I was struggeling playing a movie file on iOS with MPMoviePlayerController. The file was just recorded with AVCaptureMovieFileOutput and was called file.avi, located in the Document directory of the app.
The movie player was presented and then immediately disappeared. The URL was correct, the file played without problems on the Mac. Apparently, MPMoviePlayerController expects the file ending to match the file type. Once I renamed the file to file.mov, everything worked as expected.
This fly. It was killing me. For hours it was circling around me while I was sitting at my desk. And everytime I leaned back, it landed either on my MacBook, my iPhone or on my iPad. I watched this for several hours until it dawned on me: if this fly finds my iDevices so delicious, there must be something wrong.
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After I submitted my review of Hacker News iPad Apps to Hacker News, it shortly made it to the frontpage, with the result that the thundering horde quickly exhausted the tiny traffic quota I had at my hoster. I’ve decided to migrate to another hoster and if you read this, the DNS change has reached your corner of the Intertubes.
If you notice broken links or anything else that is flaky, please let me know on Twitter (@danielhepper) or drop me a mail at daniel [at] hepper [dot] net. Thanks!
Browsing Hacker News on the iPad is okay, but far from perfect. As of this writing, there are five Hacker News iPad Apps available on the App Store that promise a more comfortable experience:
I took the time (and money) to try them all, this are my findings.
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In this post, I will show you how to make a Pac-Man ghost lamp. You can also find it on Instructables.
To be precise, we will create small ghost lamp shades to turn a boring spotlight system into a great looking Pac-Man themed lamp.
You will need:
Once you found the right bottles and a nice lamp, this project will take about 2 x 2 hours.
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I’m currently struggling with what seems like a bug in Virtualbox that affects the new Core i7 MacBooks. While trying to fix it by building Virtualbox from source, uninstalling and reinstalling, I managed to mess up a box managed with Vagrant, rendering it inaccessible.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, you can try to fix it with the VBoxManage command.
$ VBoxManage list vms
"
$ VBoxManage unregistervm {b68ed7a7-6e72-4f16-a438-8775cd80d9b3} --delete
VBoxManage: error: The object is not ready
VBoxManage: error: Details: code E_ACCESSDENIED (0x80070005), component Machine, interface IMachine, callee nsISupports
Context: "Delete(ComSafeArrayAsInParam(aMedia), pProgress.asOutParam())" at line 175 of file VBoxManageMisc.cpp
Segmentation fault
As you can see, it died with a segmentation fault, but the broken box was now gone and I could restart it with vagrant up.
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I wanted to have /usr/local/bin to be listed before /usr/bin in my PATH environment variable.
One way to achieve this would be to add a ~/.profile file with a line like this:
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
This would result in /usr/local/bin being listed twice. It wouldn’t hurt but it’s not pretty either.
If you look at /etc/profile, you will see that the initial value of PATH is set by path_helper(8).
The right way to change to order of default paths is to edit /etc/paths. It contains one path per line, in descending order. Mine looks like this:
/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
Starting from November 1st, Amazon offers a free usage tier for new AWS customers. After finishing the horrible signup process, I was left wondering wether the free usage tier was activated for my account.
To find out, just start an EC2 micro instance*. Don’t forget to stop it. After some time, go to the account activity page and click on “expand all services”. You should see something like this:
* This will cost you a few cents if you don’t have a free usage tier.
…migration subclass in Sequel migration files.
If you combine multiple migration subclasses in one file you get an uncomprehensible exception like this one:
org/sqlite/DB.java:275:in `execute': NativeException: java.sql.SQLException: schema_info.version may not be NULL (Sequel::DatabaseError)
It made the news that the Internet has been nominated for this year’s Nobe Prize.
The Internet? Seriously? Just think about all the flame wars the Internet caused. I think some people have to check there calendar, it’s not April 1st yet. What were they thinking?
- “Ok, last year we gave it to Obama, because was so popular. That didn’t really make everyone happy. We need someone more popular.”
- “How about the Internet?! Everyone likes the Internet!”
This just ridiculous. Why not nominate swords? After all, you can hammer them into plowshares.
