Tag: mac consulting

iPhone OS 3.1 kills tethering hack dead | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews

When Apple released its highly anticipated iPhone OS 3.1 firmware update for the iPhone and iPod Touch, some users’ worries were confirmed: the tethering hack we blogged about in June no longer works.

After upgrading, if you navigate on your iPhone to the Settings app, select General, then Network, you will see that the menu item for tethering has vanished.

Developers have not yet been able to find a way to downgrade or re-enable the tethering hack. If you or someone you know has had a different experience, we would like to hear about it in the comments.

Updated on 9/10/2009 at 10:15 AM PDT: According to user comments below, tethering remains intact for some, but not for others. Varying versions of the AT&T carrier file seem to be responsible for the discrepancy. We’ll be seeking comment today from AT&T and Apple regarding these carrier files.

via reviews.cnet.com

Now, I would never, ever try anything that would violate my terms of service with AT&T. They’re so good and benevolent, and their customer service is so knowledgeable and responsive, and they’ve never done anything to make me wish Apple had been able to choose another provider… But if you were to try this tethering hack, be warned it might break your visual voicemail.

Oh, yeah: F*** AT&T.

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Really diggin’ App Store Genius

It has already turned me onto SugarSync, and a few very fun games. I was getting very annoyed by browsing the store and not knowing what would fit my style. Very cool.

 It’s worth mentioning that, unlike Genius for music, you find App Genius in the App Store itself.

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Norah Jones is great, but…

No Beatles at the rock ‘n’ roll event today. Norah is many things, but rocknroll ain’t one of ’em.

 Welcome back, Steve. Guess you didn’t want to be upstaged by Paul & Ringo, as epic as that would have been.

 Still, glad to see new iTunes and iPhone versions, and I like the new nano-cum-camera, even if it’s obvious they didn’t want to pull sales from the iPhone by giving the Touch a camera.

 http://www.macrumors.com/2009/09/09/live-coverage-of-its-only-rock-and-roll-media-event/

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iTunes 9 fixed a Genius problem

I had one music library that Apple wouldn’t deliver Genius results for. One forum said it was because of screwy characters in the track info. I did examine the XML file, and found a bunch of characters with diacritical marks, but it wasn’t worth the time to try to find and replace them all.
I just installed iTunes 9 on that Mac, and it brought Genius down lickety split.

I’m running home now to get iPhone 3.1 and iTunes 9 on my own machines.

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Norah Jones is great, but…

No Beatles at the rock ‘n’ roll event today. Norah is many things, but rocknroll ain’t one of ’em.

 Welcome back, Steve. Guess you didn’t want to be upstaged by Paul & Ringo, as epic as that would have been.

 Still, glad to see new iTunes and iPhone versions, and I like the new nano-cum-camera, even if it’s obvious they didn’t want to pull sales from the iPhone by giving the Touch a camera.

 http://www.macrumors.com/2009/09/09/live-coverage-of-its-only-rock-and-roll-media-event/

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So far, Snow good: 10.6 in brief

I like it. I like the speed. I like the sturdiness. I like that I can finally put the muthaflippin date in the slipper-lickin menu bar.

Big and small changes have made upgrading to 10.6 worth my effort. The assessments I’m most in line with say that Apple has dug in the closet for all the projects they’ve put off in the decade of OS X’s existence, and even some ― like date-next-to-time ― that have lingered since the 1984 Mac.

Before I go farther, I want to restate our official recommendation to clients: If you don’t have a compelling reason to upgrade, please wait to install Snow Leopard. Let Apple release at least the 10.6.1 or 10.6.2 update, to ensure that you don’t get bit by any of the bigger bugs. And please make sure you have complete backups before you install. Also, there are a couple of additional installers at the end that you may need.

Since the arrival of 10.6, I have listened to some maligning of 10.5. But our experience with the penultimate system was really smooth. So for me, Apple really didn’t have that far to go. Still, onward and upward.

I’m not going to list the little glitches and speedbumps I’ve encountered, as they are almost all quite picayune; I’ll venture that most non-power users who get into 10.6 early will have a very good experience. That said, problem-havers are always the loudest voices, on the Internet as elsewhere, and sites such as macfixit.com detail the issues many are having. The one I’ll mention, which is pretty specific, is that many of the system hacks and tweaks I have come to rely on, especially SafariStand, don’t work reliably in Snow Leopard, because Apple has deprecated the InputManager API. Developers will hopefully be able to find a way around that, because I need my Safari AdBlock, bad!

Finally, I’m very happy to report that I have Snow Leopard Server running on my network, and am similarly very pleased with its smoothness. It was a nice excuse to clean out the cobwebs and the failed experiments. So far, network homes and portable homes work great, and no issues with permissions or file sharing. I haven’t gotten Address Book or Calendar Servers up, but I’ve barely tried. iChat Server is logging something weird that I can’t find a fix for in the forums. 

Nu? Between iPhone 3.0 and OS X 10.6, it looks like 2009 is a much better year for Apple rollouts than what we saw with iPhone 2 or 10.5. What a relief!

Less than briefly,
Your Humble

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Fully Posterized

Big props to Alan Weinkrantz for pushing me to properly prepare Posterous! What a lovely system. Now I’ve got my personal stuff going to http://jjmarcus.posterous.com, and consequently to my Twitter page and Facebook, while my tech musings flow to the blog, my Facebook business page, and my new j2mactexas Twitter feed. This is way more fluid, and nicely separates personal lifeblogging from the geeky stuff. Solid!

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The Missing Key

Can’t believe it took me this long, but I finally learned where the forward Delete key is on Mac laptops. It’s <fn>+<delete>. Of course, this also works on the new little wireless keyboards that lack a number pad. 

This is a fine time to mention a couple of the keyboard shortcuts that I use for text editing on the Mac:

I use the arrow keys all the time. Fairly obviously, the left and right go one character at a time, while up and down move one line vertically. But if you add either the <option> key to those directions, you skip whole words or whole paragraphs at a time. The <command> key goes further: command-left takes you to the front of the line, command-right to the end, command-up goes all the way to the top of the document, and command-down goes all the way down.

Okay, that’s totally useful, but now you should try adding the <shift> key — the key that selects — to all of those maneuvers: shift + arrow keys highlights character by character, but add option or command to shift, and you start selecting whole words, or grafs, or the entire body of text, easy like pie!

Finally, you can also add option or command to the delete key, or the fn-delete, to delete whole words or lines at a time.

I almost never use the mouse when I’m editing text, but sometimes I’ll employ a double-click or triple-click, to select a word or a paragraph, respectively.

(Thanks to Georgianne for deciding that “fn” should be pronounced “effin’.”)

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Upgraded Drobo capacity

After my Snow Leopard Server install, my Drobo gave me a start, showing that it was much closer to running out of space than before. I think it was a coincidence, but I ordered 2 1TB drives — thank you, Amazon Prime! — and now I’ve got another 500GB or so to play with.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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