www.gisvold.co.uk - Apple

Interesting tip for iPhone Internet tethering

tor — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:17:20 +0000

Just so set the scene :

- I have a iPhone 4 (Vodafone UK)

- And I have a Boingo mobile phone subscription on it (around £4/month)

I am currently sitting outside Starbucks - on my MacBook - connected to the Internet using tethering from the MacBook to the iPhone.

It looks remarkably like I can use the Boingo subscription on my iPhone to connect my MacBook to the Internet through the iPhones wireless (ie Starbucks) wifi netowrk.

Seriously flawed legal system

tor — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:17:43 +0000

If this story is even remotely true - then it is about taking a company to court over a product that noone has had for more than week - so in other words you will not have given the manufacturers any chance to remedy any such problems.

Seriously wrong regardless of who the company is.

Law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has already targeted the iPhone 4 in a potential class-action lawsuit against Apple. The firm is currently seeking out iPhone owners who have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls, and weak signals.
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SoftRaid 4.0 releases

tor — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:47:28 +0000

After a (very long) wait SoftRaid 4.0 has been released into the wild :

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Apple worth more than Microsoft. Wow.

tor — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:31:05 +0000

This is incredible to anyone that has followed Apple since the beginning :

Apple passes Microsoft's stock market cap ...
Apple passed a symbolic milestone today as its market cap passed Microsoft's for the first time. Beginning in the morning, the total value of Apple's shares was higher, reaching $225.7 billion at 3PM Wednesday afternoon where Microsoft had dropped to $223.4 billion. The two companies' share prices have headed in opposite directions since the year began, with Apple growing more than 17 percent while Microsoft's has dropped by an almost identical ratio

[From MacNN | Apple, iPod, Mac news @ The Macintosh News Network]

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Kindle for Mac

tor — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:44:36 +0000

And the Kindle reader for the Mac is out in the wild:

(Click for larger)

Read Kindle Books on Your Mac
Get the best reading experience available on your Mac. No Kindle required
Access your Kindle books even if you don't have your Kindle with you
Automatically synchronizes your last page read and annotations between devices with Whispersync
Create bookmarks and view the annotations you created on your Kindle
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Energizer battery charger contains backdoor? REALLY?

tor — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:17:21 +0000

If this is true then this is yet another good reason to use Macs/

WHAT? Un-freaking-believable! Energizer battery charger contains backdoor
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Postbox new beta

tor — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:44:35 +0000

My default email program was just upgraded :

About the Postbox 1.1.2 BETA
Submitted Mar 05 by Sherman Dickman
A new BETA version of Postbox is available for testing which contains a number of improvements and bug fixes for Windows and Mac. Additionally, Postbox now works with Things and OmniFocus to make you even more productive!

To get started, please download and install the Postbox 1.1.2 BETA, and for Mac users, the most recent version of Things (1.2.11) or OmniFocus (1.7.5).

[From Postbox Support : About the Postbox 1.1.2 BETA ]

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Am I the only one to see the irony in this

tor — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:05:23 +0000

....eeehhhh - no price in the UK so far..

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SoftRAID - the wait

tor — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:56:24 +0000

My favourite safety/disk utility - SoftRaid does not work with Snow Leopard OsX - and the new release has been "in the works" since early 2009.

But there is hope - as their website has the following new announcement :

The SoftRAID 4.0 official release is near. We expect sometime in late January to mid February 2010. Upgrades from SoftRAID 3.x will cost $69. All customers who purchased after January 1, 2009, are eligible for a free upgrade to SoftRAID 4.0.
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Another infected PC

tor — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 10:23:07 +0000

And yet one more time I'm sitting here with someones laptop (running Windows) that has been so infected that the owner is no longer able to ignore the warnings.

It does make me realise how easy a life we Mac people have.

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Weather station

tor — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:55:40 +0000

My main Christmas gift from the family was a Weather station - and decent Mac software for it.

So this is currently online from a few places on the Internet, and of course available from a webpage inside the house (and on my chumby)

The Lightsoft Weather Centre - or LWC as it's affectionately known is the key to getting this up and running on a Mac under OsX, and it looks like this :

(Click for larger image)
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Apple HiFi - how to repair

tor — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:37:50 +0000

It is not exactly obvious how to take a Apple HiFi apart - but after hunting around I found this source :

How to dismantle / open an iPod HiFi

UPDATED 28 August 2008

As I was relaxing on the sofa last night, I became aware of the general silence in the room. For the ordinary guy this might not mean anything, but when you are sharing the room with a 10 month old who’s just started walking, silence is usually a fair indication of a misdemeanor being committed. In this case, the little darling had pulled the cover of the front of my iPod HiFi and was busy prodding the middle of the speaker cone. Result: one deformed speaker cone, and one angry daddy.
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solargorilla and powergorilla - my first outing

tor — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:13:59 +0000

I got the combination powergorilla and Solargorilla for my birthday - as a result of trying to charge way too many things when we went camping in Switzerland this year, and I managed to both deplete it fully during a scout event this weekend, and then charge it again.

But back to basics :

(Click for larger)

The device on the left is the Powergorilla - basically a big battery with 3 connectors

- USB out for charging devices such as the iPhone
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Reconstructing an Apple II+ as a project

tor — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:52:16 +0000

Wow - I used to love my Apple II, and have great memories of it and it's 6502 CPU. SO I may just have to read the rest of this story:

Apple2fpga: Reconstructing an Apple II+ on an FPGA
Stephen A. Edwards
Columbia University
As a Christmas present to myself in 2007, I implemented an 1980s-era Apple II+ in VHDL to run on an Altera DE2 FPGA board. The point, aside from entertainment, was to illustrate the power (or rather, low power) of modern FPGAs. Put another way, what made Steve Jobs his first million can now be a class project for my 4840 embedded systems class.
What is an Apple II?
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Virex for the Mac

tor — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:32:05 +0000

I installed McAfee Virex for OsX on my laptop yesterday - and it froze this morning, something that continued through 2 restarts. As a matter of fact it seemed to freeze totally for period of approximately 2 minutes, then I got access to menues for 5-10 seconds, before it froze up again - while it left the syslog full of messages like this.

May 8 09:31:17 edsa-portables-macbook com.mcafee.virusscan.ScanManager[88]: kextload: /usr/local/vscanx/Extensions/Virex.kext/ loaded successfully

May 8 09:31:23 edsa-portables-macbook kernel[0]: Virex Kext: "Loading Phoenix kernel extension"

May 8 09:31:23 edsa-portables-macbook kernel[0]: Virex Kext: "installShutdownCallback: installed shutdown callback"
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Car charger for MacBooks

tor — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:26:40 +0000

Interesting - at long last a car (12V) charger for MacBooks with a Magsafe connector :

HyperMac Car Charger
is proven to be the better way to power and recharge your MacBook on the road. Unlike DC-to-AC auto inverters, HyperMac Pure DC Only Car Charger does not produce dangerous high AC voltages. It is also twice as efficient, more compact and produces a cleaner power signal important for high fidelity performance.

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Zdnet tests Runcore Pro IV 2.5-inch SATA SSD in a MacBook

tor — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:19:53 +0000

This is interesting - a hands-on test on a series of Solid State disks that you can drop straight into a MacBook, in sizes up to 256GB.

And the results are impressive - but follow the link to read for yourself:

Building on the success of their netbook SSDs, Runcore has released its line of Pro IV 2.5-inch SATA SSDs for notebooks and they’re incredibly fast. As in life changing fast. The Pro IV SSD (pictured) comes in an aluminum enclosure the same dimensions as a standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm SATA drive, allowing you to drop it into any notebook computer – including any of the SATA MacBooks.
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My new email client - Postbox

tor — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:43:15 +0000

I've started using a new email client - Postbox :

Find everything from anywhere, really fast.
Postbox works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your email. We mean everything: every bit of text, every contact, address and link. Every picture, document and attachment. Itâ€™s all in the catalog and itâ€™s all searchable.
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Easy sensor graphs from Arduino

tor — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:14:51 +0000

Interesting use of Apple's graphing tools for display of measurement data:
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InlineControl, Control solutions for the Mac - and Arduino

tor — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:46:31 +0000

This is a interesting announcement - as it looks like it lets you control iTunes and FrontRow from either a RS232 serial port, or a IP address. This would in theory let me write a Arduino application to remote control these - and I can see lots of situations i where I could use the combination of the two! Just look at the diagram and replace the "control system" with a Arduino - letting you build remote control devices anywhere in the house!
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