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Some of you might have read one or the other article at Tweaking4All, related to moving Audio and/or Video files to your beloved iOS device (iPod, iPad or iPhone) without the use of iTunes. Not many of us like iTunes, and that includes me.

As a response to one of these articles, one of the Tweaking4All visitors recommended WALTR, a new application available for the Mac OS X and Windows platform, which allows copying music, ringtones and video files to your iOS device without iTunes.

As usual, I was pretty skeptical as we have all seen too many of these “miracle apps”, especially when they are not free.
WALTR is not free either and initially, $29.95 sounds pretty steep for such an application, but I promise you: it’s worth it! It makes transferring audio and video to your iOS super fast and super simple.

So if you frequently want to transfer audio and/or video files to your iOS device, then I can highly recommend this application!
If you want to do it only once or twice, then at least consider using the free trial version.

In this article I’ll discuss the Windows version, and will give you a quick overview how to get started, and what it does and does not do, and some tips and tricks that might be helpful. I did write the same article for Mac OS X as well.

Some of you might have read one or the other article at Tweaking4All, related to moving Audio and/or Video files to your beloved iOS device (iPod, iPad or iPhone) without the use of iTunes. Not many of us like iTunes, and that includes me.

As a response to one of these articles, one of the Tweaking4All visitors recommended WALTR, a new application available for the Mac OS X and Windows platform, which allows copying music, ringtones and video files to your iOS device without iTunes.

As usual, I was pretty skeptical as we have all seen too many of these “miracle apps”, especially when they are not free.
WALTR is not free either and initially, $29.95 sounds pretty steep for such an application, but I promise you: it’s worth it! It makes transferring audio and video to your iOS super fast and super simple.

So if you frequently want to transfer audio and/or video files to your iOS device, then I can highly recommend this application!
If you want to do it only once or twice, then at least consider using the free trial version.

In this article I’ll discuss the Mac OS X version, and will give you a quick overview how to get started, and what it does and does not do, and some tips and tricks that might be helpful. I have also written a Windows version of this same article.

If you’re a Mac user, and you’re enjoying the newer MacOS X versions, then you might have noticed that Apple’s own implementation of SMB simply sucks … it just doesn’t work and for a company like Apple to just leave it this way is beyond me.

SMB is a network protocol, commonly know as “Microsoft Windows Network” or Samba, which allows sharing of files and devices over a network. Most of us use this on our Windows computers and theoretically (it seems) MacOS X should support this as well.

For me it’s to share files with family, friends, or to share media files with my XBMC/Kodi setup.

In this article, I’ll show you how to quickly get started with a working Samba implementation, instead of using Apple’s broken implementation – for this we will make use of SMBUp.

I’ve always loved Kodi, formerly known as XBMC. I’ve installed it on regular PC’s and Mac’s, tiny PC’s, AppleTV’s (1st and 2nd generation), Boxee Box, etc.  With the arrival of Amazon’s Fire TV, it was just a matter of time when I’d buy one.

I did look at numerous Android based devices before, just for the purpose of running Kodi (XBMC), but so far all the horror stories have kept me from doing so. Amazon’s Fire TV however has been reviewed and always seemed to score high when it comes to performance.u

However, … one downside of Amazon’s Android based devices is that Amazon feels the need to force their rules, their app-store and their interface on you and will not allow you to tinker with non-Amazon approved apps – like Kodi (XBMC).

So in this article I’ll show you how easy it is to install Kodi on Amazon’s Fire TV, and some additional Tips & Tricks.
It’s quick, it’s easy and the end result is awesome.

I honestly had zero use for a XBox 360 Controller on my Mac, since I’m a keyboard/mouse gamer … but I was toying with another article (Kodi on Amazon Fire TV) and was looking for a Game Controller for the Amazon Fire TV.

Looking around I noticed that the Microsoft XBox 360 wireless controller for Windows should work with the Amazon Fire TV and with MacOS X. Since I do play the occasional game on my Mac (yes: that is possible!) with Steam, I figured why not give it a try. The controller, with receiver, isn’t all that expensive.

So in this article: How to connect and use an Xbox 360 Controller on MacOS X …
TIP: For those of you who are trying to get this to work with an XBox One Controller, please read the “Bluetooth XBox One controller on a Mac” article as well.

While working on my DD-WRT project for my NetGear R7000 router, I ran some tests to see what the ideal connection setup for my router would be.

During the testing you’d typically want to see the speed of your WiFi connection, possibly including noise, RSSI, channel, country code, used frequency, etc. and initially it can be a bit daunting where to find this information. But … surprise: this info is readily available on your Mac, no extra software is needed, you just need to know where it’s hidden …

Therefor in this article 4 methods to figure this out on your Mac, without the need to install specific software for the task.

This week was an interesting week – I travel quite often between my home in the USA and family and friends in Europe. With a world that has become smaller due to the Internet, you’d expect that services you’re used to are still available when traveling … well that’s not the case. I guess the movie industry still hasn’t gotten the message that region limitations is simply ridiculous. So my NetFlix suddenly got neutered and forced to the Dutch version.

I didn’t ask for this, and I most certainly did not pay for this … why not simply link content to your account, which has an address and therefor determines where you reside? Or even better: Just drop the nonsense with regions entirely … I’m sure it will reduce piracy as well.

Anyhow, long story short: to get to my real account (US) I could spoof my location by using well known VPN service like Astrill. Works great, looks a little suspicious, slows down your connection due to encryption and it’s not always “cheap” or easy to use.

Along comes UnoTelly (and I’m sure there are other services like that) offering to try their DNS service for free (8 day trial). This article is about my findings with their services (DNS and VPN) … in short: it’s worth it!

To remotely control my Windows machines, I always prefer to use RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) as it performs much nicer than VNC (Virtual Network Computing). VNC has this streak of “JPEG” quality and slow behavior, whereas RDP is fast and crystal clear.

RDP is however a proprietary protocol from Microsoft. So how can we use RDP to control our Ubuntu box remotely?

This is where xRDP comes in play, an open source remote desktop protocol (RDP) server. It actually runs VNC protocol over RDP as far as I understand, yet if behaves much better than VNC by itself (possibly because of the used desktop manager). Since Ubuntu 12.10 (if I’m not mistaken), xRDP doesn’t seem to work with the Ubuntu desktop anymore … unless you use an alternative desktop manager. This seems related to 3D acceleration and nobody seems to care (since 2011, according to bug reports).

Note : if you really need Copy/Paste functionality between the two machines, then please use Ubuntu’s default installed “Desktop Sharing” instead (MacOS X users read this forum post).

If you’re familiar with the Put.io service (article) then using pyLoad as your download manager is your best choice (at this moment) when running it on a QNAP.

Put.io is a service that downloads torrents for you to their cloud service, where you have your own private space so you can download it from there like any other file. Put.io even supports the use download managers that split downloads into multiple chunks so that you can maximize your Internet bandwidth (they even recommend it).

Other download managers on the QNAP however do not support multiple chunks, so you’re “stuck” with pyLoad and that’s where you might run into small issues, but we will get to that into this article.

UPDATE: You might find Aria2 to be a more suitable Download Manager for this purpose – read our Aria2 on QNAP Guide.

Downloading a torrent safely can be tricky. All kinds of options and services out there offer you privacy protection and most of them (VPN’s for example) can be cumbersome to setup or maintain, and are often slower than the real deal.

Put.io however offers a cloud service that does all this for you. It downloads (and even seeds) a torrent safely for you into their cloud service and stores the downloaded files in your private storage space (starts at 50Gb!!).

Once a download has been completed, you can then download the downloaded torrent as a regular file. They recommend and support the use of a Download Manager to get the maximum speed out of your Internet connection.

For $0.99 you can take it for a spin for a day and you’ll be surprised how well it works.

I recently purchased a NetGear R7000 Nighthawk WiFi router capable of 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz Wifi. This router so far has been awesome – compared to my old ActionTec WiFi router: it right away gave met a 10% speed increase on my downloads and it supports 5Ghz WiFi (great for Apple products).

Now I wanted to try something different: DD-WRT.
DD-WRT is an open source firmware available for numerous routers, offering a vast amount of features that you will not find on normal routers. For me the main reason to try this was: Support for DNSMasq, so I can assign multiple hostnames to the same IP address for my Test Webserver, and build-in VPN. Not just VPN support as most routers claim (meaning: pass through of VPN traffic)! No, we’re talking real OpenVPN build in so the router actually maintains the VPN connection.

In this guide I will use Kong’s DD-WRT firmware and go through the steps and go back to stock if needed.

In a previous article, I demonstrated how to use “Data Pull” to read sensor data over a computer network using an Arduino ENC28J60 Ethernet shield/module and some sensors (DS18B20 for example). In this article we will do the opposite: Data Push.

This means that we will make the Arduino send data to our server, which stored the results in a database. For this we will use an Apache, MySQL and PHP setup, which can be a full-size web-server or an easy to install “WAMPServer” setup on your desktop or laptop computer.

Some basic experience with PHP and web-servers will be helpful when working your way through this article.

Back in the day, when the first LED TV’s appeared, Philips came with a great feature: Ambient TV lighting.

Ambient TV lighting consisted out of lights that would project to the wall behind your TV, one or more colors matching the content on your TV. So if the majority of the screen would be red, then the light emitted would be red, if the majority of the screen is green, then green light would be emitted, etc.

Over the years this has been refined to multiple colors, matching small parts of the screen. Unfortunately though, this wonderful feature is not something you can simply add to your TV. You will have to buy a Philips TV with this feature, …

Until now though, and only for XBMC (Kobi) users. Some smart guy(s) created Boblight, which is opensource and can run (for example) on your XBMC computer. The computer analyzes the video content and “converts” it to signals for LED strands, so you can attach these strands behind your TV and have a DYI Ambient TV lighting effect.

Note : This will only work for content played through your XBMC Media player (I used OpenElec)! So your regular TV shows, your XBox or PlayStation, none of these will have an influence on the “Ambient TV lighting” we will be discussing in this article.

I just installed a WiFi card in a Mac Pro and thought I’d share the ease of installation on my website. In my case, I installed it in my pride and joy, a 8-core Mac Pro 2008 model (Mac Pro 3,1) which kicks ass, but it works on newer models as well. As long as it’s a a model before the new late 2013 model (the fancy trash bin).

For this WiFi upgrade I used the Apple MB363Z/A Airport Extreme Wireless Upgrade Kit, found at Amazon new for $25, which MacOS X recognizes instantly – so no need for crazy drivers and weird WiFi apps. The Mac Pro, made out a metal alloy, has two build in WiFi antenna’s and this setup will pick up on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz WiFi (if the same card is being used).

When I started building my own “AmbiLight” project, based on OpenElec (XBMC) and Boblight, the first problem I ran into is finding a tool to create a Boblight config files for use under MacOS X. Naturally, there are quite a few great tools out there that do a good job, but it’s either a script, web-based or limited to Windows users (Boblight Config Tool), and again … not for MacOS X …

Creating a config file for Boblight can be quite tedious when you have a large amount of LEDs (I had 290 LEDs), when you mix up the orientation of your LEDs (pretty common issue), or when you do not have your LEDs spread out evenly.

So here is my tool, for Windows, MacOS X and Linux, written in Lazarus Pascal – enjoy!
UPDATE: Another minor bug fixed, added test video and Boblight Config Maker can now also be found at Alternativeto.net.