06 Nov
   Filed Under: How-To, Personal Work   

In an earlier post, I asked for your interest in a how-to on graphing several network statistics using MRTG, an open-source application that generates graphs using data pulled from SNMP. I used an Airport Extreme (802.11n, gigabit) for this, but it should work with Snow / Graphite Airport base stations and up (Express and Extreme). For other routers, your mileage may vary, and it may even not be possible, so I decided not to make a guide for anything else than Apple’s routers. If you want to have graphs in your desktop, updated in real time, as seen here, read on!

Continue reading…

06 Nov
   Filed Under: Design, News   

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a game that looks very promising. Appleinsider has a few screenshots of the Mac alpha up (is it a Mac alpha? Might just as well be a bunch of PC screenies, apart from this one), and of course I noticed one thing more than all the others;

7154D104-B98F-4395-8808-89484D9E5219.jpg

Ouch. Mr. Carmack, let’s make a deal, okay?

06 Nov
   Filed Under: News   

The Serif reports that a shortened version of Helvetica, the eponymous documentary about the typeface, will be shown tonight. It will show on BBC 1 at 10.35 PM Greenwhich Mean Time. I haven’t seen it yet, but going from what I have heard, it’s very much worth watching.

05 Nov
   Filed Under: Apple, iPhone, News   

Quicktime and iTunes were just updated over at Apple.com. The upgrade’s new features aren’t revealed, but I am sure it will address some changes necessary for the iPhone 1.1.2 firmware.

T3 got their hands on an iPhone carrying the 1.1.2 firmware and posted a picture gallery; if the images are in any way reliable, there’s not a lot of changes apart from International language support. A bit of a bummer, if you ask me, if the update would echo in just a few extra keyboards and plug up some exploits.

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04 Nov
   Filed Under: iPhone, News   

Via T3:


First off, there’s support for dozens of languages, so if you happen to be a fluent Cantonese speaker, the phone has all the relevant character sets so you can display your language properly.

There’s full support for French and German, with special keyboard lay-outs on the ready to tackle accented characters – perfectly understandable, of course, what with the phone heading for launch across the channel this month too.

This is very good news for people like me, who crave the iPod Touch’s “languages” button to switch autocompletion dictionaries to Dutch, German, or whatever you may need. I hope we’ll see a hack for this firmware soon.

04 Nov
   Filed Under: Interface Design   

I have been working on a few technical things over the course of the weekend; first meshing my home wireless network by letting two routers form a single network, and after I was done, setting up MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) for my Airport Extreme, which is the border gateway.

MRTG produces pretty graphs of networks statistics, and I integrated them into my Leopard desktop using a space station icon I am working on, a bit of Photoshopping and Geektool 2.1.2 (since the website is down, I’ll host it here for the interested). Geektool, in turn, is a preference pane that lets you show console output or images on your desktop, refreshed at a certain interval.

I’ll let the result speak for itself (click for larger version over at flickr);

Picture 1.jpg

If there’s any interest for it, I’m willing to write a nice how-to for setting all of this up easily. Drop a comment if you want to see such a post.