MWKit – a Cocoa framework for talking to the MetaWatch

As said before, I’ve been putting together a little framework to talk to the MetaWatch.

Well, here it is, as promised, it works on both, Mac OSX and iOS (jailbroken)

MetaWatch Hacking: iOS Support

I’m putting together a Cocoa framework that’s going to work on both, iOS (jailbroken, using btstack) and Mac OSX (using IOBluetooth or TTY directly)

Here’s a video showing an iOS demo App.

code coming soon. see MWKit for more info, source-code and repository.

Metawatch Hacking: First Prototypes

What’s a MetaWatch ?

Well, it’s a watch obviously, kind of a smart watch but not actually that smart, basically it’s a remote display for other devices to write to, connections are made via Bluetooth using SPP (a serial port protocol).

Still, leaving it rather dumb was a smart move, so I don’t really know what to call it, it’s pretty cool that’s for sure

Anyhow, after few delays, my MetaWatch (which I had originally pre-ordered back in May) finally shipped and I had almost a week now to play with it, here’s what I came up with so far.

OpenSource: a SickBeard Launcher App

I really fell in love with SickBeard lately, so I made this little launcher App.

How to use

Simple, just download the app and start it. A dialog will show up prompting for your SickBeard install path, click choose path, select it and you’re done.

How an iPhone breaks free (extended)

I’ve never posted this so here it is,
the full version of a review paper on Jailbreaking iOS, I’ve posted a while ago.

It’s not totally up to date anymore, but it covers the history of jailbreaking, the reasons it exsists, the technical background as well as the inner workings of some of the most recent tools which at the time of writing this paper have been Star or greenpois0n.

I didn’t’ really follow the recent developments in this field since writing this, so feel free to drop a comment if you have anything to add or feel like something needs to be updated.

View this document on Scribd

How an iPhone breaks free

A short introduction to the topic of Jailbreaking.

This is the short version of a review paper on Jailbreaking iOS, I’m going to write over the next weeks.  My intentions here are to provide a detailed explanation of the whole process, aimed at readers with a technical background who want to read up on the topic.

View this document on Scribd

Upgrading Disk over RAM: Three reasons to switch to SSD

I’ve just made the switch to SSD, and I gotta say, the performance gain you’ll get from this really is impressive.
The decision to upgrade Disk over Ram turned out to be just right, so here are three good reasons to make the switch to SSD.

Livescribe Pencast – Sharing large Recordings

One of the key features of a device like the Livescribe – Pulse Smartpen definitely is to be able to share one’s notes and recordings with others, especially since Livescribe is directly targeting students with their product.

This makes it even more sad, that they still haven’t got their online platform right, I own a Pulse Smartpen for about a month now, and for a couple of times, it would have been great to be able to just share the notes I took during lectures with others from my course, unfortunately this didn’t work once, since recordings of one to two hours length (that are pretty common in the student-scenario) ended up  having no audio once the upload was done.

So, thinking positive, I’ve just tried again, hoping they’ve might fixed this finally.

They didn’t.

However, I’ve just stumbled across the root of all evil, of course, it is their flashplayer. For some reason it doesn’t play the audio until it has downloaded the whole file (…hello?), so for a one and a half hour of audio, the player will have to download about 25mb of data befor you will hear your recording, depending on your connection, this can take quite a while.

I really hope they’ll get this done soon, in the meantime we’ll just have to live with this, but at least, we can share our notes knowing that it’ll work after the goddamn flashplayer has got it’s whole audio file.

A short Introduction to PyPy

Here are the slides from my presentation about PyPy I’ve recently held at my University.

How to use the avr-toolchain with Xcode

After reading an article about how to use the avr-toolchain with Xcode, I ended up beeing able to build and clean an avr-project in Xcode but that was it, flash and fuse options still required to switch to a terminal and do so manually. 

This was kind of a step backwards, I thought, since developing in textmate and leaving the rest to the makefile seemed to be still more comfortable, so I played around a bit and came up with this: