One interesting thing is that the internal iPod battery is not charged with the TuneJuice. When the TuneJuice is connected, the battery indicator on the iPod just shows that there is more charge.
Since the internal batter is not charged, I wonder if the iPod Dock connector has separate pins for external battery packs than for battery chargers.
I finally got around to getting a torx screwdriver to tighten the hinge on my PowerBook. This was the same problem that was fixed at the Apple Store last October.
I find it pretty interesting that none of the tool sets that we have at home had a torx screwdriver, and that Home Depot only had one in the whole store. This especially since most computers use torx screws. Maybe there would have a better selection if I had gone to a store like Fry's Electronics.
Technorati Tags: torx
An appleScript has been posted on the Paint the Tiger blog that prints out the list of podcasts that are in iTunes. This is a lot nicer than looking at an opml file.
One thing that I would love to add is to have the html have link to the podcast itself in the generated html. Unfortunately, this url is not made available from iTunes AppleScript dictionary.
The only negative of this cover is that since this covers all of the iPod, it is not that easy to move the hold switch.
Technorati Tags: iPod, iSkin eVo3
Very similar to BMW's film series and Alpine's Mute movie, VW has released some GTI ads on YouTube.
I find this type of marketing pretty interesting.
[via atmaspheric | endeavors]
Google has release three Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets. I have installed the Gmail and Search History widget.
[via Google Blog]
Technorati Tags: Dashboard Widget, Google, Mac OS X
A while ago, I mentioned that it would be nice to make the encryption that is available in AIM for .Mac customers compatible with other AIM accounts. The Off-the-Record Messaging program provides a proxy that enables this. This proxy essentially provides all of the key management and the encryption support needed.
Unfortunately, it is not really integrated well with iChat or Proteus. You need to use the proxy to accept the public encryption keys from the people that you are chatting with. There is a plugin for gaim, and there is built-in support in Adium X, so the interface should be better in those applications.
[via macosxhints]
Technorati Tags: Adium X, AIM, encryption, gaim, security
Maybe if I really want to increase the performance of our car, this is a very interesting option.
[via Autoblog]
Technorati Tags: Sentra
I just noticed that a lot of the podcasts that I have listed in iTunes had not been downloading new shows. Also each of these had a exclamation point icon next to them. At first, I though that this was because the rss feeds were not being parsed by iTunes. When I clicked on the icon, I saw this message
It looks like iTunes stops downloading podcasts if you don't listen to the shows. I assume that Apple did this to prevent podcasts from filling up the disk. This is fine, except it stops downloading them even if you manually delete the old files. I think that they should change this to only stop downloading the new podcasts shows have not been listened to or have not been deleted.
In addition to that, iTunes should notify you that it stopped downloading podcasts.
Next month, Sony is going to make some new content available for SOCOM 3. This will include new maps for online play. The map pack will be $5.99.
I assume that this will use the online account, that was required to be created, when registering the for the online SOCOM component.
One interesting thing that I didn't realize is that SOCOM 3 can use any USB Mass Storage device for storing this downloaded content. I wonder if Sony will allow USB thumb drives to be used instead of their memory cards.
[via SOCOMBLOG]
Technorati Tags: SOCOM
Sound of Traffic is a pretty cool little application that "visualizes" the traffic on your network ports as audio sounds. The resulting sounds are pretty interesting. When my computer was not doing much heavy traffic, it sounded very similar to whale sounds.
Here is a mp3 with a sample of what this sounded like on my laptop.
[via macosxhints]
Technorati Tags: Sound of Traffic
I just noticed that my dns server was being used as a caching dns server for some random host. In my log files, I was seeing ANY queries for x.h.ctrc.cc. When I looked at the cache, this was for some encoded data.
Using the documentation on this page, I was able to fix this problem. The way that I fixed this was to add the following to the options section:
// version statement for security to avoid
// hacking known weaknesses
version "get lost";
// optional - disables all transfers -
// slaves allowed in zone clauses
allow-transfer {"none";};
// optional - disable all recursive queries
allow-recursion {"none";};
recursion no;
Since I moved this server to a different timezone, just noticed that the representation of the time for each of the posts does not take into account the time zone offset.
I have a fix for the blogtimes plugin in my tree, and will be checking it in soon.
CNet has posted a video of the Streetdeck software running. This software looks pretty cool. I really like the gestural interface.
[via Autoblog]
Technorati Tags: Streetdeck
It looks like this box is going to be $150, and it will be available in the 3rd quarter of 2006. I don't know what type of content will be available for it. I don't know if there will be a price for each piece of content downloaded.
[via Gizmodo]
Technorati Tags: P2POD
One thing that I don't like about it is that you can not make calls with the car kit. Also you can't make calls with the phone when it is paired with the car kit.
A new version of the Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile, and the Phone Book Access Profile haven been announced. These are supposed to improtve phonebook and dialing handling for car Bluetooth.
I wonder when car head units will support these profiles. Also I assume that cell phones would have to support these profiles.
[via Wi-Fi Network News]
Technorati Tags: Bluetooth
About a week ago, I accidentally deleted all of the passwords that were stored in Firefox. So I have been manually reentering the passwords for each of the sites that I visit. If Firefox used the Keychain, this would be less of a hassle as the passwords would just be stored there.
Camino is a Gecko based web browser, that has a lot of the support for the Mac OS X features. It integrates with the Keychain, Address Book and Spotlight.
The one potential downside is that it doesn't support the collection of Firefox extensions. This is not really an issue since it has built-in support for blocking ads and popups.
I am now running Camino browser as my default.
[via The Apple Blog]
iTunes Statistician is yet another tool to visualize an iTunes library. This is yet another visualization tool like iTunes Signature Maker or OGMT.
Here are my statistics:
I have been using the iPod for about a month and I do like it, but there are things that I would change:
When I added all of the tracks from our server to my iTunes library, I had a lot of duplicate tracks. On my laptop, I had the protected AAC files, and the server has the mp3 format versions.
First I used iTunes "Show Duplicate Tracks" menu item to display all of the duplicate tracks. Then I selected all of the tracks and created a playlist with those. Then I ran this script which puts all of the duplicate tracks that are located on the server into a new playlist.
I keep most of my music on our server, for a couple of reasons.
But now that I have been using an iPod, I now want this music to be able to be copied to it.
I wonder how well this works. Will it work across the multiple phases of most homes electrical systems? How does this handle interference on the power lines?
[via Engadget]
It looks like Slim Devices is updating the SlimServer software to integrate with Pandora's music recommendation service. Pandora's service allows you to enter a name of an artist, and it will create a "radio station" of music that is related to that artist. The new software will automatically make that radio station available for your Squeezebox.
I went to Pandora's web site, and tried their flash version of their service. I liked the recommendations. I don't have a Squeezebox, but I would like to listen to these stations in iTunes or on my iPod.
The StreetDeck Trunk Mount Bundle includes the CPU and a 7 inch motorized touch screen monitor. The bundle is $1699 at MP3Car.com.
[via Gizmodo]
Technorati Tags: StreetDeck
I downloaded MediaCentral, and I was pretty impressed. MediaCentral essentially has the same functionality as FrontRow, but has some additional features.
The interface is pretty intuitive. It doesn't have the sound effects like FrontRow does, but it does run pretty well on my G4 laptop, and not just the new iMac and the Mac Book Brow.
[via PVR Wire]
Technorati Tags: FrontRow, MediaCentral
I heard about AOL and Yahoo's plans to charge for email delivery today on the Digital Experience Podcast. It appears that AOL and Yahoo will charge email senders if they want to guarantee that the message will get to the recipient. If the sender doesn't pay, the email may be stopped by the spam filter, have the attachments stripped, or have the urls removed.
I wonder how successful this will be. If I were an AOL or Yahoo customer, I would be upset if mail that is destined for me is not delivered. Also as a sender, I am not going to pay to send email. This is the same way I feel about challenge-response spam filters; I will not respond to a email challenge.
Verizon is now allowing customers to use their cellphones a broadband modem. They are supporting this on the LG VX9800 and VX8100 and the Motorola RAZR V3c and E815.
Officially Verizon is only supporting this when connecting to the phone with USB. I haven't tried the Bluetooth connection since this change, so I don't know what the speed would be. I will try it out when I get a chance.
[via Engadget]
I always thought that companies like using rebates because more people would buy the products. But in addition to that, I am sure that only about 50% of people actually fill out the rebate forms, so the company doesn't have to pay out a rebate for each person that buys the product.
DIRECTV had a rebate when I got the HD DIRECTV DVR. I haven't gotten around to filling it out. Most companies will just let the rebate expire. But DIRECTV has sent me two letters reminding me about the rebate, and actually included the rebate form again.
I wonder if DIRECTV got in trouble with not fulfilling rebates in the past.
Today, the server that is running this blog was running out of memory. The problem was there was a subnet range that was hitting different urls on this blog in a rapid succession. I had apache configured so that it was was allowing 150 child threads. This with them memory requirements of LifeType, the box was running out of memory.
After I fixed the apache configuration, I also setup iptables to block requests from that range. In addition, I installed the bwshare apache module. This module will automatically change the response to to a html warning message, which will not require the php script to be run.
Technorati Tags: bwshare
We have been using Speakeasy VoIP for about a week now. And I have been pretty impressed. There are some interesting things that I have noticed.
Technorati Tags: Speakeasy VoIP, VoIP
A while ago, I ran the Add Birthday to iCal AppleScript to get the birthdays that are listed in my Address Book into a Calendar in iCal. I just discovered that this has been added to iCal itself.
There is a new option labeled "Show Birthdays calendar". When this is selected a new calendar is created with all of the birthdays from your Address Book. You can even share this calendar so other people can have access to this.
I am guessing that this was added in 10.4.
Technorati Tags: Address Book, iCal
I've been pleased with my Home Assistant setup for some time now. One of my main focuses has been achieving local control. This ensures...
