The Indigestible

…don’t bother jail­break­ing it. No value added, and quite a lot of the JB apps just flat don’t work on it. It’s far too dif­fi­cult to change the root pass­word, too. I ended up say­ing to hell with it and restoring.

Which was also an exer­cise in oy gevalt. Sure, every­thing gets backed up — except what­ever music, videos and iBooks you might have had on it — you have to put them back on by hand. Gigantic pain in the ass.

For rea­sons a lit­tle too abstruse to go into here, I recently ended up in pos­ses­sion of a 16 GB wifi iPad. It was hardly planned, and I’ve only had it since Wednesday, but I thought I’d share my take on it.

For starters, yes, it’s basi­cally a big iPhone or iTouch. That’s been the biggest deri­sive com­ment levied against the iPad, but if you’ve ever actu­ally used an iPhone, you can see right away what’s wrong with it as a crit­i­cism. The iPhone is not a cel­lu­lar phone and it’s not a smart­phone. It’s a pocket com­puter with GPS, a com­pass, a tri­ax­ial accelerom­e­ter and two dif­fer­ent kinds of wire­less net­work­ing (three if you include tele­phony, four if you count SMS/​MMS). About the only thing you can’t do with an iPhone is print from it directly or con­nect USB devices such as a DVD or exter­nal hard drive.
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Because that’s cur­rently my net­work access point.

Spirit (re-)jailbroke 3.1.3, and Cydia and Rock remem­bered all the JB apps I’d installed — even the for-​​pay ones — which is spec­tac­u­larly nice, thank you very much; and benm​.at pro­vided a work­ing AT&T teth­er­ing hack. (Which I don’t think you need to JB for, but I did any­way, cause that’s how I roll, mah niggaz.)

On the upside, I can con­nect pretty much any­where now, even if my tor­rents are func­tional only on an as-​​needed basis. Also, I got Categories back, because an iPhone with­out fold­ers is just plain tarded.

On the down­side, my cable provider’s net access is hosed — again — so with­out my 3G cov­er­age,* I’d be totally dark right now. My teth­ered iPhone is slow, but Tango Foxtrot. 60K/​sec is far supe­rior to 0K/​sec.

Look. Tin cans and string are a lot of fun when you’re six. I expect a bit bet­ter from an ISP that I’m pay­ing $160 a month for. I think I’ve just about had it with NPG.

I think I’m okay. It seems that I wasn’t the only gmail user to have some account-​​cracking issues a while back, but I sup­pose time will be the real test on this one. If you start get­ting mys­te­ri­ous ran­dom links to obscure porn sites or Canadian phar­ma­cies from me, please let me know right away. Especially if it’s porn. (Be sure to write down the URL and send it along. For, you know, more thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion. Because we all know how rare porn is on the inter­net. That’s why so many men spend so much time, every day … inves­ti­gat­ing it.)

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* On an unlim­ited data plan I’m pay­ing for, AT&T, so why the flam­ing hell are we (the US) the only major indus­tri­al­ized nation that doesn’t have iPhone teth­er­ing? Hmm? Can’t fig­ure out how to meter it? Here’s a hint for you. Look up the def­i­n­i­tion of unlim­ited some­time. Fuckwads.

You wanna know what makes teen boys into crack­ers and phreaks? Bullshit rules like this. That’s what.

I have an Xbox 360, which I occa­sion­ally use to play games in much the same way that I use my iPhone to occa­sion­ally make phone calls. Most of the rest of the time, I’m using the devices for some­thing else. In the case of the iPhone, it’s a portable enter­tain­ment cen­ter and a remark­ably pow­er­ful micro-​​computer; in the case of the Xbox, it’s a DVD and gen­eral media player.

I also have a Mac Mini, and it’s wire­lessly con­nected to my home net­work. This means that, in the­ory, the Mini and the Xbox can talk to each other.
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Just check­ing to see if this works from iPhone. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Lots of com­plaints about how iPad doesn’t mul­ti­task any more than iPhone 3GS.

Okay, so, well. My machine is jail­bro­ken, and has a mul­ti­tasker in it. It’s about 5% more con­ve­nient than it used to be. If I unin­istalled the mul­ti­tasker, frankly, I’d barely notice. I use Orbit almost every time I trig­ger my phone. Multitasker? Hardly ever.

What things, pre­cisely, do you detrac­tors want to mul­ti­task on iPhone, or on iPad, that you think you’ll be miss­ing? Endgadget was whin­ing about how they want to play videos while IMing. That is not mul­ti­task­ing; that is attention-​​switching.

What mul­ti­task­ing things do you do now, with a desk­top sys­tem, that you think you need to have on iPhone, with its lit­tle screen (video and IM on the same 320×240? Come on), or that you believe you’ll be miss­ing on iPad?

Play your cards. Show your faces. Put up, or shut up.

A devel­oper known as “Briask” cre­ated a Joomla! mod­ule called ImageSlideShow, which works nicely, except that it insists on insert­ing an alpha fade effect between images, even if you’ve set the tran­si­tion delay to 0.

This means that if (for instance) you’re using one of those Cisco flat panel-​​Web enabled dis­plays, the image tran­si­tions can really start to chug, because the CPU can’t han­dle the transitions.

I man­aged to mod the JavaScript on it, so now it won’t do that any more.

The devel­oper indi­cated he would put that on his to-​​do list for the next revi­sion — but he said so back in November of 2008. So I’m not hold­ing my breath.

Here’s the mod­ded ver­sion. It’s prob­a­bly an inel­e­gant hack, but WTF. It works.

mod_​briaskISS

I have both — FFox 3.5.6 and OSX.6.2 — and just now, when I tried to open a tab in FFox, my sys­tem logged me out and forced a re-​​login.

Never, ever hap­pened before, with any browser, on any OSX release.

Is this part of the rumor I’ve heard that FFox 3.5.6 is more or less lethally unstable?

Methinks I’ll switch back to Safari, or go to Opera, for a while. Just in case.

And, heh heh, no I don’t think I’ll be putting Fennec on my iPhone any time soon either, thanks.

They’ve had it with MS. Their Dell PC, six years old, can’t be upgraded to Win7. Even if it could, they’d have to back up, for­mat and rein­stall. Which, for the record, is a shitty stu­pid thing on Microsoft’s part. My upgrade curve from OS9 to OSX did not involve a sin­gle for­mat of the HD. At all. And that was nearly ten years ago, when Apple was trail­blaz­ing. MS has no excuse for this. None.

I was argu­ing for Ubuntu, but Mac won out in the end. The superb pric­ing on the Mini is part of what did it, but I’ve been hack­ing code longer than my nieces have even been alive, and that may have been a fac­tor as well. It was Linux or Mac, ulti­mately; they’re more or less totally dis­gusted with Redmond.

I did agi­tate for Ubuntu, but in the end, Apple won out.

Because, you know, it works. It just fuck­ing works.

Thanks, Bill, for prov­ing with Windows 7 what I’ve been say­ing for years. Now focus your com­pany on XBox, Windows Mobile, and Microsoft Foundry. You’re excel­lent there. Keep it up. Cede the desk­top to your betters.

You could spend umpteen skil­lion hours deal­ing with Adobe, or you could give this a shot.

I have all the sys­tem require­ments in place. Mac OSX.4.11 or later. Plenty of RAM. Dual core fast box, even if it’s not Intel, but the Motorola chipset.

So when I try to run the Flash CS4 installer, it just hangs. I get a blank win­dow say­ing “Installer Alert”, but no con­trols, no mes­sage, nothing.

What to do?

Well, after 30 min­utes lis­ten­ing to on-​​hold music from Adobe’s tech sup­port, and another fif­teen min­utes telling the rep I will not cre­ate a new user account just for CS4, and will absolutely not for­mat my hard drive for their damn asi­nine vec­tor ani­ma­tion engine, I found out what it was, sort of.
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In case you ever need to do it your­self. It’s stu­pidly easy.

Basically it involves chang­ing the word “approved” in the loca­tion bar to “spam”, select­ing the com­ment you want to unspam, and click­ing approve. You don’t need Akismet, and you don’t need to hack your data­base. Nice.