Last w
eek Energy Star<
/a>, which is a joint program of the US Enviromental Protection Agency<
/strong> and the US Department of Energy to help save energy a
nd protect the environment, released a new set of gui
delines for Energy Star certification for computers that went into effect J
uly 20. These guidelines push for energy-efficient power supplies, efficient st
andby modes, inclusion of power management and provision of user education abou
t these features.
It's worth nothing that none of Apple's computers meet the new require
ments. Not a one. At least Dell has three models that do, and
most of those that already comply are from Lenovo and
Gateway. In total only 125 laptops and desktop models meet the new req
uirements at the moment.
Not to worry though. Manufacturers have until January to comply so that they ca
n earn the Energy Star label for their computers. It's just a bit disturbing th
at other manufacturers are on the ball about this, while Apple, with its recent
green posturing, was caught with with its pants down.
If you're at all interested in the details, get a spreadsheet of the compliant
and non-compliant manufacturers here.
July 2007 Archives
Last w
eek Energy Star<
/a>, which is a joint program of the US Enviromental Protection Agency<
/strong> and the US Department of Energy to help save energy a
nd protect the environment, released a new set of gui
delines for Energy Star certification for computers that went into effect J
uly 20. These guidelines push for energy-efficient power supplies, efficient st
andby modes, inclusion of power management and provision of user education abou
t these features.
It's worth nothing that none of Apple's computers meet the new require
ments. Not a one. At least Dell has three models that do, and
most of those that already comply are from Lenovo and
Gateway. In total only 125 laptops and desktop models meet the new req
uirements at the moment.
Not to worry though. Manufacturers have until January to comply so that they ca
n earn the Energy Star label for their computers. It's just a bit disturbing th
at other manufacturers are on the ball about this, while Apple, with its recent
green posturing, was caught with with its pants down.
If you're at all interested in the details, get a spreadsheet of the compliant
and non-compliant manufacturers here.
Popcap has made Bejeweled available for free for iPhone users.
From the press release:
SEATTLE, Washington â July 30, 2007 â PopCap Games , the leading developer and publisher of casual games, today announced that it has launched a custom version of its flagship game Bejeweled® for the Safari ® Web browser on Apple Inc.âs new iPhone® and is making it available at no cos t to iPhone owners. Beginning today, iPhone users can log on to www.popcap.com via the iPhoneâs Web browser and play the iPhone-specific version of the original match-3 puzzler Bejeweled for free. Thi s customized version of Bejeweled leverages the Web 2.0 capabilities of Safari and the wireless capabilities of the iPhone, and has been optimized to take adv antage of the iPhoneâs unique display and input controls. PopCap developed the Safari-based version of Bejeweled in partnership with Polish developer Arkadius z Mlynarczyk, one of the first programmers to take advantage of the Apple iPhon eâs capabilities for video gaming purposes.Photo from GameStooge.
Forget
the laptops, this time it's the first class action suit against the iPh
one battery. It's also one of the least thought-out, moronic, gramatic
ally faulty legal documents I've seen in a long time.
Apple Inc. and AT&T has been charged by s
ome 
A rec
ently completed survey by the Eagle Research Group found out that 70% o
f Zune users surveyed are not happy with their players and int
end to switch to either an iPod or to an iPhone as soon as their service contract expires.
36% said that had they known Apple was coming out with the iPh
one they never would have purchased a Zune. Also of note is that 3% of the surv
ey respondents were either employees or contractors of Microsoft.
Imagine that.
Ye
s, it's possible.
It's also as buggy as hell, majorly complicated to do, needs a whole bunch of
stuff and uses up a lot of geek brain coupons. Also, the wifi doesn't work, plu
s it's slow as molasses flowing down the side of your wall on a cold morning in
December.
And it violates your EULA.
But it can be done. And has been. On a Thinkpad.
Tom Merritt of CNET and host of Buzz
Out Loud shows us how he did it in detail on a post on his blog SuBBrilliant.
Some folk from the pearls-before-swine OSX86 Project have been
at this for some time at osx86-project.org and they have a wiki <
/em>on how to do it, plus a list of device compatibility. The legality and logi
c of actually doing something like this is pretty murky, and the only seeming m
otivation for doing it is similar to the one why canines will lick their privat
es - because they can.
Ayayay.
Someth
ing extremely useful for OS X users that they've taken for gr
anted for a long while now has finally been updated for Microsoft Windo
ws folk.
Bonjour 1.0.4., formerly Rendezvous, is now a
vailable for Windows 2000/2003, XP (with latest service pack)
and Vista.
This was first released with Jaguar in 2002, with a not-so-full-featured Window
s version released in 2004. What is it, exactly?
Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables autom atic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers. More details and download link (2.1MB) for Bonjour 1.0.4 here. Us ers of 64-bit versions of Windows can get theirs here.
Revenge is a dish best served
cold.
- Klingon proverb
In 1997 at the Gartner Symposium and IT Expo in Orlando, Micha
el Dell, founder and CEO of the company that bears his name, was asked
what he'd do if he was in charge of Apple Computer. Dell said
sarcastically, "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money bac
k to the shareholders."
After a month, Steve Jobs fired back: "We're coming afte
r you, you're in our sights."
It took Steve almost a decade, but early last year, Apple's market value passed
Dell's, from Apple's $72,132,428,843 vs. Dell's $71,970,702,760 at marke
t close of January 13, 2006.
As of market close yesterday, Apple Inc.'s value is officially double
that of Dell Inc.: US$127.8 billion to US$63.65 billion.
Cold enough for you, Mike?
A Japanese couple's Mac burst into flames at their Osaka <
/em>home last April, scorching the husband's finger, which caused his wife, poo
r thing, such distress that she had to seek medical help.
Of course they had to sue. Now Apple Japan and Sony are being sued for 2 million yen (nearly US$17k) in the first-e
ver legal case for Sony over the notorious Sony-made battery fiasco which has r
esulted in the recall of 1.8M Apple laptop batteries, and a total of nearly 10M
batteries from Dell, Lenovo and other vendor
s as well sold from 2003 to 2006.
It has since been determined that tiny metal particles left in the batteries co
uld cause them to short circuit, and there has been a massive effort to recall
the batteries since the problem was discovered. Story here.
Meantime the Japanese gentleman's finger has presumably healed since and his wi
fe has likely calmed down over this outrage, but the litigation is just beginni
ng over at the Osaka District Court. 2 million yen will cert
ainly buy lots of iPhones.
Oh. My. God. I never thought I'd live to see the day.
In the absence of major stories (not that we ever have much lately, outside of
the iPhone noise), here is smattering of various items in no p
articular order of importance or relevance to life:
- Apple's made a listing of tips to help improve the iPhone battery life, in an effort to smooth ruffled feathers over the blunt an d hamhanded way Apple told everyone the bad news about the battery replacement policy. See the page here< /a>.
- The intrepid folk at irc.osx86.hu have figured out how to enable ssh on the iPhone without using restore mo de, and this has been done by overwriting an existing binary blah blah bla h blah blah blah. What this means is you can access your iPhone from a shell on your Mac, which lets you send or retrieve files blah blah blah blah blah. The upshot is we're closer to getting total control over the iPhone, which is alway s a good thing. Details on TUAW, if you care at all.
- A hacker made a program that runs on an iPhone that says "Hello Wor ld". Whoopee! This is a good thing because it's the first non-native app made b y an Apple outsider for the iPhone, and proves that it can be done. The world a waits. More on Ars Technica.
- There is no real direct relationship with Macs and Apple with this bit other than the people who make the show use Macs to do it, Mac users love t he show, and lots of Mac users also play World of Warcraft, wh ich is why this is being mentioned at all: the South Park epis ode "Make Love Not Warcraft" has been nominated for an Emmy Award, marking one of the few times explosive diarrhea has been shown graphically in a nominated program. Cool news from Kotaku.
Some nice folk with lots of time
on their hands at Independent Security Evaluators thought it m
ight be fun to find a vulnerability in the iPhone, and after a
couple of weeks of on-again, off-again work, inevitably found one.
Then they followed the hole to its logical conclusion - a full, workable exploi
t, which probed with tools made by the other nice folk at #iphone dev still feverish trying to crack the phone after a month, can do stuff li
ke steal your SMS messages, address book, call history and voicemail, among oth
er things. This is done using a malicious website opened on Safari on the iPhone.
More a proof of concept than actual malicious intention, the ISE people have in
formed the mothership so patches can be created, and full disclosure will be ma
de with fanfare in Las Vegas at Black Hat USA 2007 on Aug. 2 a
t precisely 4:45pm. Meantime, details abound on the net:
Article from the New York Times here.
YouTube video here.
PDF of preliminary technical paper here.
ISE website with instructions here.
Is there some unspoken rule, some commandment tacitly understood and obeyed by
all Mac users that the best place to put your white Ap
ple sticker is in the lower right corner of your car's rear window? Is
this rule in fine print in the documentation that comes with the Mac that I di
dn't read but obey instinctively, like the lemming that I am? Has there been so
me whispered conspiracy passed down from user to user that I never got wind of
but am following anyway by sheer unconscious impulse?
I just find it odd that I come across the white sticker on cars all the time, e
ither on the left or the right lower corner of the back window (sometimes on th
e upper corners, but not too often), but when I ask the car owners why they put
it there (theorizing that it's some secret code or practice of their particula
r MUG), they just say, nothing really, it just "felt" right.
I've put one on the same location on three or more cars that have passed throug
h my hands - without being told. It looked particularly appropriate on my wife'
s all-white Honda Civic hatchback, although at the time she co
uldn't understand my partiality for Macs (she's since come around). I saw a fri
end at the car wash this weekend and it was in his Mazda's rea
r lower left corner, and when I asked him about it, he just shrugged. Looks nic
e there, he said. The Kool Aid has some subtle side effects, don't it?
Just curious, where do you guys put yours?
It seems that everything's gone wrong Since Canada came along Blame Canada! - Blame Canada/South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut I'll be darned. Canada's charging an iPod Tax now. The Copyright Board of Canada has approved a measure where dig ital media players and storage devices must be taxed on the assumption that the y will be using copyrighted material, and that people who create these material need to be given their due. Canadian Private Copyright Collective board member David Bassk in says "We'd all like lots of things to be free. But those who create the musi c deserve to be compensated. When you go and buy an iPod, the retailer gets pai d. So you can't say that the people who make the music should get a free ride." Eh? This movement was begun in February by several industry alliances and councils who initially asked that levies be increased on recordable CDs and rewritable m edia like SD cards, including iPods and similar players. Logically, this would extend to any device that can play audio files, which will include computers an d cellphones. The additional tax is there on the assumption that Canadians will be playing pirated material, and put there so that those wronged will get thei r due regardless. Double eh? So does this mean that since the tax will be there, Canadians can now pirate wi th impunity? Hey, you guys paid for the right already, right? If this becomes a trend (which I seriously doubt), blame Canada indeed. More from Ars Technica .
Nike and Apple's partnership for the
Nike + iPod Sport Kit has won the 2007 Consumer Products Bron
ze International Design Excellence Award (IDEA), which is a se
t of awards honoring the best in, er, design.
This year it's the only Apple product in the honor roll. More from the IDEA si
te.
This year it's the only Apple product in the honor roll. More from the IDEA si
te.
Engadget reports that the MacBook Pro's big
-ass 85 watt MagSafe power adapter has been redesigned to be s
maller and lighter and approximating the size of previous power bricks of older
models. Same price too - US$80. Not immediately available though. Maybe in abo
ut a month. Nice to know.
Been looking for anyth
ing as iPhone-like as possible that I can tinker with now to
make the interminable wait easier, and I came across something in the office th
at, uh, touched closer than the others - the HTC Touch.
It was released earlier in the year and talk has been circulating, as talk will
, that this one would sort of steal the thunder of the iPhone a bit on its rele
ase. Not quite. Truth be told, it's just a touch-screen Windows smartphone with
a thin veneer of iPhone-ness painted delicately on top. Once you get used to
the TouchFLO interface (which would be really really really fa
st - it's more of a showy gimmick than anything) the HTC Touch is just a 
For an added cost of about US$149 (to process your existing unit or add it to t
he cost of a new one which you also buy from them) you can have your iP
hone done in any of 29 colors from the colorizing company Colo
rware.
They use a special painting process and final layer that prevents scratches, an
d they do it for most new gadgets from PS3s to Wiis to Xbox 360s, or ostensibly, anything you can imagine.
Color your world here. Make mine Ferrari Red.
18-carat gold. US$19,310.
More 
A TUAW reader claims to have fou
nd a way to get the iPhone's phone functions working (albeit w
ith limitations) outside the United States.
Reader AJ in the UK says he was able to get his iPhone to make
calls and send text under Vodaphone in the UK, although visua
l voicemail was still a bust.
Here's how he claims to have done it: he got the AT&T SIM out of his iPhone
and stuck it into an 02 XDA, brought the XDA to a Vodaphone s
tore and had them add the phone to his existing Vodaphone contract. Upon gettin
g back home he puts the AT&T SIM, now Vodaphone-complaint, back into the iP
hone, uses the aforementioned iASign app to activate it, and v
oila!
The iPhone says the network is still AT&T, but it's the Vodaphone account a
nd number working. Ostensibly, this trick could work elsewhere in the world.
It's a bit unclear why or how Vodaphone would tamper with an alien SIM at all,
or how the altered SIM could help activate the phone functions of the protected
-to-the-gills iPhone, but the TUAW reader claims it works. Hackers who are curr
ently having sleepless nights trying to liberate the iPhone (now on Week Three
- after claiming it would just be a matter of days before they'd succeed) are u
p in arms saying this is physically impossible. Other people have since tried,
and failed.
It just might be a big hoax (and almost certainly is), but hope springs eternal
. Let's wait and see.
More details on The Unofficial Apple Blog.
We're almost there. A n
ew app called iASign developed by the intrepid hackers at 
My tears of joy won't stop flowing!
Epic Games VP Mark Rein has announced that THE recent killer game
for the XBOX 360 is coming to the Macintosh platform.
They announced last week that it would be coming out for Windows , and I had been crazy-jealous but was used to this sort of discrimination.
I was hoping against hope that with the WWDC announcement gaming would be a bet
ter deal for Macs this year, that they might ease up and port or develop games
simultaneously for us. Sometimes wishes come true after all.
No word on the release date or any other details, but just knowing it
will come is making me giddy. I'd been lusting after a 360 just so I can play G
ears, but it looks like I won't need to buy one anymore.
Icing on the cake: Unreal Tournament 3 is also on the way.
One of the agreement
s made between Apple Inc and Apple Corps, whi
ch is the record label of the Beatles, to prevent bloodshed ov
er the same name is that Apple Inc only dip its feet in waters entirely differe
nt from the waters Apple Corps wades, so that the record company, who's got dib
s on the trademark, will not summarily chop off the feet of the computer compan
y when they start dipping them into the Apple Corps pool.
Who can forget that big stink raised by the record label after Apple Inc. start
ed selling music on the then iTunes Music Store, a clear viola
tion of the agreement? Things have cooled off a bit since then and there's been
an uneasy peace in the orchard. A judge ruled last year that things will go we
ll as long as both parties engage in distinctly different businesses. There has
even been talk that Beatles music will be sold on the iTunes Store.
Well, looks like the peace might be short-lived if the rumors are true that App
le is getting set to do exactly what it shouldn't - become a music label itself
(let's see you try to weasel out of this one, Steve).
In the wake of Universal renegotiating the terms of distributi
on of their music through the iTunes Store, talk has been circulating that Appl
e is close to becoming precisely what they should not be - a music label - with
acts like Jay-Z and Beyonce, if the rumors a
re to be believed.
Let's get ready to rumble!
Wouldn't you know it? Checked my calendar and found out that this blog celebrat
ed a quarter-year anniversary yesterday. We're three months old! Who'da thunk i
t? Just three months? Seems like I've been doing it forever. Hope we last anoth
er three.
Happy Anniversary to us!
Blizzard has always been a game software company near and dear
to the hearts of Mac users everywhere. This is because of Bli
zzard's insistence on simultaneous release of their games on both Windo
ws and Macs. Well, we got more reason to heart Blizzard now.
In the beta of the forthcoming release of Ver. 2.2 of World of Warcraft
, Mac users can now record in-game videos using Quicktime using the H.264 codec, with selectable resolution and fra
me rates. Vid-cap your red-eye quests and post them on YouTube
! Aside from numerous fixes, the beta version also optimizes graphics performan
ce on Macs with Altivec (PPC) or SSE (Intel)
systems.
Not all Macs can smoothly record caps, however, as the requirements are a bit h
efty. You'll also need Quicktime 7.1.6 running on OS X
10.4.9.
The beta still isn't available to the general public yet, and is only for beta
testers running in the Public Test Realms of WoW. Not to worry, it's expected to be released soon.
Wirelessinfo
.com got Apple to admit that there is a glitch in
the battery indicator of the iPhone, essentially telling user
s that the battery isn't fully charged yet while in fact it's already topped up
.
In their blog survey, at least 60% of the respondents said that their units wer
e kinda wonky in this department, so the folk behind the blog contacted Apple P
R about this. According to the site, Apple told them: "Your battery is full
y charged, but the UI (User Interface) is just not correctly reflecting this. W
e expect to fix this in a software update."
I've had laptop batteries from Apple with this problem, despite proper care and
conditioning. Ah well.
(BTW, nice battery label, ain't it?)
From Skype
to IRC and now to MMS sending. If App
le doesn't put it in, you can be sure someone will find a way to do it
.
One of the niggles about the iPhone is inability to send MMS.
Folk over the the hackTech blog make the brilliant observation
that MMS is just glorified email aliasing, so it would just be a matter of sen
ding your MMS to the right address. hackTech says you just need to route the MM
S/email to the carrier and put the recipient's number in front of the @.
hackTech gives you a list of the relevant address extensions from Allte
l all the way to Virgin over on this page.
So what's next? Torrentfreak speculates on the possibility of
torrenting your favorite TV shows on your iPhone over on their site.
Now I've seen everything
.
iPods and iPhones are popular targets for thi
eves, snatchers and muggers, and an enterprising company has figured out the be
st way to protect your Apple gear - hide it in a Zune<
/strong>!
These guys at Hide-A-Pod bu
y unwanted Microsoft Zunes from eBay, gut the
m and modify the case to accommodate an iPod or an iPhone so you can hide it in
plain sight, without fear of theft.
The cases come in brown only (for more protection) and are available online for
US$29.95 (although you'll have to inform them of the model you plan to use wit
h the Zune casing to make sure it'll fit). There is a simple cable to connect t
o your Apple product to enable you to use it from within the case, and it comes
with big truckloads of wonderfully sarcastic features, like a special "squirt"
module you insert in the case and fill with liquid, so you can squirt unsuspec
ting folk from your "Zune". Welcome to The Anti-Social indeed.
Hide-A-Pod is unique in that it sets a high watermark for prot
ective technology while maintaining a high level of sarcasm. Check their site f
or more information, a FAQ and user testimonials. Microsoft loyalists and Zune
lovers are advised to look at the fine print on the bottom of each page of the
site.
Hee hee.
Spin.com, the website of music mag Spin, a si
te which I read, respect and love, quoted me on a story they did on <
strong>Apple's Next Big Thing initiative on the iTune
s Stone.
Nothing really. Cheap thrill. In my native language, kilig. Just thoug
ht I'd mention it.
Fro
m using Skype on the iPhone, we move on to
Those who have the revelant gear can get Firmware Restoration CD 1.3 from Apple, which, uh, does what it says: restores the firmware for Inte
l-based Macs, great for those times when you get screwed by a failed update. Yo
u'll have to download the image and create a CD from it, but at least your butt
'll be covered when that pesky update messes you up. Details and the 22.5MB dow
nload here.
Also available is the Macbook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.3 whic
h fixes display issues on 2.2 and 2.4GHz 15-inch models. Just remember you must
have a previous version of the update already installed for this to work. Get
this 1.8MB download here.
Those 
More updates, gang. Tho
se nice Mac folk who run Microsoft apps in th
eir computers might want to know that Microsoft's released an update for This update fixes a vulnerability that an atta cker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. This update also addresses an issue with using public folders in Entoura ge, and it contains the latest postal code information for Japanese addresses.< /span>What this update is for:
Office 2004 Standard Edition, Office 2004 Stud ent and Teacher Edition, Office 2004 Professional Edition, Word 2004, Excel 200 4, PowerPoint 2004, Entourage 2004.It's a 15.6MB download, and you can get it here.
Fire up
Software Update!
Apple's released iTunes 7.3.1, which, in Appl
e's usual detailed and thorough notes, "addresses a minor problem with iTunes 7
.3 accessing the iTunes Library", while also issuing Quicktime 7.2, which "addresses critical security issues" and has "numerous bug fixes".
The Quicktime update also does something for the H.264 codec and adds
support for full-screen viewing in the Quicktime Player.
While relatively minor fixes, the things are hefty: on my Windows machine the Quicktime update weighs in at 24.36MB and the iTunes update at
56.80MB; on my Macs QT was 53MB and iTunes at 34MB.
More helpful details (no, really) on the Quicktime update here.
Ecamm Networ
k has just released a stop-gap solution for those iPhone owners hankering to store files onto their new gadget - even if there are p
erfectly good flash drives and iPods aplenty to do it on. Neve
r mind that you won't be able to actually see or even access the files on the i
Phone itself, the fact that you can actually do it, use the iPhone as a 4GB or
8GB external drive, should be reason enough. I think.
Ecamm's iPhoneDrive gets th
e drop on Apple on enabling this dubious ability on the iPhone
for a paltry US$9.95 (try before you buy - demo available here). Connect your iPhone to yo
ur Mac (Windows users are SOL) and it appears as an external d
evice you can drag-and-drop stuff onto, or as an alternative to dragging-and-dr
opping, provide you a toolbar where you can do the same thing the long way.
I predict this'll be good for about two weeks to a month, or until Apple issues
that initial update that'll just enable this no-brainer feature on the OS. The
n you can kiss your ten bucks goodbye.
Almost two weeks in, the no
velty of the social, cultural and technological phenomenon known as the iPhone is fading and reality is starting to bite. A million new users
are waking up and looking at their purchase with a more critical eye, and some
are not liking what they see. Aside from a few glaring design and OS shortcomi
ngs, there are an alarming number of other things coming to light.
It's not all bad news, like the previous hullabaloo in the media about the batt
ery only lasting for approx. 400 charges - not true; after 400 charges, it'll w
ork at 80% capacity or lower, but will still work fine, like most other gadgets
. But there are other gotchas, though, big and small.
For example:
- It's got an onerous Battery Replacement Policy. Se e this previous post.
- You can't use an existing AT&T SIM in an iPhon e. (Oddly, the new SIM that comes with the iPhone can work in other phones.)
- If you buy it and use it outside the USA on roaming for two months straight, Apple/AT&T will brick your iPhone. It'll have to come ho me every now and then to renew its citizenship/residency status. Meaning, if yo u are one of those tourists who bought one and activated it in the US but plan to bring it home, you'd better pony up the US$175 termination fee, or else be t he proud owner of a US$600 paperweight beginning September. (Which begs the que stion, will iPhones activated outside of the AT&T/iTunes p rocedure automatically brick themselves after two months? Hmm. Food for thought .)
I'm crushed. One o
f my favorite tech journalists and podcast hosts, Veronica Belmont, is leaving her home of three years, CNet, to join Jason
Calacanis' new firm Mahalo to do a daily video thing. I saw it
on Digg and followed the link to Robert Scoble's blog that said P
C Mag's EIC Jim Louderback is leaving the magazine to
join Revision3 as their CEO, and mentioned Veronica's departu
re as a related bit of info. Didn't want to believe it, but I guess Veronica is
beating everyone to the punch: I found she just left a message that it is all
true on her Pownce account, and follows it up with a entry o
n her blog.
Buzz Out Loud will never be the same.
Oh, well.
It was just a matter of time.
There's this site I go to now and then just to see the understated lunacy of th
eir (award-winning) marketing program. Blendtec, makers of hom
e and commercial blenders, asks and answers for us one of the most important qu
estions in life: Will it blend?
These kooks have done what the kid in us has always wanted to do - put anything
and everything in their blender, citing as their reason that old adage about w
hy dogs lick their privates: because they can. Also to prove that their Total Blender can take just about anything. Over the years they've bl
ended literally everything; most recently they blended a Transformer robot. The video is actually retro and a bit creepy, from the old sixtie
s TV promo music to the cheerful yet disconnected demeanor of the host, Tom Dic
kson. He tortures tech with a smile, sort of like the Nazis at work in Dachau.
Now, they've blended an iPhone.
You can watch the carnage here, if you have the stomach for it.
Oh, the humanity...
If you're like me, with no push email on my phone but still obsessive about get
ting the latest from your Gmail inbox, you probably u
se Google's freeware GMail Notifier, which up
dates you as to what's new as it arrives.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that the Notifier sends your password out i
n clear text every time it accesses your inbox over the net. Thankfully, I foun
d this out at about the same time a tip was being shared to shut down this loop
hole. The tip is so useful I can't resist passing it along.
Here's what you do, courtesy of a comment by poster Highplace on anPull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down C ommand and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You'll see a hidden setti ngs editor. Enter 'SecureAlways' in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 1 in the Value field, then click Set. Quit Notifier and start it up again. From now on all connections with both Gmail & Gcal will be https.Nice to know.
I've wondered about this. Theoretically, it should be possible, since the iPhone gives you the "full Internet" via Safari. T
o be sure, a major bummer complete with squinted eyes and frantic pinching and
swiping and tapping, but still theoretically possible.
Well, we've got proof of concept. The folk over at everythingdigital.org have uploaded a YouTube video where WoW is being played (wi
th great difficulty it appears) on an iPhone. It was done with the help of some
thing called Telekinesis, which is a streaming app. It does se
em slow and tedious, and in the future might actually be workable, but we'll ne
ed a modified client whatever the case may be.
See it here:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFZA6gRK4qs]
(Thanks to Joel T. for the heads-up!)
Forget that secondary
button - Apple has gone whole hog and applied for patents that
use the same multi-touch technology used in the iPhone on a mouse.
The patent application, apparently filed over a year ago, will map the entire u
pper surface of a hand controller and make it sensitive to hand and finger gest
ures, or to recognize images of specific hands so it can apply individual user
profiles. Aside from clicking and tapping, in principle you can pinch the mouse
surface to zoom in on a portion of the picture, and vice versa, swipe to scrol
l and make circles to rotate. It's like having a tablet-mouse.
(If this is the case, I'm just wondering why they don't take the mouse out alto
gether and just provide a little tablet instead? Or apply the tech to the scree
n directly like some tablet laptops? Then again, who am I to second-guess Steve
Jobs? They probably have something along those lines already for all I know.)
Whatever the case, this'll be cool.
Image from Electronista.
Apple released late last week Version 1.0.2 of the iPod Reset Utility for first and second generation shuff
les. This is for situations where you can't play music on them or it c
an't be recognized by your system, and iTunes cannot reset you
r shuffle. (Perfect for me, been having some issues with my 2g lately.) It rese
ts the shuffle to factory settings (and of course deletes all your Abba songs),
and reinstalls the iPod software.
3.5MB download. Get it here.
Many folk who've gotten an
iPhone have learned the disheartening battery replacement poli
cy of Apple for their new phone. The battery is soldered into
the unit and is not user-serviceable or -replaceable, and when it conks out, yo
u'll need to send it in to Apple.
Here's the bummer: the service will set you back US$79, with US$6.95 for shippi
ng, and will take three whole business days. If that'll be too long for you to
be without your precious iPhone, Apple offers a loaner unit while you wait - fo
r US$29. Say again?
People are up in arms that this little tidbit wasn't properly disclosed until t
he near-one-million mob that bought iPhones this past week were over the novelt
y and looking soberly ahead at life with their new gadget. Apparently, unlike t
he service plans splashed on the front pages of the site, this tidbit is buried somewhere d
eep in the support pages out back. For the vast majority who've made it a habit
to have extra batts that they swap in and out for their other phone, this is a
major downer, apart from the fact that getting a replacement battery will set
them back 20% of the original cost of the unit.
A consumer advocacy group named T
he Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights has written a protest letter
to Apple, and more and more folk are up in arms over this convenient omission
from the deluge of press releases and promotions the iPhone's been enjoying sin
ce January.
Let's see what happens next.
Waitingforiphone.com reports that AT&T ha
s activated one million iPhones since the release last June 29
, a little less than a week ago, according to an unnamed but reliable source fr
om within AT&T. This, despite all the difficulties with activation reported
by many users. The same source also said that Apple was a pain to work with, b
eing so secretive that they released the activation API to AT&T on the day
of the launch. Full details here.
More blah blah blah.
According to a thread at Hackintosh, late yesterday the very i
ndustrious folk over at #iPhone have enabled a full interactiv
e shell in the iPhone OS using the iPhoneInterface app mention
ed previously, coupled with some creative soldering involving a resistor and so
me pins, plus three short commands through iPhoneInterface. The resulting seria
l console got the hackers an interactive shell with a near complete command list that is a massiv
e step towards achieving their holy grail. (At least that's how I understand it
.)
We officially don't support this - we're just reporting it - but nevertheless t
he world waits with bated breath.
There is life outside the iPhone.
There's the iTunes Store.
iTunes is now selling select whole albums from indie bands at much lower rates
of US$5.99 and US$6.99 in the Next Big Thing section. Some of
them are even DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks. (Clicking on this <
a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewCustomPage?name=p
ageNextBigThing">link will open up your iTunes app and take you online to t
he Store's NBT page.)
In the spirit of democratizing music and allowing access to excellent indie ban
ds and giving these bands a crack at getting somewhere, Apple'
s move is commendable. That said, when the heck are you opening up the store to
our region of the world? *grumble*
As mentioned in the previous post, Version 1.0 of the iPhoneIn
terface tool has been released. It's as rudimentary as expected, and f
or now Windows only.
Notes from the developers:
We have successfully written a tool named iPhoneInterface allowing for some basic manipulation of things on the phone, and are releasing it tonigh t. We are including source code so you can understand the techniques we have us ed so far. We will be expanding the functionality of this tool significantly to morrow. The best news is that we have prototype code that allows the ability to :Basic command set:Note: Not all of the features listed above are necessarily included in tonight âs initial release. We are continuing significant work on this tool and will probably have similarl y worthwhile updates tomorrow.
- Run any desired application already residing on the phone.
- Control what processes run on the phone (currently implementation i s very hackish)
- Move files around on the phone
- Enable viewing of verbose information during the restore process
- Activate the phone without iTunes and without a token
help - help services and help values ls - list directories cd - change directory mkdir - make directory rmdir - remove directory deviceinfo - get device info fileinfo - get file info readvalue - read a value activate - activate iPhone with plist deactivate - deactivate iPhone startservice - start service on iPhone enterrecovery - Enter recovery Mode quit - exit shellThe Windows version can be found here: (Updates from iPhone Hacking News.)
Breaking News: 
Coolness. Just thought to mention that I was men
tioned on
Buzz Out Loud, CNet's Podcast of Indeterminate Len
gth, Episode #509 for July 3.
Sent them a quick email the other day about my friend who activated the iPhone here in Manila, and figured they might want to report on it, a
nd the next day it was there, a short mention near the end. Nice and quick. Bei
ng a long-time fan, I was thrilled to be part of the show in my small way. I us
ed to work in FM radio for nearly two decades and have hosted my share of talks
hows and podcasts too, and I feel a kinship with these kooks.
Gave me a spike in hits too, since they posted a link to this site on their 
Excuse me while I show off.
I finally got my grubby hands on a live, breathing iPhone toda
y. Yes, those are my grubby hands in the picture.
I'm not often at a loss for words, but I am now. You'll have to wait for my gru
bby hands-on review coming soon in the next dead-tree edition of my magazine Mobile Philippines.
Some kind soul (a blogge
r named Jason Romero) is sharing the default iPhone ringtones from his blog. At least those who can't get an iPhone yet can
pretend they do by using the ringtones. If you don't have enough self-respect t
o resist this pathetic consuelo de bobo, you can download the tones here. It's 25 tiny MP3 files in a 2.1M
B zip. Besides, you're sick of the Marimba ringtone already, r
ight?
The Wash
ington Post reports that Europe will be getting the iPhone come November 1, 2007.
Germany's Deutsche Telekom, through its cellphone unit T-Mobile will be carrying the iPhone in that country beginning on tha
t date, with pricing starting at US$612 for a unit and the service. (It's uncle
ar if this is for the 4GB or the 8GB iPhone.)
Carriers for other European nations have not been determined, but it's likely t
o be Vodaphone for the UK, France Telekom for
France (duh) and Telefonica for Spain.
Still no information for Asia.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oGaZIKYvo]
Jeez. As Bugs Bunny once said: What a maroon.
At the risk of turning Mac-A-Doodle into iPhone-A-Dood
le (ugh), here are a few interesting factoids I've come across regardi
ng that damned thing which I am seriously starting to get sick of even if I don
't yet have one:
- some reliable estimates put it that a little over 700,000 units wer e sold over the iWeekend. If Apple and AT&T hadn't put limits on purchases, I daresay they could've sold a little more. In three days, Apple had surpassed AT&T's sales of the Motorola RAZR in its first month of its release. According to reports a million iPhones were alloca ted for the launch. More details here;
- analysts have determined that actual cost to produce an 8GB iPhone is US$220; a 4GB unit costs US$200. Details here. Apple, shame on you;
- hackers have kracked that leaked OS restore image mentioned previou sly and posted the root and user passwords (which I won't pass along for obviou s reasons);
- Stevie finally got the domain he's always wanted - iphone.c om - but at a price. The domain squatter, Michael Kovatch, who got the name twelve years ago got an undisclosed seven-digit amount f rom Apple to buy the name. Michael can expect to buy his fill of iPhones with t hat amount. With change. Expect to change your urls soon.
Found this trick out in the wild earlier but have been sitting on it, wondering
if it's ethical to post the damned thing. Then I found it on some other forums
, and then later on Gizmodo as well, and I thought, what t
he heck. (Also, I didn't feel right posting it because I didn't want my fr
iend to feel bad that he could've saved his US$200.)
Anyway, this method, while skipping the prepaid activation fee, has its own uni
que requirements, which may be more difficult for those outside the USA. For it
to work you need two iPhones and an authentic US cel
l phone number from a provider other than AT&T. Some folk
claim that a similar trick involving just one phone works, but they provide no
details.
Once again, may I remind you that doing this will be at your own risk, and most
definitely will void your warranty and not save your butt if something goes wr
ong. Caveat hacker.
1) Obtain two iPhones 2) Plug in iPhone #1. In iTunes select "I am a new AT& T Wireless Customerâ and âActivate 2 or more phones on an individual o r FamilyTalk Plan.â 3) Follow the steps for the FamilyTalk plan and enter âxxx-xxx-xxxxâ to port a number over from another provider (e.g. Sprint). 4) When the you receive the âActivation Completeâ e-mail, plug in iPhone #2. 5) Select the option âI am an existing AT&T (Cingular) wireless custome râ and âReplace a phone on my account with this iPhoneâ 6) Fill in the information re-using âxxx-xxx-xxxx.â Allow iPhone #2 to activate using this number. This number will be legit. 7) Plug in iPhone #2. iTunes will unlock the phone for use, but without a cell phone number assigned or account from AT&T.
Here's a Mac-A-Doodle scoop:
A good friend of mine (whose identity will remain secret, but not for long by t
he way heâs flashing the thing around to everyone in sight), is a man who Iâd l
ike to throttle. In envy.
Because yesterday he got an iPhone, direct and hand-delivered
from the US by a relative who came home with the phone as pasalubong.
We should all be so blessed with such relatives.
Whatâs more, amazingly, he got it to work â well, after a fashion. Everything,
except the telephone part, seems to work just fine. Youâd think that with all t
he activation safeguards that Apple and AT&T put in, all youâd do is put through emergency calls. Well, if thereâs a wil
lâ¦
Hereâs how he managed it:
He wracked his brain the whole night trying to find a way to get past the activ
ation screen. (He likens the situation to being given a Porsche without any keys.) In frustration he went through the iTunes
routine just for the heck of it. At the identity check screen where they ask f
or the Social Security Number, he types in a series of 9s, which predi
ctably gets him an error message.
But hereâs the loophole: iTunes then asks if you wish to get a
prepaid account. Ka-ching!
He promptly cajoles his US-based sister to let him use her US debit card to get
the account and some pre-paid minutes (which cost him all of US$30), upon whic
h the phone is, of course, activated.
Everything worked â internet surfing, email, photos and movies, ipod stuff â ex
cept the phone part (duh).
Great, but here is the complication: to maintain the account, the debit card wi
ll be charged a fixed amount every month â which is money down the drain becaus
e you canât of course use an AT&T account in the Philippines. He tried to g
et the account canceled, but he finds out heâll be charged US$175 as a penalty.
Sure. Since he got the phone for free, heâll essentially be springing for a lit
tle over two hundred bucks for an iPhone. Thatâs about PHP9200. Good deal in an
y book. So he cancels it. But everything else still works, and now he has a fan
cy wifi-surfing multi-touch iPod with a great screen that I will kill him for.
If you were a normal person not blessed by iPhone-bearing relatives, you can ge
t the fanciest 4gb iPod in the world for about US$700. It's possible. Hmm.
By the way, he says the hype didnât even come close.
Justin Long, the young actor we all know as the Mac G
uy, turned down an offer of a free iPhone from
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A website that purports to unlock iPhones so they can be used
outside of AT&T service (meaning anywhere in the world tha
t uses the GSM system) has been exposed as a fake.
Digg reports that iphon
eunlocking.com is a big fat scam to secure iPhone IMEI codes by the tr
uckload, and cites a blog called Stand Your Grounds (which makes m
e think of messy coffee makers) that claims to prove (a bit unintelligibly) tha
t the site is a fake. Hey, I could have told you that right off.
Americans beware. Non-Americans, wishful thinking. Shame on you.
(In the interest of full disclosure, Iâd just lik
e to say that this stuff is all geek to me. I just sort of peripherally sense t
he monumental significance of the info, hence I mention it here on the blog. Ot
herwise itâs just blah blah blah blah blah...)
Yesterdayâs leaked firmware (check a couple of posts back) had a few surprises
for the gearheads who live for this stuff. Weâve learned the possible identity
of the chip that the iPhone runs on, and itâs either a 620MHz
ARM CPU, or a SAMSUNG S3C6400, which is a 667MHz ARMÂ chip.
Either one is bad news for hackers because of something they have called 
Everyone's favorite classic paranoia kill-em-all game, Postal,
has just been given a new lease on life as a Universal Binary update.
Postal Dude can go postal once more, this time on Intel Macs all over
the place. This 10-year-old classic was both hailed and reviled since its rele
ase in 1997, for obvious reasons. It's the only game that gives you "Mass Murde
r Opportunities" like mowing down marching bands, spraying protesters, or charb
roiling whole towns.
The game description goes:
After coming home from work to find his house repossessed, the play er-character, known as Postal Dude, decides that everyone is out to get him and goes... well... postal. He figures that everyone in town has been infected wit h something that makes them all psychopathic killers. Paranoia can be fun. The game gets under way with Postal Dude standing outside his home, unable to get i nside but armed to the teeth nevertheless. Go figure. Moving from one surreal l andscape to the next, you must make use of the twelve weapons at your disposal in order to dispatch anything with a pulse. The goal in each of the 16 levels i s to off a given percentage of the "hostiles" (that is, cops, soldiers with mis sile launchers, rednecks with huntin' rifles, etc.) without getting killed your self. Pretty simple, really. There are no magic power-ups, no special abilities - just you, your arsenal, and the occasional Kevlar vest or first-aid kit. A younger me had hours of unbridled, murderous fun and let me work off lots of aggression back in the day. I don't think the present me'd be comfortable playi ng this one any more, but you can give it a shot, so to speak. This update is entirely a digital download that goes for US$10 at the M acGameStore website. You can get Postal here.
Not even 24 hours since it
s release, hackers are hard at work at kracking the iPhone fro
m a 91.5MB iPhone OS System Restore Image now available for do
wnload on the internet, and sourced, apparently, from an Apple
webserver.
Mac-A-Doodle will not be a party to this by posting a link to
the Mac hacker forum where this download is available, although we will say tha
t with a little, um, digging, it can easily be found. (Not that most of us can
do anything with it; the DMG from the IPSW file is passworded, and even if you
succeeded in decompressing it, is only useful to the precious few who can work
the black magic.)
But boy, that was fast, wasn't it?
It's interesting how 
The following morning after its release, hundreds of thousands of bleary-eyed n
ew iPhone owners who spent most of the night tinkering with th
eir new toys (or trying to activate them) woke up to a whole new post-iPhone-re
lease world where new variations on old accessories have sprung up overnight li
ke mushrooms, and whole new species of money-wasting add-ons that may or may no
t be useful have appeared on the net.
Check out for example the website of a company called iStyles to check out their ga
llery of 76 new iPhone skins priced at US$7 each. The pink one pictured above i
s particularly fetching to some iPhone demographic that includes jailbird 
Apple's released a special logo that will appear on certified and authorized th
ird-party accessories, so you'd know you're buying kosher gear, but I doubt tha
t we'd see this on most of the accessories at your neighborhood geek mart. Appl
e has also said that most existing iPod accessories that utili
ze the standard 30-pin connector will in all likelihood work with the iPhone, a
lthough it's your call; if it messes anything up, you're on your own. That's a
bit of good news at least.
Elsewhere, parasitic ride-on businesses are in full gear - like the normally er
udite and entertaining David Pogue of the New York Times is showing his creepy-quick entrepreneurial acumen in announcing next month
's release of his book
iPhone: The Missing Manual. (Preview here.) Also, the massive domain land
grab is still in full steam, with every permutation and combination of every wo
rd in the English language coupled with "iPhone" has been bought and promptly s
quatted on.
Welcome to our brave new world.
Apple apparently prepared too well for yesterday's iPh
one launch, and for once, it was a case of supply (amazingly) exceedin
g demand.
News outlets like Ars Technica report that despite the thousands in line across
the US and the manic pace of purchase, plenty of stocks were left at the end o
f the day. At least this was the case at Apple stores - some AT&T stores ran out of stock, largely because they had smaller allocations.
Amazing when you think that (according to one estimate) the things were selling
in Apple Stores all over the country at a rate of 30,000 units per hour.
At least everyone went home with one (or two). Everybody happy.
Now with all that supply, couldn't they throw a few hundred thousand or so over
here to our neck of the woods? Pretty please?
News outlets like Ars Technica report that despite the thousands in line across
the US and the manic pace of purchase, plenty of stocks were left at the end o
f the day. At least this was the case at Apple stores - some AT&T stores ran out of stock, largely because they had smaller allocations.
Amazing when you think that (according to one estimate) the things were selling
in Apple Stores all over the country at a rate of 30,000 units per hour.
At least everyone went home with one (or two). Everybody happy.
Now with all that supply, couldn't they throw a few hundred thousand or so over
here to our neck of the woods? Pretty please?
