Category Archives: Reality Distortion Field

Apple and Mac related stuff.

Reality Distortion Field

Operation Chokehold

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Mike_FnT_choke_hold

Fake Steve Jobs is angry at AT&T‘s poor network performance and all their excuses. Dropped calls, falling back to EDGE, slow data rates, poor voice quality, etc. So he called for Operation Chokehold through his blog:

Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

Since this post, there has been a lot of discussion about it: on the blog, on the web in general, even on Twitter. Everyone is all over it.

This all started as a joke and now sort of took a life on its own. The Facebook page has about 2000 fans. The Facebook page against it only 22 as of this writing.

According to latest estimates by The MKX® Department of Cyber-Risk Assessment, nothing will come out of this. But following all the commotion is kind of fun. Will you join Operation Chokehold?

Reality Distortion Field

John Siracusa reviews Mac OS X 10.6

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snow_leopard_ars-thumb-640xauto-8029Every time there is a new major Mac OS X release, John Siracusa of the excellent technology website Ars Technica releases a long and detailed review. And the one for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard one has arrived. I post about it here because I think a del.icio.us link on the sidebar is not enough.

John Siracusa has been writing these reviews since Mac OS X DP2 (December 1999) and they are excellent, offering a well written detailed view into the internals and externals of Mac OS X. For me it’s a fascinating read. For you, I don’t know… this is probably attractive only for the technical mind. Mom, don’t read this.

Reality Distortion Field

No longer missing iPhone features

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In June of 2007 I wrote a post titled “Seemingly obvious software features missing from the iPhone“.

Today, iPhone OS 3.0 will be available and the iPhone 3G S is shipping, so I thought it’d be interesting to see how things stand now.

Below is the original list, with the items that are now covered striked through:

  • Video recording
  • Voice-note recording
  • VoIP (like Skype) functionality
  • .Mac syncing
  • Copy/Paste
  • Ringtones from your music
  • Synchronization thrugh WiFi or Bluetooth (done through MobileMe)
  • Keychain (password storing)
  • Objective C/ Cocoa SDK
  • Dashboard/Widget support (outside of Safari)
  • iChat (through 3rd party applications)
  • A2DP
  • Voice dialing
  • Games
  • Slot for memory cards
  • Spotlight
  • Java
  • Flash
  • MMS
  • Geolocation
  • eBooks
  • Built in RSS Reader (through 3rd party applications)
  • SSH ((through 3rd party applications – client only)
  • Bonjour iTunes sharing
  • Printing support (through 3rd party applications)
  • Video teleconferencing
Almost everything is covered now. What do you think the new list should contain? Here’s a recent article with 25 still-missing features.
Democracy, Reality Distortion Field, Tech

Browser comparison

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Safari 4 just came out of beta. I gave it a try at my work computer (a Windows XP machine) just to go back to Chrome shortly after. Now I’m back with Safari. The main reason? Text rendering. See, in Safari you can configure the browser to render its text like Mac OS X does. In my opinion, text looks a lot better in Mac OS X than it does in Windows. Sure, it’s a matter of taste; my excellent taste versus other people’s terrible taste.

To illustrate my point, I took a screenshot of the Facebook homepage. Why? Because it shows text in the English, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabet. You’ll see how Safari’s text looks much better. From left to right: Apple Safari 4, Google Chrome 2.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0,and MS Internet Explorer 7.0:

browser-comparison
Web browser comparison on Windows XP: Safari 4, Google Chrome 2.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, and MS Internet Explorer 7.0 (click to zoom)

What do you think? Which one do you like better?

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Reality Distortion Field, Today's quote

Today’s quote: Steve Wozniak

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wozdwts-02

After hearing that judge Bruno Tonioli of Dancing with the Stars said: “It was like watching a Teletubby going mad in a gay pride parade”.

 

I think it should be noted that Teletubbies aired for 5 years, had 365 episodes, and a #1 music single! I’d take that as a compliment.

You can watch Woz dancing like a Teletubby going mad in a gay pride parade in out previous post. Or just go vote for him.

Reality Distortion Field

Safari 4 beta

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The good people at Apple released Safari 4 beta yesterday. For those not in the know, Safari is Apple‘s web browser. According to the traffic analysis for The MKX® (more on that sometime next month), a large amount of readers are still using Internet Explorer.

At home, I’ve been using Safari for years. Before that I used Camino. At work, I had been using Firefox, but switched to Google Chrome a few months ago and liked it very much. Now I’m giving the new Safari 4 a spin both at home and at work. Call me a browser slut if you’d like, I’ve been known to use iCab and the now free Omniweb in the past, and even IE for Mac back in the Mac OS 8 days.

I like it so far. For example, on Windows I can make the fonts look like they do on the Mac: much better – but perhaps a personal preference… from someone with better taste. I also like the new tabs (heavily borrowed from Chrome) and the fact that it will sync my bookmarks with my home computers and iPhone through my MobileMe account.

You can download it and test it here.

Reality Distortion Field

MobileMe does not like Chrome (updated)

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MobileMe + Chrome

Every year I struggle with the decision of whether to renew MobileMe (formerly .Mac, formerly iTools) or not. This year, for the first time, it’s a no brainer: The family pack covers myself, my two brothers, and my parents for a total of 8 Macs and 4 iPhones.

So I’ll pay. But it won’t be all happiness: I’ve been using Google’s new and excellent browser Chrome at work for months now. It’s stable, lightweight, simple, and fast. All of a sudden, MobileMe stopped working on Chrome. There is an interesting discussion on the topic at Apple’s Support Discussions. In summary, MobileMe started doing a browser check and it breaks if Chrome is the browser. If you fake the user-agent string, MobileMe works just fine.

C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-en) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1″

This is very annoying because it proves that there is no technical reason (that anyone outside of Apple can gather) for MobileMe not working on Chrome. A big part of MobileMe is the “Cloud” part: You *should* be able to access it from any standards compliant browser. A big problem if it doesn’t work, especially for paid for service!

We will see how this pans out.

Update 1/13/2009: The shortcut above did not work for me, but I saw this today here and it did the job: MobileMe works in Google Chrome. Too bad you have to fake Google Chome’s identity. Instructions: create a shortcut to Google Chrome, right click on it and select Properties. Modify the target string to look like the one below, but substitute “mkirsch” with your user name. Hopefully it works for you as well.

“C:\Documents and Settings\mkirsch\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”  –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19″

Update 1/13/2009: Looks like it’s fixed! Today I noticed that if you go to http://me.com in Google Chrome, you are shown the “Unsupported browser” screen. You can choose to ignore it and you are taken to full MobileMe. Just in time for my renewal :).