All this and more could be yours! Furniture shown optional.

I've got a room for rent in my three-bedroom townhome in North Aurora, IL.  Amenities include:

• Your own private bedroom and bathroom
• Semi-private living room, complete with fireplace ("semi" only because I'll need to be able to walk through it – otherwise it's all yours)
• Garage parking space
• Monthly professional cleaning service
• Free laundry with fancy LG machines
• Shared kitchen & dining room
• One roommate (me) who is frequently away
• Can be either partly furnished or unfurnished

Perks of the location include:

• Woodman's 24-hour grocery store less than 5 minutes away
• Gym directly across the street
• Five minutes from I-88
• Close to lots of shopping on Randall Rd.

Perks of the fact that I'm a nerd include:

• Reasonably fast internet connection (8-9 megabit down, 1 megabit up)
• Network access via Wireless N or gigabit ethernet
• Use of wireless laser printer
• Space (if desired) for backup & remote access of personal data on an OpenSolaris ZFS-based server with redundant drives & battery backup

Price: only $600/month plus half utilities (which include gas, water, sewer, electric, trash, and internet; on average half utilities amounts to a little over $100). I think that's a pretty awesome deal for the area and the amenities, but feel free to try to convince me otherwise. Lease is informal and month-to-month, with no long-term obligations or commitments.  If you're interested, or know someone who might be, please leave a comment.

The manifold wonders of indoor plumbing await!

I hope the downtown Naperville Barnes & Noble will get its act together some day – in the meantime, there are plenty of local alternatives with free wifi, rafts of available power outlets, and better music. And never forget that there are folks out there with real problems.

Pandora Radio is where I find most of my new music these days.  When I hear a song I really like for the first time, I bookmark it, and usually end up going over my bookmarks sometime later and buying a lot of the tracks on Amazon. Unfortunately, the big music companies, for reasons unfathomable to sane and rational people, are still trying their hardest to prevent anyone from buying their music, and have mandated a 6-track "skip limit" for Pandora.  Looking for new music, and already own (or dislike) the next few songs Pandora plays?  Tough – after 6 skips (12 if you switch stations), you're stuck with whatever happens to be playing.

Well, I think that's pretty stupid. If you'd like to get your 6 skips back after you've used them up, here's one way to do so.  Generic instructions for any browser first:

1. Go to the Flash Settings Manager's Website Storage Settings panel, find the entry for pandora.com, and delete it. (In case you were unaware, as most folks are, Flash plugins get their own semi-secret cookies that are not deleted when you delete regular browser cookies.)
2. Delete any normal browser cookies from the pandora.com domain.
3. Reload pandora.com.  Ta-da!

This takes advantage of the fact that Pandora allows anonymous listening for a period of time. It probably doesn't work with a registered account (because your skips can be tracked with more persistent server-side state). So you won't get to save stations, bookmark songs, etc. But if you really want to skip more than 6 times in a row, you can.  As a special bonus for Safari users on OS X, here's a bash shell one-liner that'll accomplish steps 1 and 2 for you automatically (this deletes some files and is potentially dangerous if copy/pasted incorrectly – be careful):

export PATH=/usr/libexec:$PATH && export C=$HOME/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist && PlistBuddy -c print $C |awk '/Domain =/{x++; print x-1,$0}'|grep ".pandora.com"|cut -d ' ' -f 1|sort -rn|xargs -I "{}" PlistBuddy -c "Delete :'{}'" $C && find ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects -name "pandora.com"|xargs -I "{}" rm -rf {}

For the curious, Safari stores its cookies in .plist format, which can be primitively read and manipulated by a command-line utility that comes with OS X called PlistBuddy.  Due credit to this code snippet for hints on how to use it to delete cookies.  Safari's cookies are stored in ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist .  Flash stores its cookies in ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia Flash Player/#SharedObjects/ .

As far as I can tell, none of this violates Pandora's Terms of Use.  The closest prohibition is one against "[circumventing] any technology used by Pandora or its licensors to protect content accessible via the Pandora Services or the Licensed Application", but I'd really like to see someone argue with a straight face that a user cleaning out his or her browser cookies counts as "circumventing technology".  Then again, these are record companies we're talking about – if anyone would try it…

A colleague of mine recently asked if I knew of any applications that would allow him to save and backup voicemail off his iPhone. He had found The Missing Sync, but frankly $40 is a bit steep just to save voicemail; he didn't need to do anything else.

A quick search turned up an article describing how to save voicemail from a jailbroken iPhone, but nothing so simple for a non-jailbroken phone. The article did, however, drop a clue: voicemails are stored in AMR format.

iPhone backup files are conveniently all stored in a directory named for the phone's ID in "~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/". The files all have a .mddata or .mdinfo extension. Could any of them contain an AMR file? According to the AMR format RFC, plain, single-channel AMR files should start with the ASCII string "#!AMR\n". A simple grep revealed that several files in fact contained the AMR header. As it turns out, Apple has politely stored each voicemail in its own, separate file – no file carving is necessary to extract the voicemail.

It's so simple to find the voicemail in an iPhone backup, it can be done with a bash shell one-liner (credit to Seren in the comments for finding a slightly more compatible "find" syntax):

pushd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup ; for I in `find . -name *.mddata -exec grep -la '#\!AMR' {} \;` ; do cp $I $OLDPWD/`basename -s mddata $I`amr ; done ; popd

That'll copy all the voicemail for the current user's iPhone(s) to the current directory, named with a .amr extension. (Both QuickTime and iTunes can play .amr files.) Note that this can take a minute or two – so be patient for at least a couple minutes if it looks like nothing is happening.

For those less familiar with bash, I'll break down the one-liner a bit:

pushd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup ; \
for I in `find . -name *.mddata -exec grep -la '#\!AMR' {} \;` ; \
do cp $I $OLDPWD/`basename -s mddata $I`amr ; \
done ; \
popd

1. pushd changes the current directory and stores the previous current directory in the $OLDPWD environment variable. The "Application Support" directory has an unfortunate space in it, which makes it a bit tougher to throw around pathnames using it without getting the escaping just right – I didn't want to bother with it.
2. The find command looks for only those files that end in .mddata to save a small amount of time (there are no voicemails in .mdinfo files) and then passes each to grep. grep is used to look for files with the AMR header; the -la options are used to quit looking through a file after the first match (again, this is for a small speed improvement – the AMR header ends with a newline and must be the first thing in an AMR file, which means grep is able to move on quicker on the few files that match) and to treat files as text.
3. Use basename to strip off the .mddata filename extension so we can make a copy of the .mddata file with a .amr extension.
4. End of loop.
5. popd restores the current directory to the original working directory.

There are tons of different ways of doing the same thing; I tried for a little while to find one that was functionally equivalent (using xargs rather than a for-loop and bash substring manipulation rather than basename, etc.) but would fit in a Twitter update, but alas, I'm not a bash expert, and failed. If you can come up with a shorter one-liner, feel free to leave it in the comments. It needs to be general (it can't assume a specific iPhone ID, for example), and needs to assume a very large number of files in the backup directory (such that "grep '#\!AMR' *" would likely fail due to "*" being too long; that happens to be the case for me). Other than that, have fun.