iPhone 2.1 update and a cool new feature I noticed
With my iPhone woes (mainly that I have/had shitty signal at my house), I updated my iPhone to firmware 2.1 and boy has there been some significant changes:
The UI is much faster, the keyboard rarely--if ever--lagging and I've noticed that most applications load much faster and are way less lagging. Plus, my signal strength is a lot (I'm talking 2-3 bars worth) better. Overall, it's a significant improvement and I haven't found anything to complain about.
But one thing I noticed that was really cool was the viewing of multiple albums at a time. As shown in my picture, you can see I was listening to a bunch of Girl Talk and as I was viewing all of the songs by Girl Talk each song has the album then the artist underneath it. I don't know why, but I think this is awesome (especially for someone like me who might just make a random playlist of songs or maybe for those using the new Genius playlist). This same type of thing happens in a playlist (see the link at the end of the post).
Just wanted to contribute to the massive amounts of rants and raves for the 2.1 software.
The Alkaline Trio, Wizard World Chicago, and Wall-E
This weekend was pretty much 100% bad ass: I attended an Alkaline Trio concert, had the privilege of going to Wizard World Chicago and meeting Brian Michael Bendis (the whole reason for going to the ordeal) along with doing some other awesome stuff throughout the whole convention, and I saw Wall-E with Dallas.
Sweet right? Well, let me elaborate:
Friday:
I worked my normal schedule until 5pm and met a friend of mine to head to Yesterdog. One hot dog was all I needed from that landmark place in Grand Rapids to be ready to go see The Alkaline Trio. Come 7pm, we were let in the doors of the show and stood around for about a half an hour just goofing around until The Fashion made their way to the stage. They were a psudo-pop-punk band with a strange techno feel that was neither good nor bad, but still a listen. They played a 35-minute set and took off leading straight into the band Bayside. They too had an iffy sound, something along the lines of pop-punk, but a tad slower. My friend Tori was very into them, yet they didn't really hit for me (like a lot of pop-punk bands usually do, if only for a moment). They finished their 45-minute set and after a very boring 35 minute wait, The Alkaline Trio made their way to the stage. Let me tell you, it was fucking incredible. Song after song of perfection and amazing Alkaline Trio-goodness ensued for a little over an hour. They played songs from their last two albums, Crimson, Good Mourning (more notably: "This Could Be Love", "Mercy Me", "Time To Waste" and "This Could Be Love"), a few new songs from their album and finished their encore with "Radio" from their album Maybe I'll Catch Fire. For any Alkaline Trio, such as myself, it was seriously amazing (especially "This Could Be Love." Boy do I love that song).
Despite being tired, I ended up staying up until 2:30am talking about comics with my buddy Jeff Lanning once I got back from the concert.
An AppleScript to turn the brightness of your laptop display on/off
Yesterday at work, Eric was asking me if I knew of a way to immediately make the screen of his MacBook go straight to off (0 brightness). The only way I could think of doing such a thing was just holding down the button to dim the brightness or perhaps via AppleScript. He, of course, didn't want to just hold down the brightness key, and asked me to write an AppleScript to be triggered via QuickSilver to turn the brightness off and then back on.
And of course, there was a way to do it via AppleScript.
So, after much searching and reading on various sites (I forget them all or I would definitely credit them) here is what I got:
Now, what the code here does is simply this:
First, it checks to see if "TextEdit" is open, sets a boolean accordingly, then checks to see if the logfile "brightness--.txt" exists in your Documents folder and sets another boolean accordingly. Next, it opens System Preferences and opens the Displays pane. Using very dirty code, it grabs the current brightness level and stores it into 'brightness'. It checks to see if 'brightness' is over 0 then it sets your display brightness to 0 and follows that by storing 'brightness' into the logfile "brightness--.txt". But if your brightness is at 0, then it opens up "brightness--.txt" and reads the value it previously had stored and sets your display to that value.
This all of course assumes that you've used this script when your display was on or had a brightness greater than 0. But other than that works pretty well.
In case you didn't want to create the script/application, I've bundled a .scpt and .app of this script into a zip file which can be downloaded by following this link:
brightnesskiller.app & brightnesskiller.scpt
Feel free to modify it and such so long as you give me some kind of credit in the code (I leave a claiming comment at the top). I hope someone finds some use out of it.
--Edit: 06/04/2008 3:45PM--
Found an error with my original code. Made a small update. Check the source ^^ :)
Some random stuff (dreamhost promo codes?! OMG!)
Well, StatusTweet is coming along. I'm calling it alpha .15. No help pages, e-mail updates forgot passwords yet, but we're progressing. Oh, and we have no design, but HTML colors + positioning = my friend! We may start some private beta soon for those who are interested in connecting facebook and twitter some more.... more info soon, I promise.
On separate, but related note, we've moved hosting from a friend's Dreamhost account to our own server (yay!). I've worked out with some friends to host a few sites on our server and yea. My new pet project may be a toilet usage tracking site... not sure if anyone would be into using the service, but, because I'm no web genius I'd be using the amazingness of Twitter to help with texting and such... I think it could be fun. I know I'd use it. :)
Speaking of Dreamhost, I have some cool promo codes:
MIKERAPIN1 - this will get you $50 off your price, one (1) MORE free domain name on top of the free one you get for signing up.
MIKERAPIN2 - This will get you just $50 off if you don't need the extra free domain.
MIKERAPIN3 - This baby will get you $50 off PLUS a free unique IP address.
MIKERAPIN4 - this will get you $50 off your price, two (2) MORE free domain name on top of the free one you get for signing up.
MIKERAPIN5 - this will get you $50 off your price, three (3) MORE free domain name on top of the free one you get for signing up.
How cool, right? Dreamhost promo codes... who'd have thought?
Anyways, for signing up, I got a free domian... DestroyTheCyb.org. Nothing cool yet except a sweet image I 'borrowed' from io9.com and a gif from a google search... it's kind of fun though, right?
StatusTweet, slowly progressing
Just in case anyone was wondering, the site is progressing.. like molasses.
I've been working on the site a bit every day and getting... well, somewhere. I just implemented some new Ajax (Nick wrote some Ajax of his own, but I wanted to try MooTools :/ ).
We've had a layout change since I last blogged about the site and it looks pretty damn sweet. All thanks goes to Rob Brogan and his random design ideas.
To see the site in 'action' head over to my dummy twitter user niparekim. Mind you, all of my blunders and illogical mishaps have been handled on that user, so repeats of updates and such are in there.
And yea. I'll be calling this alpha .07 until I start to really fix things.
Another twitter site
Yes guys and gals, I'm working on a new site that works with twitter. I got the idea last weekend from Rob Brogan via twitter and Nick Nelson and I decided to make it happen.
What is it you ask? Well, first, check out http://www.twitter.com/niparekim and guess....
Did you go? I figured you didn't. If you did, you would have been able to guess the site's basic functionality: to post specific Facebook friends' statuses to twitter. How? Well, it's pretty simple, but until the site really launches and gets out of what I call "alpha 0.2", I won't reveal much more... Mind you, this could be expanded on greatly, given Facebook's massive amounts of information...
Let me know if you want to be an alpha/beta tester. I may not get you into this thing right away (I just got things working with twitter last night), but maybe in the very near future. Really, I could use more than the 2 other helper users (Rob Brogan and Nick Nelson) given that I need some people with massive amounts of friends on Facebook (and people who aren't on my network on Facebook) to try to see how angry my database can get at me. hehe
-Mike
Mike Rapin’s Guide to Web Searching via Quicksilver
So, there I was in my chemistry lecture, too lazy to reach into my backpack on the floor and pull out my calculator to solve a simple problem written on the board by my professor (who is a bad ass, seriously):
'Find the square root of 2.3x10^-18'
Lo and behold, I was on my beautiful MacBook, and BOOM I popped open Quicksilver (Ctrl + Space). "Ha!" I thought, "Square roots can be solved by the calculator plug-in I have!" So, I typed =sqrt(2.3*10^-18) in, hit enter and the Quicksilver plug-in did its job. I was satisfied with the answer (.00000000151657508881 ~= 1.5x10^-9). But it was at that moment that my friend sitting next to me, who is a Windows/Linux user but wants a Mac really bad yet can't afford one, said this to me:
"Dude, in Launchy, calculates on the fly... why doesn't Quicksilver do that?"
And I replied, "Damn I don't know... I know Spotlight does."
The conversation ended there as the lecture continued, but I was baffled as to why Quicksilver couldn't actively update calculations... I was searching and searching on Google when I came across this guide to Quicksilver on the MacRumors.com.
Now, this article didn't answer any of my questions outside of explaining that ascii math notation (ex. sqrt(16) or 10^8) work in Quicksilver's calculator function, but what drew my eye and made me forget about the whole calculator deal was the part about web searching.
MC Chris owns
... I wanna go to an MC Chris show!
Anyone get that?
Well, given that my last post was all hippie-liberal and such, I'll move onto some random and fun stuff:
I love my hacked iPod. Seriously. It. Is. Awesome. If you have an iPod touch or an iPhone and you haven't hacked it, you really do need to to get the most out of your gadget or whatever you want to call it. And yea.
Cool stuff with Leopard. If you're into customizing your OS in a somewhat-easy-but-really-cool-looking-after-you-do-it way, follow this link. It makes Stacks prettier.
What else... hm... I saw this before it was on Digg--Super Mario Galaxy: 11 out of 10. Hells yes.
More to come soon I'm sure.
-Mike (aka Gambit)
A bit on my experience with a hacked iPod touch
So, let's see here... I got my iPod the day before it was officially released (9/27/07) and I hacked my iPod... I don't recall. Somewhere around early to mid-October, a few days before iJailbreak was released. But since then here's what I know has worked for me and what I currently use:
Working:
Installer (duh)
All of the iPhone apps (Mail, Google Maps, Weather, etc.)
Summerboard (plus all of the themes even if they are missing icons for some apps)
iToDoList
All of Erica Sadun's apps except Widgets which was very buggy for all widgets I tried (simple and complicated)
NES minus the sluggishness when multiple sprites on screen or multiple movements are occurring, but having NES games still rocks
All of the Mobile- apps
Light
Sketches
Ants
Apollo
FireflyMediaServer
Mines
Tapp
iCountDown
iSplit
Vista
SendSong
iBlackJack
Tiff Exploit Fix
Taskbar Notifier
Kind of working:
Customize (I could launch the app, but couldn't change anything...)
Stack (It works, but I wasn't able to customize the stack(s) and also my 'dock' was missing an icon as the stack took up to spots)
Services (Bluetooth?)
VNSea (everything connects, but I get a jarbled screen on my MacBook and Windows XP desktop)
Not working:
weDict (I tried multiple dictionaries with no success)
Colloquy (No idea why this won't work, even after multiple installs)
What I'm currently using: (Straight from Installer.app)
Installer (duh)
iBlackjack
NES
VNSea
MobileFinder
MobileToDoList
Sketches
CommunitySources
iApp-a-Day
BSD Subsystem
MobilTerminal
Summerboard
Tiff Exploit Fix
Erica's Ported Utils
Erica's Utilities
Taskbar Notifier
And yea. If you're looking to jailbreak your iPod Touch, look no further than http://jailbreakme.com/ which, if you navigate there with your iPod Touch, will jailbreak your iPod Touch with one click on and on top of that, install Installer.app and fix the TIFF exploit in Safari which allows for this whole install to occur. Awesome right?
Anyways, if you have any questions I am more than willing to answer them.
-Mike
A new beginning
Howdy kids!
I've decided to move over to WordPress from Blogger. Why? Well, because I can customize the crap out of everything! I mean, I love Google and all, but I need to make my site for me.
Other than that, plan on seeing a ton of cool updates dealing with Apple related stuff and cool techie/geek news, etc.
-Mike (aka Gambit)
