Posting Binaries on Usenet

I've written about Usenet before, as in downloading off Usenet, but I've never gotten around to posting binaries or feeling a need to. Until now. I saw a request for an old movie that I had as an ancient VHS rip, and the request looked so lonely I just had to fill it. But how? I never posted to Usenet before, so I fired up MT-Newswatcher X and thought it would be a simple process. Instead I found a deal-breaker. First, it doesn't encode files in yenc. Annoying, but not a death blow. But then I found out it doesn't post filenames longer than 31 characters. Hold on. Now I like Mac OS 9 just as much as the next person, but do we really want to go back there? No, no, no. There has to be another option.

So I went looking, and there aren't a ton of choices for OS X. There's Unison by Panic, Inc. (Panic, huh? As in kernel panic? Oh, wait, that's Unsanity). There's also Thoth by living legend Brian Clark. Both of these are shareware, and there's also a shareware utility called Cocoa Newspost whose developer website is missing, so support may have ended.

I also looked at the possibility of using Pan on OS X, but while deciding to steer clear of that PITA, I learned about a command line utility called Newspost. A command line utility? No simple GUI, having to learn complex text commands, having to compile it yourself? Baby, you're a black hole and I'm a nice plump juicy class G star!

Newspost's website calls it a "usenet binary autoposter for Unix," but there is no statement it runs on OS X. However, OS X is Unix, so why not compile it and try it, right? Well, what do ya know, it worked! All it took was a simple make && make install, no configure script necessary. The only glitch was man newspost returned No manual entry for newspost. Don't know why that is since it's in /usr/local. Oh well, the man page is here on the internet, too. Now let's get on to using it!

There are basically two commands you need to enter. First, setting your defaults (just once), and second, the command to post (for each time you post). Setting your defaults is the stunningly complicated and labor intensive task of typing this:

newspost -f emailaddress -F personality -o organization -i newsserver -u username -p password -z 119 -d

Replace emailaddress with the email you want other users to see, personality with the name you want other users to see (enclose it in quotes if it has a space), organization with your organization, newsserver with your Usenet news server address, username with your Usenet account username, password with your password (please make it more complex than "password"). The port number is always 119, and the trailing -d says to make these defaults.

Next it's time to post something, probably to alt.binaries.test for starters. If you're posting a single file, this will require the stunningly complicated and labor intensive task of typing this:

newspost -s "subject of your post" -n alt.binaries.test -y /path/to/file

Posting multiple files can be done like this:

cd to /directory/of/files

newspost -s "subject of your post" -n alt.binaries.test -y filename*

or:

newspost -s "subject of your post" -n alt.binaries.test -y *.mp4

The "filename*" means you're posting all the files in that folder with the same filename but with different extensions (like a split mp4 with a bunch of pars and an nfo). The "*mp4" means posting every file in that folder with an mp4 extension.

And that's pretty much it. The man page and this how-to pretty much tell you all you need. So happy posting! Just don't break Usenet.

TenFourFox 9 is Out!

Well, a release candidate, anyway. But it's the debut of methodjit which will come to our rescue now that tracejit is going the way of the dodo, and as a result our javascript scores won't take a massively negative hit. All the details are blogged by Cameron Kaiser, the lead developer, here (download link included), so go read for the compiler pr0n. But I can report to you my Dromaeo scores are about ten percent faster from version 8 to 9 on my ancient Sawtooth, and Sunspider shows a 25 percent improvement. Not bad work;)

On the GUI side, the only difference I see is a de-coloring of the stop/reload button. It used to be red/blue, but now it just blends with the white of the menubar. I've seen just one rendering problem, unfortunately with Blogger's Dashboard interface, so I'm writing this post in Safari. I could just try clicking the "Try the updated Blogger interface" link that's been staring at me for several months now, but that wouldn't be living up to my namesake. I think I'll deploy a corollary of my tried-and-true life strategy Ignore It Until It Goes Away. In this case, I'll Wait It Out Until It Comes Back. I'm sure it'll work.

UPDATE: The Blogger problem is a Firefox problem, not just TenFourFox.

Download Vimeo Videos

For the first time a video on Vimeo.com lured me to their website where, as a Vimeo newbie, I was confronted with the PowerPC conundrum of having flash installed but it being so crappy it made the video unwatchable. So I thought, there's Mactubes for Youtube and ways to convert flash to .mp4 on Youtube. Maybe there's the same for Vimeo. And after a little searching I found three (three!) reliable ways to download Vimeo videos as .mp4's.

The first is www.downloadvimeo.com. It's just a simple website where you paste the video url into the download field and it downloads the .mp4 to your default download folder. Simple, though this being a website, you never know if it'll disappear overnight, so I went looking for an application or Firefox add-on that'll do the trick, and indeed there are two (two!) Firefox add-on solutions.

First is FlashVideoReplacer. It works on Youtube and other streaming sites as well as Vimeo, and it gives you the option of watching the vid either embedded with the Quicktime plug-in, or you can also download the .mp4 to your hard drive. For embedded playback you need your Quicktime plug-in enabled.

The second add-on is a Greasemonkey script called Free Youtube! Also works with Youtube as well as Vimeo. When you install it, instead of the embedded video you get a simple download link in its place. Downloads the .mp4 to your hard drive, and that's that.

And there's 270 more words dedicated to getting around flash on PowerPC. They're gonna have to build the modern day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria to store it all.

Flash on Facebook

I'm told in comments there is a crisis of epic proportions on Facebook that has naturally spawned a new Facebook page! Okay, putting aside Facebook users' tendency to match the outrage of the day with a corresponding Facebook page, it seems this time there is justification for PPC users as Facebook will no longer play flash videos unless you have the current Flash 11.1 installed (and Adobe's PPC support ended with 10.1). There's an ingenious fix detailed in this Youtube video, however, where the creator has made a modified Flash plugin to report itself as 11.1 even though it's still 10.1. Lo and behold, Facebook videos now work.

The direct download link is here (with a ReadMe included): http://www.steelbin.com/FPforFBPPC.zip

I've read several reports in forums saying it works, though I can't verify it myself since I don't do Facebook. Also this probably has security holes you can drive a tank through, but luckily there don't appear to be enough PPC Mac users to attract the hackers of the world.

That Facebook page for PPC Macs above might be worth keeping an eye on, too, as there may be more issues popping up in the future.

Progress

Windows '95:

iOS '11:

Wow. We've come a long way in 84 years.

OS X Stocking Stuffers

Since it's coming up one Christmas, Hanukkah and whatnot season, I thought I'd toss out some little OS X nuggets I've discovered over the years. These aren't full-fledged features per se, more like little stocking stuffers that not everyone is aware of:

Control-Click any text in cocoa apps for a quick dictionary/thesaurus definition. Just choose "Look Up in Dictionary" from the resulting menu and you get a mini popup dictionary. Very handy for when I want to look up a quick synonym.

Command-Click filename in window title bar to get the full path. This is useful if you have more than one partition or you're just disorganized in general.

Command-Click and drag menubar items to change their order. For the proper feng shui.

Shift-Click the Force Quit menu item to force quit current application. This is a nice easy way to relaunch the Finder.

Command-Option-Control-8 reverses or inverts screen colors. This is great if you're reading a black-background web page with white text and it's killing your eyes. Just hit the above key combo and you have black text on a white background. Also this can be good for dimming your screen since most of your screen is usually white or light colors. Like if you want to use your laptop in bed but you don't want to wake your partner after a particularly rigorous lovemaking session, just hit the keys and you have a nice dark screen that still retains contrast.

Also, dragging your home folder into the dock makes the Finder much more usable.

Now if only I could find a way to remove the existential taunting from a blinking cursor.

Compile mplayer on OS X

Finally, success. My tears of frustration did not short out my kkkkkkeyboard and I ca finally type ut thi simple howto (well, simle for me ayway).

So why compile mplayer? There's a relatively recent binary for Tiger and up available here inside an application wrapper that you can extract if you want to use it from the command line. It's from September 2009, recent enough for pretty much anything now, but it's almost 2012 and 2014 or 2015 are just around the corner, and by then it'll be six years old. So what if nobody steps up and provides a distributable binary for Tiger or PowerPC users? What if it's 2015 and users clinging to Classic and using TenFourFox 147 need an updated binary? Well, you're gonna have to roll your own and here are the basic steps to do it.

First, in order to compile anything, you need to install Xcode. In fact, for this compile specifically, you'll need SVN and Git, too. Specific instructions about this are in two posts back here. Also, you'll need to install Make 3.82 available here.

If you haven't added /usr/local/bin to your path, do it now by editing or creating ~/.bash_profile and adding the line:

. ~/.bashrc (don't forget both dots).

Then edit or create the file ~/.bashrc with the line:

PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin"

With this you can call anything installed in /usr/local/bin simply by typing the application name in the command line.

Onto compiling:

On the surface it's just a simple process of downloading the source, running ./configure, make, and sudo make install, but I came across a few hurdles that I'll show you how to get over.

First, create a new folder to download the source into, set that folder to the current directory, and then download the source with these three commands:

mkdir ~/Development

cd ~/Development

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer (on one line)

Then you want to run the configuration script like this:

cd mplayer

./configure --enable-menu --with-freetype-config=/usr/X11R6/bin/freetype-config (on one line, the two arguments are for OSD support and require X11 to be installed)

At this point I got a message I wasn't prepared for: No FFmpeg checkout, press enter to download one with git or CTRL+C to abort

When I didn't have Git installed, that was a problem. But after I installed Git and reran the script, I simply pressed enter and continued on. At this point you may get a longer error message that ends with:

git pull failed, (re)move ffmpeg/mp_auto_pull to disable pulling

The solution is to remove "mp_auto_pull" from ~/Development/mplayer/ffmpeg. Then when the ./configure script ends, run make. But there's a bug here. Make 3.80 won't work. You'll get an error, make: *** virtual memory exhausted. Stop. You have to upgrade to Make 3.82.

After installing 3.82, you'll notice the default Make is still 3.80 in /usr/bin. Since I didn't know how to make the new version the default and wasn't sure of the implications of mixing an updated Make with other dev tools, I just invoked it by typing its full path. So after the ./configure script completes, type:

/usr/local/bin/make (this will take awhile)

Then at the conclusion, run:

sudo /usr/local/bin/make install

And that's it! You should have a working binary. To get Truetype subtitles working, you can copy any fontname.ttf file from your /Library/Fonts directory to ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf like:

cp /Library/Fonts/fontname.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf (one line)

The file in your ~/.mplayer folder must be called subfont.ttf.

When I first started this whole mess, I couldn't get it to compile with OSD support. I tried using Macports to install some of the dependencies as described here, and man what a nightmare. Finally I went back to look for a simple explanation and found the ./configure arguments for OSD support here.

And with that I'm gonna watch a movie.

Linux MintPPC 11 is Out!

I just installed the new MintPPC 11 and have been playing around with it, so this is more a quick look than a comprehensive review but I like what I see.

First, the authors announce this is based on Debian Wheezy (testing) so there are likely to be some bugs. This is roughly equivalent to what Ubuntu does, basing their releases on the "testing" branch rather than "stable". The advantage is you get newer versions of software like Iceweasel 7.

I can report to you that Iceweasel 7 is fast. Like super-fast. Another very cool piece of software installed by default is Minitube, a youtube viewer for PPC users lacking flash.

The install was hassle free. The only head scratcher was when confronted with a screen asking you to choose which kernel. I chose version 3 since it was highlighted by default. I thought, "Well, I'll probably break sleep with this, but what the hell? Latest and greatest, right?" And predictably, sleep doesn't work. Other users report sleep works fine, so maybe they went with the safer 2.6 kernel.

Setting up wireless was pretty painless. Sound began muted, but I just had to untick the mute box and had sound working. The LXDE desktop was slick and its memory usage was low. Everything runs comfortably in this iBook with 256 MB of RAM. MintPPC installs by default a variety of of useful software, so everything's there pretty much set up for the average user.

One last thing, unlike the stable branch, mplayer from testing now works on G3's. The stable version was compiled it appears for G4's only. However, VLC still breaks when playing video. I got the stable version working by compiling my own, but I haven't gotten to that here yet.

So give MintPPC a shot. If you're new to it, just register for free at their website and you'll find install instructions and a responsive forum area. Good luck.

UPDATE: If you have a dual boot system, beware that the Debian installer MintPPC uses can corrupt your OS 9 drivers making your OS 9 partition unbootable. The solution is to run Drive Setup from a Mac OS 9 install CD and update drivers. I wrote about this earlier here.

SVN, Git and Xcode for Tiger

So I'm having this nightmare trying to compile the latest development version of mplayer on Tiger, and I plan on writing about it if my tears don't short out my keyboard before then, but I thought I'd drop by with a quick post in the meantime about some tools you'll need in the process.

These are basic development tools that are getting hard to find for Tiger, and they're also not just for compiling mplayer. If you want to do any compiling or developing, these are the tools you want.

First one's the big one. Xcode from Apple. You can get this either from your install DVD or by downloading it from Apple's website. It's better to download it as you can get the latest version. You have to sign up for a free developer's account and then do a little hunting around on the site, but if you click Resources at the top, then find a Mac OS X Downloads link, you'll eventually come to the Downloads section. Tiger users want to download Xcode 2.5 Developer Tools. Leopard users, your latest version is I believe 3.1.4. The whole install will end up taking a couple of gigabytes, but on the plus side you now start developing all those awesome apps for Tiger you always wanted to.

Another tool you'll need to retrieve source code is SVN, a version control system that supplanted CVS as the popular choice. The Tiger version can be found by going to svnbinaries: Home, then clicking on "Need to download older binaries?", clicking the OS X folder, then choosing Subversion 1.4.6 Universal.

The last tool I have for you is Git, a version control system that supplanted SVN as the popular choice. Honestly, world, I wish you'd make up your mind. Both Tiger and Leopard universal binaries can be found here.

One thing going for Git, it has the funniest install ReadMe I've seen. It says, well, I'll just quote it:

GIT - the stupid content tracker

"git" can mean anything, depending on your mood.

• random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronunciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
• stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang.
• "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
• "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks

I vote the latter.

UPDATE: Oh, look. Somebody made Homebrew for Tiger and Leopard PowerPC.