Carl Hutzler’s Blog

One of my clients wanted to download the front page of several newspapers each day and make them easily accessible to the entire staff. When they asked me for help, they were doing it manually by visiting the Newseum’s website and downloading the front page of each paper manually (via bookmarks in their web browser) and then using PDF Combiner to output 18 front pages as a single PDF. Then they would email the 10-20MB file to everyone.

Well there were a number of issues with that approach including the manual process (time consuming) and the large file which was filling up outboxes and inboxes. At first we explored how to make the PDFs into smaller files…perhaps a JPG of the page instead of a PDF. But this was problematic as it was then hard to read the fine print if the reader actually wanted to read an article as opposed to just seeing the headlines.

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The other day I was using my Sprint cell phone as a modem connected to my laptop over bluetooth. I was surprised to receive a normal voice call during the data connection. I took the call as normal and when I was finished I hung up and the data connection went right back to working without having to do anything on the laptop. It was just like my old Cingular service used to work. Why was I surprised? Well because I have always been told that this capability (to put a data session on hold and allow a voice call through) was an amazing feature of the GSM cellular technology and the antiquated CDMA technology just “could not do this”. Those darn sales people.

So I looked online and found out that Sprint does allow incoming calls to your phone during a data session BUT only if the data TX and RX happen to be idle at the moment the call comes in. I guess I was just lucky the other day when the call came in as my data session must have been fairly idle. So I poked around a little more online and found this site which explained how to switch the feature to ALWAYS allow a voice call to place your data session on hold. And I just tried it and it works exactly as you would expect….you are in a data session using your phone as a modem and a call comes in. The data session is “put on hold” while you take the call. Then when you hang up the voice call, the data session resumes automagically. Laptop has no idea the data session even paused! (of course if you are on the phone for a long time, I imagine some data session stuff might time out on the laptop, but that’s another issue)

Anyway, the way you do this is right on the web page above. It involves going into the service menu on your Motorola V3m phone (by entering ##3282# as the phone number). Then you select EVDO from the menu and edit the DDTM setting to be OFF. Very simple, but you need to get your phone’s MSL code to do it!! This code, called the Master Subsidy Lock, is of course some silly secret of the cell phone company. And they usually will not give it to you. But I found a simple way to make them give it to you. Just call up and say you put a security lock code on your phone and have forgotten the password lock code. They will tell you to try the last 4 of your SS# and the last four of your phone number, and a bunch of other stuff. Just say “its not working”. Then you will get transfered to technical support. They will tell you to enter the magical service menu by hitting ##3282# on your phone. Once in, they will walk you through the menus and eventually tell you to hit EDIT on one of them to reset your lock/security code. The phone will then ask for your MSL code before letting you do this. Just write down what the tech support guy tells you. Now you have your MSL !! (fyi, the MSL is different for every phone and its based on the IMEI code which is unique to every device…so don’t use an MSL code for one phone on another phone even it’s the same make/model or you can lock your phone forever as this code is also related to unlocking your phone so you can use it on other cell networks).

Dial *2 for Sprint customer service :-)

First things first!
This is a tutorial on how to rip DVDs you own and not how to steal movies!

That said, there is a legitimate need to be able to take DVDs you own and turn them into files that can be streamed/played, installed on your iPod or iPhone, or used with an AppleTV or other media device. This is a tutorial on how I do it for one of my clients along with a script I customized to make the whole process easy.

The set-up I have for one of my clients is a central Mac Mini server (headless - no keyboard/monitor/mouse) which we use for the iTunes server. It runs iTunes all the time and does not do much of anything else. We have a number of AppleTV’s on the network and each of them is paired with the iTunes library on the Mac Mini server. This set-up allows my client to play/stream any music or movies in the iTunes library on any AppleTV. This works well for their purposes.

The issue I needed to solve for my client was to make it easy to rip all of their media/content into iTunes. Automating the music ripping was easy as iTunes has built in preferences for automating the ripping of music. Just go to iTunes preferences and tell it to rip a music CD when one is inserted in the Mac Mini and when complete, eject it. Done.

But what about DVD movies? Read more

From Lifehacker.com

Just like you can get 6 AAA batteries from the inside of a regular 9V battery and 8 watch batteries from one of those expensive 12V garage door opener type batteries, looks like you can also tear apart one of those huge lantern batteries and get 32 AA batteries from the inner guts! I wonder if this is more cost effective?

First let me say that I am not a network engineer. I understand a lot about networks and how to string stuff together. But my experience is mostly on the end user side of things without knowledge of Cisco routers, IP Tables, Firewalls, etc. So if I get something technically wrong, you have my disclaimer :-)

That said, I have been experimenting with those small routers you buy at Circuit City for $50 or so made by Linksys, Buffalo Technologies, etc. What you do is buy one of these gizmos (make sure you get one that is compatible) and then “upgrade” the firmware in the router to an open source firmware called DD-WRT. To be fair, DD-WRT is not the only game in town. Open WRT, Tomato, and others do exist and may even be better in some ways. But I have found that DD-WRT has very good documentation and wide-spread use and support. I like to use what other people are using as they help me by figuring stuff out and publishing the “how to’s”.

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I posted about the new CircaVie.com site a few days ago and had a question in the comments area about how I embedded the Flash animation into my blog.

It is a good question and it was not 100% easy to do. I tried something similar a while ago with a youtube video and had similar issues.

I first tried a number of Wordpress plugins I found but none seemed easy and most of them just did not work. They got the Flash animation to embed, but then all the blog posts afterwards had formatting issues.

Finally I found a site where someone named “guitarman” said that removing extra white space was the secret. That indeed worked! Evidently WP will replace whitespace in your embed code with <BR> tags which messes up the embed code in the final post.

So I simply removed the carriage returns and other spaces and embedded the code. PS: you have to the embedding of the code by going into the Wordpress text editor (the normal one you use to post a blog entry) and clicking on the CODE tab so you can just paste in the HTML code.

Feel free to view source on the post to see for yourself.

I have a 6GB iPod mini and it has served me well for many years. And it continues to do the job. I have two accessories that I use all the time - a Belkin cig lighter for the car and an Airclick RF remote which allows me to hide the iPod in my wayyy insecure jeep wrangler. I just put the remote in a kinda out of sight but easy to operate location and no one realizes that there may be something worth steeling inside (well until I just posted this on my blog I guess ;-)

I also use the RF remote to control the ipod on long runs. iPod in camelbak and remote in pocket. Works well to skip over those boring tunes on a long run.

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The other day my wife, Rylan, made a fairly simple request. Could we buy a dual tuner Tivo and replace the old ReplayTV unit we are currently using? She had heard the new ones had two tuners inside and could record two shows at once and she had a handful of shows that were on at the same time. Seeing as how these machines were also being given away “free” around Christmas time (according to the ad she heard) she figured it was a reasonable request. Little did I know that it would turn into a 2 week experimentation effort! Read below (after the fold) to learn from my experiments and save yourself some time.
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