tech.nocr.at » Untitled

Photoshop On Your iPhone

Frank — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 05:41:54 +0000

10 years ago most of us would struggle with not only the cost of Photoshop but the cost of the hardware needed just to run it let alone do anything with it. Amazingly enough in todays day and age you can now carry Photoshop in your pocket.

Alright, alright, it’s not CS3 or anything it’s actually 1.0, but it’s still super cool on the geek factor scale. This demo was released to about 50 people who recently attended the Photoshop 20th anniversary event and will never see the light of day on the app store. Doesn’t mean that I want it, I want it bad!

Check the video out after the break of Photoshop in action on an iPhone.

Photoshop On Your iPhone originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/21. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

iPhone Safari Bug Could Cost You Cash

Frank — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:25:23 +0000

Here’s one thing you don’t hear of too often, a serious bug in Apple’s iPhone version of Safari that could end up cost you, the user, some serious cash.

Although it’s not a very common bug but thanks to someone who probably spend countless hours trying to poke a hole in Apple’s mobile device, all iPhone users might avoid being hit with extra operator costs.

Estonian Apple site AppleSpot discovered the bug in question. If an iPhone user visits a site which uses Motion-JPEG (usually found on websites that show live feeds of web cams) in Safari, Safari will continue to use up bandwidth even after it’s closed. Safari is one of the few apps on the iPhone that is allowed to run in the background. So let’s say you have a web page up that uses Motion-JPEG streams and even if that site is in another tab or worse yet, Safari has been closed, the stream will continue and if your on a mobile carriers network then bandwidth will continue to rack up.

Now just imagine you were traveling outside your home country where you would be nailed with international data roaming charges and you decided to visit that ~~sexy nurse pay live stream~~ nature wildlife live cam, you could easily rack up some serious charges. The guys at AppleSpot have claimed to rack up over 740 MB in silently streamed bandwidth in one hour of testing. That would cost something like $3,000 in international roaming charges. Yikes!

[Link to AppleSpot]

iPhone Safari Bug Could Cost You Cash originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/03. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Super Fast Robot Hands

Frank — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:02:04 +0000

I was blown away when I first saw this video. This robot hands moves so quickly that they had to slow the play speed of the video just so you can make out what the robot is actually doing.

This is just more proof that someone somewhere is building SkyNet and these robots will be taking over the world. Remember the lesson we all learned while watching BSG? Forget the upcoming zombie onslaught, we have to be worried about these fraggin robots.

Super Fast Robot Hands originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/19. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

VMWare Fusion 2.06

Frank — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:53:56 +0000

VMware rolled out another update today to their uber popular virtualization software for the mac, Fusion. The update, which was officially released yesterday, includes multiple fixes for running Fusion in a 32-bit Snow Leopard environment. Besides the usually assortment of bug fixes the release also includes enhancements for better 3D performance on Macs with Nvidia cards who run Snow Leopard.

Registered Fusion users can grab the hefty 289 MB update here. Users should note that VMWare Tools on the guest OS doesn’t upgrade automatically when you install the update. You will have to install the tools for the menu bar manually.

VMWare Fusion 2.06 originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/02. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Boxee For Your AppleTV

Frank — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:03:55 +0000

Don’t like the look of your AppleTV UI? No problem. Boxee, which is a fork of the awesome XBMC project, has just rolled out a version that will work on your AppleTV. Now you can enjoy all of your media without being tied into the iTunes DRM. Boxee installs on a flash drive which you can then use to install on your AppleTV. The interface is similar to the original Xbox version that started it all.

You can sign up for the Boxee alpha here

Boxee For Your AppleTV originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/10/01. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Oscilloscopes Hacked To Run Tetris

Frank — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:53:03 +0000

Sure, you could always use a scope to do some trouble shooting or displaying various electrical signals, but why would you ever want to do that when you could play tetris on a machine that costs a1000x the cost of an original GameBoy.

Created by engineer Lars Pontoppidan, this hack essentially uses the ATMega 32 micro-controller so that you can play the classic block stacker on an oscilloscope. The addition of an Atari digital joystick to control the game is a nice touch. Check out the video after the break.

Oscilloscopes Hacked To Run Tetris originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/09/15. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

PwnageTool And QuickPwn For 2.1

Frank — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 04:43:20 +0000

The iPhone Dev Team strikes again. If you really want to run jail-broken apps on your 2.1 iPhone or iPod touch, the iPhone Dev Team has just released PwnageTool and QuickPwn for 2.1 devices.

The Dev Team has worked around iTunes 8 without having to patch the program, so jail-breakers can try the new tool without any fear of having to alter iTunes in any way.

The is one caveat: this does NOT work with the new iPod Touch 2g, it will only work with iPhone and first gen iPod Touches only. Maybe in the coming future the Dev Team will have a fix for you Touch 2g owners. Why not, they have been able to do everything else already.

PwnageTool And QuickPwn For 2.1 originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/09/14. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

How To Speed Up WordPress With Nginx And WP Super Cache

Frank — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:43:16 +0000

Edit: Fixes suggested in the comments have been applied to this howto

We recently moved tech.nocr.at over to a bunch of VPSs in order to achieve some decent load balancing and speed. Even though SliceHost isn’t a sponsor, I’d like to give them a quick plug. SliceHost is easily the greatest VPS provider bar none. You pick the Distro you want, you tweak it, you set it up, all ports are available, you do as you wish. If you setup multiple VPS with them you can even have private IP’s between them in order to load balance or cluster. Prices start as low as $20/month. If you use them, click this link so that I can get some referral love. Now on to the article..

WordPress can be a blessing and a pain at the same time. It’s great for displaying dynamic content yet it’s displaying that exact dynamic content that can put a massive stress load on your system. WordPress’s query routines aren’t exactly the best. Let’s not even go into how much of a hog Apache can be, but for running dynamic content and prettying up your url’s, mod_rewrite can’t be beat. By using WP Super Cache to help reduce the load on your SQL queries and by placing Nginx in front of Apache as a reverse proxy, you’d be amazed and how quickly your site will load and respond, even enough to withstand a digg of slashdot effect.

Here’s what you are going to need.

This how-to system assumes that you have your Webserver running under a debian style distro like Ubuntu, but It can easily be modified for other distros like Fedora or CentOS.

Assuming that you already have WordPress running under Apache the first thing we are going to do is install the Wp-Super-Cache plugin and active it under your plugin folder of your WordPress installation. Pay close attention to the installation steps in the included readme.txt file, you have to follow each step properly in order to ensure proper caching.

Wp-Super-Cache creates static html files of your pages lessening the load on your SQL queries. Once you have it running and working let’s move on to our next step, reconfiguring Apache.

Apache can be a resource hog, especially when it has to span multiple child processes in order to serve up content. We are going to have to do some tweaking to apache’s conf file so that it will work behind Nginx.

Open up your /etc/apache2/ports.conf file

sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf

We need to change Apache from port 80 to 8080 as Nginx will be server content to the real world via port 80.

Listen 8080

Next we are going to turn KeepAlives off on Apache since Nginx will be dealing with all of the actual browser connections. This will ensure that all of the child processes in Apache die quickly and don’t hang around chewing up memory

Find the KeepAlive entry in your /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file and set it to off

KeepAlive Off

Now that we have made the needed changes in apache we need to restart it so that they take effect.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Next we are going to install Nginx which is a powerful and extremely lightweight http server that is perfect for reverse proxying or load balancing to backend servers like Apache.

sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get install nginx

Once nginx is installed we are going to need to modify it’s config file located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Your conf file should look like this.

user www-data;
worker_processes  2;
 
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;
 
events {
	worker_connections  1024;
}
 
http {
	include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
	default_type  application/octet-stream;
	access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
	sendfile        on;
	tcp_nopush     on;
	keepalive_timeout  3;
	tcp_nodelay        on;
	gzip  on;
	include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Now we need to move on to the actual site config file for our Nginx setup

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Your file should look something like this (replace domain.com of course)

server {
        listen   80;
        server_name  domain.com www.domain.com;
        error_log   /var/log/nginx/domain.com.error.log;
        access_log  /var/log/nginx/domain.com.access.log;
 
# Main location (path to you blog, relative to your domain root)
        location / {
            proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
            proxy_redirect     off;
 
            proxy_set_header   Host             $http_host;
            proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 
            client_max_body_size       10m;
            client_body_buffer_size    128k;
 
            proxy_connect_timeout      90;
            proxy_send_timeout         90;
            proxy_read_timeout         90;
 
            proxy_buffer_size          4k;
            proxy_buffers              4 32k;
            proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
            proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
        }
 
    # Static files location
        location ~* ^.+\.(htm|html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
            root   /;
        }
	# if the requested file exists, return it immediately
	if (-f $request_filename) {
	break;
	}
 
	set $supercache_file '';
	set $supercache_uri $request_uri;
 
	if ($request_method = POST) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	# Using pretty permalinks, so bypass the cache for any query string
	if ($query_string) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_" ) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	# if we haven't bypassed the cache, specify our supercache file
	if ($supercache_uri ~ ^(.+)$) {
	set $supercache_file /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$1index.html;
	}
 
	# only rewrite to the supercache file if it actually exists
	if (-f $document_root$supercache_file) {
	rewrite ^(.*)$ $supercache_file break;
	}
}

The above (especially the if statements) help Ngnix pass the static html files that are created by WP Super Cache directly to the users thus freeing up Apache to do nothing more than handle the dynamic requests.

Now it’s time to restart Ngnix and get the whole ball of wax working

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

What we have essentially done is taken the load of serving static files like images, css, and js files off of apache and passed it on to Ngnix which runs a lot faster and leaner than apache for serving static content. All requests for any dynamic content like php still gets passed on to apache. Clean and simple.

In closing let me mention that this is just what works for me, i’m sure that there might be a better way to use WP Super Cache and Ngnix to speed up WordPress, but what you see above has really helped with the load on both of the tech.nocr.at front-end web servers.

How To Speed Up WordPress With Nginx And WP Super Cache originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/11. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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A PS3 Laptop Not By Ben Heck

Frank — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:56:51 +0000

Here’s another Playstation 3 laptop, and surprisingly enough, it wasn’t slapped together by our beloved modder, Ben Heck. This mod features a 17″ 720p HDTV, 320GB Hard Drive, built in speakers, and a keyboard.

Now if a modder could only shrink my 360 down to the size of an actual laptop, then I’d be so impressed that I would actually buy one. Would make portable gaming so much fun.

A PS3 Laptop Not By Ben Heck originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/11. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Frogger For Your iPhone

Frank — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:32:44 +0000

We all remember the beloved game Frogger from our youth (some of us are older than others). I remember spending countless hours sitting on the living room floor as a kid playing this and pitfall on my old Atari. Now I can relive all of those moments (minus sitting on the floor) with Frogger for the iPhone.

The classic game is now available through the iTunes app store. It features updated graphics, updated music, and your choice of accelerometer controls or touchscreen (or both). Video of the action after the break.

Both control systems are active simultaneously by default, but either can be turned off in the game options. After spending time with all control methods, the swipe technique seems the most precise.

Frogger For Your iPhone originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/07. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Rumour – Is This The New MacBook?

Frank — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:57:17 +0000

Could these really be the leaked pictures of a redesigned MacBook? My guess is no, but after all of the hoopla with the photos of the new nano that rolled around last year this might actually be true.

Mac accessories store AppleOwner.com and a Taiwanese site called apple.pro are both showing these allegedly leaked photos, which really don’t show off any detail.

Check out the pics for yourself and decided if you think these are real or fake.

Rumour – Is This The New MacBook? originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/05. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Pick-Up Line Generator

Frank — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:56:13 +0000

Fear not fellow geeks your pick-up tool is here. The Pick Up Line Generator has 40 of the worlds most effective pick-up lines for you to either get slapped or love. Youâ€™ll be surprised how many women laugh at pick-up lines which is a great ice-breaker for a real conversation (I mean the weather, current events, etc., not some hardcore geek chat). A little Charisma and a sense of humour goes a long way. Mind you, so does a shower and deodorant.

All you have to do is hit the bathroom and consult with your little device then walk up to every woman and give it a whirl. Itâ€™s a lot better than asking them if they prefer KDE over Gnome. Whatâ€™s the worst thing that can happen?

Itâ€™s only $20 so whatâ€™s the harm?

Pick-Up Line Generator originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/01/25. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.