Monday, June 9, 2008
While iPhone price is halved, AT&T raises price of starting monthly service by $10
While iPhone price is halved, AT&T raises price of starting monthly service by $10
This is exactly the opposite of what would get me to buy an iPhone. Sigh. I don’t mind paying for the device, but I simply don’t use $70 worth of cell phone service per month.
Moreover, this brings the total minimum price of the mandatory two-year contract up by $240, which is more than the amount of the iPhone price decrease ($200).
This is on top of the fact that AT&T has ended their revenue sharing agreement with Apple - they now get to keep it 100% of the monhtly service price to themselves.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
no title
While I usually try not to link rumours too much, this was too good to pass up:
Gizmodo has heard that PowerPC support may indeed be living on … contrary to running consensus that OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” would only support Intel chips. [MacRumors]
Running consensus? So the rumour mill decides what Apple will and will not do, now? Or does the giant echo chamber that is the ‘blogosphere’ think that reality is a democracy? Hilarious.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Mac OS X Hints: 10.5: Use Automator to create 'sticky' folder views
Mac OS X Hints: 10.5: Use Automator to create ‘sticky’ folder views
Recently I decided to switch to ‘Spatial Finder’, i.e., each folder opens in a new window and remembers its position, i.e., what the Finder was like before OS X. (You can toggle this behaviour with the ‘pill’ control on the right side of any Finder window.)
So far I’m happy to be back, except for the problem in Leopard in which it won’t remember the View setting (as Icons/as List) for each folder. This change was intentionally made by Apple because they liked it this way for Browser (non-Spatial) mode, and didn’t seem to notice that it broke a very important part of Spatial mode.
Which brings me to my point, the linked article: it makes this somewhat simpler by giving you a menu item you can use to force Finder to remember the View. The instructions look complicated, but they’re not too bad.
What gets me most about this is: I have another machine that runs Ubuntu Linux. Its equivalent of Finder is called Nautilus. When I set Nautilus to Spatial mode, it does everything perfectly. More perfectly than the software by Apple, the people who invented Spatial mode… and then broke it.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Lifehacker: Enable Google Contact Sync in OS X
Lifehacker: Enable Google Contact Sync in OS X
Mac OS X 10.5.3 has a new feature that can synchronise a Gmail address book with the computer’s Address Book. Strangely, this is only available if you own an iPhone. However, removing this limitation is trivial.
The best solution is in the linked comments. Open Terminal.app and type this:
defaults write com.apple.iPod Devices -dict-add invisibl-eyefown ’{ “Family ID” = 10001; }’
This creates settings for a fake ‘device’ that looks like an iPhone (thus enabling the feature) but won’t interfere with your current iPod or future iPhone.
According to Little Snitch, the sync actually occurs only when you connect an iPod - doesn’t matter what kind, as long as the setting is activated in Address Book.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Serious security vulnerability in Debian, Ubuntu SSH package
Serious security vulnerability in Debian, Ubuntu SSH package
Yikes. Now’s a good time to run Update Manager. Your key will change, which means you’ll get a scary warning when you next try to login remotely.
Edit: Ubuntu’s package manager will automatically regenerate your machine’s bad SSH key. Debian’s will not. (Just verified myself on both OS’s.) Debian will post instructions here once they get around to writing them.
