Not long ago, I returned to the world of the internet and became utterly absorbed in the new iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 firmware. I convinced myself I had to see the new App Store, and test out all the new and exciting legal applications available for the iPhone.
I’ve been using a jailbroken iPod Touch for a while now, customized to my liking with skins and applications that I’ve become accustomed to have available. One night, without much forethought, I decided to upgrade my iPod to the 2.0 firmware, but I would use the jailbreaking method provided by the iPhone Dev Team to get the new firmware and still have access to the applications I’ve already been using. That assumption turned out to be very wrong.
Carefully, I followed the steps, and not long after I had a new, 2.0 iPod, to my slight irritation completely erased of music and video files, but that was no big deal. Upon closer inspection, however, it was loaded with not the familiar Installer.app, but something called Cydia. Well, I thought, they must be pretty similar, I mean why not? Browsing through the Cydia list, however, I could not find some of my favorite applications, and grew worried that I had made a big mistake updating.
Before I let that get to me, I tested out some of the applications on the new App Store, but soon I realized I had to get my iPod back to the way it used to be. I started scouring the internet for instructions on how to downgrade a 2.0 iPod to 1.1.4. I found several sites, and some videos, all giving roughly the same tutorial. And so my journey began.
For this task, persistence is truly key. It isn’t easy spending at least twelve hours (although quite possibly more) trying to reverse something that took me less than an hour to do. Time grew infinite. It might have stood still if I hadn’t been able to see the changing sun, and that nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to go to sleep wasn’t there.
The first step was to downgrade iTunes. I experimented with several versions of iTunes, but when I couldn’t get past error messages, I figured I would stick to what the internet people were telling me and use iTunes 7.5. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent trying and failing, even when it seemed I had done everything right. These people giving me these instructions had to have been able to have done it this way, otherwise they would have given me different instructions. Why, then, can’t I do it this way?
With nothing left to try, no more holes in the instructions left to fill, I set out to do more research. I learned that problems could lie in Apple’s Mobile Device Support. So, I learned how to remove this Mobile Device Support from one of Apple’s Support docs, and reinstalled iTunes 7.5. Once again, I received error 1604 (at least I’m past error 20, I told myself).
Scanning through a forum topic, I learned that it was possible to reinstall iPhone and iPod firmware using Xcode. I fire up Xcode, and just as I suspected, the poster was referring to the new version of Xcode (version 3). So, I power on the Leopard Mac only to discover that Developer Tools hasn’t been installed on it.
At about this time I thought, why not give it another shot on my primary computer. This time, I removed Apple’s Mobile Device Support once again, and installed iTunes 7.7. Then, I removed iTunes and left the Mobile Device Support files, installing iTunes 7.5. Hoping against all odds that this would fix my problem, I tried the instructions once again, now performing them virtually by memory.
Processing Firmware Upgrade… Surprise! no error. Wow, it worked! I powered on the iPod, and there was the old 1.1.4 firmware, with my iPod good as new. I jailbroke it once again, was forced to reinstall all the applications on it, and retransfer all my music and videos, but now everything was back to normal.
My advice after this ordeal to anyone who has a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch and enjoys the applications he or she is using, is to make sure not to upgrade to the new firmware. At the very least, consider this carefully before upgrading, because it can be one hell of a ride getting things back to normal if you don’t like 2.0. If in fact you do decide to upgrade, there is one thing I can’t stress enough: Back up your device. It was nice to know that iTunes keeps backups of preference files, including those from 3rd party applications, but nevertheless, ssh into your iPhone and back up the important things before upgrading. Having copies is always a good thing (particularly if you have saved NES games).
After Apple’s Tiger came out in 2005, Dashboard widgets started cropping up like crazy. One such widget was Monkey Business Labs’s TV Tracker. Of course back then it was in version 1 stages, and used Yahoo’s TV listings to download its listings and provide them to its users.
Being a late adopter to Tiger, I hadn’t experienced TV Tracker before it no longer was able to download listings from Yahoo!. Fortunately, several weeks or months later, the issue was resolved. All one had to do was to download TV Tracker 2, sign up at Zap2It Labs’s site and get TV listings downloaded to TV Tracker 2. The only annoyance was that you had to update your account every few months or they would deactivate it.
Maybe a week ago I saw an article in the paper about Zap2It Labs. Soon after I read it I forgot its contents. Now, as I opened TV Tracker 2, I noticed something was amiss. It wouldn’t display my TV listings. So I jumped over to the Zap2It Labs website, and found it inactive. Confused, I opened Monkey Business Labs’ website, where they announced a new version of TV Tracker, version 3.
One of the features I’ve been wishing to have in previous versions is a resizing option, and it’s finally added. As I continued to read the Features list, I noticed:
Requires a Schedules Direct subscription, at $5 a month.
What?! was my initial reaction. Fortunately, more information is available on their TV Tracker 3 support page. It turns out that Zap2It was losing money because of the large amount of interest in the site, and their only means of support being advertising.
So, TV Tracker has changed the service from which it gets its listings once again to a company called Schedules Direct. What’s different from the last version? You have to pay for it. Well, I don’t really watch a lot of TV, and don’t see any reason for me to pay for TV listings. Even though the Chronicle TV listings are crap, I still get them free with my paper. And if I want free by-day listings, I’ll just look in the Examiner.
I downloaded the new version of TV Tracker, and filed away the old version in the depths of my drive. But, I won’t be using it. If I want my TV listings online, I’m going to have to go to Yahoo! TV listings. TV Tracker was a really pretty widget, but I don’t see why I should pay for it. Now, if I had to one-time pay for the widget, I would be okay with that. But paying on a per-month subscription basis for TV listings? That doesn’t make sense to me.
ExpressionEngine recently updated its CMS (Content Management Software) to version 1.6.0, up from the previous 1.5.2, and I’ve had to update my version of the software. As you may know, BowlerDerby isn’t running EE (as ExpressionEngine is commonly called by its users). I update my BowlerDerby site by adding to the XHTML pages. But I am working on another site that uses EE.
So, I looked through their Docs pages and figured out how to update. Luckily, it went quite smoothly. If it didn’t, I guess it wouldn’t be a huge loss as the site hasn’t been launched yet. It did take a bit of time, but I’m happy to say that I am now using EE 1.6. Hey, I might even transfer BowlerDerby to EE. That might make it easier to update stuff around here.
I’ve been working as an intern at an office here for a few weeks, and as I’ve been working on my computer, there always seemed to be this kind of humming sound underneath my desk. You know that humming you hear when the fan is on in your computer.
Well, only today did I decide to check it out and see what was going on. There is an old PowerPC Mac tower underneath my desk, and I believed that to be the source of the problem. I checked behind it, and there was nothing there. So not it most certainly was the PPC. I turned on the monitor but nothing showed up. After repeating this several times, I held down a black button on the computer which appeared to be a power button. Soon, it lit up green and the monitor popped up with an OS 9 screen. I OK’ed a few error messages, and turned it off.
So that’s good. No more fan noise. But the weird (or strange, or funny) thing is, that computer has been on for weeks now, and nobody’s noticed, or cared to turn it off until I decided to check into it. It’s been wasting power constantly for at least three quarters of a month!
A couple weeks ago, I kept getting frustrated with the fact that the icons on my desktop were disappearing. What do I mean by this? Well, whenever I dragged a file onto the desktop, or downloaded something, one of my icons would disappear. Now, I understood that the files wasn’t actually missing, but the only way I could bring them back to visibility was by finding them with Spotlight.
Apparently, this is one of the signs of a bad hard drive. My S.M.A.R.T. status read as verified, and it still does to this day, but this got me concerned. So, last Sunday we went out and bought a new 160Gb hard drive for my 17″ Powerbook, and a hard drive enclosure. The guy at the computer store said that they were all out of 5400 rpm drives in Ultra-ATA, but after looking through his collection, this statement proved to be false.
When I got home, I pulled out the screwdrivers, the video camera and an iFixIt manual, and got to work. I put the new drive into the enclosure, and tried to slide the aluminum cover over the drive, but it kept scratching the sticker label. So, since I was only putting it in there temporarily, I ran the drive without the cover on my computer. I then opened Disk Utility and formatted the drive with two partitions (just in case)
Once the drive was formatted, I took it out of the enclosure, and proceeded to take my computer apart, just as I did when I replaced my top case. I then removed the hard drive, but had some trouble as I bent some of the pins taking the flat logic board connector off. I finally managed to correct this bending, installed the new Hitachi hard drive, and put everything back together. When this was finished, I popped my old drive into my Firewire/USB2.0 enclosure so that I could get my files off of it.
Back in front of my computer, I turned it on to find a startup area that looked like the Mac OS 9 “can’t find the startup drive” screen. I then inserted my Mac OS X install disc and restarted. At this point, I decided to reformat my drive using the copy of Disk Utility on my install disk, to give more space to the main partition. Finally, I installed OS X on it, and got to enjoy the beautiful Tiger intro video.
The next two to three days I spent copying over files (I didn’t want to use Migration Assistant because I had some problems with my system before). I started out copying my Applications. For these I actually did use Migration Assistant, because I figured it would be difficult to copy over the 217 (huh, I could have sworn it was 244; I did remove a few though…) items in my Applications folder any other way. I then copied over the files in my user folder, as well as some of the files in my user Library folder (Application Support and Preferences files primarily).
Now, my system is a whole lot bigger, seems quite a bit faster, and I think all of my old files have been copied over. I didn’t copy over my other users because I wasn’t using them very often (this reminds me: I should create one other user on my new system for troubleshooting purposes). But, I will be creating a full backup of my old hard drive onto an external drive because I’m not sure it’s going to last very long. Once this backup is created, I’m going to set up my old hard drive to function as a networked drive through my AirPort Extreme Base Station’s USB port. It should make transferring files a whole lot easier, because using Apple Remote Desktop to do all of my copying is at times tedious. Especially when other people on the network want to give me files.
I’ll be posting my time-lapse video of the replacement to the videos section of my site shortly.
I was reading up on the OmniFocus Alpha, and hopped over to Ethan Schoonover’s website for his screencast. Once there, I noticed his article “Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop”. Now I like to think that my desktop is quite organized. I keep everything lined up, and I know where everything is. However, his ideas about a three-folder system sounded like a good idea to me, especially since the files had been piling up there, and I hadn’t had a chance to look at everything. I took some of his ideas, and applied them to my desktop. So, I created the folders, and spent hours searching for great icons for each one, and I think it’s overall pretty good for my workflow and all that.
The icons I’m using are on the right. The Inbox icon is from the first versions of Midnight Inbox, the Outbox icon is from a set called Samurai by FixIcon, and the Long-Term icon comes from the Yeti Box set by Xman
If you’re interested in cleaning your desktop the Kinkless way, good luck
So, I’m sitting in the testing room at the Bay School in San Francisco (notice I did not offer them the courtesy of a link), taking the SAT. Well, I had a glass of juice and a cup of coffee in the morning and a few swigs from my water bottle since then. So by now, a couple sections into the test, I really have to go to the bathroom.
I’ve just finished one of my sections, and have a few minutes left. Figuring that I won’t be able to concentrate on looking over answers, I decide to get up and go to the restroom. After all, something similar happened when I was taking the PSAT at my school and there was no problem at all. But, after I open the door and exit the room, the proctor comes up to me and says I can’t leave to go to the bathroom, even though I would be dancing if there were no people in the room. I now have to go back to my seat extremely stiff, and sit down trying to look over my answers when all I can think about is where the restroom is.
Something similar happened with the proctor later on in the test. It says that you’re not supposed to have calculators on your desk during a non-math section, but what the fuck would that do? How the hell would a calculator be useful for English? I mean really, no one is going to use their calculator during an English section. So, I put my calculator on the far side of the desk (which is about 2 ft to 1 meter away from me, and behind my hat). The proctor then walks up to my table and proceeds to take the calculator off of my desk, setting it down on the ground. I saw her do this for several more students too. I’m not even using it. Why should she care?!
Now I understand that you may not think this is so strange, even though for me it is. If not, just listen to this: I’m working on a math section, so I’ve got my calculator out and I’m using it. Before we go any further though, you’ll need to know that I keep a triangle-type ruler in my calculator for when I need to draw lines in math class.
Well, this ruler was sitting on my desk, a clear, orange right triangle, and the proctor comes over and takes it (which was so far away from me it was clear that I wasn’t even using it). I know she’s going to set it on the ground so that I can’t use it, but this is just too much for me. I open my mouth and tell her that I’m not even using the thing. She says that that’s alright, but she has to put it on the ground. What the hell for?? How in the world is a ruler going to give me an unfair advantage over others in a standardized test? If anything, a ruler would hinder my testing, so if I wasn’t using it, why should she see any reason to stick it on the ground? This is just going too far. I was thinking about going to school and getting registered for a writing-on-straight-lines disorder just so I could use the ruler for the SAT. Why am I so concerned about my ruler ending up on the floor? Well you see, in certain cases, I can become obsessed with cleanliness. Especially when something I hold in my hands often is thrown to the ground in a public place where an innumerable amount of people walk across every day with soiled shoe soles.
Some people hate the SAT because it’s a test. I hate the SAT because it prevents me from going to the bathroom when I get the sensation that my kidneys are about to burst, and because my ruler gets put on the fucking floor.
So we’re reading Beowulf right now, and talking about boastfulness. Well, it just so happens that today, I just found out that I’m really good at losing elections. I am the fucking best at losing elections. No one loses elections better than me. It’s not something proud of, nor something I like, but I’m good at it.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “underachiever and proud of it”? Well, in today’s society, there is really no way for anyone to be proud of being an underachiever. Unless for some twisted reason they think that’s cool. Wait… what was I intending to prove with this point?
I’m not even sure why I run in elections. If I’m going to lose anyways, what’s the point in even running? That requires all this extra work, like coming up with a proposal, campaigning, writing a speech, and giving that speech. I guess I run because I want to prove that fact wrong. I like to prove things wrong. Many a time have I tried to prove facts wrong that I didn’t know were facts. It must be the same case here. I don’t know why I choose to bring the inevitable fate of sobbing defeat upon myself, but maybe this is something I just don’t realize when I start with that initial choice. When I walked into that dark crowded room that Monday afternoon, I was so confident. I could hear the exclamations of approval at the announcement of my candidacy. Sometimes I guess, life is predetermined. And that’s why affirmation and that “the Secret” book don’t work for me. I’m always going to lose. But hopefully, just hopefully, that’s only ever limited to elections.
I’d just like to add that I’m fucking pissed right now. If you wanted to end your reading of this post on a high note, you should have stopped at the end of the last paragraph. But I’m not going to let you do that. If I’m suffering, it’s only natural that I would want certain others to suffer too. Everything is just so fucking confused now.
Okay, so those validation errors were getting to me, and I decided to fix them. Here’s what I did:
The <center> tag
Well, I looked up some sites online, and figured out that this was an easy fix. All I had to do was go into my css file, and add a class rule with margin-left and margin-right both set to “auto”. Then, where I wanted to center something, I would just apply that class rule to its container.
Embedding a Quicktime object
As some of you may know, I’ve got a few movies in the videos section of the site. Well, previously I was using the <embed> tag to put them in my pages. But, apparently that isn’t allowed anymore in XHTML Strict. So, I found out I had to use the <object> tag. About an hour or so later, I figured out how to put the movies in my pages so that they validated correctly, and even managed to get them to work across multiple browsers.
The Problem
The problem when I fixed the multiple browser problem (so that the movies played in Camino and Firefox) was that I discovered that the footer on my site doesn’t display correctly in those browsers. Not sure what the problem is there…
But hey! In the meantime, all my code is XHTML valid. That’s something to be proud of.
Well, I just finished redesigning my website. It wasn’t that bad to begin with, but then I ended up spending a whole lot of time getting the languages together and trying to fix some validation errors. I made the flag icons myself using Pixen and Photoshop.
Turns out, W3’s CSS validation automatically defaults to CSS 2.1 (mine is CSS 3), so it displays errors. And when I go and enter the URL of the correct validation page into my web pages, my XHTML is no longer valid because it thinks the ampersands in its own URL are character references to international characters. So if you really want to know my CSS is valid, you’ll have to check it under CSS 3 yourself.
I also just found out that <center> is not a valid entity in XHTML, and I don’t know how to go about centering something another way, so I just left a couple pages with a few errors. Shouldn’t be too bad.
In any event, I spent quite a while on the colour scheme for the site, so I do hope you enjoy it!
