Reason.com comments on Barney Frank’s H.R.2267 passing committee, and quotes him discussing online gambling back in 2006:

People have said, “What is the value of gambling?” Here is the value: Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.

Quite right.  He even seems to believe it when it comes to financial institutions, to the chagrin of many of his colleagues: “Is Barney Frank Joining the Wall Street Sellout?”

At any rate, I’m sure this isn’t his guiding governing philosophy, but just for saying the right things at this time, he gets a provisional thumbs up.

IGNORE: This is nothing but some tech testing conducted on a live system.

Just pointing out the obvious: When Pakistan’s government banned Facebook over “Everybody Draw Muhammed Day”, this was not an act of self-defense. I really dislike reality television game shows, but I don’t need to ban them, because I can just not watch them. No, Pakistan’s government banned Facebook because they knew that people _did_ want to see it, and the thought of other people doing what they wanted was more than they could bear. It was bullying, pure and simple, the act of one group preemptively punishing another for not holding the same things sacred.

And now I’m thinking about NYC’s salt restrictions, activists fighting to legally prevent Walmart from putting a store in their town, the DOE’s war on high-flow showerheads, opposition to gay marriage,…

So for no really defensible reason, I’ve decided to take the old blog out of mothballs. Partly, I’m curious about exploring the new set of integration tools that have been developed to bridge the gap between Facebook and the still-popular WordPress and Twitter. In particular, comment management is a tricky issue, and I want to give a few systems a try.

(If all goes well, I might try a similar integration with my dedicated political blog-on-hiatus. God help any followers I still have at that point .)

But there are also considerations of ownership and permanence. Sure, at one level, we’re all just talking about electrons, but I work kinda hard at crafting some of the things I write, and leaving all of that purely in the Cloud is disconcerting. You ever try to retrieve something from half a year back from Facebook? At least my writing on the blog exists in drives in my basement.

So we’ll see where this experiment goes. Blog posts will automatically post a 400-character summary to FB. And I’ll continue to post certain things directly to FB that don’t seem blog-appropriate. Feedback and suggestions are always appreciated, and you are free to knowingly chuckle if I decide the whole thing is too much effort after two weeks or two months.

In the spirit of taking months off at a time for other endeavors, I present something that cracks me up from the funny guys at homestarrunner.com:

It’s from this Wii game, oh hell, there’s no point in explaining. I just think it’s funny. Enjoy it at 480p.

In order to use the iPhone Hotel Room Baby Monitor setup I described in part 1 in situations when you’re not behind a friendly router (such as in an actual hotel room), a little advance preparation is required. You’ll need a computer on your home network that you can leave on (or one that you already do) . That computer will need to be running an SSH server (sshd). You’ll also need to know the public IP address of your home network, that is, the IP address assigned by your ISP to your router that’s serving as your home’s internet gateway. Lastly, you’ll need to forward ports for both SSH and the audio stream from your router to your always-on computer. If you’ve got all of that, you’ll be able to establish a secure tunnel from your home to your laptop, and expose your audio stream to the internet, and thus to your iPhone.

As before, I’ll illustrate by using my own equipment, and leave it to you to adapt the instructions to your setup. 

I have a Mac Mini at home that I keep running all the time (set to never sleep or spin down the hard drives). In its System Preferences -> Sharing panel, I have enabled Remote Login, which runs sshd, the SSH server.

System Preferences, Sharing tab

This allows my Mac Mini to accept SSH connections using a valid username and password for this computer.

To connect to this computer from outside my home network, I’ll need to know how to reach my home network from the internet. You can find the IP address by checking your router’s administration utility (usually just a web page at its LAN address); typical names are “WAN address” or “Internet address”. Consult your router’s documentation for guidance here.  Mine is right on my router’s main dashboard page.

Locating your internet IP address

Now keep in mind that with most ISPs, unless you’re paying extra for a static IP address, this address will change periodically. We’re not talking that frequently, so if you check the address before you leave, you’ll probably be okay, but no promises. Alternatively, you can (and should) use a free service like the excellent DynDNS to track your dynamic IP, allowing you to use a consistent and easy-to-remember domain name (such as yourname.dyndns.org) instead of a periodically changing set of numbers. It doesn’t take much to get the service running, and it’ll simplify your life if you regularly need to access your home network from the road.

Now you know how to reach your home router, but how to get to your computers behind the router? This is accomplished through another feature of your router called port forwarding (or “enable applications” or some other term; again, check your documentation). You’ll need to forward TCP connections on port 22 to port 22 of the computer you always leave on, and TCP connections from port 8000 to port 8000 of the computer you always leave on. (You may choose to use different port configurations if it suits your needs; those to whom this applies don’t need me to tell them.)

With all of this preparatory work, the magic can happen when you’re on the road. Let’s say you’re out at your hotel room and want to launch the iPhone Hotel Room Baby Monitor. You have Nicecast running as described earlier. Now, open Terminal (in Applications/Utilities) and type the following to make the SSH connection and establish the tunnel from your home to your laptop:

ssh your_username@your_home_ip_address_or_domain_name -R 8000:localhost:8000

If you’ve never connected before, you’ll get a warning. Accept, then provide your password, and you’ll be treated to a command line prompt from your home computer. You won’t need that, so just minimize but don’t close that window (if you close it, the connection will be broken, and you’ll need to reconnect). The SSH server at your home is now dutifully passing all requests to listen to its own port 8000 to port 8000 of your laptop, which not coincidentally just happens to be where Nicecast will be providing the audio stream. And because your home router is also forwarding port 8000 requests to port 8000 of your home computer, pointing the Tuner application on your iPhone to your_home_ip_address_or_domain_name:8000 will play the audio stream generated from your laptop (by way of your home computer and router). Awesome!

Granted, there are a lot of parts here, and it might be daunting to a novice. But this is very useful stuff to know for a variety of potential uses with many other applications. And feel free to shoot me an email or leave a comment if you have a question. Also, you can test your setup while still at home, just to see if it’ll work before you’re outside of your home network and have no way of fixing it. Just make sure that when you test, you configure your router’s port forwarding for port 22 and port 8000 before you launch Nicecast. If you don’t, Nicecast may configure your router automatically, pointing 8000 right to your laptop, leaving out the other computer entirely. That’s convenient when at home, but that’s not how it’ll work when you’re on the road, so get that port forwarding configured as described above so it’ll be usable when away from home.

I had a cool idea the other night. My wife and I have been in hotels with the kids before, feeling trapped in the room once they’ve gone to bed. You’re stuck because you can’t leave them unmonitored, and you can’t make noise inside the room, because you’re in close quarters with a bunch of sleeping kids. Regular baby monitors are unlikely to have the range required to monitor your kiddies while you’re in the lounge down the hall. So what’s the answer? Turn your laptop into a streaming internet radio server and tune in with your iPhone.

I’ll describe how I put it together with the hardware and software I already owned, and you can probably modify the set-up to your own needs. On the laptop side, I used my 17″ MacBook Pro running the superb $40 Nicecast from Rogue Amoeba.  Nicecast takes an audio source of your choice, such as your laptop’s internal microphone, or an application such as iTunes, and will serve a live radio stream of that audio source. (Nicecast will also relay the audio to a dedicated streaming audio service such as Live365. I’m assuming that if you have or are willing to pay $10 a month for such an account, you probably know how to do this already.) Because we’re not looking for high fidelity here, dialing the bitrate down to 24Kbps on Nicecast’s “Quality” tab will conserve some bandwidth, making the stream more palatable for use over AT&T’s data network. It won’t kill you to conserve CPU as well.

Nicecast Quality tab

Pick “Audio Device” from the “Source” menu, 

Nicecast Source tab

mute the volume (laptop feedback won’t help a sleeping baby!), and click “Start Broadcast”. The on-air level monitor should be responsive to room sounds.

Nicecast main window

On the receiver side, I use my 3G iPhone and the app Tuner by Nullriver. Tuner can listen to a streamed mp3 source such as the one generated by Nicecast. In Tuner, tap the “Search” tab, then the “Open” button.

Tuner Open Stream pane

That’s where you’ll be able to enter the URL of the Nicecast stream (or technically a playlist file referencing the stream), which Nicecast helpfully provides on its “Share” tab.

Nicecast Share tab

Now under some circumstances, that might be all it takes to start listening to your laptop’s mic from anyplace in the world you can get a data connection on your iPhone. In particular, if your laptop is behind a router that provides UPnP or NAT-PMP, Nicecast will automatically configure it so that your stream will be exposed to the internet at the URL listed under “Internet” on the Share tab. But this is not likely to be the case if you’re on the road, using commercially provided internet access. Part 2 will discuss how to overcome this limitation.

Can’t wait to boot into OS9 on the rebuit iMac and install this baby…

I’m a man on a mission.  Or I guess multiple missions.  One is my very gently ramping up mission to save the world.  But I have another mission with a slightly tighter focus.

In 1995, The Residents and Voyager release a CD-ROM interactive “game” of sorts called Freak Show.  My friend Joe (who worked for Voyager although I’m not sure if he did at that time — it was through Joe’s Voyager connection that I got my hands on a LaserDisc player which allowed me to play a Japanese pressing of Disney’s “Song Of The South”) owned it and showed it to me one evening.  It was just the sort of creepily interesting presentation that tends to get under my skin.

I only saw it once or twice, but there was one part that I couldn’t forget, and haven’t forgotten for all these years since: A short musical phrase played in a loop of 5/4 time in Wanda the Worm Woman’s trailer.  You clicked on the candles in a candelabra to light them, and once all lit, a portrait on the wall smiled, the texture of the musical loop thickened, and a woman’s voice repeated with the loop “Watch me, watch me”.

I’ve found no reference to this tableau on the internet.  The phrase “Watch me watch me watch me” is part of the lyrics to the song about Wanda in the companion album, but that’s not what’s captured my imagination.  

So on to my mission.  I’ve got a working original Bondi-Blue iMac, the OS 8 install discs, and I’m still close with Joe and family.  Hopefully he still has the disc and it’ll play on that configuration (check out Freak Show’s requirements: “Macintosh – 25 MHz 68030 processor or better; System 7; 5,000K of available RAM; 13″ color monitor; CD-ROM drive (double-speed recommended)”).

Once it’s up and running, I almost hope to discover that I imagined the whole thing.  But I didn’t, I know I didn’t.  I’d like to record the audio I’ve referred to, and possibly find a way to take a few screen shots.  Then I’ll post these artifacts of forgotten technological beauty right here.  I hope you’ll enjoy it.