ianknox.net

I believe my namesake may have gone out of business!

For the last several years the domain ianknox.com was owned by another Ian Knox. In fact he ran a “School of Motoring” in Dumbarton Scotland (I know it’s just the American in me but I can’t help chuckling every time I hear the term motoring used in earnest).

Of course, I have never met Ian Knox of Dumbarton Scotland, but how can someone with my own name who runs a school of motoring be all bad?

Sadly, I believe that he may have gone out of business since his website has now officially expired from the web and is no more. At the very least he decided the website wasn’t doing it’s job advertising. If you want to see what his site did look like check out this link (hooray for archive.org).

Of course there is always a silver lining… ianknox.com now belongs to me. I prefer .net and I’ve gotten used to it but within 24 hours you can get here by visiting www.ianknox.com or www.ianknox.net I’ll also forward all the e-mail addresses.

If anyone who knows Ian Knox of Dumbarton Scotland stumbles across this page leave a comment and let me know how he’s doing! I can’t help feel a little connected to my namesake from across the pond.

A while back I picked up a second hand Series 1 Tivo from my friend Josh. After living with it for a few months I really don’t know how people watch TV without them. Along with all the cool features they have already they are extremely hackable. This weekend I finally got around to hacking mine and I thought I’d post a geeky summary so I’ll remember how to do it again if I need to and so someone else might learn a bit from my mistakes.

!!Disclaimer!!
This is just how I did it. It’s probably not the best way and it might not work for you.
If it doesn’t work or cause your Tivo to change into a smoldering pile of ashes don’t blame me!

The setup:

40 hour series one Tivo
120GB replacement HD
#10 torx screwdriver
spare computer to plug drives into
TurboNet card (in my case already installed)
Hacking Tivo Second Edition and companion CD
MFSTools 2.0 CD
Hinsdale drive replacement instructions
FAT32 Hardrive (anything over 1gb should be fine)

The Hard Drive Upgrade:

To do the drive upgrade I followed the directions on the Hinsdale page. The only exception was that with the current version of MFSTools I don’t think you need the gunlock software to fix a locked drive. I’m not 100% sure about this but when I booted the CD it mentioned something about unlocking drives so it may be built in now.

The most important thing to keep in mind during this step is to keep track of which drive is which, use this table as reference:

Primary Master = HDA
Primary Slave = HDB
Secondary Master = HDC
Secondary Slave = HDD

If you’re not sure which drive is plugged in where, pull up the system bios and it should show you, if all the drives don’t show up monkey with your jumpers, the software can’t address a HD that the BIOS won’t recognize!

I also skipped the test step after restoring the original image, it’s not really necessary (although probably a good idea).

Installing the hacks:

1. Boot the CD that came with Hacking the Tivo Second Edition, or really any usable Linux boot disk will do.
2. Mount the Tivo Drive:

mount /dev/hdc4 /mnt

< -- pretty sure on this, I don’t have the reference material handy. Remember your drive name may be different.
3. Make a directory for your hacks, I choose /var/hack since it seems to be the most popular spot to put them. Of course this is currently /mnt/var/hack/ since we’re not booting from the Tivo drive.
4. Untar the hack file from the Hacking The Tivo CD to /var/hack.
Now all the goodies are ready and waiting to be used!

The Hacks 1- Telnet:

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 from the section above.

2. Either use a text editor from the boot disk or just echo to add the following line to your /mnt/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
The syntax for using echo is:

echo "/var/hack/bin/tnlited.sh &" >> /mnt/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

Yes you could start the telnet daemon directly (tnlited 23 /bin/bash -login) but the nifty little shell script will restart the daemon if it manages to crash.

3. /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit MUST be system readable! I just chmod’d it to 777 every time, this is uber important or it won’t boot and you’ll have to stick it back in the PC and tinker.

4. Do a shutdown and stick your Tivo drive back in the Tivo and boot it up. Don’t bother screwing it down quite yet in case you borked something.

5. Test it out! Telnet to your Tivo’s IP address and you should get a command line.

Notes: The default shell is pretty shitty, it echoes two lines with each return which is odd and it doesn’t support several very useful features such as ls and ps. The CD from the book includes a copy of BusyBox which is a fantastic all-in-one shell tool. Included in the tar was a series of Symbolic links for the tools it contains all pointing to BusyBox. If you want to enable those I suggest changing you bash shell to include /var/hack and /var/hack/bin in the path.

You do this my creating a file called .profile in the root directory that contains the following line:

PATH=$PATH:/var/hack:/var/hack/bin

The next time you log in via telnet you’ll have a much more operable shell.

The Hacks 2- FTP:

1. Telnet in to your tivo.

2. Start the FTP daemon:

/var/hack/bin/tivoftpd

3. Test it out! FTP to your tivo with a blank username and password (I recommend Filezilla).

Notes: If you want to start FTP with each restart of the machine you have to add it to the rc.sysinit.

If you use ftp to transfer files be aware that it’s friggin slow and it doesn’t support a lot of stuff (file renames/permission changes, etc) AND it is likely to bork file permissions so set them manually from the command line, or at least double check them.

The Hacks 3- Tyserver:

1. Download the latest TyServer/Tytool package from The Deal Database Forum. Yes you will have to register and yes it’s weird using software distributed on a message board, but it’s totally legit. I promise.

2. FTP the contents of the TSERVER_series1 folder to somewhere on your Tivo. I made a new directory for hacks I installed (/var/hacks/ians_hacks/) but you can put it wherever.

3. CD to the directory where you put the tserver and NowShowing.tcl files.

4. Start the tserver from the command line.

4. Test it out! Run the TyTool9r18.exe (or similar) on your PC and enter the IP address and try to connect to it.

Notes: Tyserver needs to know the location of the NowShowing.tcl file so use a line like this in rc.sysinit:

/var/hacks/bin/ty_server/tserver -s /var/hacks/bin/ty_server/NowShowing.tcl &

This is necessary because each line in rc.sysinit is run as if it was executed from the root directory.

The Hacks 4- TivoWebPlus:

1. Download the latest TivoWebPlus Binary. Get the tarball NOT the zip file.

2. Un-tar it

tar xzvf binaryfilename.tar

be sure to do this one directory above where you want it to be since the tar file will make its own directory.

3. Edit the tivoweb.cfg file, add a password and a username and possibly change the port if you alreayd use port 80 on your real world IP address and you want it accessible from anywhere.

4. Start it with

/var/path/to/file/tivoweb &

from the command line.

5. Test it out by surfing with a web browser to whatever IP yout tivo currently has (optionally appending it with :xxx where xxx is the port you switched the server to run on. If it works add it to your /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

Even More Stuff:

1. For the love of god, don’t put the Tivo back together until you are done hacking it completely just in case you screw something up and you need to mount it with a CD to edit stuff again.

2. If you want to change anything on the system partition (such as stuff in /etc) you’ll need to remount as R/W with this command:

mount -o rw,remount /

You will need this for editing of the rc.sysinit. When you are done be sure to remount it again as read only:

mount -o ro,remount /

3. When editing files on your windows machine be sure to use a text editor that supports Unix line endings like Textpad or ultraedit.

4. Every hack you start from rc.sysinit MUST be followed by the ‘&’ character. This makes the program start in the background, otherwise nothing else will run until that line has executed.

5. Here are the final lines from my rc.sysinit as a reference.

#Hacks added by Ian
#start telnet server using the shell script
/var/hack/bin/tnlited.sh &

#Start tivoftpd
/var/hack/bin/tivoftpd &

#Start tytool
/var/hack/bin/ty_server/tserver -s /var/hack/bin/ty_server/NowShowing.tcl &

#Start TivowebPlus
/var/hack/bin/tivoweb-tcl/tivoweb &

Wohoo.. nothing but a political cartoonist stands between me and the top Ian Knox on google!

I love a good hardware hack, I mean really love it.

My Nomad Zen NX, originally holding 20GB of data has just been updated to a 40GB model with a little help from this guy and these guys. As if this wasn’t enough I found that I had killed my Li-Ion battery and had to revive it by using bare wires from an AC adaptor and some scotch tape. And to top off my evening I hacked my Koss headphones for a better fit and sound.

Thats right, just call me McGuyver.

A friend of mine pointed me to this website on building your own high quality digital projector, “Ever seen anything like this before?”, he said.

Sure, it looks like a we’ll-sell-you-some-crappy-plans-and-take-your-money scam to me, until I dug further.

Check out the pictures, these things actually work!

http://www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3215
http://www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1770

Now for the crackpot idea.. I have the big blank white wall in my apartment. Think I can rig one of these together? Yeah neither do I but it’s an interesting thought.

I’m not ususally one to regurgitate slashdot articles but this article is bloody amazing.

The concept of the machine/brain interface has fascinated me ever since I read Terminal Man by Michael Crichton. The book (like most everything Crichton writes) takes a bit of a pessimistic view towards the technology, but I personally think this kind of thing is pretty damn amazing. Imagine being able to type as fast as you can think.. imagine being able to capture a picture from a memory.

It’s a long way from the matrix but it’s still a very impressive first step.

Well I finally got sick of trying to organize my pictures manually and installed a nifty web based photo album called simply “gallery”.

There are some public albums if you really care to be a voyeur and sneak a peek at the life and times of Ian Knox, or of the Tantalus Theatre Group.

http://www.ianknox.net/stuff/gallery/

Well, after promising to do so for months and months I finally finished a website for a friend of mine Matt Rossi. You can check out the new page by clicking the link on the sidebar or by clicking here.

In all honesty, I have no idea what Matt’s deal is with the whales but the site turned out pretty well.

Matt’s brother Michael designed the fantastic graphics and I made it into a functioning site completely database driven for simple dynamic updating– In short, it’s way cool.

This brings me to a somewhat touchy point, hopefully not to be taken incorrectly by those who read it.

I am a computer geek by trade (and somewhat by choice, I do enjoy it) and because of this I often have friends, friends of friends, co-workers etc. ask me to help them out with various computer problems. I’m usually only too happy to oblige but lately it’s been getting out of hand. People call me on the phone and without so much as a “Hi! How are ya?” launch into their computer woes, or they stop by my desk at work and say “Hey Ian, when you get a second could you…”.
Maybe I’m being a bit thin skinned about it all– just a little case of the winter time blues, but feeling like you are being taken for granted is never fun. Now I understand why every single one of my computer geek friends and co-workers charge money for services outside the office setting.

I guess I’m just too nice/stupid/willing to please for my own good sometimes.

I’m reminded of an old axiom about finishing last but I’ll refrain, this post is whiney enough already.

So I finally joined the year 2002 and bought a Tivo from my friend Josh for 75 bucks. It’s just an old fashioned series one with a 30 hour recording capacity but I’m loving it!

I have to say I’ve had it two days and I already don’t know what the hell I did without one. It really makes TV something you watch when you feel like it or when you have the time. No more scheduling life around TV (or, as is more often the case, forgoing things I’d like to watch for real life commitments/slackness/forgetfulness).

So far on the season pass list:
The Simpsons
The Family Guy
Futurama
Nip/Tuck
King of the Hill
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
… and about 1/2 a dozen movies I picked out of the browsing list.

One of the most interesting features Tivo has is it trys to guess what kind of show you might like (based on what you have watched/recorded in the past) and if it has the disk space it will record them for you. So far it obviously doesn’t know me very well since it recorded Maury(daytime talk show) and some children’s show called Recess. I think the reason for the strange choices might be because some of the previous owners information is still stored in it’s little head.. but even Josh doesn’t watch children’s shows.

This weekend I plan to install TivoWeb and Tyserver which will let me program my Tivo from anywhere and download all of the shows for burning to DVD. If anyone knows of any other good Tivo hacks let me know and I’ll scope them out.

Oh the geekyness factor is huge ain’t it?

I was marveling at how much I have come to depend on FireFox’s built in search engine feature this morning and decided to whip up a quick search plugin of my own for the phone book at UIC (my employer, in case you didn’t know).

It turns out this is much simpler than I expected it to be. The docs are right here if you want to take a crack at it yourself some time.

You can install my plugin by visiting the install page (Wordpress doesn’t like j-script it seems, hence the other page).

One note; it currently searches only based on name, not netID or department. Since 99% of the time I’m looking up someone’s e-mail address it serves my purposes. If you have an interest in a version of the plugin that searches by the other criteria drop a line here and I’ll gladly hook you up.

Oh, and I know the icon looks like a bananna. I made it yellow because my phone is yellow, deal with it.