physical graffiti

Last night i "jailbroke" my iPhone following the instructions here:

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2009/06/stepbystep-guide-to-jailbreak-iphone-3g-running-iphone-os-30-using-redsn0w-mac.html

It worked like a charm, but there was some info that i would have liked to know before starting:

1) When you "backup" your phone through iTunes, it does not include all your music, photos, etc.
2) When you "erase and sync" it doesn't really "erase" much. Just things that are linked to iTunes, music, videos and apps. But not jailbroken apps, because those are not managed by the iTunes store.

So the entire jailbreak process should go like this:
1) In iTunes, sync and backup your phone.
2) Follow the intructions on iphonehacks to jailbreak
3) Restore the phone in iTunes - this does NOT change firmware or even replace all your apps, it really just replaces your settings
4) re-sync, it is safe to do "Erase and Sync"

The part i haven't really figured out yet is how to figure out which cydia apps i really want!

beautiful documentation of the toronto garbage strike

I just moved a few doors down from my old apartment, and i surprised to find that I have the same IP address here as i did 4 doors down!!

How many people share my IP? I have used hosts.allow to allow my ip thinking that each cable modem had a unique IP. But i guess comcast is doing some serious NAT action some where along the line so that a bunch of different physical addresses all have the same ip address!!

After getting super frustrated with the performance of chicken of the VNC (which hasn't been updated since 2006), i went looking for a new VNC app for the mac.

I found JollysFastVNC from http://www.jinx.de

So far so good! Way better performance than chicken.

After subscribing to mobileme (that's another post) and syncing my keychains safari was crashing repeatedly. I tried upgrading to the 4.0 beta (from 3.2.1) and that didn't help.

It would crash about 2 minutes after launching every time.

I tried moving all my plugins away. no dice.

I used the 'reset safari' option in the menu bar, but kept my cookies (precious cookies).

That seemed to do the trick.

Not sure why it was breaking, but it is better now. *ahhh*

For the last while (a year ? can't remember ) netflix has been delivering unlimited context to windows machines, streaming down the tubes of the interweb. recently, they opened up their 'watch instantly' service to the roku box and xbox. However, mac users were left out in the cold. why? cause of DRM. ya. dirty rotten motherf**ckers.


I was *this* close to putting my netflix on hold. i figured with the daily show and colbert and south park and the rest, it was enough.

But today of all days netflix finally opened up watch instantly to mac users.

hooray?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6558

"In experiments, researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper."

the current situation of the US is pretty interesting from a perspective of fear and greed.

At first glance, It seems that greed overcame fear of future loss. Greenspan was counting on people thinking long term when he advocated deregulation.

At face value this seems strange, since we know how powerful fear is as a motivator.

But the US has been exercising a policy of fear since 9/11. Not fear of loss, but fear of survival. Fear of survival trumps feelings of compassion, justice, or economic failure.

If one is so fearful that they question whether they and their children will even survive , then it could be argued that it is 'optimal' to act in a very short-sighted way.

Most people have a hard enough time making decisions that optimize long term goals under normal conditions.

Obama's message of hope is powerful because it implies that there IS a future. More than that, *we* are the future. This is something that hasn't been heard from washington for a long time.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31006

Scientology Losing Ground To New Fictionology
May 11, 2005 | Issue 41•19

There is a lot of outrage about the lack of a firewire port on the new MacBook
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1751964&tstart=0

I can see both sides of the issue.
For most of the college bound macbook purchasers who use their mac for web and office they won't even notice the loss of firewire.

But USB does NOT have the functionality of firewire. (read the link above for arguments about why that is)

Also, Mac users have invested a lot of money into firewire peripherals, and it just doesn't feel like firewire has outlived its usefulness.

I think Apple could help this out by assuring users that
1) FireWire will not be removed from the Pro line.
2) Creating target disk mode over ethernet functionality

I think part of the problem is that the new macbook is a pretty sweet machine. One that many Pro users might consider as a travel or home laptop. But the lack of firewire (and i also don't like the new display port thing) is a deal breaker.

Apple wants us to keep buying Pro.

Apple, if you are listening. If you released a new mac mini with an updated video card I would buy it in a second. But if you take away firewire I will not buy it and it will seriously make me consider a hackintosh.

you don't want that do you?!?