Famicoman.com

inumbr – Throwaway Telephone Numbers

I ran accross an interesting little web service called inumbr which gives you a free disposable phone number. At first glance, you get to choose an area code. There are twenty two to choose from, so you’re bound to find one close to your location (if you are in the United States that is). You also get to choose how long the number is active: one hour, one day, or one week. Then you enter the number to forward too and an email address for activation. Pretty simple, right?

After registering I notices I received a number and an extension anyone could call to reach me. I also saw I was given the option to record a personal greeting. It also appeared that I did not even need a valid email address to get a number as I didn’t have to click any activation links. The number was just handed to me in-browser. I went back to the inumbr home page and notices that I could manage my inumbr account by logging in with the number they gave me and the number I chose to forward it to. Here, I was presented with more options for my inumbr.

I saw that I could change the length of the number’s lifespan between the three mentioned terms before, as well as a one month option that wasn’t there earlier. I also saw that they gave a slot for a second number in case the first was unreachable. After that, there are many check boxes for additional features. “Don’t accept calls from blocked caller ids,” “Don’t accept calls from suspected telemarketers,” “Forward all calls directly to voicemail,” “Do not disturb from 9PM to 8AM,” “Turn off call screening,” “Activate voicemail for missed calls.”

So in all, I got a free throwaway number with a handful of features. This is great if you have to supply a number for something and don’t want to reveal an actual one, or maybe just see how you can mess around with phones.

Tags: inumbr, telephony, voip

Modern BitTorrent Hydra

Most people are aware of GGF’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay and the plan to turn it into a legal pay-site. The Pirate Bay, as many know, has served the BitTorrent community as a large public tracker/indexer as well as something of a project team known for relaunching Suprnova, ShareReactor, as well as original sites such as bayimg. Proving to be an old favorite, the acquisition of TPB marks a sad day in BitTorrent history. Despite this, the hydra theory comes in to play: when one head is cut off, two grow in its place. Though as of right now the TPB website remains active in something of a weakened state (the trackers are down) there are already a slew of alternatives available to the BitTorrent community.

Besides TPB, many other tracker/indexer sites have been around for a long amount of time. For example, H33T and SUMMOTorrent (and Demonoid to an extent) offer both in-house trackers and indexes. Other indexing sites, such as Mininova or TorrentBox offer free use with 3rd-party public trackers such as  OpenTracker. Next to these public trackers are private torrent sites that usually require a user to be invited to it by another. These private trackers offer a level of safety due to their exclusivity, but are by no means completely safe from anti-piracy outfits.

Since the acquisition of TPB was announced, many new sites have popped up to offer new outlets to BitTorrent users.

Starting off, there have been a few public trackers popping up that look promising. The first being OpenBitTorrent, which from research proves to be the trackers from TPB using a new name (so the offline time for them is questionable). A similar project using the same software, but this time spearheaded by the administrator of BTJunkie, is known as PublicBT. These two trackers are virtually identical in use and message. They are simply for the tracking of torrents with no needed registration or limitations.

Besides these two trackers, a third entitled TheHiddenTracker should be noted for an interesting execution. TheHiddenTracker hides itself and its connections using TOR. Many torrent users know not to transfer files over TOR as it is slow and degrades service, but in this case, only the tracker is reached through TOR and file sharing happens normally. To use this tracker, one would have to either install TOR, or use a handy web service entitled tor2web that allows an internet user to access TOR addresses without downloading any additional software.

Now that there are new trackers, there are also some practical and interesting ways to share them amongst others. First off, if one possessed any torrents utilizing the old TPB trackers, these torrents could easily be edited to reflect new trackers using TorrentEditor, which helps edit torrent files online.

One interesting way to share torrent files is through the use of a service called Hid.im which will turn a torrent file into an image. This way, torrent files can easily be shared in places like forums or social networking sites. Anywhere an image can be hosted can now host a torrent.

Another service entitled Torrage (combinging the words Torrent and Storage) attempts to hold torrents without providing a search function. The only way torrents can be found through this website is if a user knows the info hash that the site generates for every torrent upload. Some torrent indexing sites are already utilitzing this as a way to store torrents more effectively, in a more decentralized manner.

Last but not least, isoHunt recently launched a “social networking torrent site” by the name of Hexagon.cc. Hexagon is made up of a bunch of different, smaller groups within the whole of the website. So say thay you are a fan of Creative Commons content. You can then join the group, download torrents associated with the group, and engage in discussions. Besides the public groups, there are also private groups that can only be accessed and seen through invites. They are also apparently SSL encrypted for added protection. Even though the site is less than a week old, it already houses over 45,000 torrents and is growing every day. The site is currently only joinable through the use of invites, but expect it to open up more as it expands.

So although TPB appears to be burning down (though some argue that the acquisition is doomed) loyal torrenters can rest assured that new services will rise from the ashes. Things such as The Hydra Project and (the now defunct) Securep2p project could come to light and revolutionize how people think about file sharing. The end of an era may be upon us, but a new chapter of BitTorrent history is being written as we speak.

Tags: bayimg, bittorrent, btjunkie, demonoid, ggf, h33t, hexagon.cc, hid.im, isohunt, mininova, openbittorrent, openbt, opentracker, p2p, peer to peer, publicbt, securep2p, sharereactor, sumotorrent, suprnova, the hydra project, the pirate bay, thehiddentracker, tor, tor2web, torrage, torrent, torrentbox, torrenteditor, tpb

Google Gives Voice

So it is probably common knowledge now that Google has unveiled the Google Voice service which is pretty groovy. I didn’t jump on the boat when most people did. I heard some buzz about it, but didn’t really know what it was and dismissed it as something that was probably related to Google Talk. After I understood the concept of getting a number for all your phones and some interesting features, all for free, I thought I might as well see what it was all about.

The invite process was a lot less hassle then I’d guess most thought it was. I knew some people that signed up for an invite years ago when the service was still called GrandCentral. These people that requested invites years ago were just receiving them now which suggested the invite system was really backed up. I took my chances and put in for an invite. About five days later, I received an email telling me to pick up my new account. This part is easy enough. You go through the steps, the best being picking your number. Thankfully, you can search them using letters as well as numbers, so I could throw in a significant phrase and hope that it would spit back a local number. After maybe a half hour of debating, I settled on a number and was greeted by the Google Voice dashboard.

The dashboard, as you can see in the low resolution picture above, is almost a complete clone of the Gmail dashboard. This was great news for me as I am very familiar with using Gmail, and the Google Voice dashboard behaves in the same way considering placement of settings, inbox, etc. Basically, if you have used just about any email service, you should be in good shape. From here, I edited my settings, and toyed with some of the features.

I first decided that I just wanted to link the number to my cell phone, and ignore the options for house phone and work phone. I then went through the settings one by one. I added my voicemail message, as I am mainly going to use the number for that. I skipped the recording of my name as I don’t need that quite yet. I also set up notifications to use in conjunction with the voicemail. Whenever I get a voicemail, I get emailed and my cellphone receives a text message. So now, I have the ability to know if I have a message whether or not I have internet access.

Google Voice also has many privacy features. There is a call screening option that asks callers to identify themselves. Google will also provide a variety of options for when someone calls your number. You can choose to pick up the call, let it go right to voicemail, listen in on the voicemail that is being left, and even record the entirety of the call. There is also the ability to block numbers, and even allow different phones to ring depending on who calls.

Where I believe Google Voice really shines is how it handles the voicemail online. I already mentioned receiving notifications, but Google Voice goes far beyond that. For one, you can listen to the voicemail online, so just fire up your browser and point it to your account to hear what people have left. Google Voice will also automatically transcribe the voicemail, and even send it to you via email/sms if you desire. I also must add that there is a “Do Not Disturb” option which I use that will just connect a caller to voicemail without ringing any phone, so you never get annoyed with calls when you don’t want them.

In all, I can say that Google Voice is an interesting little Google project and I am interested in how they might improve upon it. I’m also interested in how people might use this in unexpected ways, considering how popular voip is these days. There are features like conference calling and free U.S. based calls which I am sure people can  find interesting uses for. If you want to try calling me, feel free to check out the widget to the right of the screen.

Tags: google, phone

Flea Market Find – 8-Track Tape Player

So for $5, I was able to nab a boxed (though used) Stereo 8 player. Not a common purchase I know, but it is bound to get at least some use as a stereo component.

The Box, weighing about 7 pounds while full

Eight-tracks, for those who don’t know, were once the reigning format for portable music, later being replaced by the cassette tape. Like the four-track tape, the eight-track would have multiple programs per tape that could be switched from one to the other using a button on the player. Though eight-track tapes, like the name implies, can hold more music than a four-track tape, they do so in the same amount of space. Ultimately, the sound quality of an eight-track tape is less than the quality of a four-track tape.

Queen’s News of the World

Upon adding the unit to my stereo, I can say that the sound quality is indeed low. If anything, eight-track tapes can be kept around for their novelty, or the off chance I find something on one that I cannot get anywhere else.

Front of the 8-track tape player

Angled view of the player with 8-track

Tags: 8-track, eight-track, stereo

Vinyl – A New Perspective

I didn’t grow up with records. Sure, there were a few in the house, but they never would get any play. They were banished to one corner of the basement where they were easily forgotten. The ’90s were a time where a kid was surrounded by cassettes. I look back, and there were maybe a handful of CDs kicking around in the living room. All the cars were outfitted with cassette players, I had a Walkman and a little fisher price player; tape was king. As a teenager in the new millennium, everyone would be quick to assume that I have a evolved with technology, and sport a  substantial CD collection consisting of all the latest and greatest bands. Staring over at my stack of fifteen dusty CDs, I can’t say that I would agree that this particular mold fits me. For some reason, I tend to flock towards vinyl records.

There are numerous reasons why I choose vinyl. Up front, I would tell you that I enjoy the quality. I’m not necessarily saying that vinyl is far superior to CDs in terms of sound, as I have heard both sides of the argument. Records are of course analog while CDs are digital. There are numerous arguments about digital recording versus analog recording involving losslessness, compression, overall sound quality, etc. Honestly, it all seems to vary from recording to recording because of differences in recording hardware, and general human influence. One thing that seems to be consistent however is how music mastery has changed throughout the years. Vinyl mastering is thought to take much more care as modern mastering seems to focus more on loudness than other aspects. If some of today’s masters were put directly onto vinyl, the needle would jump around and the record would be unplayable making vinyl a far more delicate format. When I say I like the quality of records, I don’t imply that I think vinyl is always a crisp format offering the best possible sound. To me, vinyl offers a warmer sound that I don’t think I get from CDs. Sure, there are cracks and pops and hisses, but this all just adds to the experience and brings out character from the audio.

Another thing that I enjoy about records is the price. CDs brand new seem to hover around fifteen dollars, while used ones may situate around the ten dollar mark. Vinyl on the other hand, can be had for limited money. While there are, strangely enough, reproductions and new vinyl selling for around the same prices as CDs,  older vinyl is cheap. I can go out to a flea market and fill holes in my collection for ten cents to 2 dollars a record. So not only am I able to get titles I’m after, but for the price I can also experiment. Something looks interesting, I don’t feel bad putting down another dollar to bring it home.

Records also seem to have some interesting history that makes them appealing. Going around from vendor to vendor, you strike up conversation. Sometimes it’s about how the records came from a radio station, or maybe you get wrapped up in someone’s memory of a concert, or just a recollection of another time and place that fits perfectly with the music you are buying. Every record has its own personal story. Every scratch or scuff has its own place in history. Doodles line the faces off The Beatles on their Let it Be album, telephone numbers are scattered all over the back of Billy Joel’s The Stranger. No two records are the same, even if the music on them is.

There is also plenty of stuff you can get on records that you cannot find on anywhere else. There are some pieces in my collection that I know will not be released on CD, there are some things that were brought to CD, but are remixes of the original tracks, etc.

I don’t remember exactly how I got into collecting records. I probably saw a copy of Dark Side of the Moon or something equally as substantial for one dollar and decided if anything, it is at least interesting to have around. This has grown, however. My collection increases almost weekly, and I now have over one thousand individual albums on the medium. All that can deter me at this point is where to put them.

A wall of my records

My stereo and a few more records

Tags: vinyl

Piradio

A month ago, I was in preparation for a charity event, Relay for Life. Whether or not you agree with their practices doesn’t matter. I simply used the event as a vehicle for a new project. The idea of the event is you and a group of people camp out on a football field while doing a 24-hour walkathon. I got the bright idea of creating a portable radio station for this event, so members of the group walking with radios could all get the same music from a central base of operations on the field. This was also an idea for doing an on-location podcast.

My mission started by going to Best Buy and picking up a cheap Dynex brand 4-station FM transmitter. I hooked it up to my iPod and saw that I got maybe 60 feet of good signal from the transmitter. My goal was to try to push the transmitter to do over 100 yards. A seemingly impossible goal, but I knew since this thing had no external antenna, I could solder one on somewhere and get some improvement, right?

After taking apart the unit, I was left with this,

Front of the board

Back of the board

I didn’t know where to start in my attempt to add an antenna. I tried googling off some of the numbers on the pcb but couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was looking at. I then got some help from an old friend by the name of TestMAD who was more savvy in this area than I was. He conferred with his father on this project, and they deduced that I would solder one wire to one of the three pads (you can see them on the bottom left of the pcb in the first picture) and I would have to solder another wire to ground, which I did by scraping away some of the green on the back of the board and soldering onto that.

Next, there was the matter of antenna size. The antenna size had to correspond with a particular frequency I would broadcast on. If I were to change the broadcast frequency, I would have to change the antenna size as well. Making it too long or too short could hurt the signal. So, I decided to keep transmission at 88.1MHz which would require an antenna around 33.5 inches long. There was next the choice of what type of antenna to use. A dipole or a quarter wave vertical antenna were suitable options.

A quarter wave vertical antenna using radials (picture from radio-electronics.com)

A dipole antenna (picture from wikipedia.org)

I settled on the dipole as I had an adjustable tv antenna that could fit the specifications. It was also good for portability. Later I was told that using the other antenna design could have provided more coverage, which could be something to try at a later date.

After the final assembly, I had something that looked like this,

Yep, pretty classy. I might as well point out that in that picture, the antennae are too long. The length or 33.5 inches is supposed to include both the length of the actual antenna as well as the wire used to connect it to the pcb.

So on the day I was to use this, it turns out the event was pushed inside due to possible bad weather. However, this was great news in that the football field where the event was supposed to be held was completely empty. The field also had yard markers, so I could easily see how much coverage I was getting. After sizing the antennae, powering up and walking out into the field with nothing more than a battery powered radio, I got about 75 yards before I lost the signal. I didn’t hit my goal, but I squeezed a noticeable amount of coverage out of the transmitter.

If anything, I leared a few things about transmitters and antenna design. Also, hey, now I have an FM transmitter I can use just about anywhere, for anything. Maybe it’ll pop it’s way into some other projects.

Tags: fm, pirate, radio, transmitter

Appleslices

A few weeks ago I struck up a conversation via twitter with a fellow by the name of ionfarmer. I thanked him for a throwback to me from a blog post he did while I, along with ethan, was still was involved with the Hak5 BBS project. We got to talking and he wrote a nice blog post regarding the ordeal on his website, which I advise everyone to check out.  Most of the posts there discuss Apple computers, as the title would suggest, but there are other topics for those out there who don’t want to keep the doctor away. The main subject of our discussion was a little-known website I started while I must have been around 14 years old entitled HackInACan. I can tell you that I don’t think anyone would want to be known by the body of work they produced at such an age, but as I once heard in a Jason Scott documentary, as a teenager you end up writing a bunch of stuff that belongs to the world and you can’t take it back. So, I present you with something that at this point belongs to the world. Please be gentle.

Tags: apple, blog, ethan, hackinacan, hak5, ionfarmer, jason scott, website

Photosynth – It’s 3D… kind of

We’ve all seen panoramic photos. Some of us have even tried out hands at stitching to create our own from a few snapshots. Yeah, I’m late to the show with this, but Microsoft’s Photosynth gives you the ability to create your own stitched photos, giving the illusion of a 3D space.

An Example Photosynth Image

To start, one must take pictures, I took around 200 for my first synth. The best thing to do is to go stand in one place with a camera, and take pictures from that one stance, utilizing every angle. So you’ll want a lot of little pictures which will all be combined to create a large one.

I proceeded to take these little pictures from several points. I used an enclosed room, so while it was hard to get the angles I wanted because of the walls, I did not have to worry about the environment changing. Photosynth relies on object textures when stitching the photos, so doing something like this outside can get a little troubling.

For my second, more complete synth, I took around 550 pictures total. The application recommends something around 300 max, but it will work with larger amounts. After dumping the pictures onto the computer, I pointed Photosynth at the directory and it went to work. That was it. For better or worse, the computer does all the assembling by itself. This can however take a long time. My 200 picture synth was just under 12 hours while my 550 picture synth was just over 30. Things will probably zip right by if you have a beefy editing box or something similar, but I had to wait longer than I would have imagined with my dated laptop running everything else I normally run in addition.

The finished product was decent however. Some things did not line up properly, some photos seemed to be omitted. It was a lot better than I expected, however. The majority of the stiching was flawless. I do have to say I was sad see that there didn’t appear to be an option to edit already created synths. So if I ever wanted to add a few frames to complete a wall, or take one away that messed up the whole floor, I could only do that by starting the synth over. Not entirely sure how practical it is, but I consider it a nice little application that can create hours of enjoyment (or frustrations if you have a fidgity camera).

If you’re lucky and have the plugin installed, the photosynth I created should load below.

Tags: photosynch

IPTV Archive MKII

So in December, I made a goal for myself to do some iptv archive work on my Winter break. As the time ticked down for December, I realized I did nothing to reach my goal. So in early January I started reuploading to the blip.tv account, paying attention to formats and conversion timeouts. It came to where I reuplaoded everything that was there, and than some.

So from there, I began work on a website for this archive, something static. When Stage6 went down, I lost all my tags and home made descriptions, and I didn’t want to have to go through that again. Enter http://cmdline.tv/iptvarchive. Its not much to look at, but it gets the job done. I hope to be uploading a series or two every week. With a few hundred gigabytes of this stuff, that shouldn’t be too hard to keep going.

So check out the site, spread it around, register, tell me I’ve got something wrong or broken, have fun.

Tags: cmdline, itptv

IPTV Archive Update

I’ve been working hard to bring back the iptv archive. Expect something cool to look at soon.

Tags: cmdline, iptv