fplanque: dev blog

b2evolution 3.2 will be shipping with an enhanced twitter plugin based on Lee Turner's twitterlution.

The twitter plugin for b2evolution allows to ping twitter in addition to other ping services. It will tweet the title of the new post and it's permalink url. The exact format of the tweets is configurable. By default it also includes a #b2p hash tag which will make it possible to follow all b2evolution bloggers who want to participate.

The plugin can use a different twitter account for each blog. It can also use a different twitter account for each user. (If both are available, then the blog account will be used).

So... if all goes well now... this post should automatically be tweeted to @francoisplanque ...

So your hooked up your Mac to your 5.1 receiver and all you get is lousy stereo? Worry no more, decent AC-3 support is finally available for Mac OSX!

In my case I have an Intel Mac Mini from 2006 hooked up to a Denon AVR-3801 via a fiber optic S/PDIF connection. On most (fairly recent) macs, an SPDIF fiberoptic cable will be the best solution to get the digital 5.1 signal from your mac to your home theater equipment.

Once you make that connection, there is one thing you should be able to do immeditately: play back DVDs in 5.1 Dolby Digital (or DTS or whatever surround track is on the DVD). If not, remove any DVD from the drive, then launch the DVD player app (not Front Row), go to Settings and tell it to output the DVD sound directly to the digital output instead of using the Mac Mini sound processing system.

If still not, the problem is either the cable or the mode selected on your receiver

Now, what if you want to convert your DVDs to files on your terrabyte harddrive? (Private use copy is legal here but I can't tell you about your country). So for the video you'll probably use a divx or xvid codec and for the 5.1 audio you'll use an AC-3 codec... and package all that into a nice AVI file.

Now in order to play that back on your mac, you need a bunch of codecs that are now conveniently packaged in a single downloadable package called Perian.

Once you install Perian, you will get playback but the sound will be stereo, or at best, some variation of Dolby Pro-Logic depending on what you set on the Perian preferences pane. But what you actually want is to get the AC-3 audio from the AVI file straight out to the SPDIF digital out without your Mac doing any alterations (especially not a stereo downmix!)

In order to do that you first need to go to your Applications/Utilities folder and launch the "Audio MIDI Setup" app.

At the lower right, you want to set the Digital Out format to 48000.0 Hz. (See screenshot) That's the frequency used by AC3. Some say you also want to set it to 2ch-16bit but I haven't found this to be necessary so I leave it at 2ch-24bit.

Once that is done, you need to launch the Terminal app that you will also find in Applications/Utilities. In the terminal window type the following in order to enable passthrough of the AC3 signal to the digital output:

Full story »

In order to get page up and page down to work properly under Mac OSX Terminal, as well as the home and end of line, you need to go to Preferences and then Keyboard and configure the right escape key sequences:

First cool thing that everybody knows already: Mac OSX is based on Unix so you get ssh out of the box.

Second cool thing you may not know: OS X 10.5 actually also comes with an ssh key agent (ssh-agent). That means that, without any additional software (like PuTTY Agent on Windows...), Mac OSX can actually load an encrypted private key into memory and remember it for all subsequent connections...

Third cool thing that almost seems too good to be true: ssh-agent can store the passwords of the encrypted keys into your keychain. Than means that you have to tell it once to remember the decryption password for your key(s) like this:

ssh-add -K .ssh/id_whatever_your_rivate_key_is

And next time you log into your mac and try to ssh somewhere, your private key will be loaded automagically (as long as your keychain is unlocked of course).

Very groovy!!

How does your brain feel today?