Bookshelf Apps

Finding your DS settings page

April 7th, 2010 0

If you have a Linn DS on your network you can find the settings page using Bonjour. This is one of the new features that came with the Cara firmware release. Maybe not a lot of people know about this, so heres a quick introduction. Actually, if you want the quick introduction skip ahead to the section titled Bonjour. First a short introduction to ethernet networking…

First thing is, why would you want to find your DS on the network, and why is it so hard? Every device on the network has an ethernet address, and just like a normal address, this is how we find each device. The address is normally shown in a format called dotted decimal, and looks something like this:

192.168.0.10

Normally, but not always, the first three numbers are the same for your entire local network, or in networking terms, subnet. So in the example above the subnet is 192.168.0.* and the device is at location 10. Each of the numbers is 1 byte, so it can go up to 255.

There are some special addresses that are reserved for private networks, such as a normal home network. That is why your 192.168.0.1 is different from my 192.168.0.1. The most common ranges for home networks are:

192.168.0
192.168.1
10.0

The 10.0 one has a bigger range than the 192.168 ones, so if you plan on having more than 250 or so devices then you are better off starting with the 10.0 address range.

Normally your internet router has this all preconfigured, so you don’t need to worry about this, it’s just useful to understand the addresses.

Finding your DS

When a network device starts up it doesn’t have an address. You could assign one manually, but that presents a bit of a chicken and egg problem if you want to set the address over the network. To access the device you need to know it’s address.

The solution to this problem is for the device to ask your router for a new address. This process is called DHCP, for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Any device on the network can be a DHCP server, but normally it is your internet router.

So your DS is up and running with a dynamic address, how do we find it. SongBook and other UPNP applications us a protocol called SSDP, Simple Service Discovery Protocol. The way it works is that SongBook sends a broadcast message (to every device on the network) asking for any devices of a specific type (UPNP MediaRenderer, Linn Product, UPNP MediaServer etc). Each device responds with a bit of information about itself, and it’s address.

But that’s not very useful if you want to find the address yourself to access the configuration page.

One way you can do this is to go to Preferences in SongBook Mac. It lists the addresses that it knows about there. But that’s not much use if you are not using a Mac, and there is an even easier way.

Linn DS’s with Cara firmware have another protocol called Bonjour. This is a network discovery protocol developed by Apple. It’s got a long history, parts of it dating from the old AppleTalk networks that were designed to work without any central configuration.

Bonjour

Bonjour is standard on a Mac, but is an optional install on Windows. If you have iTunes you may have Bonjour installed, if not you may need to install it. The easiest way to do that is with the iTunes or Safari installer, but there is a standalone Bonjour Print Services for Windows that will also work. Once installed you need to enable the toolbar in Internet Explorer, it’s under View.Explorer Bars in IE 8.

In Safari, on a Mac or Windows, open Preferences, and under Bookmarks there is an option to turn Bonjour on. Once it is on you will see a new menu in your Bookmarks Bar called Bonjour. In that menu you should find the name’s of any Linn DS’s you have on the network. Bonjour find’s them and lists them in the menu. It’s that simple.

A Possible Future For AppleTV

April 1st, 2010 0

We all know that the AppleTV is not as successful as everyone had hoped. It works well for what it does, but what would be a big improvement is if it was opened up to third party apps.

The best way to do this would be through a software update that brings the AppleTV in line with the iPhone OS. The core of the operating system is the same, so it is just the user interface layer that would change.

The biggest thing that this would enable is an App Store for the Apple TV. It’s such a simple thing to do, and such an obvious idea that I am sure that Apple has considered it. Hopefully they are hard at work on just such a thing.

From our point of view we’d love to bring SongBook to a TV screen, and the porting would not be difficult. Sure the interaction would be quite different, but the core of the application would be just the same. I’m sure that a lot of iPhone developers would be thinking the same thing, the’d be a huge application base just from ported applications (and games).

In the long run Apple could also update the Apple TV to use their own A4 processor, the PowerVR SGX graphics core in the A4 has got all the speed needed to drive a HD display.

Maybe this will be the next new product for Apple after the iPad?

We have looked at using other boxes for a TV interface for SongBook, but the work required for porting, and the quality of the results means that it would be a large task. Do you think that this is something that people would want?