Vladimir Jirasek

My iPad apps - March 2012

2012-03-30T16:52:00.001-07:00

Below are the screenshots from my iPad so ou can see what pops I have installed.

Cycling challenge - London to Brighton for BHF

2012-03-18T13:40:00.002-07:00

I need challenges so I registered for the London to Brighton cycle with the British Heart Foundation on 17th June 2012.

I would like to raise at least £1000 for the British Heart Foundation. You can support me in my goal at my fundraising page.

This will be the route.

View London to Brighton in a larger map

Sandboxing allows free Guardian access

2012-02-17T13:16:00.001-08:00

I like reading news online. It saves out forests plus is much more interactive. I have been looking for a newspaper to subscribe to. Times are out of question. Guardian, seems like good option, especially as they offer first day free. However, if you combine this try before buy offer with iOS sandbox architecture the newspaper issuer may loose out. here is why.

Try following:
1. Download Guardian through NewStand Store
2. Enjoy reading first day
3. Next day delete the app from news-stand
4. Download again

To correct this would require for apple to know that I downloaded the app already and indicate this to Guardian app.

I am in any way suggesting doing it. It is just interesting to see a security feature disrupting revenue.

Well done video teaching 5 different light techniques for portrait photography by Jay P. Morgan

2011-12-31T04:10:00.000-08:00

A friend sent me this video. I find it very well done and I hope you will too.

My iPhone apps - December 2011

2011-12-28T15:10:00.001-08:00

It has been over a month since I have been using my iPhone 4S. I would like to share the apps I use, at least by showing the screenshots of the home screen.

I am using Folders to fit my main applications on the first screen.

What's wrong with Apple TV 2

2011-09-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

I am fan of Apple. Apart from work laptop, all of my home computers run Apple operating system. When Apple TV was announced I ordered one immediately. That was a year ago.
What is my verdict after an extensive use?

Where AppleTV stands out:
I like Apple TV design; it is small, sleek and quiet. The interface quality is best I have seen. The remote application on iOS devices is exceptionally good.

Where AppleTV fails:

1. Viewing photos

AppleTV support playing slideshows of photos stored on other computers participating in the same Home Sharing network. That is all ok, if you want to play all photos in a project or album. For example, when I import photos, I label those that I would like to share. Clearly, there is no need to share all those 400 photos and make my friends suffer by "Death by Photos". This is one of the biggest limitations of AppleTV. Its integration with Aperture 3 is very limited. It would help if I could set it to show photos with a specific label only.

The integration with photo-hosting services, such as Flick, Picasa is also very basic or missing.

2. Accessing content stored on non-apple devices

I use QNAP TS-259 Pro as a home NAS. All my music, video files and photos are stored there. AppleTV 2 cannot access any of the content services provided by QNAP. And the list os rather extensive: SMB, AFP2, and DLNA. If I want to pay any movie I have to switch my iMac on and start iTunes. Hardly a seamless experience if you ask me!

Why Apple does not implement DLNA, a standard for content management and playback?

3. Accessing Internet based services

The Internet based services ar rather limited on this side of the pond. No Netflix, no Lovefilm and no Internet radios. I do not miss the last one as we have another Internet radio from Pure.

So here you have it. Three most annoying issues with Apple TV 2 for me. The most fo them would be solved by implementing DLNA protocol and movie subscription services, like Netflix and Lovefilm. It cannot be that difficult as there are DLNA application in AppStore already!

From snaps to TV - photo showings

2011-09-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

I am an enthusiastic photographer. My photo library is now 100GB big and counting. Yet, when someone visits us I had to use my iMac or laptop to show the photos, and more importantly not every photo I take and import. Well, not anymore thanks for a combinations of technologies and products I have put together. And although I like Apple, I must say that Apple has done very poor job in making the user experience great when it comes to sharing selected pictures on a TV! Apple, take notice and make my experience better! Until then, I will use the system below.

Let's see what my workflow is. See the picture below.

Digital photo to TV flow

I use my Nikon D7000 to take pictures
Aperture running on my iMac imports the pictures to a project. I have folder structure: year/project name under Aperture.
I export pictures I want to share to QNAP NAS
Apple TV 2 running XBMC accesses the NAS via DLNA protocol and shows it on the TV

Let's look at the setup in little more detail:

I only want to show certain pictures. For this reason I use "Labels" in Aperture and tag any picture with a label "NAS". Select only those pictures that have the label and export them to NAS into a folder format: Year/project name. I scale the pictures on export to fit the TV screen, i.e. max resolution 1920x1080px and 100 pixels per inch.

QNAP NAS is running TwonkyMedia server and is configured to look into /Multimedia/Photos folder for pictures. It is then able offer the pictures to any DLNA compliant client. Sadly, Apple TV 2 is not DLNA anything!

Hence I had to jail-break the Apple TV 2 to run XMBC. There are numerous guides how to jail break and it changes all the time, so I do not want to post the link here. Just Google it.

So far, this system works fine. I only have photos that I want to share with our visitors via an interface that is easy to use.

Contact me if you want to know more and get help with the setup.

Apple Mail on Lion and Google Apps: solving the folder confusion problem

2011-08-06T01:03:00.000-07:00

Since I have upgraded to Lion on my iMac the Apple Mail and Google Apps started to behave weirdly.
The symptoms were:

When I sent an email it was copied to a newly created folder "Sent Messages" stored on Google Apps
When I deleted the email it stayed in the All Mail and was never deleted

Fortunately, and thanks to Google search, I found the way in this Google forum thread. In this post I want to show you more graphically how to configure your Apple Mail to fix the problem.

First, there is nothing to configure in the actually Google Apps Web mail interface; it is all done in the Apple Mail on your Lion.

Step 1: Go to Apple mail preferences ("Command" + ","), click on Account, select the Mail account you want to fix and then go to "Mailbox Behaviours". Set it as you see it here on the screenshot. Then close the Preferences.

Step 2: Expand [Google Mail] folder under your account, Click on "Sent" and then select Mailbox menu -> use this mailbox for -> Sent. repeat this for folders Trash and Drafts. Note that I do not use Junk capability on Apple mail as I believe the Google does an excellent job with the junk mail.

In the end, the Apple mail folder three should look like this:

Enjoy.

Comprehensive review of USA Inc finances

2011-08-03T01:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks @BillGates for highlighting this report from respected KPCB.

I would like to see something similar for UK and other European countries. p=People need to realise that money do no gown on trees and all their benefits and services need to be paid somehow.

Is Dropbox going to refund for their security incompetence?

2011-06-25T02:32:00.000-07:00

I have sent a refund request to Dropbox today:

Hello,

due to recent security incident I want to cancel my premium subscription. You failed to keep your systems secure and I no longer wish to share my private data with you and through you.

Please refund appropriate portion of my annual subscription fee.

Best regards

Vladimir

Let's see what Dropbox has to say about it. Will post response to this blog.

-----Update on 28 June 2011 -----:

I dot a response from Dropbox. It is positive one and they offer a refund. Let's hope Dropbox step up the security and I will be able to use it again!

Kevin - Dropbox Support, Jun-27 02:56 pm (PDT):

Hi Vladimir,

I can provide a refund to your account but it cannot be to your credit card, unfortunately.

Charges to credit cards can only be refunded when the charge made is within 120 days. The credit card merchants do not allow refunds after that point. This is a hard limit set by the merchant service and not a Dropbox policy. As a result the only method we have available is via Paypal's online payment system.

You can select a refund by one of two methods:
1. Paypal (fast)
2. Check (slow)

If by Paypal then please provide a Paypal email address to send the refund to.
If by check then please provide a name and mailing address to send the check to.

For your record, I have reviewed our logs and there is no record of any authentications occurring during the affected time period to your account. We are confident that no unauthorized accesses occurred as a result.

Best,

Kevin

Skype on Non-Skype enabled TV?

2011-02-26T02:51:00.000-08:00

I really like the new Skype service on certain TVs. I could sit comfortably on my sofa, which is 3.5 meters away from the TV, and enjoy full Skype experience. But hey, I do not want to buy the new TV?
So I wonder, could I buy Apple Mac Mini, connect high quality webcam made for sofa-like call experience and plug it in Mac mini?

Looking at the Skype site here http://shop.skype.com/skype-for-tv/tv-compatible-webcams/panasonic-communication-camera-ty-cc10/#h1, the webcam specification looks fairly standard to me. It has a USB interface, supports HD, has uni-directional mics. Note that currently Skype software in Panasonic and Samsung TV can only call to Windows Skype.

Unfortunately, there isn't any information about using those special TV webcams with Mac on Skype website, not I could find anything on Google or Bing.

If you know this could work, please let me know.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Facebook privacy settings

2011-01-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

I value my privacy and share limited information with the world and little more with my friends. Facebook got better on the privacy issues but still it requires custom configuration to limit the access to the personal information to friends only. Certainly, there are examples where the Facebok was used to check on job candidates. Recently, even teachers have not escaped either as per following article.
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/853472-facebook-photos-could-cost-teachers-careers

So what settings I use?

As you can see I use Custom settings and set everything to Friends only, hence no information is available even to friends of my friends.

My switch to Google Chrome browser

2010-12-28T13:23:00.000-08:00

I have been using Safari on my Mac (and iPad) for last 4 years. During those years I moved briefly to Firefox but abandoned it as slower and non Mac looking app. Now comes Google Chrome 8 which I tried last month and have been using since.

The switch was fairly painless due to two serices that I use:

XMarks - synchronization of bookmarks.
1Password - password software with plugins for most web browsers

Now I have Google Chrome with many extensions as shown in the screenshot of my toolbar:

From the left to right:

1Password
XMarks
Instapaper
Tweetdeck
Video history for YouTube
Evernote
Blogger
Google reader
Google URL shortener

What I really like on Chrome browser is the speed, synchronisation of settings between my computers (Windows and Mac) and system of extensions. Safari has extensions as well, but I did not find them very useful.

Now, what is needed is Google Chrome on iPad and Nokia phones.

My iPad applications in pictures

2010-12-18T03:42:00.000-08:00

---Apologies for missing pictures. It seems that Cloud service misplaced the so bare with me, I will repost.---

A picture is worth thousands words, so here I present a gallery of screenshots From my iPad.

Enjoy.

Images rotated with free application PhotoPad.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

How would I change Apple TV?

2010-12-11T15:19:00.000-08:00

Intro

I have love-hate relationship with my new Apple TV. It is incredibly small and quiet multimedia device, yet its content source capabilities are somewhat limited compared to it’s competition.
At the cost of £99 this presents itself almost at an impulse buy threshold.
So has it delivered the expectations. Read on.

Content

Hence my first suggestion is to enable Apple TV to look outside iTunes Home sharing for the content, both on the local home network and on the Internet.

I own QNAP TS259 Pro NAS where all my digital content is stored. It supports iTunes (for music only), AFP and Windows sharing and also has DLNA support. Though the last one does not really work well with videos (tested on my PS3).

So, I would like Apple TV to be able to connect to the AFP share and start streaming the content. There are load of iPad applications that can do this. Also, if I had Mac Mini this would be very easy to do. So why not Apple TV? I do not want to have my iMac running all the time. My NAS is on always (with some energy settings switched on).

Next, the content from the Internet is very limited to iTunes (UK library) and YouTube (there are some restrictions on the content outside USA). Look at competitor, Apple. Why there is no Netflix support in the UK for “all you can eat” packages?

Photos

Apple TV can connect to my Aperture library and show photos. The interface is quite good. But as I mentioned above, my photos are also on my NAS in the same structure as in Aperture.

It would also be good to have more intuitive connection to Flickr. I could authorise Apple TV for Flick access (OAuth protocol would come very handy here) and see my photostream and those of my friends.

Moreover, it completely lacks the access to Google Picasa photo service. I guess that the rivalry with Google is behind it.

Music

Listening to music is really limited to iTunes or Internet Radio. And it is pity. Why cannot Apple tV connect to Spotify or Napster? Such a functionality would add tremendous value to me as I do not have Sonos or other Spotify compatible Hi-Fi (at least not yet).

Social interactions

Apple TV miss most of social capabilities. I have Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts. I would like Apple TV to be able:

Selectively publish on Facebook or Twitter what I have listen to or watched
See what my friends are watching or listening to
Access Facebook pictures from my friends
See what my contacts in Flickr have posted in their photo-streams
Interaction with iTunes Ping

This is just a short list of tasks that come to my mind. I am sure the list can be much much longer.

Conclusion

As Steve Jobs said, the Apple TV is still his hobby; and it shows. I am honestly hoping that Apple is working on a new software that would bring some if not all improvements suggested here. Until then, my Apple TV is going to be used less frequently and may be replaced by a more versatile Mac mini.

Installing Adobe Reader X on Windows 7 - problem with Microsoft Windows Search Filter Host

2010-12-10T01:21:00.000-08:00

As you may know, there is new Adobe Reader X which bring important security improvements in this bug infested application.
So I wanted to install it on my Windows 7 Professional. All went well until the following error:

Files in use: Microsoft Windows Search Filter Host

Now, what do you think that a normal user would do? Nothing at all! There is no way to close this process as it is not an Windowed application, nor running in a system tray.
So what is it then? Quick search on Google shows that the process name is SearchFilterHost.exe.

And it is running as SYSTEM. As I am administrator on this host I can try "End process". So I did, but the process simply restarts!

Conclusion: I cannot install Adobe Reader X on my WIndows 7 in normal mode.

Is Amazon new DNS service a wise move?

2010-12-06T03:18:00.000-08:00

Amazon announced the new DNS hosting service (Amazon Route 53) in the cloud today. The link with more details about the service is here.
The service is similar to others, except there is one one important security concern for me - billing per usage, as is the case with many other Amazon cloud services. More precisely, 50c per million queries up to 1 billion and then it drops to 25c per million queries.

What I feel is that this model might not be very safe for Amazon customers. It may open an avenue for someone malicious to make them pay for something they have benefited from. Let me explain.

The reason lies in the nature of DNS and the network protocol it uses, which is UDP. UDP protocol has not security controls built in and it is very easy to spoof UDP packets. By creating a packet where the source IP address belongs to someone else. As the DNS is stateless (only one query and one response) the DNS server simply send the response to the original source IP address. By doing so, millions of packets can be sent by malicious persons in relatively short time and be unrecognisable from those sent by company's customers.

Let's take my broadband connection for example - 50Mbps down and 5Mpbs up. If I assume a typical IP packet with a DNS query is around 50 Bytes I can send approx. 12,000 DNS queries per second, theoretically. Let's lower it it to 10,000 to be on the safe side. To hit a million of queries should take me around 100s (close to 2 minutes to approximate again). That means that every 2 minutes can cost a company using Amazon DNS service 50c (and that is just using one computer behind a cable modem!).

Now imagine a DDoS attack if someone wants your company to bleed cash. Let's assume I want your company to pay for DNS $1000 per month. I need to generate 3 billion DNS packets. That will take me approx 85 hours using just my Mac; easily done in few hours with many PCs hosting remotely controlled malware!

Of course, Amazon could put in place some kind of DDoS protection. Or could they? DSN packets can be spoofed and there is no way to tell the difference from the legitimate customers. Another option is for a company to restrict how many queries they want to limit per month, but that could easily be used by criminals to reach the limit quickly and starve legitimate customers of DNS data.

In short, I would stay far away from Amazon DNS service in the current offering, unless they update the pricing model to offer "all you can eat" DNS service.

How to backup your documents and pictures for less

2010-12-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

I have been advising some of my friends on best ways to backup their data. Most of them have very few documents (word and even less excel) and much much more pictures. So, here is what I tell you:
Use Google Picasa for Pictures and Mozy free service for documents or Dropbox for seamless synchronisation between multiple computers.

For pictures:
1. Get Gmail account
2. Sign up for Google Picasa
3. Install Google Picasa software on the computer
4. One the Picasa client find all pictures toggle the "Sync to Web" and sign in with the Google account.
The amount of space that comes with free Picasa service is "just" 1GB. This might not be enough for all, so I say - upgrade storage. For $5 per year you get 20GB, and $20 gets you 80GB. That is pretty good value in my opinion.

For documents:
Get free Mozy or Dropbox. Both give 2GB of free storage. The difference is that with Mozy you do not need to think of any setup and where you save documents. With Dropbox, you need to save files to the Dropbox folder to get them uploaded to the cloud.

I hope this helps someone.

Warning US citizens, your Internet freedom is about to disappear!

2010-09-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

Most people connected to the Internet enjoy freedom to see what they want, visit sites they want and generally roam freely. That is, all except citizens of states such as China, Iran, and others.
And soon, you might be want to add USA to the list. Shocking, isn't is? The country that invented the Internet is now taking legal steps to enable sites to be put on a mandatory and a suggested black-lists respectively. All in the name of media content companies that do not want to change their attitude to digital content; but that is another topic I guess.

There is a very interesting article here: http://www.americablog.com/2010/09/s-3804-internet-blacklist-bill.html
Let's hope that the bill does not passes to the law. But if it does, what can ISPs do to enforce it and what can tech savvy people (and criminals to be honest) do to go around the restrictions?

Ways to enforce the law

ISPs could update their DNS servers to simply return false responses to DNS queries from their clients.
Analysis: Probably very easy to implement but not much effective unless DNS traffic from clients to other DNS servers is blocked as well.

They could also block IP access to those DNS names, i.e. if www.devil.com resolves to 3.34.2.5 IP address, this could be blocked.
Analysis: Very effective but requiring dynamically change access lists based on DNS queries. This would have impact on the performance.

Ways to overcome the restrictions

Let's assume the blacklist contains DNS hostnames or domains and all DNS servers in the USA must honour the list. In that case, I can simply use my own DNS server (even locally on my computer), use DNS servers of someone outside USA. It would be interesting what OpenDNS would do here, i.e. if they were obliged to do this filtering for all DNS queries coming from USA IP address space.

Next obvious option is using VPN. I could setup a VPN server outside USA and connect to it from my computer.
Another variant could be reverse/anonymous proxies.

Conclusion

This bill is a very very bad idea and I hope it does not pass. Because if it does, EU might be stupid enough to follow the suit and we could kiss goodbye to our Internet freedoms and be forced to go underground.

What are you opinions on this topic?

Thumbs down: Seagate BlackArmor 220 NAS

2010-08-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

I am selling Seagate Blackarmor NAS I bought three days ago! Why? Well, basically I did not do enough research. This NAS looks good but that's about the only thing it does well.

For one it does not support Mac, which is very big concern for me. I need a NAS that can work with Mac AFP protocol, support iSCSI, support TimeMachine AND encrypt volumes at the same time. Seagate, as it seems, only supports the latter. The integrate looks so 2000 with basic HTML. Compare it to QNAP's Ajax driven interface.

One more nail to the coffin - the DLNA streaming to my PS3 does not work.

Yes, you guessed, I am selling Seagate and buying QNAP, 259 Pro specifically.

So Seagate, come to your senses and produce something that is not just for Windows users and works well for media streaming.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

One registry key and what a mess it does to Windows!

2010-08-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

In my network I have several computers and servers, most Windows (XP SP3 and Win7). About two months ago I started noticing strange behaviour across some PC and 1 server.

Symptoms
1. Windows Update Service stopped downloading updates.
2. McAfee Total Protection SaaS client stopped downloading updates with an error message: Component's digital signature cannot be verified.
3. Windows Update stopped working complaining about digital signatures with error code 80092026

Resolution
After some digging on the Internet I found only a few indication of the problem. And one of them was correct: http://blog.stealthpuppy.com/windows/windows-update-80092026-plus-certificate-crypto-operation-failed

Looking at the registry entry (HLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\SystemCertificates\TrustedPublishers)I discovered one particular key that was present only on systems experiencing problems.

The problem has gone away as I deleted the key. The systems are working fine now.

I hope this helps someone.

New task management system

2010-08-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

I had been using Apple Mail functionality to manage my to-dos and tasks. Lately I realised I need to get more organised, i.e. use computer in more sophisticated way and started looking for task management software.
First obvious requirement was availability for Mac, iPhone and iPad. This narrowed contenders to merely two: Things and OmniFocus. Both are not cheap, though Things will set you at around half what OmniFocus commands.
I tested both for few days and decided to stick with Things for these reasons:

The interface is cleaner and smoother
Their iPhone and iPad applications work better for
I can use Tags
I can use responsibility areas for never ending tasks
It is cheaper

Will post more when I will have been using it for some time.

Troubles with Apple Mail and multiple certificates

2010-08-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

Back from holidays, refreshed and blogging again.

Today I needed to send an email signed with my certificate issued by Czech authorities. I also have Verisign email certificate and both are imported into my Keychain. I was looking for a way to tell Mail which certificate to use, but there is only one button:

I was searching on the Internet and there are two ways to tell Apple Mail which certificate to use:
1. Go to KeyChain Access and disable certificates that should not be used - in my case the Verisign certificate
2. Delete all certificates and import them in the order I want to use them.

Come on Apple, even Outlook can do this as well as Thunderbird, which is by the way much better in handling PGP secured emails.

I hope this helps someone.

Trip to Snezka in Krkonose mountains

2010-07-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

We visited Krkonose mountains and did very nice trail around Pec pod Snezkou. Here are some pictures from the day.

New "My Mac Software" page

2010-07-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

I strongly believe in sharing information. Also, I have been sometimes struggling to find best software for specific tasks that would run on my Mac.

So in order to help others, I have created a new page My Mac Software, where I plan to share a list of Mac software I use. I will be adding more details on most of them in coming weeks.

Please keep the discussion live and share your applications.