Madness

Sunday November 02, 2008 at 13:25

So you have a DVR

You’ve got a DVR, and you want to get all the great stuff you’ve recorded. Turns out, this is a lot more difficult than one might think. If you have Time Warner, like I do, it’s really difficult. You can try to mount the HD/DVR receiver through Firewire, and hope you don’t do something really bad to the device, (Linux box required). Our, if all you really care about is getting certain items, or perhaps getting all those great movies that play On Demand, there’s an easier way. I have an EyeTV, with the option for full digital lossless recording. On the back of the HD/DVR, there is a cable out jack that pumps data out in full HD. Connect the EyeTV to this jack, set the input option to Digital, and suddenly, you are recording full digital video of anything that is currently playing on your TV.

Remember, the EyeTV cannot access the higher cable directly, nor can it access the OnDemand channels directly. This means that you will not be able to set up record times. However, if you record your shows or movies, or even live TV on the DVR, then all you have to do is let it play through the EyeTV, and record it as if it’s live television. Click the Export to AppleTV option, or iPhone for that matter, and you suddenly watching True Blood on your iPhone. Don’t forget, the latest releases of EyeTV software also allow full streaming of TV shows to your iPhone over WiFi, which is pretty cool when your in the bedroom trying to put the 2 year old to bed.

Monday August 25, 2008 at 8:47

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Favorite iPhone keyboard hack

Monday August 11, 2008 at 15:30

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Winterboard now supports removing App titles

Sunday August 10, 2008 at 20:28

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App Store, Cydia and Installer: 2.0.1 Firmware goodness

Tuesday August 05, 2008 at 12:39

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WebClip icon examples:

You’ll notice that the Yankees WebClip has the sticker theme applied, but the Ada and Anais WebClips do not. The Ada and Anais WebClips were created by zooming in on the site logos before saving to Home Screen.

Tuesday August 05, 2008 at 12:32

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iPhone WebClipping icons: A How To

If you’re like me, you hate the way that the iPhone makes icons for WebClips. When you save a bookmark to your Home Screen, you want it to either match your theme, or at least not look like a silly small version of the web site. Here’s a trick for Jailbreak and non-Jailbreak users to take control over those icons (screen grabs coming in later post).

Some sites are nice enough to provide a custom icon for iPhone users, but if you’re on a site that doesn’t, and don’t want the ugly, here’s a web page looking icon, follow these steps:

Find an image on the page you like, maybe the logo.
Zoom in on this image so that it fills most of the screen.
Click the + to open up the bookmark screen.
Simply click Add to Home Screen button.
You will be presented with the new icon, of the image you selected.

If you’re running on a Jailbreak phone, you can do the same thing. However, you have even more control. I have a certain theme that I use for everything on the iPhone, and I want my WebClip icons to look like this theme. Open up an SFTP client, and go to:

/var/private/mobile/Library/WebClips

You will find directories for all your WebClips. Go into each one, and look at the icon.png file until you find the one you want to change. Create the icon you want, and upload it to the directory. It’s that easy.

The iPhone 2.0 firmware currently does not support the Overlay trick. If you are still running a 1.X firmware, you create custom overlay PNG files to create WebClip icons to fit your theme. Look in the Applications -> MobileSafari.app directory to see examples.