Right around the same time the TV had another issue where it would power on a couple times before the picture would actually appear on the screen. The Samsung plays a start up sound when you first press power on your remote. Normally the picture appears shortly after the start up sound, but my TV would play the sound two or three times before the picture would appear.

A Google search turned up a number of people with the same symptoms. AVS Forum has a huge thread on this series of Samsung LCD’s, and includes a bunch of advice on how to fix the problem. Long story short, you need to replace some bad capacitors on the power supply board.

Step one is opening up the TV. There are a bunch of screws to remove on the back, don’t forget the big wall mount bolts. Here’s a picture with the back cover removed.

And here is a close up of the bad capacitors.

I replaced three of these (total cost was < $6 at Fry’s). The bad ones are the medium sized black capacitors with a bulge on top. I put everything back together and the TV is working great!

I’ve removed the Twitter/Song.ly integration from this new release. That feature has always felt half-baked to me anyway. It’s easy to get excited about integrating everything (Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc.) into an iPhone app, but Stream.ly is about streaming radio, so that’s where I want to focus future development.

The following link is a bookmarklet that you can use to get the stream URL for any Professional Live365 station. Make sure the station says “professional”, or the stream won’t work.

In Firefox and Safari you can left click (keep the button down) and drag this link to your bookmark toolbar. In Internet Explorer you can right click and add the link to your favorites.

Live 365 Stream URL

Now when you visit a Live365 professional station page, like Houndstooth, you can click the saved bookmarklet and it will give you the stream URL.

If you open a compatible streaming radio link in Safari on the iPhone it will open a QuickTime player that will play the stream. Since Safari is allowed to run in the background, you can press the home button and start up other applications while the stream is still playing in Safari. The downside is that you can’t do anything else in Safari while the stream is playing.

Try it. Click on the Indie 103.1 playlist URL or the Houndstooth Radio stream URL from your iPhone.

I’ll add a feature to Stream.ly in the next update to do this automatically from the application. I’ll also update the Stream.ly website so you can browse the station directory from Safari on the phone and listen to a station without needing the application itself. The application adds a lot of nice features though.

UPDATE: It’s still in a “beta” stage, but you can now browse around the Stream.ly Radio web directory and play stations in Safari from this URL. iPhone only for now.

I sent you a multimedia

message. You can view my

message w/in the next 7 days

via the web at

www.viewmymessage.com/1

using MSG ID l3l4kd93ej

Password lame4att

Until AT&T unlocks the new MMS support in OS 3.0 us iPhone users have to enter a message id and password on http://www.viewmymessage.com to view MMS messages. Since the new OS allows copy and paste I made a web page to simplify the process. You can copy the entire text message and paste it into the textbox right from your iPhone. Touch the Send button and the message id and password are pulled out and sent to the viewmymessage.com site.

None of your text messages or MMS pictures are saved or logged by this page.

I even made a quick icon for it, so you can save a nice Safari home screen bookmark.

Try it out!

MWHXKN6Y3W9L
XFPT4LPTJWWE
ERL74NXJL9RW
WKMF7TYLLKPR
NY3R6PE7WHTL
64TWKLAN9HFA
R4NNWK3A3PE6
LAL7MJPTAT76
J6EFKX7ANKYK
EN3PWFP3X3F9

You can copy-paste one of these code into iTunes. Click on the Redeem link in the iTunes Store Quick Links box.

Enjoy!

SmackFu has a great page that documents the ShoutCAST metatdata protocol. They don’t mention the difference in the server response, but you’ll find references to it on Google.

When  you send an HTTP GET request to an Icecast server (like Indie 103.1) it replies with HTTP 200 OK. This is what we’d expect, and you can use CFHTTPMessageCopyHeaderFieldValue to read the response header where you get the Icy-MetaInt value. SHOUTcast responds to an HTTP GET request with ICY 200 OK. When this happens CFHTTPMessageCopyHeaderFieldValue returns null.

One solution is to look for the ICY 200 OK response and parse the headers manually. I’ve created another Google Code project called audiostreamer-meta and used Matt Gallagher’s execelent AudioStreamer example as a sample project. The sample application will parse the metadata from both server streams. Check the debug window in Xcode to see the metadata. The code needs some clean up, and it would be nice to display the artist, tract, and other metadata on the view itself. Feel free to join the project and help make the code better.