This is Not a Brain Surgery

11:14 am - Importing audio books into iTunes

I have worked out a procedure to import audio books into iTunes. Below you will find a link to Automator script which automates the following steps:

1. Convert files to AAC: some older iPods could not remember playback position in MP3 files. For new ones you may want to use this step anyway to adjust bit rate to save space. I am using following import settings in my iTunes:



2. Adjust volume by 30%. Some books are just not loud enough and I could not crank volume any more in my car. So as precaution I always adjust a volume by 30% - it always possible to bring it down while listening.

3. Pre-set equalizer to "Spoken Word"

4. Set options song: "Remember Playback Position" and "Skip When Shuffling". Unset options "Part of a Gapless Album" and "Part of a Compilation".

5. Set Genre to "Audiobooks"

I am using these steps for few years now and very happy with results. Additionally, if your chapter names have numbers at the beggning (e.g. "01. Intrduction", "02. First Chapter") you may want to use this iTunes script to conver them to track numbers.

Now, as promised, an Automator workflow which performs steps 1-5 on a collection of audio files selected in Finder and adds them to iTunes as a new Playlist, called "New Audio Book". Download "Import Audio Book.workflow.zip" and unzip it into "~/Documents/Workflows". Now you can select files, start Automator and run this workflow. Alternatively, you can open it in Automator, choose "Save As Plug-In" menu and select "Finder Plugin" format. After that you can right click on selected files in Finder and select "More->Automator->Import Audio Book" to run this workflow on selected files.

04:46 pm - cross-platform file encryption

If you keep some private information on your USB flash drive, it is good idea to think about what would happen if it get lost and get into wrong hands. I have lost my old USB drive which had some private information, nothing out of ordinary but something that could be potentially used for identity theft.

So I decided that my next USB drive should have all such information encrypted. Here I faced a first problem - I am using Mac, but I would like to be able to read encrypted files on Windows or Linux. So I started looking for cross-platform encryption utility. First I tried Lexar Jumpdrive Secure II which claimed to work on both Mac and PC. Well, it works on PC but their Mac software failed to install on my MacOS 10.4. Even if it would, it requires OS driver installation and system reboot, which could be a problem if I want to access my files on somebody else machine.

To make long story short, the solution which worked for me was bcrypt. I have put Windows, Linux and MacOS binares on my flash drive and encrypted all my sensitive files with it. BCrypt uses Blowfish encryption algorithm and is extremely portable. It is simple command line utility you can run right from flash drive without installing it on host PC.

07:20 pm - google web accelerator

Google offers me repeatedly to download their web accelerator:



Just to turn me down, because Macintosh is not supported:



I guess, they are just too lazy to check USER-AGENT header in my HTTP request to see that I am using Safari on Macintosh.

11:21 pm - Apple's little dirty secret (that is UPnP)

Tonight I was debugging with help of a friend my iChat video/audio connectivity through a firewall and we noticed that it talks UPnP. This fact is not mentioned anywhere on Apple site. Even in documents such as this, port 1900 (SSDP protocol which iChat actually uses) is missing.

I think, the reasons why they do not advertise support for UPnP are purely political. If you search on Internet for "Apple" and "UPnP" you will find dosens of articles where people explain that UPnP is Microsoft-specific crap and Apple have Rendezvous which does the same thing but better. They wrong on many points here: First, while initiated by Microsoft, UPnP forum now consists of 696 members, which include names like 3COM, CISCO, IBM, AOL, Intel. For example UGD Protocol used by iChat lists as authors people from Intel and CISCO, and none from Microsoft. Second, most important, is that Rendezvous AFAIK does not address firewall and NAT issues.

So, great news is that iChat supports UPnP and was able to discover UPnP daemon running on Linksys wireless firewall/router with SVEASOFT firmware. In successfully established dynamic NAT mapping for SIP protocol (port 5060), but failed to establish one for RTP/RTCP (iChat uses port range 16384-16403 for them). So SIP connection went through OK, but video/audio stream connection failed. Once we had set up a static port forwarding for RTP/RTCP, everything worked like a charm.

09:58 pm - Installing Firewall Builder on MacOS X 10.3 (Panther)

If you are trying to install Firewall Builder on MacOS X 10.3 please read further for some hints. This is just informal note, if you have any problems you should consult documentation on the official site.

First of all you need fresh version of Fink. Just download and install binary package (it requires X-Code tools installed). MacOS X 10.3 support in Fink is fairly fresh and you need to install some updates. To do this use: 'fink selfupdate-rsync' followed by 'fink update-all'. Now 'fink --version' should show something like:

/Users/lord/tmp> fink --version
Package manager version: 0.17.4
Distribution version: 0.6.2.cvs

Downloading the file "fwbuilder-1.1.2.tar.gz" failed.

(1)      Give up
(2)      Retry the same mirror
(3)      Retry another mirror
(4)      Retry using next mirror set "sourceforge"

How do you want to proceed? [1]