Kit·blog

Kit·Blog Notes — F1.1 Nokton camera porn

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:44:22 +0200

If you're addicted to high speed lens — you freak! — should take a look at Cosina's Voigtländer branded Nokton 50mm F1.1 for the Leica M mount.

Sexy, ay?

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Photography.
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Back on Boogie Street [Flickr]

kitone — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:14:41 PDT

kitone posted a photo:

Park alley, Baia Mare, Transylvania. Adieu.

Kit·Blog Notes — Well, Have You?

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:54:43 +0200

"I call it the "cab test." When you get into a taxi and tell the driver that you're in advertising, they often ask you whether you've done anything they might be familiar with. Well, have you?"

Jeff Goodby: We Are Becoming Irrelevant Award-Chasers.

Oops.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Advertising.
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Kit·Blog Notes — It's Only Business, Isn't It

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:20:40 +0200

Buy Nokia and help Iran regime track, censure and repress activists: Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Zeitgeist.
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Kit·Blog Notes — Magnificence as you have never seen

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:34:39 +0200

Hellen Mirren in Fedra [link in Romanian], beamed At The Light Cinema (LibertyCenter) live from London National Theatre via satellite: awe-inspiring.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Theater.
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Kit·Blog Notes — Jobs Had Liver Transplant

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:16:53 +0200

I'm not really eager to join the conversation on such a private topic, but here's the fact as reported by The Wall Street Journal:

Steve Jobs [...] received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. The chief executive has been recovering well and is expected to return to work on schedule later this month.

Gruber feels this is a very weird report: [1, 2, 3].

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Apple.
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Kit·Blog Notes — Orange Romania: [no*] Push Notifications

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:08:58 +0200

From Orange Romania customer service: iPhone Push Notifications not active in Romanian Orange network, no date set for activation.

Lame.

Update: Push Notifications do work in Orange Romania (see comments). I was wrong, Orange CS representative was wrong and Twitter palls were wrong. What a clusterfuck.

*I'm so glad that I was wrong!

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Romania.
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Kit·Blog Notes — Up And Then... Up

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:52:54 +0200

Life is... I don't know. Pixar grants girl's dying wish to see 'Up' will — as Gruber puts it — will choke you up more than Up itself did.

Via DF.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Movies.
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It is about a girl called Little Red Riding Hood [Flickr]

kitone — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:40:56 PDT

kitone posted a photo:

Street, Bucharest. Suspense.

Kit·Blog Notes — iPhone OS 3.0 New Features

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:03:22 +0200

Updated already? Here are two in-depth looks at what's new in iPhone OS 3.0:

The iPhone Blog: iPhone 3.0 Software Walkthrough
iSmashPhone: How To Use The Best 40 Features of iPhone 3.0
iLounge: Secrets & Features of iPhone OS 3.0
Macworld: iPhone 3.0 software update
PCWorld: iPhone 3.0 Update: 10 Hidden Features

iPhone 3.0 Push Notifications doesn't seem to work with Orange Romania for the time being.

Update 1: I was wrong about Orange—once you have installed an application that uses Push Notifications, a menu option appears in the main “Settings” app where you can configure your Push Notification preferences. No menu if you have no compliant apps, though.

Update 2: Dan Berte reports that Orange might have "some port limitations on the data plan" which could cripple Push.

Update 3: Mystery solved: no Push Notifications in Romania.

Update 4: Mystery re-solved: I was wrong.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Apple.
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Kit·Blog Notes — 101 Mona Lisas

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:34:27 +0200

101 Variationen der Mona Lisa, as they say. One from Bucharest, guess which one.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Miscellanea.
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"The world is very big and mostly red, yellow and green" they concurred [Flickr]

kitone — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:04:48 PDT

kitone posted a photo:

Street, Baia Mare, Transylvania. Listen.

Kit·Blog Notes — Dazzling

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:06:43 +0200

Shine A Light makes you wish there was a Nobel Prize for shooting and editing rock band movies. It dazzled me when I first saw it in a small Edinburgh theatre, it dazzles me again every time I watch the disc.

P.S. You have to buy the disc, though, in order to see that the "Bonus Digital Copy" intended for playing on iPhones and iPods won't work in countries that lack a local iTunes Music Store, despite the fact that (a) you paid for it and (b) you are not warned about that anywhere.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Music.
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If you let yourself love a wild thing, you'll end up looking at the sky [Flickr]

kitone — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:55:53 PDT

kitone posted a photo:

Office, Bucharest. Sympathise.

Kit·Blog Notes — The 'S'

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:39:03 +0200

And, of course, a guided tour of Apple's new baby, the iPhone 3G S.

P.S. With a new camera (the current one is crappy) and a new operating system this is — for me, at least — the end of history: as soon as I get it I won't care about phones anymore, just as I don't care about computers anymore, being perfectly happy with my MBP. Problem solved. Case closed.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Apple.
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Kit·Blog Notes — Avedon

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:13:15 +0200

Through the eyes of Richard Avedon because — as my friend Mr. Mendoza said — "A little fashion won't hurt anyone".

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Photography.
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The master of the dome [Flickr]

kitone — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:49:12 PDT

kitone posted a photo:

Richard, Berlin, 2008. Closer.

Kit·Blog Notes — 1000 comments

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:07:06 +0200

The comment № 1000 was posted yesterday evening (local time) on Kit·Blog by a laconic reader named Marty.

Thank you, Marty. Cool indeed.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Personal.
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Kit·Blog Notes — Dede

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:15:10 +0200

From Russia, with love. Or so I think.

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Brandient.
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Kit·blog — Monitoring AirPort access

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:26:37 +0200

Who's there?

As Macintosh computers proliferate and AirPort Wi-Fi base stations are no longer the esoteric boxes they used to be 7 years ago, I hear more and more often the question "How can I monitor my AirPort for intruder access?". Luckily, Mac OS X is built upon UNIX, so all the tools are there, waiting to be used.

Here is a little one-liner, a shell script I wrote a number of years ago and used ever since to monitor the access on different generations of Apple AirPort base stations:

snmpwalk -v 2c -c [SNMP Community String] -Oq [Airport IP] RFC1213-MIB::atPhysAddress | grep -Eo "([0-9a-fA-F]{2} ){5}([0-9a-fA-F]{2})" | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sed -e 's/[\. ]/:/g' -e 's/[MAC address 1]/[Station name 1]/' -e 's/[MAC address n]/[Station name n]/' | sort | awk '{print FNR "\t" $0}'

SNMP access

Before using it, though, you need to prepare your AirPort base station to respond to this script.

In order for the AirPort to allow such inquiry, the SNMP access has to be enabled (to find more about SNMP, you can start with Simple Network Management Protocol's Wikipedia entry).

For this, open AirPort Utility.app, go Advanced → Statistics, check Allow SNMP, also check Allow SNMP over WAN if you need to check the access list remotely; fill in the SNMP Community String — which acts like a password for SNMP inquiries, so try and make it strong, in order to be able to withstand dictionary attacks. Update the configuration, and after the AirPort restarts, use the UNIX snmpwalk command in terminal:

snmpwalk -v 2c -c [SNMP Community String] -Oq [Airport IP] RFC1213-MIB::atPhysAddress

Where you substitute [SNMP Community String] with the SNMP password (without square brackets) and [Airport IP] with AirPort's IP (without square brackets) and 'atPhysAddress' is the OID specifying which portion of the object identifier space will be searched—physical address allocation subtree in this case.

The AirPort should reply with a list of MIB values containing the MAC address to IP allocation tables, one string per line.

One MAC address is the internet provider's router you're connected to, the others are the equipment connected—wireless or via Ethernet cable—to your AirPort.

Prettification

You can further isolate the MAC addresses with UNIX grep

grep -Eo "([0-9a-fA-F]{2} ){5}([0-9a-fA-F]{2})"

and then prettify them with tr and sed

tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sed -e 's/[\. ]/:/g'

And, if you don't want to remember the MAC addresses (especially if there are loads of them in your network) you can write your own MAC address to station name conversion table with sed again

sed 's/[MAC address n]/[Station name n]/'

where [MAC address 1] is the MAC address of the wireless card of the first computer you want on the table in canonical form and upper case (without square brackets) and [Station name n] is the name you want that MAC address to be substituted with (without square brackets).

If you need to permanently keep an eye on this, you can place the output straight on your desktop with the wonderful GeekTool utility. Just make a new Shell entry, paste the script in there and you're all set.

Red flag

Please note that the script above should not replace the basic security measures, like Wi-Fi protected access via WPA or WPA2, MAC address access control etc.

Kit·blog — Posted in Apple.
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Kit·Blog Notes — Bing sets New Record

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:02:01 +0200

In horizontal scaling, that is. Bravo. Keep up the good work!

Kit·Blog Notes — Posted in Design.
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