Two small changes need to be made first though to make it less desktop like; and more Server Like (yes before installing Lion Server App).

Power

The single biggest issue with Mac Minis is getting them to power on automatically after a power cut, or when power is removed. If your server doesn’t switch on when the power is restored, this will have the effect of turning your machine off.

and change the settings to

Other things worth poking are:

Turn the Firewall on

and turn off location services.

Running without a screen

My mac mini gets upset if I ask it to boot without a Screen (VDU, or Monitor) the easiest way of dealing with this is to make a simple terminator to convince the Lofn that a (non-DDC) monitor is attached. All that’s needed is to connect a 75Ω resistor between pins 2 and 7 of the (analogue) VGA connector. I have acquired a DVI to VGA ( DB15) converter and have bent its legs into the holes; and glued it in place on the connector.

Setting up as a server

At the moment due to nbArianrhod having a broken engine I am currently living at my parents in Swindon, so I am going to try and set up Lofn in a testing environment off my parents Virgin Media connection using uandc.co.uk as my test domain (being that Daniel Webb has failed to buy it off me). as I bring it up and get it working I will continue to blog my findings.

The AgendA

The AgendA is a British-designed organiser from the mid-80s. Its most striking feature is the microwriter keyboard. As if to encourage the use of the microwriter, the conventional keyboard is arranged alphabetically.

The microwriter is a descendant of the first chord keyboards, pioneered by Doug Engelbart (inventor of the mouse). Part of the innovation involved in the AgendA was a system of mnemonics to assist in learning the chords. Once the user had learnt the basics, it was possible to move on to more advanced uses of the chord keyboard including a full set of single-chord commands for the machine.

The Microwriter

The original Microwriter was not an organiser but a writing machine designed by Cy Endfield and first sold in 1980. It was intended to be used as a text input device, as well as to help the disabled to communicate. It could only show a single line of text on its built-in LED display, but it had interfaces to external display and storage devices. The photo shows a later model with a one-line LCD, released in 1982.

A review of the first version appeared in Personal Computer World magazine in December 1980, and a review of the improved version appeared in September 1982. Both versions sold for £500.

Data Egg

The Data Egg‘s “keyboard” consists of seven buttons (at least 3 for the thumb, 1 for each of the remaining fingers) wrapped around a shape that’s easy for the hand to hold. The seven buttons are pressed in different combinations, much like playing chords on a piano (hence the name ‘chording’), and can be used to type all letters, all numbers, all punctuation — pretty much anything one can type on a typewriter. The Alphabet is also easy to learn since the shapes of the letters resemble the button patterns that are pressed.

GKOS

There is also GKOS (Global Keyboard Open Standard) system that claims to have Full QWERTY capabilities with only 6 keys on the back of a device.

Twiddler2

The Twiddler2.1 is a pocket-sized mouse pointer plus a full-function keyboard in a single unit that fits neatly in either right or left hand. The Twiddler incorporates a keyboard which ergonomic keypad designed for “chord” keying.

These just make up a few of the keyboards I have had a look at; Greg Priest-Dorman¹ has done a lot of playing with these through his time of having a wearable computer.

There are a lot of Aids & Guides to written for the EkaPad available here; and the howto for another home made one the “Septambic Keyer” here;

More Thoughts

I think unlike the Palantype or Stenograph keyers; I am going to go with single letter cording; using either the Septambic Keyer or Chordite as the base for my keyboard.

I have ordered some switches from ebay; and have Poly-Form Mouldable Plastic to make the handset.

If you want details on how to take apart a mac mini there is a guide here

So my mac mini now has 2 Gigs of Ram meaning that installing lion is easy now. there are a couple of hard drive mounts for making use of the optical drive bay available [1 2] so the next addition may be a second internal hard drive; or an upgrade of the primary hard drive.

The Plan then will be to reduce my hosting charges, but increase the amount of Hard Drive space and Ram I have available (there may be a reduction in Traffic allowance); by moving my machine into Mythic Beasts Mac Mini Co-Lo hosting.

Once all this is up and Running; b0atg1rl and I plan to try and get some more clients; and work to formalise Just Vigilantes, My more Professional blog is at PhilipMcGaw.co.uk

There are two types of keyboard used in the UK for STTRs (Speech to Text Reporter), the Palantype system and the Stenograph system. Unlike a QWERTY keyboard, not every letter in a word is pressed, but several keys will be pressed at once whaich represent whole words, phrases or shortforms. Specially designed computer software will then convert these phonetic chords back into English which can then be displayed for someone to read. This system can also be used for subtitling and closed captions in television broadcasts or Webcasts²

Stenograph System

A stenotype, stenotype machine or shorthand machine is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use. Some users of this machine can reach 300 words per minute.³

The Stenograph system is whole words in a cord; not just one letter; which while faster to type with than individual letters, it would mean learning word lists, and learning to spell full words as chords would take far too long.

Palantype System

The Palantype system like the Stenogpah System is also corded:

recording words phonetically syllable by syllable instead of letter by letter. To effect this, several keys can be depressed at the same time, as with a chord on the piano, instead of having to be depressed one at a time in sequence. The overall saving in the number of keystrokes is shown in the Tables and the corresponding saving in time is not difficult to imagine.⁴

Something of interest on the Spelling Society’s site was this article about AgiliWriting⁵, an abbreviated, alphabetic shorthand that, if taken down correctly and legibly, can be transcribed by anyone else on a computer which has an automatic word processing conversion program to transcribe the text into standard English (auto replace/correct).

My Idea

Since learning cords for full words may be harder than just learning cords for single letters, I am looking at somthing like ”Yet Another One-hand Keyboard” ⁶, it has not been updated since 16/09/2010.

since I have now got some experance with using a Teensy as a human interface device, as such I will use that again.

When I am next around the London area it may be an idea to have a wonder along to see the Incorporated Phonographic Society⁷ (IPS).

Bmi.js, and I guess the image compression are a result of ByteMobile‘s “Smart Capacity”

Through a wide range of patented optimization techniques, as well as caching, Bytemobile web optimization solutions enable network operators to cut internet and mobile application traffic by 30-35%. This includes traffic generated by the automatic download of software updates. The result is reduced network congestion and significantly faster web page downloads, leading to superior quality of experience (QoE) for mobile subscribers.

Some of the annoying problems with it are:

• All the images are pipes through a proxy to degrade their quality and reduced their resolution in order to speed up the browsing experience, this can get annoying very quickly. However hovering over the images ushaly reveals a hint that: “Shift+R improves the quality of this image. Shift+A improves the quality of all images on this page“.
• bmi.js is not very well written it hijacks event handlers and stands a high chance of messing up the scripts you want to run.
• Non-deterministically inlines some of the CSS and JavaScript into the main source files of the web pages. This can create errors either because of mistakes in their algorithm or the consequence of stripping white space from source files.
• Strip copyright messages from copyrighted javascript libraries and css libraries.
• Breaks Local Caching: For example, A user is visiting a sequence of pages on your site which all use the same jQuery libraries. Instead of letting the mobile browser locally cache the library, ByteMobile inline the library on every page, forcing your phone to load the entire library over and over again for every page.
• Its not just my Browser that these alterations are made in, any where that an image is displayed (or html page is pulled in) the alterations are made, so emails, RSS reader, iTunes for example.

There seem to be a limmited number of Workarounds; some more use than others:

• Only visit https sites; (EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere available for FireFox and Chrome makes staying on https easer). However not all websites are available via https; while you can go to https://skippy.org.uk/ it will return an error telling you the certificate is invalid.
• Another workaround (if you have access to your .htaccess file) is to on the server you can set cache control by adding Cache-Control: no-transform to your .htaccess file

  # Force no caching
  
  <FilesMatch "\.*">
  Header append Cache-Control "no-transform"
  Header append Vary "User-Agent, Accept"
  </FilesMatch>

  This will stop all modifications and present your site correctly (assuming that ByteMobile respect this), and that you only look at sites where this has been set.

• If you are writing PHP you can control your HTTP by using something like this:

  <?php
  header("Cache-Control: no-transform");
  header("Vary: User-Agent, Accept");
  ?>

• And ASP

  <%
  Response.AddHeader "Cache-Control", "no-transform"
  Response.AddHeader "Vary" , "User-Agent"
  %>

• One that may work (assuming the Telecommunication company haven’t brorken it) is Bytemobile Unison feature called “clientless personalization”. It should be able to be reached via http://1.2.3.50/ups/ - if it’s configured, you will end up on a page which will offer you to disable all feature you don’t like.
• T-mobile it’s called “Mobile Broadband Accelerator” You can Visit: http://accelerator.t-mobile.co.uk or http://1.2.3.50/ to configure it.
• I will try and update this list as I find out where other config pages are located.

What is Project Euler?

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

As I am poking about more and more with the Teensy USB Development Board [my note book of sorts] (I have four now, two Teensy 2.0s and two Teensy++ 2.0) and I am looking to play a bit more with the Arduino (or Arduino Clones), and since I am more of a mac user than anything else, I probably should look at learning Objective-C.

I am already using a Teensy / Arduino microcontroler for a number of projects of mine (Accessible Keyboard and My 1st ROV) so trying to use them, and Objective-C for Project Euler could make for an interesting challenge:

Project Euler – Problem 1  code for a Teensy:

/*
 Project Euler - Problem 1

    If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9.
    The sum of these multiples is 23.

    Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
*/

#include

int loops = 1;
int times = 1000;
long test = 1;
long result = 0;

void setup()
{
    Serial.begin(38400);
    delay (6000); // Give me time to start the serial consol
}

void loop()
{
    if (loops < times)
    {
        // we are looking for numbers between test and times that are multiples of 3, or 5

        // the %3 == 0 checks for the remainder being Zero I think;
        // the == Logical Same,
        // the || Logical OR
        if (test %3 == 0 || test %5 == 0)
        {
            result = result + test;
            Serial.println(test);
        }
    }
    else
    {
        Serial.println("This has either Finished, or is broken.");
        Serial.println("The Result is:");
        Serial.println(result);
        delay (600000);
    }
    test++;
    loops++;
}

Ok so it is probably not very well optimised, and could be a lot cleaner; but its a start. however importantly it gave me the correct answer.

As I progress through the Problems, my code should start to get optimised, and my maths skills should get better too.

For this test I am using the The ISO 12233 Target, and a randomly mildly ammusing mame I found online. The ISO 12233 target was developed for digital camera applications. It includes several diffrent patterns, and knife-edge targets.

	Direct Conection	O2 Mobile Internet	T-Mobile
Meme I accidentally 93MB of .rar files what should I do…is this dangerous ?	I-accidentally-93mb.jpg – 30.25KB (29.95KB)	I-accidentally-93mb.jpg – 8.88KB (8.60KB)	I-accidentally-93mb.jpg – 9.43KB (9.16KB)
ISO 12233 Chart	ISO_12233-reschart.jpg – 4.14MB (4.14MB)	ISO_12233-reschart.jpg – 4.14MB (4.14MB)	ISO_12233-reschart.jpg – 4.14MB (4.14MB)
Lorem Ipsim Test Page	Loremipsum.html – 205B (2.50KB) grey_120x240.gif – 221B (4.63KB) valid-xhtml10 – 277B (1.84KB) 3 Requests – 703B Transferred.	Loremipsum.html – 1.63KB (2.59KB) bmi.js – 372KB (13.84KB) grey_120x240.gif – 4.90KB (4.63KB) valid-xhtml10 – 2.30KB (1.84KB) 4 Requests – 2.05KB Transferred.	Loremipsum.html – 205B (2.61KB) bmi.js – 372KB (13.84KB) grey_120x240.gif – 188B (4.63KB) valid-xhtml10 – 282B (1.84KB) 4 Requests – 1.68KB Transferred.

Direct Connection

This was via a fixed line broadband connection, and was used as the control, the images were originally downloaded and then re-uploaded to Skippy.org.uk where they were processed and optimised by my server for inclusion in my blog using wp-smush.it. the following actions are applied to all images on my server (under 1mb):

• JPEGs have meta data stripped
• optimizing JPEG compression
• certain GIFs are converted to indexed PNGs
• stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

O2 Connection

This test was carried out using my O2 Simplicity contract; using my tethered iPhone (I wonder if it would have been different using my unlocked 3G modem (It is not called it a dongle!)).

The actions that O2 carry out on my request include:

• Lossey Compress of images
• Remove white space from HTML files,
• Add bmi.js to requests
• Addition of the Shift+R / Shift+A mouse over (may be from bmi.js)

T-Mobile Connection

This test was carried out using B0atG1rl’s T-Mobile G10431 3G mobile modem,

T-Mobile perform the following actions on the data I request from the internet:

• Same as O2
• Cache images (images are served from their cache at http://1.2.3.10/bmi/skippy.org.uk/).

Again T-Mobile didn’t touch my ISO12233 chart.

What this means?

Well to me it means that the internet I am seeing when I use mobile broad band is not the internet I requested; apparently Three don’t do this; I will be talking to a number of customer service departments, and will write up another post with my further findings.

The Macintosh SE/30 is a personal computer that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1989 until 1991. It was the fastest and most expandable of the original black-and-white compact Macintosh series.

The SE/30 had been wiped clean years ago, or the hard drive was buggered, either way it wouldn’t boot; and I could not find a copy of System 7 for download, so I went and asked the Museum of Computing in Swindon if I could borrow a copy of System 7.

As it turned out there copy of System 7 would not work, in the end I just donated it as is to the Museum of Computing.

Although Lion shows up as available to install on the App Store, it returns an error when you try to install it

I tried to re-download OS X Lion on my macbook pro, but it knows that its installed already, and prevents you from re-downloading; however there is a work around, if you hold down the ‘option key’ (⌥) you can click on it to re-download.

After copying the install file to the mac mini, and trying to run it, the installer returns the following screen:

Telling me that MAC OS X 10.7 requires at least 2 GB of memory, which is still annoying since my mac mini only has 1 GB of memory; however this shows that the only thing the installer seems to be worried about is my lack of RAM…

There seems to be a  way around it, download a copy of Pacifist fromhttp://www.charlessoft.com/

Pacifist is a shareware application that opens Mac OS X .pkg package files, .dmg disk images, and .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .xar file archives and allows you to extract individual files and folders out of them. This is useful, for instance, if an application which is installed by the operating system becomes damaged and needs to be reinstalled without the hassle of reinstalling all of Mac OS X. Pacifist is also able to verify existing installations and find missing or altered files*, and Pacifist can also examine the kernel extensions installed in your system to let you see what installer installed them, and whether the installer was made by Apple or a third-party.

Pacifist is not yet compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” so the next steps were completed on my Mac Mini:

The File you need to open is OSInstall.mpkg in the Install Mac OS X Lion (right click ‘Show Package Contents’) > Contents > Shared Support >

Jump to Resources, and click on the padlock in the top right

The File you need to edit is the Distribution File

Changing var minRam = 1048; to 1024, re-package the distribution file, and see if the changes help (here is my copy of OSInstall.mpkg.zip)

Now while I now get the following screen, suggesting I can now attempt the install

It returns the following error

I will have to have a look, and see if the hackintosh community can offer any help.

One of those things I love about my Mobile Phone Contract is my unlimited data, way back at the beginning of time for “Smart Phones” I signed up on O2′s £25 Simplicity Contract, (February 2008) this let me have the fun and exciting offer as follows:

After a while they dropped the Price inc VAT to £20 (£20.42 now because VAT went back up). but they never removed the word Unlimited from the description of my Data allowance, or put an end date on it:

While I had a HTC Win6 phone it was all good; I had a little app that I could run that allowed me to use all that data (see unlimited anywhere o2?) however after a small accident involving either the washing up bowl, or a Pond (I forget the demise of it) I moved on after a while to a secondhand Apple iPhone 3 (Someone at work was upgrading from the iPhone 3 to a iPhone 4). however one thing I lost was the ability to tether my computer to my phone, as O2 seemed to think that was something they have the right to charge more for…

…as they sell it as a Bolt On; oh and as an interesting point of reference O2 don’t seem to know what their fair use policy is in regards to the amount of data I can use; (but they seem to think they should have the right to stop me accessing adult sites)

A while ago I bought a USB stick from Three and had it unlocked, a while after that I Acquired a Edimax 3G-6210N Wireless 150M portable 3G router, And I have been using that on and off with my O2 sim card without any problems, However today i spotted that Tether was in the iTunes Store; and with the associated Mac Client it would allow me finally to tether my Computer 1:1 to my Phone 

Tether is an application that just runs directly on your smartphone. This means you can access the internet anywhere, just like you could with an air card. Even if you’re stuck in the middle of no where with no available wifi hotspots, Tether will work through your cell phone’s data plan.

Instructions for using Tether

1. Download Tether Client (mirror on Dropbox) onto your Mac (Windows Client).
2. Install the client software.
3. Now, you need to install Tether for iPhone (seems to no longer be available in the UK iTunes Store) onto your iPhone (Also available on BlackBerry & Android).
4. Run Tether on your computer and on your iPhone.
5. You will be prompted to select either USB. Next connect your iPhone to your computer with the USB cable that came with your iPhone. You should now see data/packets flowing on Tether. That means you’re connected!

Run the software on your Phone

Run the software on your Mac

Wait for the browser window to pop up.

— This is no longer possible to set up due to the iPhone Tether App being pulled —

There are a number of advantages to iTunes & iPod Audiobook format when using an iPhone, iPod or iTunes to listen to Audiobooks:

• Because audio books are most of the time quite large files, it’s unlikely that you listen them in one piece. Your iPod remembers the position where you stopped listening the last time. So when you continue listening to your audio book, maybe days later, you don’t have to waste time finding the right position to start. This even works, if you are listening to music or other audio books in the meantime. — even after resynchronising your iPod.
• You can adjust the reading speed to your personal preferences. This seems not that important to me but it can be useful in certain situations.
• There’s a special Audiobooks entry in the menu of your iPod.
• Audiobooks can have chapter stops within them
• Audiobooks are automatically skipped during shuffle.

While the remember location feature is available for books in the MP3 format, the iPod format (.m4b) provides you with a single file for your entire audiobook, while having the option of preserving chapters.

I am playing with AudioBook Builder (Torrent link to allow for more testing before purchase(Updating will break the SN))

I have been testing AudioBook Builder with Terry Pratchett books, This post shows the Discworld Novel “The Light Fantastic” being converted to a single m4b file:

The files as acquired from TPB

Starting up AudioBook Builder

Create a new Project

Setup meta-data for the audiobook, including art work (acquired from Wikipedia)

Drag files from Finder to the chapters window

Click the ‘Join’ button to make a continues file; with no bookmarks (Remember position fulfils my requirements) you may want chapters.

Click on Build Audiobook, and in a few moments the files will appear as a single book in iTunes

If you need to edit the MetaData you can right click on the file and edit it in iTunes. at this point you can now delete the source files, and the Project file.

For more information on what you can do with The Pirate Bay and other Torrent sites, have a look at this post of mine: Book 10 – Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff

As Part of my attempt to reduce the amount of stuff I have, I have been ripping my DVDs to my Mac; this allows me to store them on hard drive; and not need to get the disks out all the time; Also it allows me to watch them on my mac mini, which has a dead DVD rom drive (at some point I will put two 1 TB hard drives in it).

In General my work flow is to use The Little App Factory’s “RipIt” to both Rip the DVD to a full .dvdmedia folder of the disk, and most of the time also compress the film to an iTunes friendly file. RipIt will usually rip a disc within 35-40min. and then using the CLI version of HandBrake it will automatically the video for iTunes.

If I have only ripped a Disk to .dvdmedia I can then use HandBrake to produce the files for iTunes.

One of the things I am finding hard is the act of reading; Its still something I don’t get on with; oddly I find reading on my iPhone via the Kindle app easer than to read the pages of a Dead Tree Ware Book, I think that this is due to the line length being shorter, and the number of words per page being less; making the page easer to read for my poor addled dyslexic brain.

While I am not a huge fan of walled gardens; I think I will have to ask either bma, or Loupie if I can borrow their Amazon Kindle to see how I get on with the hardware version of the app, I also find that the Amazon Kindle app for my mac (and the kindle cloud reader) is not too bad to read; however using my mac to read tends to be too distracting, and a bit cumbersome to read quietly.

So here is hoping that I can get the remaining books read in time.

Setting the box up is easy; the instruction manual is well laid out and can answer all questions you need. my wifi is set up with WPA2 PSK, and a nice pass phrase; the settings for the o2 GPRS are as follows:

• APN/Access point: mobile.o2.co.uk
• Username: mobileweb
• Password: password
• Session type: Continuous / permanent
• Authentication: Normal
• Security: Off
• DNS Servers: 193.113.200.200 and 193.113.200.201

Note: The “Mobile Web” service must be enabled on your contract for these settings to work.

There are a number of other user names that should work; including faster; (with the same password). Other networks settings can be found here.

nbGypsyRover has a post showing them with a Zoom 3G router. I am curious to find out how other members of the boating community connect to the web (please answer in the comments section).

Historically I have used Virtual box for my virtualization needs; however it wont work properly under 64bit OS X.

Looking through Google; I found that Parallels fulfils my needs, as it will allow me to run the BootCamp partition as a VM;

One thing I some times worry about, is how to make a backup of my Mac’s Bootcamp partition. there are some sites that give you details; but they all point back to a app called WinClone:

If you want to make a quick clone of your bootcamp partition, or you want to migrate your bootcamp partition to a different machine, Winclone makes it a breeze. Winclone will create an image of your Windows partition, and allow you to quickly restore it to get you back up and running quickly.

For this you will need both WinClone and NTFSprogs; they are both free; (At the time of writing WinClones official site is dead).

First install NTFSprogs; this little app allows your mac to talk to NTFS partitions; (this will not work on FAT32) then run WinClone:

And that is that; while you cant get Time Machine to back up your Bootcamp Partition natively, you can back up images of it.

Apparently you can also use WinClone to change the size of your Bootcamp partition.

As I have a .ac.uk email address, I still have access to DreamSpark and as such access to a free copy of Windows 2008 R2; this will allow me to play with windows server settings; While most people may install Windows for games; I don’t play that many games (Portal is the only one I do play at the moment).

Downloading and burning the Windows iso was easy; as was burning it, installing it on my mac was also easy:

Using the Boot Camp Assistant under OS X is very easy; it just requires you to download a CDs worth of drivers and stuff for the Windows.

Windows setup is hard to Screen grab; but again just follow the guide; and follow that through. there are a number of customisations to make to Windows 2008 R2 to make it a sensible and useful Desktop OS.

I would recommend to any one that has an Intel mac that they install Windows if they have a copy, and the free hard drive space (My Windows Partition is 80 GB; plenty of room for all the software I will want to run under it.

To Configure Windows 2008R2 as a Desktop OS have a look at this site: Win 2008 r2 Workstation

By booting into windows and renaming the disk so that the first character in the label is a full stop it can now be changed and hidden. You cant change its name in OS X if its formatted as NTFS.

Fulla is the name of my ByteMark server; it is mounted via ExpanDrive using SFTP (SSH).

I have been playing with the Amazon Kindle iPhone app; and the Mac App, while the iPhone is not the best way to read an electronic book; it’s certainly not the worst. while the Mac App on my MacBook Pro is awesome

Looking at it objectivity; I think the Amazon Kindle would be a good ebook reader to buy (I have been playing with Loupie’s); I was thinking about getting an iPad; but now I have a fast mobile computer; I think the Kindle will work better to fill that requirement set; and I can still buy Dead Tree Ware books for Technical Subjects.

While I do like mac applications; I have to state that iBooks sucks; no ability to read the books from within iTunes makes it useless for reading on a mac.

However my biggest complaint about non Dead Tree Ware books is that you cant lend them out.