We (finally) got Finn his first haircut last Friday. Here he is looking like a little angel:

And here he is (pre-haircut) in his current default mode (eating):

That last pic was taken at Powerscourt Waterfall the day of my birthday. Absolutely gorgeous place, I love having stuff like that so close to Dublin – literally a thirty minute drive.

So, Finn is just over 14 months old now and is coming along in leaps and bounds. Not literally – he’s just starting to find his feet as it were and is pretty close to walking. I’m guesstimating that this time next month he’ll have taken his first few tentative, unaided steps. For the moment though, he has us holding his hands while he walks stiltedly everywhere (he may have found his feet but his knees are a different story). He usually insists that you hold both hands but sometimes he’ll settle for just his right hand; for some reason he puts his left hand over his ear when you walk with him like this. Try to let go of his right-hand in favour of the left and he’ll just plop himself back down on the ground.

He’s confident enough at this stage to be able to walk up and down the living room (and the path outside the house) using his walker for balance. Trying to explain to a one-year-old that it’s time to go in because it’s just started raining is great craic.

When it comes to cruising though, he’s flying around and is well able to pull himself up on pretty much everything he can reach and that isn’t likely to topple over – sofas, beds, chairs, Thomas the Tank Engine thingie, your legs and the TV stand. I used to think that that last one was Finn being pragmatic; instead of moaning that 32 inches just isn’t a large enough TV, he figured that if he got as close to it as possible then it would seem bigger. But then he started hitting the screen and I was quickly disavowed of that belief. Little rascal :@

Anyway, here are some videos:

One of the great things about OS X Leopard is that it comes with Apache installed out of the box. Apache is an open source carrier grade web server that you can use to host websites and so on but more importantly – from the point of view of the iPhone or iPod Touch – it supports byte range reading. What this means is that your humble Mac can function as a streaming video server on your WLAN for your iPhone or iPod Touch with a little bit of legwork and a small PHP app that I threw together.

So how do you do it?

First things first – we need to enable web sharing. Open System Preferences, click Sharing and click the box next to ‘Web Sharing’.

Next we need to enable PHP. Although it’s installed with Leopard, the PHP module is disabled in Apache’s configuration by default. Let’s enable it – open a Terminal and type:

sudo nano -w /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

(Note that the ‘-w’ is important – it disable line wrapping). Press CTRL-W and type php5 then press return – the cursor should jump to the line that loads the PHP module:

#LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Delete the hash mark at the start of the line and then press CTRL-O to save the updated config, followed by CTRL-X to exit the Nano text editor. Back at the command prompt, we need to restart the Apache server:

sudo apachectl restart

Give it a few seconds to come back up and then check that it’s working by browsing to localhost. You should be greeted by the default Apache home page. That’s the messy stuff done – it’s all downhill from here.

Download my EasyStream scripts and extract them to the Sites folder in your home directory. Make sure you keep them in their own subfolder (i.e., Sites/EasyStream). Create a directory under this one (call it whatever you like, I suggest ‘Movies’) – this is where you’ll store the video that you need to stream.

Open your browser again and go to http://localhost/~User/EasyStream/ (make sure you substitute ‘User’ for whatever your short user-name is). You should see the EasyStream interface but it’ll probably look a little barren with no videos to watch. The easiest way to create some is to use Handbrake to convert some existing ones, using Handbrake’s ‘iPhone & iPod Touch’ profile.

Once you have some video, it’s time to test with your iPhone/Touch – connect your device to your WLAN and then open Safari and browse to http://yourdevice.local/~User/EasyStream/ (substitute ‘yourdevice’ for your Mac’s hostname and ‘User’ for the short form of your username). EasyStream should list the video in your EasyStream/Movies folder; tapping on one should cause QuickTime to open and after a short pause to buffer, your video should start playing.

Like most things, this trick has some pros and cons. First the pros – you no longer have to fill your iPhone/Touch up with videos; just stick them in your EasyStream folder instead. Secondly, if you forward port 80 on the outside of your firewall to your Mac’s IP, you can view your videos remotely provided you have a working internet connection for your device and know your public IP address (I’ve no idea how well this works over 3G). Finally, as our first test demonstrated, you can view the EasyStream pages in your ordinary browser – you can also view the videos (provided QuickTime is installed). The non-iPhone version of QuickTime downloads the entire video before it starts playing but you can fix that by ticking the ‘web optimised’ box in Handbrake before you start your conversion.

As far as cons go, I’ve built in a ‘compact view’ that breaks the videos into an alphabetical hierarchy but with lots of videos in your EasyStream/Movies folder, things could still become cumbersome. Secondly, there’s no way to bookmark where you are in a video, so if you stop playing something midway through and then go back, you’ll have to scrub through until you find where you where. Luckily the iPhone makes this relatively painless and it’s a worthwhile trade-off not to have to store the videos on your iPhone.

As you know from my last post, Finn was one on the 19th of February just gone. I got so caught up in the party and so on that I didn’t think to take some photos on the day, but here’s a short clip of everyone singing Happy Birthday to him.

Everyone had a great day, particularly Finn – although he did have us all tormented, wanting us to hold his hands so that he can walk around. Both he and Eoin also discovered the joy that is chocolate rice krispie cakes – Eoin made the even more joyous discovery that they’re even tastier when broken up and eaten off the floor. Yum!

As I mentioned above, Finn is mad to walk – if we put him standing at the sofas or our bed, he’ll ‘cruise’ back and forth. It’s only a matter of time before he starts walking unaided but for the moment we’ve finally found a surefire way to keep him out of trouble: he can pull himself up in the cot and he can maintain his balance so long as he has something or someone to hold on to but he hasn’t mastered sitting back down again. Good times.

All of this development has been fascinating to watch; it’s something that you don’t get a real appreciation for until you’ve experience it first hand and close up. They grow from being a tiny creature whose mind is little more than a collection of instincts and responses to a miniature person who knows his own mind and isn’t shy about letting you know (one year-olds having tantrums are hilarious, by the way – for about 5 seconds).

They also become adept at entertaining themselves:

That’s a little plastic chicken, by the way and he spent about five minutes doing that before the amusement wore off.

Finally, an illustration of how persistent he can be – like the above video, this is just a minute or so of something that went on for a few.

It’s hard to believe, but Finn is a whole year old today!