mac geekery

Galleon is a relatively new project that allows any system with Java to host a wide range of services for your TiVo, ranging from getting news and weather, to archiving your TiVo video and serving your own video to your TiVo. The best part is that this requires no hacking of your TiVo. All of this can be accomplished via the public HME APIs that TiVo has made available to developers.

Having recently installed this software and seeing how useful it is, I wanted to talk a bit about it with some articles on MG. In this first one, I’ll go over installation and basic setup of Galleon. Later, I’ll talk about some more advanced arrangements you can make with Galleon.

At its core, HME is a very simple idea: a program runs on your computer that provides services on the TiVo in the form of pictures and sound, and takes input from the TiVo to trigger changes on the computer. Galleon is a host program, written in Java, that uses a modular architecture to provide a wide range of services ranging from news (RSS) and weather (with forecasts, radar, and local alerts) all the way to podcasting and videocasting (audio-only) support. In fact, with TiVo’s ToGo and GoBack features, Galleon can also take video from your TiVo and send it back, turning your computer into an additional TiVo in the home, essentially.There's more »

If you can drop to SUM then you can, with some effort, reset passwords and do bad, bad, evil things. If you trust that the one file that will never go bad on your disk is your /etc/passwd file, then you can tell the system to require the root password to enter SUM.There's more »

My little sister joined the world of Macintosh recently, buying an iBook, some accessories, and software. Being the family’s geniusy Mac guy, she had it all shipped to me so I could install her software and her printer drivers and blah blah blah. She’s knew to Mac, of course, and I wanted her to experience the Welcome Movie and the Setup Assistant. Here’s how I did it.There's more »