Installing SlimServer on an AppleTV

One of the services I needed to move off my server before shutting it down was SlimServer which runs my Squeezeboxes. I had looked at a few small PCs that were ultra quiet and as I was looking at the Shuttle website, it compared one of their boxes to a Mac Mini. Hmmm, I have an extra one of those lying around that I could use and then remembered I have an AppleTV that I'm not using. So, I decided to see if I could install SlimServer on the AppleTV as it is fanless and super quiet. Here's what I did:

1. Download Patchstick
2. Follow the procedure and install Patchstick from a USB thumb drive
3. Download the Mac OS X version of SlimServer
4. Download the XMRadio plugin
5. Edit XROAPI.pm in the plugin by commenting out

   	if ( defined( $self->{activeClient} ) ) {		return [			$client->string('PLUGIN_XMRADIO_ERROR_HEADER'),			$client->string('PLUGIN_XMRADIO_IN_USE') . ' ' . $client->name()		];	}

   So that I can have more than 1 Squeezebox talking to XM at the same time.

6. From the AppleTV, enable AFP in the awakwardTV menu
7. Mount the SlimServer dmg file that was downloaded above
8. From the image, copy Install Files/SlimServer.prefPane/Resources/server to your desktop
9. Place the modified XMRadio plugin in ~/Destkop/server/Plugins
10. Mount the AppleTV volume via AFP
11. Modify ~/Desktop/server/Slim Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/Start Slim Server.sh to add

    HOME=/Users/frontrow; export HOME

    before the ./slimserver.pl line

12. Copy ~/Desktop/server to the AppleTV's AFP volume
13. Create a folder on the Desktop called SlimServer
14. In that folder create 2 files. The first is called StartupParameters.plist and it contains:

    {  Description     = "SlimServer";  Provides        = ("SlimServer");  Requires        = ("Disks");    Uses		= ("mDNSResponder", "Resolver", "DirectoryServices", "NFS", "Network Time");    OrderPreference	= "Last";    Messages =    {	start = "Starting SlimServer";	stop = "Stopping SlimServer";    };}

    The second is called SlimServer and it contains:

    #!/bin/sh. /etc/rc.commonSERVER_RUNNING=`ps -axww | grep "slimp3.pl|slimp3d|slimserver.pl|slimserver" | grep -v grep | cat`StartService() {ConsoleMessage "Starting SlimServer"if [ z"$SERVER_RUNNING" = z ] ; then	pushd "/Users/frontrow/server"    sudo -u frontrow "Slim Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/Start Slim Server.sh"    popdfiif [ z"$#" != z"0" ] ; then    ConsoleMessage -Sfi}StopService() {if [ z"$SERVER_RUNNING" != z ] ; then    kill `echo $SERVER_RUNNING | sed -n 's/^[ ]*([0-9]*)[ ]*.*$/1/p'`fi}RunService "$1"

15. Copy the SlimServer folder to the AppleTV's AFP volume
16. Login via ssh using

    ssh -1 frontrow@appletv.local

    password is frontrow

17. Change the root file system to read/write using

    sudo mount -uw /

18. Move the SlimServer folder using

    sudo mv /Users/frontrow/SlimServer /Library/StartupItems/

19. Make the SlimServer file executable

    sudo chmod +x /Library/StartupItems/SlimServer/SlimServer

20. Change the owner

    sudo chown -R root:wheel /Library/StartupItems/SlimServer

21. Disable auto updating

    sudo bash -c 'echo "127.0.0.1       mesu.apple.com" >> /etc/hosts'

22. Restart the AppleTV

    sudo reboot

23. From Safari goto: http://appletv.local:9000/
24. Change the music directory in the SlimServer prefs to /mnt/Media/Media Files

The only problem so far is that it creates multiple Albums for each album due to how the AppleTV stores the music.

Fixing a microwave with soap

One of the problems with being an engineer is that I have ideas on how to fix things and it takes a lot for me to have someone else fix things. Lately we're been having problems with our microwave door closing; it was just sticking. So, I finally got annoyed at it and decided to take a stab at fixing it. I figured it just needed to be lubed up, but what type of lubricant would work that wouldn't blow up. I had WD-40, but that was a bad choice as I thought that it could be smelly, wasn't good around food, and could blow up the microwave. My second choice was a bar of soap. Sounds stupid, but what did I have to lose. I used a bar of Irish Spring (it makes things smell better) to lube up the prongs on the door that go into the microwave. That seems to have been the ticket; after less than a minute of trying to fix the microwave, it was as good as new!

Lets' spy on the competition

Today I saw that NEAT Receipts has provided more information on their Mac version, and here. Just about a month ago, the founder of NEAT Receipts (or one of his employees) purchased a copy of ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. At first I thought maybe they wanted to talk to me about the products and I contacted them about it, but now it seems that the goal was simply to either look at the competition or learn from it. So it looks like NEAT Receipts has 3 developers working on the program; I wrote ReceiptWallet initially in about 2 weeks part time and have had over a year to perfect it.I just hope that they don't copy my ideas and interface as it has taken me a long time to get things quite usable. They're exhibiting at Macworld, so I'll have to take a look at what they have and maybe change my marketing message, "The original receipt management program for Mac OS X".

Email and DNS Services turned off!

I'm pleased to say that I'm out of the DNS and email services businesses. I'm now relying on GoDaddy for DNS and some of my email forwarding and Google/Gmail for email. While it may seem risky to rely on Google's free service and GoDaddy's low cost service for stuff as important as mail, but I'm confident that things will be fine. Gmail did have some slowness yesterday, but it cleared up today. The only hiccup is that my brother-in-law couldn't send mail when he got home. After asking my sister a bunch of questions to nail down the problem, I discovered that Cox blocks outbound connections on port 25 which is great of them to try to prevent spam from originating from customer machines. Luckily, Gmail also accepts outbound mail on port 587, so a quick change got around the problem.