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Tag: apple

  • Stickers Overdose

    If an Apple designer pitched this craplution to Steve Jobs, he’d rip their still-beating heart clear out of their chest.

    via HP Slate has a bad solution to “too many stickers” syndrome.

  • Mac OS X: It's the "little things"

    It’s details like the following that sometimes make me stop and realize how fined tuned a software Mac OS X really is.

    Tonight, I did the following, sequentially:

    1. Moved a folder to the trash, not realizing that a subfolder contained a file being written to.
    2. Tried to empty the trash. The Finder told me those files were still in use.
    3. Took the directory out and dropped it on my Desktop (not the original location)
    4. Inspected the files and dropped them back into their original location

    Where things get interesting is that the process which was writing to the said file never crashed or in any way gave an error. It happily followed the files as they moved around, keeping on keepin’ on. Everything was handled cleanly by the Finder and abstracted from the process. Classy.

    It’s also worth noting that the said process was not an Apple app, so no unfair advantages.

     

  • Mail Bug from Hell…

    I was wondering why my home connection seemed to be crawling since yesterday. I didn’t worry too much at first, thinking that with my wife working from home yesterday as well, we were just downloading a lot of stuff between the both of us.

    But the slowness persisted this morning. I took a peek at our bandwidth consumption and something became immediately obvious: there was something wrong on the upload end of things. We had somehow uploaded 2GB+ in one day, which is rather peculiar for us.

    Turned out the issue at hand was an arcane bug involving Apple’s Mail.app “self-recovery”, MobileMe, Gmail, an oversized message and some kind of infinite loop.

    1. Tried to send a 36MB video via email to a friend a couple of days ago.
    2. Gmail prompted me that the message was too large, as they have a 34MB upload limit.
    3. Mail.app kept trying to save it to my draft folder but likely kept getting the same Gmail error, silently.
    4. Mail.app kept on “rescuing” copies of the said message in a “recovered messages” folder.
    5. Mobile Me kept trying to sync my mail accounts.
    6. Repeat ad nauseam.

    I ended up solving the issue by simply trashing my entire ~/Library/Mail folder on my iMac, replacing it with a quasi-identical copy from my MacBook Pro and resyncing my mail accounts.

    Problem now seems to be gone. Won’t get bitten by this one again…

  • Star Walk: Awesome iPhone Astronomy Application

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhhPi7i32Uo&w=640&h=360]

    I’ll admit to have been jealous of my good friend Xopher‘s Nexus One phone and its nifty Android-based, augmented reality Google Sky Map. But I knew I’d find a similar one for the iPhone.

    Lo and behold, while in Seaside, a friend showed me Star Walk running on his iPad.

    One thing the video doesn’t showcase is that the application makes use of the built-in compass, GPS and gyroscope. This lets you simply point your device anywhere and get a picture-perfect representation of what astronomical objects are in your field of vision as well as get all the details you could want about them.

    At $2.99 for such a complete app, I think it’s a very good deal and entirely worth the expense.

    Copernicus would be stoked. 🙂

  • SSH Setup for EC2 UI on Mac OS X

    If you are using Amazon’s EC2 as a cloud hosting solution, you owe it to yourself to install the most excellent EC2 UI Firefox extension (source) to manage your server instances (note: not yet compatible with Firefox 3).

    Now, if you also happen to be on Mac OS X, one annoying thing is that EC2 UI is configured by default to be used on Linux (and GNOME). Looking online, all I could find were questions on how to set EC2 UI on OS X to use the proper terminal and ssh, but no answer.

    Fear not! Yours truly spent a few minutes on the case, and ended up finding a solution that is at least viable for myself, and will hopefully be for you as well. The trick is that I have X11 installed on my OS X box anyway, so I just use the binaries intended for this package.

    EC2 UI setup for OSX

    There you have it. Now, I can right click on any instance listed in EC2 UI and select “SSH to Public DNS Name”. X11 and xterm are both seamlessly launched and proceed to log me into the desired instance.

  • TUAW's 1.1.3 iPhone Update Liveblog

    From: “1.1.3 iPhone Update Liveblog“:

    It’s time to kiss my beautiful jailbreaked iPhone goodbye and to surrender to the inevitability of the 1.1.3 update. Goodbye delightful shell access. Goodbye beautiful 3rd party applications. I’m upgrading for the sake of my readers–and hopefully downgrading soon after! Read on for the liveblog…

    I salute you, Erica, for taking a bullet for the team once more. 🙂

  • iTunes Canada Gets the TV Treatment

    Patrick Tanguay led me to Apple’s announcement of the new TV programming offering through iTunes Canada.

    I have to admit that I share his lack of enthusiasm for their offer… There’s just no way I’m going to spend money on 4:3 ratio video.

    All my screens are 16:9 or 16:10: mac laptop, external monitors, iPhone, and so on. And whatever I’ll buy in the foreseeable future will obviously not going to be any other way.

    They’re obviously targeting the last two remaining iPod models with such screen proportions, the Classic and Nano, but it’s just not for me. Sorry.

    Nice try though. A bit late maybe but nice.

  • Fresh Screenshots of WPhone on iPhone

    From iPhone Screenshot Goodness at WPhone Admin Plugin:

    Thanks to Matt, I can now take iPhone screenshots to my heart’s content. So I’ve updated the set showcased on this site and made a zip archive of 18 screenshots available on the same page.

    The only sad thing about this is the “No Service” at the top-left corner of each screenshot… *sigh*
    Soon, soon enough.

  • That’s Pretty Swell!

    I guess the least I can do is post a little somethin’ somethin’ from my new toy, with the help of our very own WPhone.

    If I said it once, I said it a thousand times: joy!

  • It's Here!

    My shiny new iPhone

    Turns out working from home on Friday was the worst idea I had all week… My iPhone arrived at the office, and I could have had it to play with all weekend. Unfortunately, no one in my team clued in to what the mystery package was, so they didn’t tell me. To be fair, I really wasn’t expecting it to arrive during US Thanks Giving. But I guess the USPS to Canada Post handover happened before the long weekend.

    And now, I’ll have to be strong (!), and ignore it all day while I get things done before I can play with it all night. I don’t see much sleep in my future. 😉

    Thanks Matt! Thanks WPhone!