Nicholas Pike

This afternoon I put together a quick Ubiquity script: Spellcheck!  Spellcheck uses Google under-the-hood to do a quick spellcheck of any words you pass in as parameters after invoking spellcheck in Ubiquity.

spellcheck rudiculous speeeling

Pretty sweet!  Hit the link below to suck it into your Ubiquity installation:

http://apps.npike.net/ubiquity/spellcheck.html

Was looking through some library functions for NSIS (NullSoft Scriptable Installer), and found some of the strangest code comments I have ever seen:

Oh how I missed dual monitors!

Finally went and saw Adams band “Hey Thanks” play this weekend (at the California Brew Haus).

Also had my first iPhone return this weekend. Was at the movies Friday night (The Rocker), and my iPhones Ringer Silence switch fell clean off the side of my iPhone.

Made an appointment at the genius bar the next morning, got to eastview around 4pm, and walked out at 4:15pm with a brand new phone.

The iPhone has this nagging restriction, thats been driving me crazy since I traded in my iPod Touch as my main music playing device.

You can’t plug your iPhone into a second computer (for example, at work) and play back music from the iPhone on your computer!

This just makes no sense, because the iPod Touch (and any other iPod) can manually manage music on multiple computers.

Below is how you can hack your iTunes to circumvent this stupid restriction.  A few caveats:

• I have no idea how well this will work if your 2nd installation of iTunes is actually managing any music in its library
• I have no idea if you can actually add/remove songs from your iPhone on the 2nd computer.  I wouldn’t recommend it, but it probably will work.

Lets Begin

You will need a text editor, and a hex editor for your operating system of choice.  There are many free options for both Windows and OS X.  For this post I will be using Windows and Ultra-Edit.  Make sure iTunes is closed on both machines before making these changes.  Make sure to backup “iTunes Music Library.xml” and “iTunes Library.itl” on the second machine before editing.

Determine your iTunes Library ID for your first computer (the one your iPhone syncs with primarily)

1. Locate your iTunes Music Library.xml  (Windows:  Usually in My Documents\Music\iTunes  OS X: Usually in /home/[username]/music/iTunes)
2. Open this file in a text editor and find the line that looks like the following:
   

   <key>Library Persistent ID</key><string>79273A3FF1AD7693</string>

3. Write down the value between the <string> tags, in my case “79273A3FF1AD7693“

Hack your 2nd iTunes

On the second computer you wish to enable playback with, do the following:

1. Open the same file from step 1 above on this computer
2. Write down the existing <string> value like step 2 above.  (This will be different then the one you have already written down)
3. Replace the existing <string> value with the one from step 3 above.
4. Save. Close File
5. In the same directory that you found “iTunes Music Library.xml”, you should also see “iTunes Library.itl”.  Open this in a hex editor.
6. Search for your Library ID in the file.  If there are no results, try adding a space every two characters in the Library ID and search again.
7. Replace this ID with the one from your first computer.  (Should be EXACTLY the same amount of characters, otherwise this will not work)
8. Save file.
9. Open iTunes, and plugin your iPhone!

Last Steps

Your 2nd iTunes might pop a warning that says your iPhone is currently synched with another computer, and that syncing will erase all content.  Cancel this dialog.  Make sure your iPhone is set to manually sync on this computer, and you should be fine!

Due to a request by Microsoft LIVE Legal Services, iXboxLive has been renamed to “Xbox LIVE Friends”, and even better news: is now completely free!

So it seems a cracked copy of one of my applications has hit the interwebs today…  first time I’ve ever had to experience that first hand.  It really feels like a dull knife in the back.

Oh well - a very small percentage of users currently jailbreak, and an even smaller percentage are going to hunt down these cracked applications.

And today’s XKCD comic sums up my life recently rather nicely.  I feel like this guy is using my life story as his comic book story.

iXboxLive 1.1 has been submitted to Apple for review!  Many under-the-hood changes, and a ton of visual changes:

• Many crash bug fixes
  • Won’t immediately crash to the springboard if you have no active internet connection (iPod Touch users). This often resulted in your buddy list being wiped. This has been fixed.
  • Occasionally downloading avatar images from Microsoft would result in a crash. This should be fixed.
• Redesigned Buddy List and Details View
  • The Buddy list now resembles the style of displaying friends that Xbox.com uses! (Thanks Mike Jefferson and Erik Bye for your help here..)
  • The gamer details view has been redesigned by TOTUSHI. You can find him online here: http://www.totushi.com/. He is a visual artist that does excellent freelance work.
• Message Xbox buddy’s with www.xbox.com
• Online buddies are automatically moved to the top of your buddy list
• The application now does some under-the-hood caching of gamer tag avatars, which should result in better loading performance.

iXboxLive is also sporting a new Springboard Icon, designed by Erik Bye:

Time for some screenshots!

Been really working out a lot in the last few weeks. Purchased a mountain bike awhile ago, I try to ride that a few times a week for ~7 miles.. weather permitting.

I still throw in a hearty 3 mile walk a few times a week..

The weather here in Rochester has been pretty rainy, so I’ve added another in door exercise routine (in addition to my weight lifting): a heavy training bag for boxing!