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iTunes music store is being restocked

Looks like Apple pulled more than just the NBC content from iTunes this evening.  Let’s hope they’re just restocking for the holidays.

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comment on this | posted in: Mac Troubleshooting

Sometimes bugs are cool

Coolest bug I’ve seen in a while: “Infinite Desktop.”

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(2) comments | posted in: Mac Troubleshooting

Mobile scrobbling!

At long last, Sam Steele’s MobileScrobbler iPhone app has been released via Installer.app.  This is the first AudioScrobbler / Last.FM social music client.  As you listen to music on your iPhone or iPod Touch, MobileScrobbler sends the title, artist, and album to the Last.fm website. Last.fm uses this information to suggest new music, new friends, concerts, and events based on the music you listen to.

* Automatically submits songs as you listen to them
* Works over EDGE or Wifi
* Queues songs when you’re in an area with no signal
* Runs as a native application, not inside Safari
* Source code available under GNU General Public License version 2

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comment on this | posted in: iPhone iPod News

Better attachment compatibility

Apple has improved the compatibility of Leopard’s Mail.app messages in one key way- you can now truly attach files instead of embedding.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been annoyed with the process of trying to get an attachment to precisely go at the very end of a message.

This is important because Microsoft Outlook often does not display inline attachments in a meaningful manner.  Most users won’t even see them and if they do, it’s probably because the Microsoft Exchange server broke the inline attachment and signature out of your email and made them both attachments.  Ugh.
 
Poster Allen Hancock on MacOSXHints calls it “Send ‘real’ attachments in Mail messages.”

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The option is located on the “Edit” menu under the “Attachments” option.

comment on this | posted in: Mac News

Crazy?

I know I’ve seen mobiletorrent mentioned before, but a BitTorrent Client for iPhone is just crazy.

From the Google Code page:

Warning

The use of BitTorrent is heavily network intensive and may breach the terms of your cellphone contract if used over EDGE, not to mention possibly incurring phenomenal cost if not on an unlimited data plan. Thus, this application (when complete) will not permit Torrents to download if the iPhone is not connected to the internet over Wifi.

comment on this | posted in: iPhone News

Custom iPhone CSS signatures on TUAW.com

Tuaw.Com iPhone Sig Post

View this article on TUAW.

This article references “Set a custom css signature on your iPhone

Original article content:

Here’s a great how-to that I’ve been meaning to post for a while. Blogger David F. Bills posted a tutorial for adding custom CSS signatures to your iPhone email defaults. The process involves copying over your preferences file and adding the CSS code to the SignatureKey preference.

This gets very interesting when Bills shows you how to add a custom image to your signature. You actually have to encode the image directly so it arrives with your message. Otherwise, spam blockers may block the image download if you just use an HTML link.

It’s a really easy to follow method and I had very little trouble getting it set up to include the signature shown here. My biggest obstacle came from my tendency to paste everything in TextEdit. For this project, PropertyListEditor works better and more reliably due to the length of the pasted key.

comment on this | posted in: Press

Safari is coming of age

Finally, the WebKit team has added support for Enhanced Rich Text Editing in version 3.  One less reason to fireup ‘ole clunky Mac Firefox. 

Check it out- just click the text and editing controls appear.

comment on this | posted in: Mac News Webdev

CrashPlan engine notes

The good folks at Code42 have made some changes to the way that CrashPlan is loaded and controlled at the system level.  After a bit of digging, I’ve got it figured out. 

They are now using launchd to control the engine.  So at boot, the following is executed by kernel_task (with root perms):

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

This means that launchd is constantly monitoring the process to make sure that it is running.  Should make the software even more reliable.

To unload the software as a mere mortal, I issued:

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

The -w flag adds the “disabled” key from to plist to keep launchd from immediately relaunching the process.

All loaded processes can be listed per user and sudo can be adding to list the system-level processes.

launchctl list

My final crontab:

30 7 * * * root launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
30 9 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
30 23 * * * root launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

comment on this | posted in: Mac Troubleshooting Unix

A few more leopard icons revealed

Usingmac.com reveals a few more more of the gianornous Leopard icons.  Very cool-

comment on this | posted in: Mac News

iPhone 1.1.2 jailbreak works

So the iPhone 1.1.2 jailbreak indeed works.  Make sure you have 45 minutes or so to complete the current hack. Steps include:

1. Installing the Octohack from Installer.app
2. Updating to 1.1.2 in iTunes
3. Downloading the 1.1.2 jailbreak
4. Installing the readline library
5. Running jailbreak.jar
6. Rebooting!

The only tricky part was installing the readline library.  It isn’t mentioned in any of the instructions and if you don’t do this, the hack fails without any worthwhile error.

Download the zip here.  You need to copy:

libreadline.5.2.dylib

to:

/opt/local/lib

Then, proceed with launching jailbreak.jar.  After some waiting, you will be ready to reboot, reboot and run with it.

comment on this | posted in: iPhone News
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