Living Digitally

Stream music to your Xbox 360 (from any computer)

My Xbox 360 monitoring script worked, and I got a Platinum system from Circuit City. I've had it for about a week now, and I think I've spent as much time playing with the dashboard and media capabilities as I have playing games.

I don't have a Media Center PC (yet), but it turns out I don't need one in order to stream music to my Xbox 360. All you need is a media server that the Xbox thinks is a Media Center PC. I'm using a server called TwonkyMusic from Twonky Vision. I'm running it on a G5 iMac in my kitchen, and it streams music to my Xbox 360 over a 802.11g wireless network perfectly. The server automatically starts when I log in, and indexes all the MP3 files in the /User directory. It even runs a little web server on port 9000 that you can use to administer the music server from inside or outside your network. The TwonkyMedia server will stream photos, as well, but I'm only interested in music since all my photos are on Flickr (who I hope is working on some sort of media streaming solution of their own).

The one issue I've had with the server is that I ended up having to shut off the firewall on my iMac (but not the firewall between me and the outside world). I tried opening all the ports that TwokyMusic claims to uses, and that let me connect to the server from my Xbox, but not browse music for some reason. I have to look into that further, but otherwise, it's been working great, and my Xbox 360 has been playing music just about nonstop ever since.

The Twonky server products are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and will allow you to stream music to about 34 different devices. I'll still probably end up getting either a Media Center PC, or whatever Apple announces in a couple weeks, but in the meantime, this is a great solution.

Bookmarklets for meebo

Update: meebo now has a very nice single sign-on implementation. These bookmarklets no longer work, and thankfully, are no longer necessary. Thanks, meebo.

I'm a big fan of meebo. I think it's creative, technically impressive, and very handy. As I experiment with moving as much of my desktop to the web as I can, meebo is a very important component since IM is almost as important to me as email. The only problem with meebo is that it's not as easy to use as my two other favorite IM clients (Adium on OS X and Gaim on Windows), mostly because it does not automatically log me in. Frankly, I'm actually glad I don't get automatically logged in since that would probably mean that meebo would have to store my passwords. I fully trust meebo's intentions, but I'm not sure I want to give anyone my AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, and Google Talk credentials.

My solution was to write some bookmarklets that log in for me. The bookmarklets contain my usernames and passwords which essentially mean they are stored in my browser rather than on anyone's server, so they are as safe as my workstation is secure. For a little added security, the passwords in the bookmarklets are Base64 encoded which does not actually encrypt them, but it would protect them from the nefarious "quick-glance" attack.

There are step-by-step instructions below, but in general, the way these bookmarklets work is that you drag them into your bookmark bar (or otherwise bookmark the links), edit them so that they contain your usernames and passwords, go to meebo.com, and click on the bookmarklets to automatically drop your credentials into the appropriate fields. The bookmarklets will work whether you are logging in for the first time on the page with the four login forms, or whether you are already logged in to one or more systems.

Why web apps will move offline

Have you noticed all the downtime lately? Del.icio.us had serious database problems, Bloglines was moving to a new data center, and TypePad had problems with their storage system. Even MXNA, the Adobe aggregator I wrote and maintain, was down for a couple hours Saturday morning while I was forced by database errors to upgrade MySQL. Moving all your applications and data online certainly seems like a good idea until either the service you need isn't there, or your own Internet connection is down. Yesterday, I accumulated about half a dozen URLs that I needed to add to del.icio.us, but couldn't, and I was forced to use Google Reader while Bloglines was on vacation. Of course it could have been worse. It could have been Writely or Num Sum that was down, and I might have needed access an important document or spreadsheet.

As more and more applications move to the web, and as we all come to depend more and more on being able to access those applications, two things are going to need to happen:

Playing with the Yahoo! Mail beta

I finally got on the new Yahoo! Mail beta after applying three times and even asking some friends at Yahoo! to put in a good word for me. You see, I'm a big Yahoo! Mail fan. Back when Gmail launched, I created a Gmail account like everyone else, and I still use Gmail sometimes, but I decided to stick with Yahoo! Mail as my primary email solution. I've been using Yahoo! Mail for several years now, and I've always been happy with their feature set, and I always knew someday they'd release a revolutionary new interface.

Using Firefox Live Bookmarks with del.icio.us

I'm a big fan of del.icio.us. In fact, I've come to rely on del.icio.us because of how easy it is to organize and access my links. But I also like the convenience of having bookmarks in my browser. I realized yesterday that I can have both, without installing any extensions.

The key is Firefox's Live Bookmarks. Live Bookmarks track a site's RSS or Atom feed to show you updates as though they were actually bookmarks. In other words, you can bookmark a feed rather than a site, and Firefox will aggregate the contents right into your browser, treating each item in the feed as a bookmark. And it just so happens that del.icio.us generates all kinds of RSS, just like any good Web 2.0 application should, so by live-bookmarking my del.icio.us tag RSS feeds, I now have all my most important del.icio.us links in my browser, and they are automatically updated as I add new links.

For even more Firefox and del.icio.us integration, check out the del.icio.us Firefox extension.

Xbox 360 hunting

No, I haven't gotten one yet. Yes, I want one. In fact, I want one badly enough that some friends of mine (Danny Dura and Mike Chambers) and I put together a script that keeps constant tabs on 13 different sites who we believe are mostly likely to get more in stock. The script pulls the source of specific product pages, checks to see if one or more strings are either present or not present, and if it looks like there's a hit, sends email and SMS messages. Initially we got several false positives, but at this point, the script is refined enough that when we get a ping, we know it means something. In fact, last weekend, Circuit City was selling a couple of different bundles for about an hour, but it was between five and six AM Pacific time, so we were all sound asleep. I dare one of these stores to get a shipment while I'm awake and sitting in front of my computer.

Why not sell exploits?

I read on eWeek today that eBay, in response to a request by Microsoft, recently pulled an auction for an Excel vulnerability. Apparently, the auction had gotten up to all of $53 before being taken down. According to the auction description, Microsoft employees qualified for a discount by mentioning the discount code "LINUXRULZ". Very clever.

The article got me thinking... Rather than having the auction pulled, Microsoft could have actually bid on it and won, then promptly fixed the issue, thereby hopefully preventing any actual implementation of the exploit, and at the same time, portraying themselves as a pretty good sport. Then I started thinking it might be interesting for companies like Microsoft to start offering bounties for vulnerabilities in their software. That way, the exploits stay out of the hands of evil-doers and possibly the media, the "researcher" makes a little cash, and everyone's happy. For those who search for exploits purely for the notoriety rather than the money, maybe companies could even add the researchers' names to a special page on their corporate site with a big and humble "Thank You" next to it. Seems like in the end, it would end up costing less in R&D, and probably in PR, as well.

Introduction

Living Digitally is a simple and fun blog for posting about simple and fun technology. I have my work blog for posting about work, and my watch blog for posting about watches. I also wrote MXNA for aggregating work blogs, and Newsbrew or aggregating other types of news. And I love to read about, write about, and play with technology. And yes, I'm a crappy designer.