Wireshark is my new Toy. Let me tell you why.

Ever try to save a Youtube video?

Save a streamed song or lecture?

In Canada, both actions usually are protected as long as it is for private or personal use. Practically, saving flash embedded content is a pain.

Aside It is possible to examine the browser cache directory or install plugins to intercept the embedded content. If that works for you great.

That is where Wireshark comes in. It is a cross platform network protocol analyzer based on Ethereal.

What does that really mean? Well it lets you examine the traffic coming into your computer, including the embedded content.

First grab Wireshark here: http://www.wireshark.org/

Next, install it and fire it up.

The following are instructions for capturing video from Youtube:

1. Start capture on network card.
2. Navigate to youtube video page, wait for video to completely load into the cache.
3. Stop caputure on the network card.
4. In the ‘Filter:’, paste ‘frame.len == 1434′, this should match the length of the segments of the video as it was downloading.
5. Right click on one of the segments and click on ‘Follow TCP Stream’.
6. This will assemble the TCP stream of the video with the headers.
7. Click on the ‘Save As’ and save locally.
8. Open a editor, like textpad and strip all the headers out of the top of the file.
9. Test it in a player like vlc.

Similar steps are required for flash files.

For more details see my Wireshark notes.

My iPhone app is in the home stretch, finalizing the name and getting the art work completed. It isn’t rocket surgery, but functionally it scratches an itch I had, so I though I would have some fun with it.

If you are interested in beta testing send me your UDID and I can send you a copy.

The transition was reasonably painless, a few adjustments to make, like using init.d instead of service. I made some notes for myself that others might find helpful:

Ubuntu Notes

Ubuntu KVM Host notes

Ubuntu KVM Guest notes

With apologies to Mr. Jarvis, I would like to suggest that The Best Computer is The One That’s With You. For me that is my new Macbook Air.

I bought it as a refurb from Apple’s website, it is small and light enough that I can carry it around and don’t really notice it. The multi touch trackpad is so much better then my old Powerbook’s single touch trackpad.

In addition, using my tethered iPhone to get Internet access lets me be online anywhere. No more scamming WiFi signals.

There are some short comings; only one USB port and no built in Ethernet jack. But those are minor gripes.

Of course it is the best computer for me because I am always able to get online and do a quick bit of work and ‘good enough’ that I am actually productive.

In a few steps you can.

1. Choose your song in iTunes, right click, choose ‘Get Info’.
2. Under the ‘Options’ tab there is a ‘Start time’ and ‘Stop time’, edit your song so that it plays only what you want. Don’t worry you can undo the Start and Stop times when we are done.
3. Click ‘Okay’ to save changes to your Start and Stop times.
4. Right click the song again and choose ‘Create AAC Version’. This will create a new file and add it to iTunes. You should see it right below your old file.
5. Right click the old song and under the ‘Options’ tab reset the Start and Stop times.
6. Right click the new song and choose ‘Show in Finder’ (or equivalent PC option).
7. When you find this new file, rename the extension from m4a to m4r.
8. Now delete the new file in iTunes, right click on the new file, choose ‘Delete’, then ‘Remove’ but choose to ‘Keep File’.
9. Now drag your .m4r file back onto the Library icon in iTunes.

You’re done!

Reminder: make sure you are syncing your ringtones to your phone.

My dad’s ring tone is now Yakety Sax, I figure Benny Hill would be proud.

(Tested on iTunes 9.0.1 for OS X.)

So far pretty good, only a few dead zones one big one near the Darlington power station and Edge only zone at the Port Hope VIA station.

Having internet on the VIA trains isn’t new, they have wifi, but it is nice not having to worry about it.

UPDATE: Huge Edge section from Port Hope to Cobourg, gah.

UPDATE 2: Edge from Cobourg to Belleville.

UPDATE 3: East of Belleville picked up 3G again, I think coverage is good if you can see the 401 from the train

“This page requires a secure connection which includes server authentication.”

“The Certificate Issuer for this site is untrusted or unknown. Do you wish to proceed?”

First, I want to say that the v2.0 OS and iPhone is one of the best mobile platforms out there. The big caveat is that if you type a lot, you are better off with a Blackberry. But it has the better web browser, app support and it is and ipod.

So what could make it better, here are my top five:

1. Cut and Paste. Nuff said.
2. Back ground apps, the notification api never showed up.
3. Mail.app, landscape keyboard, would seriously close the typing gap in email
4. Mail.app, expunge when deleted, at least an option to do so.
5. Update Springboard to handle more apps. Nice problem for Apple to have, that people are struggling with Application managment.

I don’t really care that much about Flash, MMS or Bluetooth, but they would be nice too. Totally selfish list, lets see if Mail.app gets some love in this release.

The first step in backing up the dvd is to decrypt it. There are many free ways of doing this, often involving decss. My recommendation is a commercial app called AnyDVD. Yes, you can use free apps to decrypt 90% of the dvds out there and yes AnyDVD is expensive and only runs on Windows. AnyDVD is actively maintained, in fact they have released a version that will decrypt Blu Ray discs. I guess I am old enough to choose my software battles.

After installing and inserting a dvd into the drive, backing up the dvd is as simple as navigating to the drive and copying the VIDEO_TS directory to your hard drive. The size of the backed up directory will usually be about 7 Gigs or less.

At this point the backup can be played on any software that can play dvds. I suggest VLC media player, which is cross platform and will display the full dvd menus.

Finally, if you wish to play back the content on your ipod or game console I would suggest HandBrake. It has profiles for the different platforms and allows queuing of transcoding jobs.

Side note: The OS X DVD Player will play the backed up image, start the application first and drag the VIDEO_TS onto the icon in the Dock.)

Posting from Startup Empire, an event hosted by Startup North, with a few familiar faces from the Democamp scene.