look at JPEG2000 and where it is now. Embedding it into RFID chips in passports is the only use they found for it. No browser really supports it. No camera records pictures into it.

After reading this article, the first thing I thought of was the JPEG2000 "affair". The JPEG group liked it too, they said it's superior to normal old JPEG and it somehow...died :)

And what do you think will happen to Windows Imaging Format, HD Photo, JPEG XR or whatever they call it this morning. Customer buys a camera. Takes some nice pictures, goes to his favorite photo store where they have those automatic kiosks to get prints from his memory card. He (or she) inserts the card...and nothing happens, the device screams that there are no pictures on the card, customer freaks out, runs home and his Vista Home Premium (short name, huh ?) displays all pictures just fine. If he's one of those more or less tech savvy people, he'll set the camera from HD Photo to plain old, but working, JPEG. And will never ever care to switch it back. Cause it just drives him into problems.

JPEG 2000 is back, just today it came from the company that loves proprietary formats and licensing them at high prices. I think we've got some stuff to look forward to!

Wifi: Free or not ?

When the first public wifi network began to show up, it might have been late 2001 here in Czech Republic. Mainly hotels and the high-end cafés began to share their 128kbit/s line with their customers. But then someone though it's possible to make money out of it. And who's got the infrastructure ? And it wouldn't cost him virtually anything to make a hotspot ? Yes, landline and mobile providers. So former Eurotel and Telecom (merged and bought by O2 by now) decided to start a pilot service. Noone ever in czech republic has been taking money for hour or two of wireless connection. They offered their service to many hotes and pushed it into every single KFC restaurant. And it was free, until they've announced the service officially launched. You send them SMS, they bill you $3, that goes to your current phone bill. and you have the right to use it for hour. Or you can have 2 hours for $5. Or 24 hours for $15.

You can say "it's not really that expensive", but you could have a nice desert instead of 1 hour WiFi. It might been due to lack of propagation, people's lazyness to hassle with the payment or anything else.

The fact is that the service usage dropped after payments were required. T-Mobile did the same and I've never paid them a buck. I've been using the Eurotel's WifiJet (that was the name) with some free coupons, 4 times 5 hour coupon...I've drained them all and paid around 3 hours myself. But that's it. See ? It's free, people use it. It's not free and you think about it...do I really need the internet right now ?

All the cafés that got T-Mobile representative's head stuck in their ass telling them how the hotspot service is great are now ditching them, leaving open wifi for everyone. KFC decided they'll buy the all the network related equipment from O2 and run their own free WiFi in all the restaurants. Even on the Prague airport. Funny thing is that it's the first WiFi network there. Just because the airport didn't like any of those paid hotspot providers' terms.

The internet getting is free again, like it was meant to be when word "hotspot" was invented.

Do you think the "paid" and "free" seesaw will ever flip to free completely ? And flip back again then ? I know it's not possible to kill every paid hotspot provider, but if enough people choose to go to café with free WiFi over a paid one, they might just kill themselves...