Mar 2
Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is "good enough" for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.
I would only say I am not surprised at all by this step — given amount of pressure Apple has pressed on Flash-based content (and obvious progress of JavaScript support in modern browsers) it is not surprising.
© The Register — http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/02/virgin_america_html_flash/
Feb 3
I have my iPhone officially unlocked by O2. However, today I had to unlock it unofficially too — naturally, using blackra1n + blacksn0w combination (I've donated for blackra1n once, and now I feel like I need to donate for using blacksn0w — it was my most painless jailbreak and unlock ever). You can ask, why did I do that?
Well, how'd you like a reason: when I swap my SIM cards I am not necessarily at my home iMac so I can connect iPhone to iTunes to do an iActiva..damn, just to activate it! I don't want it, really — it's nowhere simple and counterintuitive like hell: I've activated it already once, and I've unlocked it once — why should I bother doing it every now and then?
So I had my iPhone blackra1n'ed, installed blacksn0w — whoa! It turns out, swapping SIM cards could be just that — swapping SIM cards. And this is the way it supposed to work.
Jan 20
One guy: don't want to replace my MacBook Pro right now, need to wait until 27th
Me: is there anything to wait for?
One guy: it certainly is
Me: you know what is it?
One guy: Yep.
Me: fancy to share?!?!?!?!!11
One guy: NDA.
Me: ...
One guy under NDA: do I really want to get killed?
Jan 16
It was an ordinary Saturday morning, a bit rainy, a bit grey but otherwise quite normal. So, one by one, I turned on all my four laptops and iMac and proceeded to my usual morning routine...
To say the truth, Vaio laptop isn't mine — a technically challenged college of my wife has asked me to choose, buy and set it up for her. Small laptop (netbook) is Natalie's. Rest of them are indeed mine.
Jan 15
It would be cool to have a way to switch "natures" of your Mac OS X, not unlike the way I change Perspectives in Eclipse from PyDev to Java whenever I start hacking different project. Let me illustrate it on one simple example.
When I'm at work I'd love to have my work resources connected and available in Finder. That includes, say, some network shares, VNC servers, and so on. And — I would like to have them just in Finder's "Places" menu.
When I go to uni, I'd love to have my Birkbeck folder there — may be not only this folder, but some of it's subfolders too, so I shouldn't go to Dropbox/Birkbeck/IBIP/Lectures just to find my image-based information processing lectures, I would rather select IBIP shortcut in Finder and get straight to it.
But there's a problem — I don't need my IBIP shortcut at work. More than that, it would probably distract me and this is the last thing I want. On the other hand, my work network shares would be more than pointless at uni, as they'd be not only useless but even inaccessible without a VPN (and why do I need a VPN at uni?).
So, you see, Mac is good and Mac is cool, but quite a few things could be improved.
(however, maybe I should spend a little bit of my time and write a script to fix all this stuff for me? that would certainly work...)
Jan 12
Yesterday I realised, that I am way too tired of my
new iPhone's battery dying at 11PM every day — and if on
every day it was dying at 11PM which is somewhat acceptable, on a
bad day it died at 9PM just when I was leaving university building, looking forward for 30 minutes on a train accompanied by my iPod, ebook, RSS news or what's not. Now, that annoyed me — annoyed me much, and I decided it's a time to do something with it.
Yesterday I took a look at my email accounts on iPhone. 4 of them: MobileMe, my university email, Gmail for public stuff and my very private email. I switched off three of them, and set up a forwarding to my Gmail account. Then I
switched my Gmail to Exchange. And that was it.
Dear, that was a difference. Today was a fruitful day and I received about a 100 emails on combination of my email accounts. I used Internet quite a bit, I listened to few podcasts and music, posted a number of updates using Tweetie, read Stephen King's book for about an hour during my commute, breakfast and very late after-work lunch, and you know what?
Now it's 18:23. Battery on my iPhone is still full. I'm not kidding. That what it shows: it's full. I don't have any battery-monitoring utilities as I hardly feel any need in them, but I see, that despite all my unintentional efforts, iPhone's battery is still healthy as hell. And it couldn't make me happier.
There're just to simple things you need to understand from whatever I've written above:
- The fewer email accounts your iPhone checks, the longer it's battery will last.
- Checking email only when you have new email rather than every N minutes saves your battery even further.
That is it, chaps — hope my experience will help someone to save some of iPhone juice just enough for his or her way back home.
Jan 7
Got my brand new shiny iPhone 3G today. Surprised? I'm not — apparently, this is the way Apple replaces batteries to some iPhones. That's too bad that they didn't give me a replacement 3Gs, but there're no idiots in there, and, perhaps, they have a stock of old phones (you cannot buy iPhone 3G 16GB anymore, only 8GB for 3G version), so it took a couple of days to get a replacement one. Otherwise, reverting my iPhone to Day 0 (even for £55) isn't such a bad deal at all.
Nov 17
I'll make a long story short today — I did a "new iPhone"-style firmware update, i.e. without restoring everything from the backup. iPhone started to work like a dream on 3.1.2. But I've lost few things which I didn't want to lose — in particular, my SMS messages.
I found a backup of my iPhone which was done yesterday. Next I found a brilliant utility named
iPhone Backup Extractor. I'll tell you what — normally I do not buy paid versions of software if the free version is doing what I can. This app doesn't have a paid version, so I just went and donated €5.00 to author — it's a brilliant piece of technology, dead simple and works. All what it does is just extracts the data from the backup file(s) (there're zillions of them in iPhone Backup directory) in form they can be placed to the iPhone. Well - that's what I did.
PhoneView allowed to copy and paste these files where they belong — and the next time I fired up my "Messages" application, I was pleasantly surprised by each and every SMS since I've purchased my iPhone.
Dear Mr
Padraig Kennedy — you have saved my day. And I appreciate it. My best regards to you and to what you're doing.
Oct 5
It's simple, really - especially now in Snow Leopard.
1. Fire up your Finder and go to Macintosh HD
2. Grab Applications folder
3. Put it into your dock next to the Trash bin, Downloads, etc.
4. Wait few seconds while it loads all the icons
5. Right-click it (or option-click it although if you're switcher, you shouldn't care about old-school Mac terminology) and select "View content as" -> List.
6. Click the icon and see the menu.
7. Enjoy!
...
...
N-1. Though many find using QuickSilver easier and more simple to invoke your applications.
N. Personally, I use Spotlight as I hardly need QuickSilver's niceties, and good ol' Spotlight works better and faster.
N+1. Drag the app icon to your Dock, dammit!
