Notes on Apple IR remotes reverse-engineering

In 2009, I wrote a driver to make the infra-red remote on my original MacBookAir work out-of-the-box on Linux. The driver was rejected upstream on the basis that the device would soon be supported through more generic means. In the meanwhile, it lived in Fedora's kernel tree, and I took some notes about implementing pairing, so that only your remote would work with your computer.

I'm posting this now because I wanted to poke at a MacOS X application today, and couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the program to monitor disk-activity. Hope this finds its way to a search engine near you.

• Launched the System Preferences, Security, and unlock the panel.
• In a terminal: sudo fs_usage -f filesys -w and check the output when enabling/disabling the remote.
• We can see the modified file is /Library/Preferences/com.apple.driver.AppleIRController.plist
• Installed PlistEditPro and opened the file up.
• Now try to pair a remote (menu and next together)
• You can see the UID value changing in the file. I named the remotes I had available to me:
• New remote: UID = 145 
• Old clean remote: UID = 24
• Old dirty remote: UID = 227 
• After adding some debug to the aforementioned appleir driver, in Linux, I got:
• New remote: appleir: received (5 bytes) 25 87 e0 91 02
• Old clean remote: appleir: received (5 bytes) 25 87 e0 18 03
• Old dirty remote: appleir: received (5 bytes) 25 87 e0 e3 02
• So the 4th byte is the remote's UID.

Now one could implement remote pairing using a sysfs attribute, a udev helper to apply the pairing across reboots, and PolicyKit helper to set and save the paired UID.

This will be left as an exercise to the reader :)

iDevice changes

If like me you jumped the queue of soccer moms, divorced middle-age business men and fanbois on Friday morning, you might have had a new toy to play with this week-end.

The good news

If you use Fedora 13, we fixed up some bugs and you can now mount your iPaid (private joke) on the desktop, and have it show up with a spiffy icon. All the updates are in updates-testing.

upower got the ability to tell you your battery status when plugging in an iDevice, though you'll need gnome-power-manager from master to see it, and even then, it won't show up on a desktop system without a UPS. Still some UI problems to iron out there.

gvfs will now warn you about the device being locked. Again, this change is only on master as it adds new strings.

nautilus-ideviceinfo is nearly ripe for consumption after my wad of bug fixes. I expect the code to move into the GNOME repos soon after the first release.

The bad news

Still no video, music or e-books syncing on the tablet iDevice.

No support yet for the per-app documents syncing. If you have a jailbroken device, you can use iFile to move your documents to the Documents sub-directory of /var/mobile/Applications/application-UUID (make sure to turn on "Application names" in the preferences).

Fedora 13 is out!

As the subject mentions, Fedora 13 is out!

Check out the announcement, and the fancy looking release notes.

Funny tidbit, The Register called it Linux for Applephobes, but failed to mention the enhanced iDevice support, and the features we added for Apple Macs as a Fedora machine.

Hardware enablement

Patches flying, and the results are nearly there.

Driver for the Apple Infra-red Receiver should soon be upstream (and a patch not to break LIRC setups), along with support for the Intuos 4 wireless tablet.

Ross merged patches in Gypsy which should allow for crappy serial GPSes to work, as well as the one on the Nokia N810 (and N900?), and the (even) crappy(er) ones that require a closed-source daemon and write to a FIFO.

No more stuttering

Today, as some of you guessed from my teaser yesterday, I finished implementing on-disk buffering in Totem, using playbin2's new features.

Using Totem in master with this gstreamer patch, Totem will start playing back videos as soon as enough buffering has been done on disk.

Note that this will only work for QuickTime and FLV streams, but that means that the YouTube Totem plugin and streaming trailers from Apple's website just got better, and should allow us to implement stream saving very soon.

MacOS X can suck loads too

That's what I got when testing QuickTime's helpers when a codec isn't supported (which happens fairly often). It doesn't ooze ease-of-use.

Useless discussion bait #1697

Apple invents Galago:

For example, Apple said the framework will allow developers to programatically determine through their own applications whether a specific instant message user is online[...].

We're well known for nicking ideas from Apple, and they also like to steal some from us, which isn't surprising given some of the cross-breeding among the communities that's happened over the years.

They still have a much better record at bringing those features to the users (Beagle vs. Spotlight, where the latter is integrated in many many more applications than Beagle is), and even better at advertising them (with pretty moving pictures).