Non-Tech: Unintentional Humour from Valve
When Valve was first leaking details about Steam for Mac, they released a series of images parodying 'classic' Apple ads. This was one:
I get what they're trying to say - the PC is boxy and old-fashioned while the Mac is shiny and new. The unintentional humour is that while the Portal turret does it's job adequately in its game, it's easily defeated. The PC (or Team Fortress 2 turret) on the other hand starts out small and meek, but can be easily upgraded in to a massive powerhouse. That said, which would you rather have? Effective but locked down, or less-than-pretty but easily customizable?
Of course, I could just be reading too much in to things again.
After 5000 Tweets: A Review/HowTo of Twitter
I recently hit the 5,000 tweet mark on Twitter, and figured that it's as good a time as any to write something about my experience on the abbreviated social networking site. It also seems appropriate as I permanently deleted my Facebook account (well, I'm in the process, anyway).
Click 'Continue Reading' below for the wall-of-text review.
Rogers Wireless Hijacks Wildcard DNS Records
Although I can't confirm when this happened (it may have happened a while ago and I just never noticed), I was browsing the internet last night on my Google Nexus One and noticed that, when I mistyped http://imdb.com, I was redirected to http://www20.search.rogers.com (which doesn't work outside of Rogers' network) instead of receiving a normal Not Found error. This all smacks of the infamous VeriSign Site Finder fiasco.
I'm no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I'm even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It's their service, and there's no opt-out link on the page.
Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different -- you'll need to alter them as applicable).
To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):
- Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
- Assume root (su command).
- Remount the system partition in to read/write mode -- mount -o rw,remount /system
- Browse to /system/etc.
- Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
- Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file -- 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
- Save and quit!
You're done! You've just manually opt'ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you'll just get the normal 'Not Found' errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you've entered doesn't exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn't running a webserver.
TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers' Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.
Weighing in on the iPad
This is a first here, really. I'm not really an Apple guy (I used to have an iPhone, and I use an iMac at work that runs Windows most of the time), and I rarely comment on products that I don't own, but really, this is just dying for picking apart.
Steve Jobs has reportedly been quoted to say, "This [the iPad] will be the most important thing I’ve ever done” - I really hope that this is just a misquote, or wrongfully attributed. Why? Well, let's start with what we now know.
--How it looks. If you haven't seen it, it looks basically like a huge iPod Touch with a massive bezel.
--What it runs. Apparently Apple has licensed the rights to make another ARM processor, dubbing it the "Apple A4". Do we really need another ARM processor varient? What's wrong with the Snapdragon?
--What it doesn't do. Flash. Yes, really. I don't particularly like Flash, but if they're touting it to be 'better than a laptop', why are they blocking access to a large chunk of the content that's out there?
--What it doesn't change. It apparently going to run the iPhone OS (speculated at version 4), so you're still locked in to the App Store and Apple's draconian approval process. I wonder how long it will take before it's jailbroken?
--What it lacks. Supposedly, it won't come with 3G. Reports say that you'll be able to tether it with a mobile device (although I wouldn't be surprised if they only let you tether it with an iPhone), but really, if they're saying people should use this instead of an e-book reader, why leave that out? And on the subject of e-books, who really wants to ready a 1000+ page book on an LCD screen, when you can get a Kindle 2 with an easy-on-the-eyes e-ink screen instead?
--What they screwed up on. Really, why name it the iPad? I see where they might want to leverage the branding from the iPod, but all that makes me think of is another type of product.
All and all, I think that a lot of people who bought in to the hype of this are probably pretty disappointed. The iPad? What a joke.
Update: Unconfirmed tweets are saying that it will be priced at $499, or $629 with 3G.
Update #2: Apparently you'll be able to use connect a standard keyboard to the iPad as well. So why bother making it a tablet at all? Why not just give it a slide-out keyboard and be done with it?
Sony and Apple Will Be the Death of Me
Argh. One of my recent tasks at work has been taking video recorded on a Sony Handycam HDR-XR200V (and HD Digital Video camera) and making the footage web-ready. Normally, the camera is a joy to work with. It's easy to get the recordings off of it, and the software provided with it converts it in to WMV and MPEG2 quite easily. In terms of web-readiness, though....
Normally we just convert everything to WMV format, as the video is only used in-house for a short period of time and then deleted. Files are stored on our local server, so size isn't really an issue. In this case, though, I need to put the final versions up our website so a few external people can access and download the clips. That means that 2GB+ files are completely impractical.
Digging around, I found that we had a Quicktime 7 Pro license, so I thought my problems were solved. Take the raw .MTS files, convert them to MPEG format using Sony's utility, then use Quicktime to export them to smaller, more web-ready MP4 format. But do things ever really work out that easily?
The first problem is that although Quicktime will play .MPG files, it doesn't have a built-in MPEG2 codec, which is the codec the Sony utility uses. Quicktime doesn't support WMV at all. If you want support for MPEG2, you need to buy the codec from Apple. That wouldn't be so bad (it's less than $30 CAD), however it doesn't recognize the audio track in the Sony-converted files. Crap.
After a few hours of near-hopeless searching through page after page of shareware and crap-ware, I finally found a solution. Take the Sony-converted MPEG2 files and convert them to .MOV format using MediaCoder, a truly free audio/video conversion suite (with a 64-bit Windows version). From there, I booted into OS X and fired them in to iMove to quickly splice a few segments together, and iMove spat out the .M4V files I needed. After that, it was a simple matter of using Quicktime Pro to make a few different versions of .MP4 files in varying levels of quality.
The system works, however it relies a lot on Apple products (not ideal if you don't have a license, a Mac, or just hate Apple products), and takes a lot of time. The result is that my bacon has been saved, and I'll be able to get the web-ready videos out to those who need them on time.
iPhone OS 3.1.2 and Blackra1n
So the other week, Apple released the latest version of the firmware for the iPhone, OS 3.1.2. Not really a lot in the way of fixes:
- Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep
- Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
- Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming
However, always the optimist and hoping that maybe this update would fix the ever-present crashing Mobile Safari, and not needing to worry about needing to unlock (ever), I updated my 3G as soon as a jailbreak was available.
The update itself went smoothly, or rather, the restore did. Your best bet, with any new release of the iPhone, is to do a full Restore, and never an upgrade. This will help with performance and battery life, whereas you're likely to have problems with an upgrade.
As soon as the Restore was finished, and after iTunes happily activated my phone, I downloaded Blackra1n, a jailbreak app by Geohot. The instructions are simple:
- Upgrade your phone to 3.1.2 - Note: THIS WILL UPGRADE YOUR BASEBAND! As such, you loose, possibly permanently, the ability to use Ultrasn0w, the Carrier Unlock.
- Run Blackra1n.
- Connect your iPhone
- Click "Make it ra1n".
Simple, right? Well, sort of.
After you click "Make it ra1n", your phone restarts in Recovery Mode (not DFU mode!) and you should see a picture of Geohot. However, if you have an iPhone 3G, that isn't likely to happen. Instead, you'll most likely see the iPhone Recovery Mode logo and Blackra1n stuck on the "Running" message. If you disconnect you're iPhone Blackra1n will say it completed successfully, however the phone will remain in Recovery Mode. To exit, simply hold Power+Home until the screen goes black, then turn it back on.
If you check the log file Blackra1n creates in the same folder it's run from, you'll notice lines like:
ERROR: usb open failed while sending command
ERROR: usb open failed while sending payload
This means that no, you're phone isn't jailbroken. Fortunately, it's not bricked - just reboot it and all will be well.
So, how do you fix this problem? Unfortunately you don't. There are sites that tell you to put Blackra1n in the root of the C drive, and others that remind you to Run as Administrator, and some that say to use XP vs. Windows 7, or the other way around. The short of it is, though, it's all crap.
I eventually got Blackra1n to work simply by running it over-and-over.
- Try it.
- It fails.
- Reboot phone in to normal mode (hold Power+Home until screen goes black, then turn back on normally)
- Repeat.
After around the 20th try, it finally completed and jailbroke the phone. Lesson learned? When all else fails, keep trying.
iPhone OS 3.1: What’s all the hubbub, bub?
Last week I upgrade my iPhone to OS 3.1 using the iPhone Dev Team's Pwnage Tool. As I don't care about unlocking (Rogers is the only GSM/3G carrier in Canada, aside from Fido which is owned by Rogers), I was only interested in the jailbreak.
A few things to note: I initally made the mistake of trying to restore the custom .ipsw file in DFU mode, which gave me the dreaded 1600 and 1604 error codes. Easy enough to fix - just downgraded to the official 3.0 OS (ignoring error messages), jailbroke with Redsn0w, and then did a proper shift-restore with the pwned 3.1 .ipsw (yes, the pwnage tool only runs on OS X, but you can transfer the pwned .ipsw it creates to a PC and use the shift-restore method to jailbreak, instead of waiting for a new Redsn0w).
After the restore was done, I synced my contacts, favorites, music, etc... and reinstalled my favorite apps through Cydia without any issues. So far I've noticed that my battery life has improved (something rare, apparently - it probably helps that I never do a Restore From Backup), apps run and launch a lot faster, and best of all, Mobile Safari hasn't crashed on me yet!
So far, 3.1 has been the best update yet from Apple for the iPhone - it'll certainly be my fall-back-point if future updates aren't as smooth.
Short: Another From the Search Results
To the person who found my blog using the search term 'iphone exchange "missing emails"', it's an easy answer:
When the iPhone's Mail.app is setup to use Exchange, it has an initial limit to the number of messages it will grab from the server -- the default is the 50 most recent messages. This can be increased to 200.
The key word here is recent - by default, the first 50 recent messages you load will be displayed. Want to see anything other than that? Sorry, you gotta use Outlook Web Access. That's just how it was designed.
Entourage 2008 and Exchange: What were they thinking?
I recently purchased an iMac at work for a project that I was working on. The first thing I did was use Bootcamp so I could dual-boot with Windows 7, and for the most part never touched OS X. Then I ended up with a copy of Office 2008, and figured, "Let's see what all the fuss is about". I wiped my Windows partition, installed Office 2008, and told myself I'd try to go a full month with just OS X.
It's been just over two weeks, and I'm finished with it. I'm going to install Vista on a VirtualBox VM and load up Office 2007.
The deal breaker? Entourage 2008. Why? Well, lots of reasons, actually.
To start off with, unless you install the Web Services Edition Update, say 'bye-bye!' to things like your To Do list and easy calendar syncing. Do you use Distributions Lists that are stored on your Exchange Server? Too bad! Entourage can't sync them, so you'll have to recreate them all by hand on your local system! Want a different signature for your email replies? Tough luck!
Aside from the lack of support for basic functions that Outlook has had for ages, there are also a plethora of usability issues. Randomly, Entourage will decide that dragging-and-dropping isn't hip anymore and won't let me move emails around unless I reboot the computer. A simple close/reopen isn't good enough it seems. If I try to add an appointment to my Calender on the Exchange Server, there's a 50/50 chance of it actually showing up after saving it.
The MythBusters may have proved that you can polish shit, but in the end, it's still shit. Hopefully the announced Outlook 2010 for Mac will be a near-clone of the Windows version and the Mac BU at Microsoft burns the Entourage source code at the release party.
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