Most geeks hate that dreadful day when they have to go on vacation. You back up your laptop, your cell phone, the chargers of both. Then you get to the airport and you have to unpack everything and take off your shoes, bend over and grab your ankles. I’ve even had them through my laptop, needless to say I wasn’t happy. This trip however I decided I would take only my iPhone and live off it for five days. Why? Because a laptop needs wifi and that is not always easy to find. The iPhone has both wifi and EDGE support, which is not as bad as reviewers have said. What would I be doing on the laptop if I did bring it? Using the Internet to check my email and read Digg on Google Reader. All that works flawless on the iPhone.
The only issues I had was when trying to load a simple e-mail with one picture in the Mail application. Loading would only work once, if that, and from that point on it would give me the error: “Message is not downloaded.” I could always surf over to my Gmail but that defeats the purpose of having an e-mail client.
I am going to go five days without my desktop machine or laptop. I will have remote access through the iPhone though, but I will stay away from that as much as possible. I do not think I will have wifi so that is already a hit below the belt but I can always walk over to a free wifi network.
I am a big supporter of Podcasts and I listen to them a lot. They update daily and I would love for the iPhone to download them automatically. My way around this is to use Google Reader and click on the feed when a new podcast is released. What the iPhone will do is load the video like it would YouTube, I’ve done this over EDGE for iPod formatted videos and within three minutes the video is playing.
Monday I will have my report! You can see what I’m doing live on Pownce!
I am a big fan of Digg and I read it all the time, constantly. Recently when I visit the site I get a problem that I have always ran into but just not as bad as recently. If I click on a story, the site has been taken down for bandwidth reasons. The common response from the Digg community is “Get this Greasmonkey extension or Firefox plugin HA! ur so pwnd!!1″ but that doesn’t quite work when the mirrors do not have it backed up or if the site has javascript or flash that is required to see what the article is about.
What about new users? Does this mean that if new Digg users want to use Digg they have to download a bunch of applications to surf Digg or will the “503 Service Unavailable” message scare them off?
In this video I picked two stories at random from the Digg. There is nothing Digg could do to fix this and this would require web hosts to get rid of their outrageous bandwidth fees and limits, which are a scam anyway.
Image from Homestar Runner.com
Is it time to hack the iPhone? I took this question and tried it to see how easy and worthwhile hacking the iPhone would be. I downloaded iFuntastic, SSH, NES, and Wifi-Tether hacks for the iPhone. I got two of those to work. Hacking the iPhone is not the easiest hack I have done and I would rather wait until there is a nice application like iFuntastic that will install applications to the iPhone. If your a Mac user who has to hack their iPhone now, iFuntastic is for you. If your not and you want more then changing the AT&T logo on your phone I’d say wait.
Also I need to say, Ryan Block the Engadget Jackass wrote on his blog that iFuntastic will put you iPhone is GUI hell if you install iFuntasy from the iFuntastic application. This is not the case. You have to install it and you can easily uninstall it by clicking the uninstall button. Ryan Block may suffer from a reading problem.
Download iFuntastic
Follow Up (August 13th): I found a awesome article on hacking the iPhone, putting SSH on it and more by Shaun Inman and it isn’t easy but it works. You can read his article here but do not read the “Read Me”s in the files you download. They’ll just give you a misguided headache. This is not for those of faint heart or Ben Curtis.
A while back I reviewed the Apple’s Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless router. Well five months later Apple decides to say “Hey thanks for buying it! Take this can, shove it up your butt while we release it again with gigabit ethernet.”
This is truly disappointing. It’s bad enough Apple is screwing everyone who buys these new, beautiful, iMacs by releasing Leopard two months after they buy their computer.
Any tips on what I should do? What can be done?
“What about AMD chips?”
Steve: “We use Intel chips”
Awesome response to an uneducated question. Intel is faster.
“What about the iMac in business?”
What about it?
“With someone editing movies and going to publish, why not support HD uploads?”
Go download a 2 minute episode of MacBreak in high-def and come back to me with why HD-video downloading is a bad idea.
“Why are you not participating in Intel Inside program and not putting stickers on your Macs?”
I’m not touching that, that guy shouldn’t be allowed in. He’s probably the one who’s cellphone went off twice during the keynote.
The new iMac is recyclable, thin, black, and just all out pretty. The sad part about it is the big black border around the screen which just hits me as ugly. The pro is that this thing can hold 4GB of RAM and 1 TB of hard drive space. Awesome.
Apple’s iMac page
The secret is out, the Fake Steve Jobs identity has been released by the known “Secret Haters“, The New York Times. I have been seen on Pownce saying that Valley Wag should leave him alone when they tried to spy on him, apparently The New York Times ’s writer, Brad Stone, thought this gave him a free ride to literally track him down.
What good has this done Mr. Stone? Do you think this makes you cool spying on a great writer? Go back to writing about MySpace.
Brad Stone has joined the ever-growing list of “journalist” who are jerks which include: Ryan Block and Brian Lam.
I went out and bought a 50-pack of blank CDs from Ativa to use in my iMac for iTunes and the Mac in general. I stuck it in and told iTunes to burn, 40 minutes later it was still trying to burn the track list together. I had to force-eject the disk and then restart my computer so the Mac would know that there is a working CD drive. I also tried burning these CDs in other applications and it produced the same thing on 9 different disks. I went and got more CDs from Memorex and they worked just fine.
The moral: Cheep CDs are not always best and Ativa CDs are never worth it.
MacRumors.com has been an excellent site for, well, Mac rumors. But lately their site has been publishing just flat out scary rumors tha, with any common since could not be true. It’s all an attempt to keep the site alive while not having any real source of rumors.
Today they announced that Apple may be planning to put advertisements in iTunes. Let me get this straight, I am going to pay to use a service with advertisements? Yeah! That’s where I want to invest my money. Good thinking there! They claim that the advertisements will be well noticed in the Podcasting section, because violating Creative Commons is what Apple would just love to do.
So to compete with MacRumors, I am announcing that I will no longer go to their site unless they prove to me they will stop with the bull or Apple says “You know that iTunes thing? Forget that lets put ads in it!”
