Gadgets – Page 17 – Roo's View

iPod Touch location service: Skyhook

So the iPod Touch doesn’t have GPS built in, but it does provide location services if you have the right magic. If you were lucky and once you had hooked up to your local WiFi access point, your iTouch was just magically able to figure out where you were (at least a rough approximation – ie: within a block or two). If you were lacking magic, then you’ll be familiar with the “Your location could not be determined.” dialog.

The magic is due to Skyhook: They’ve taken the same information you’d gather wardriving – and turned it into a generally useful bit of data. Those of you that have regular GPS devices, will know how poorly they function indoors. However, indoors is exactly where WiFi works fairly well.

They have a reasonable How It Works page, where you can also submit your own access point if you don’t happen to be in the database. There are three bits of data you need to submit: your address, an email address for confirmation and your wireless MAC address.

If you happen to run DD-WRT on your router, it is very easy to find from the routers status page.

You’ll notice there are 3 MAC addresses: LAN, WAN and Wireless. The LAN address is the wired address for your internal network, the WAN is what is broadcast over your broadband connection and the Wireless is for WiFi. Skyhook relies on the latter, which is the MAC address that your iTouch is associated with.

I submitted my information on Saturday Sept 26th, and it went live on Monday October 5th. They say it may take up to 2 weeks. If you don’t get the right MAC address, it won’t work, so make sure you’ve got a handle on that.

You can check the coverage for your area, but with an iPod Touch you are limited to being able to make use of it only in areas where you have a WiFi connection as well. Why? Well, simply put the database is out there on the web – if you can’t find the database, you can’t look up your location. Of course with the iPhone, you can use your cell data connection to query the database and get the increased accuracy and/or have it work indoors.

While I figured this out the hard way, while writing this post I came across the following blog posting that covers this as well as other useful tips. There is also a slashdot article on Skyhook.

iPod Touch firmware upgrade with VMWare

With the recent OS 3.1.1 release it was really only a matter of time before I got around to upgrading again. My previous firmware upgrade was not very smooth. As I’ve mentioned previously, I run iTunes on a VMWare image of Windows XP – hosted on my Ubuntu desktop.

During the firmware upgrade process the iPod changes the type of USB device it is – this causes problems for Linux/VMWare. I had previously thought there was no way to get around these issues, making VMWare based firmware upgrades impossible. I’m happy to report that I was wrong.

Motivated by the OS 3.1.1 upgrade being free of charge (to suckers users who had purchased 3.0, and only $5 otherwise), I figured I’d take another run at making this work under Ubuntu / VMWare. I found a post that discussed upgrading the iPhone under VMWare, and it turns out that this was pretty much the magic sauce to make things work. The steps are shamelessly reproduced here, I cannot take the credit:

Create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb containing:

blacklist snd_usb_audio blacklist usbhid

Reload udev to refresh the configuration we just changed:

sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

Forcefully remove the kernel modules:

sudo /sbin/modprobe -r snd_usb_audio sudo /sbin/modprobe -r usbhid
Perform the upgrade under VMWare.

Reverse these steps after the upgrade to restore your Ubuntu machine to normal:
sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

Read on for gory details on what I actually did..

Continue reading “iPod Touch firmware upgrade with VMWare”

Hacking Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaner

Like many, I enjoy a clean house. There are plenty of gadgets out there that help you keep on top of the various cleaning duties – Scrubbing Bubbles: Automatic Shower Cleaner being one of them. While some of the gadgets you pick up are really gimmicky, this one seems to help reduce some of the heavy cleaning the shower needs with minimal effort.

Now this doesn’t eliminate the need to clean the shower, and I should be honest here – when it does need cleaning I manage to neatly avoid doing the dirty work, but I can say that the Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner seems to lengthen the time between shower cleanings.

The only bummer is that the bottles are not refillable. We stretch ours out by only using it every 2nd day or so (instead of every day as is recommended). It still would be nice to be able to refill with a concentrate and dilute with water. The catch is – the caps do not screw off, so you can’t open the bottles.

Let’s take a look at how the cap works:

So on the left you can see a close-up of the threaded part of the bottle. Very sneaky, they’ve put a pair of small ‘ratchet’ nubs – there is another pair on the other side as well. Looking at the cap, you can see the corresponding teeth. Once tightened down, the cap is very solidly locked onto the bottle.

To hack this – you’ll need two of the scrubbing bubbles empty containers. From one you will recover a cap, from the other the bottle. To remove (destroy) the cap, I used a pair of wire cutters and a pair of needle nose pliers. I started a cut up the side of the cap, then grabbed the edge of the cut with the pliers and peeled it back. I used 2 or three cuts until I managed to free the cap from the bottle. Removing (destroying) the bottle to recover a cap was easier, but I used the same basic approach: a small cut, followed by the pliers to twist the material away. Go slow (and carefully with sharp tools!) since you want to avoid any damage to the part you are trying to keep.

The bottle must be modified to removing the nubs. The plastic is a hard plastic which seemed to respond nicely to a coarse file I had in my workshop. A few minutes of work and I had smoothed over the two pairs of nubs – the cap now opens and closes easily. Now we’ve got a refillable container.