For whatever reason, at home I’ve been primarily sticking with a single monitor.  I use Ubuntu and natively use virtual workspaces, but still doesn’t give me the screen real estate that a 2nd monitor provides.  Rather than invest in a 2nd monitor right now, I thought it would be pretty slick to use my iPad as a second “virtual” monitor.  It turns out this is possible AND very easy!

What is a virtual monitor?  Through the magic of VNC i can actually use all of my apps on my main Linux PC and at the same time add touch screen support!  What do you need?

• A computer (PC, Linux, or MAC) with some VNC server installed and a VNC viewer.  I don’t really have a preference on VNC software, but you can check out RealVNC (http://www.realvnc.com/)

• An iPad running some VNC-capable software.  I haven’t researched extensively but I believe there are a number of solutions.  The app I’ve been running for years now is iSSH.  iSSH is sophisticated terminal software that is capable of SSH and support VNC connections.

• A nifty iPad stand that turns your iPad into a swivel monitor (OK, this isn’t needed, but puts some icing on the cake).  I’d recommend the RocketFish iPad Stand.

How do you set this up?  Easy…

1. You can opt to control your PC with VNC like most users do.  However, if you want a real “virtual” monitor/desktop you’d want a distinct workspace.  By default VNC uses :0 (your main desktop) as it’s default display.  You can create a new VNC server instance on a fresh desktop at :1.  I’m using TightVNC so the syntax may vary, but the command to setup is easy:

vncserver -alwaysshared :1

AND to kill the isntance when your done or want to start over

vncserver -kill :1

Note: the -alwaysshared is needed if you want to also control the iPad “virtual” monitor from your main PC

2. If you haven’t done so download and install iSSH from the App Store (currently $9.99 USD).  Setup either an SSH with VNC, or Raw VNC connection to your main computer.  Make sure to specify :1 as the port.
3. If you want to also control this new iPad virtual desktop from your main PC you can run vncviewer. On the command line (assuming Linux) run:

vncviewer :1

Note: You should see this display mirrored on your iPad as well.  You now have the choice to control exclusively from the iPad or share from the main PC.

Here’s a screenshot of my iPad monitor setup using the RocketFish stand and running Firefox from my iPad.

1. Find an alternative to iTunes that let’s me access ALL of my music on the go with a low barrier to syncing/listening
2. Cleanup my music collection (meta tags, filenames, etc.) since my iTunes use (abuse) has left many songs forgotten and neglected
3. Free my Music… while I’m in the mood to completely ditch iTunes I might as well get rid of all my DRM-protected music.  I’m doing this for both philosophical and practical reasons.

SubSonic (http://www.subsonic.org/)

Subsonic is an open source music (free) java-based streaming server for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Right of the bat, I have to say it’s one of the most impressive open source apps I’ve come across.  I had it setup on Ubuntu in < 5 minutes and it works flawlessly!  Subsonic provides a web interface so you can access and listen to your music from anywhere.  I have it hosted on my own personal server and have tested it seamlessly over both 3G and Wi-Fi. The great thing about this product is there are applications for iPhone, Android and Windows 7 that let you stream music to your phone.  The app I chose for iPhone was iSub Music Streamer.  It cost $5 USD, but is probably the best money I’ve spent in the app store.  Things I really like?

• Transcoding – Even if you don’t have all .MP3s on your server, Subsonic can convert and stream other types on the fly (like AAC, AIF, M4A).  You can also customize audio bitrate based on bandwith usage (Wi-Fi or 3G), but by default I don’t limit.
• Caching – Once you’ve played the song it will be cached.  You can also queue or cache songs ahead of time and force the app into offline mode.
• Playlists – You can create both server-side and client side playlists.  This makes it really easy to share with multiple devices (iPhone(s), iPad, PC, media center, etc.)
• Podcasts – This feature completely eliminates the need for Iphone.  Plug in an RSS Podcast URL and Subsonic will download your podcast .MP3s and keep them updated on demand.

A viable alternative to iTunes?  You bet!  No sync times and music is available from anywhere.  I’m rediscovering my music collection all over again and listening to music I haven’t really bothered with in years.

Jaikoz Audio Tagger (http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/)

Years ago I used a very good Windows program called MP3Tag to cleanup my music collection.  This program would let you bulk-edit the MP3 ID3 tags (Artist, Album, Track, Year, etc.) and rename files.  This program still works well but I found an even better alternative.  Jaikoz (20GBP-~$33USD) is another amazingly slick app. It does everything that MP3 tag does plus more:

• Integration with online metadata sites like MusicBrainz and Discogs to automatically identify files
• Acoustic fingerprinting using Amplified.  If you have a file with no identifiable information in the filename or metadata Amplified will most likely find it (think Shazam or SoundHound)
• Adds album cover art and lyrics

A few years ago I blogged about an incident where my first iPod Video music db became corrupt and I lost information on about 500+ songs (meta data was non-existant in most of them and files were renamed to something like QD3K33.mp3).  Unbelievably Jaikoz was able to recover about 95+% of the files and even added album cover art and lyrics!

Noteburner (http://www.noteburner.com/)

Since Rhapsody and Amazon started offering .MP3 downloads all of my online music purchases have been through them.  However, I still have (had) hundreds of DRM-protected songs that I purchased through iTunes and Rhapsody.  Back in 2008 I went through some pain to burn the Rhapsody purchases to CD and then rip them again back to .MP3.  This time around I wanted to find a way to make it easier.  I’ve used virtual CDRW software in the past like CDBurnerXP and it worked well.  Noteburner, a worthly alternative ($39.95), offers many of the features of CDBurnerXP but also burns to CD and converts to MP3 in a single-step process!  Simply install, select as your preferred CD-RW drive for burning and burn the playlist.  Noteburner will automatically create the virtual CD, read the CD-TEXT provided by itunes, and create the .MP3 file.  Once you have all your converted files, simply load them into Jaikoz and get the full range of meta tags including album cover art and lyrics.

My total cost for this little project was less than $75 and I couldn’t be happier.  I now have a clean music collection that I can access from anywhere in the world, and don’t have to feel the iTunes pain ever again.  C-ya!!

Of all the apps I use, I have to say that GoodReader is at the top of my list!  GoodReader is a really comprehensive PDF viewer with a large number of features.  Although I’ve been a fan of AirSharing, GoodReader offers it’s main feature of sharing files using Wi-Fi, and some others not present in other apps: excellent support for large PDF files (>75 MB), the ability to connect over the network to view documents (WebDAV, FTP, Google Mail, etc.). At this point I’ve pretty much copied the majority of my My Documents folder.  And, to access the rest of my docs I simply need to VPN into my home server, connect over WebDAV and quickly download.

Now, GoodReader can support a number of file formats including .txt, .html, and various video and audio formats.  But, I’ve been trying to standardize my doc collection into a common format: PDF.  I have a handful of websites that I’ve been wanting to convert to PDF format for offline viewing and have found the PERFECT open source command-line solution: wkhtmltopdf to the rescue.  What makes wkhtmltopdf unique is that it uses Webkit (WebKit is the engine of Apples Safari, which is a fork of the KDE KHtml) to render pages and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Since it’s based on Webkit this means that the resulting PDF looks pretty much like it would in Safari and the format remains intact (including HTML links which is a big plus).

To test this out I thought it would be good to take the Squashed Philosophers site with me.  For anybody with an interest in philosophy, Squashed Philosophers from Glyn Hughes is really an excellent cliff notes-like site that takes that ideas and works of the greatest philosophers of history and compresses into a summary that can be ready in ~30 minutes (condensed but very high quality).  I figured this would be a great thing to take on the go.  I wrote a quick little Perl script that grabbed all of the sub-pages from the main page, and executed a simple command for each URL. Example:

# wkhtmltopdf http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/ancientgreeks.htm ancientgreeks.pdf
Loading pages (1/5)
Resolving links (2/5)
Counting pages (3/5)
Printing pages (5/5)
Done

The resulting PDF looks really good (embedded in my Document Browser for preview).

http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2010/04/ive-been-working-on-this-quietly-in.html

Since I purchased my new iPhone 3G a few weeks ago, I’ve been happily syncing it with my MacBook Pro. As much as I love my Mac laptop, most of my day to day work is done primarily on my personal desktop running Ubuntu Linux. I thought now would be the ideal time to move all of my music-related activities entirely from OS X to Linux. So, I recently migrated all of my music there (35+GB!), and have been trying out a handful of open source solutions for managing my music collection (SongBird, Rhythmbox, Amarok, etc.). What I’ve quickly learned is that most of these applications work fairly well, however they don’t integrate with the Apple Store (love it or hate it, they’ve got great content) and you can’t sync yet with the iPhone 3G.

Since I’m already running VMware Workstation (XP SP2), I thought it would be a breeze to download the latest version of iTunes and sync away. That dream unfortunately did not come true! It took a little while but after I imported my music library from a shared folder, I decided to plugin the iPhone. I waited….. waited….. and nothing happened! I restarted iTunes and got a most obscure error message:

“iTunes could not connect to iPhone “” because an unknown error occurred. (0xE8000035)”

After an inordinate amount of Googling, It seems this has been a common problem affecting both VMware and VirtualBox users. There was a mixture of comments. Some users said things where working fine for them, others gave up with tears in their eyes. From what I could gather, here were the most common suggestions for solving the problem:

1. Upgrade from Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 3
2. Enable USB 2.0 in your VM preferences
3. Try plugging the phone into a different USB Port
4. Set ehci.present to TRUE in the .vmx file
5. Try running the VM in VMWare Player instead of VMWare Workstation

I can safely say that *none* of these suggestions helped. The first, and most time consuming, thing I tried was upgrading to SP3. No luck! USB2.0 and EHCI where already enabled so that couldn’t be it either. Different USB ports didn’t help, and VMWare Player behaved exactly the same. As an absolute last resort, I decided to download the latest version of Workstation. My version 6.0.2 was from about 7 months ago, and I noticed that 6.0.5 was released at the end of Aug. The solution that worked for me?

Upgrade to the latest version of VMware!!

Why did this work? I browsed through the release notes, and saw mention of an iPhone-specific fix in version 6.0.3:

“With Workstation 6.0.2 the iPhone might be seen as a camera device by a Windows guest but iTunes did not list the device in its device list. In Workstation 6.0.3, the iPhone is usable and visible in iTunes for Windows guests.”

Problem solved and my iPhone is now happily syncing away with my virtual instance of Windows XP. I figured I would share this post and spread the word in case there are other hopeful, but stumped, iPhone 3G users out there.