Got an iPhone 3G the other day. Still in the process of playing and discovering what its capabilities are. But a bit disappointed. Learned a few things about it. Unlocks, jailbreaks, etc. The phone was locked and jailed at present.
Locked - can't use SIMs from other operators. Does not have the APN settings menu item. So, even if I can activate other SIM cards, I won't be able to use data services since I can't set the APN.
Jailed - cannot access the device. You can't even use it as a USB drive, like standard iPods. To install apps, you need to go through the App Store. To read a PDF, you need to email the PDF to an email account you then access via the phone.
Other limitations I've noticed:
- Does not support hidden SSID. I never broadcast my SSID, I am now, because of this device. It just cannot find my wifi if I hide the SSID. No problem once I started broadcasting it.
- No MMS and no video phone.
- No cut and paste capability.
- You cannot see the podcast show notes. At all. On a standard iPod, you just click on the center button a couple of times to see the show notes.
- Heavy use can really eat into battery life, but I suppose this is to be expected. I have not tried to see how long standby lasts. Was checking out the app store and doing some browsing, battery almost drained after a couple of hours.
- It only supports Apple video/audio formats + MP3.
- minimal capability to control your downloads, maybe you can but I have not found any method of cancelling downloads as yet. So, if you have several downloads queued up and you don't want the 1st one, you're stuck, you need to complete the 1st one before the 2nd one will start and so on.
- I was hoping for a way to control the podcasts, i.e. since you can download it, I thought I'd be able to manage and delete old ones. No such luck.
Good things about it:
- It has a speaker. I can now listen to music or podcasts without putting on an earphone.
- The screen has got a very good resolution.
- It feels great in your hand.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Friday, March 21, 2008
Directory Listing
In Windows, listings always start with directories, then files. In OS X, it's the other way around. No big deal, but at the start it can be a bit confusing, especially when one is so used to the way Windows is structured.
VPN
My wife is a workaholic and continues working after getting home. One of the thing she relies on to do this is the VPN connection into the office. I work with my wife in the same company. Our company uses the Nortel VPN client. This client is free for Windows machines and can be downloaded from a number of places in the net and also from the office intranet. For OS X, I can only find paid for versions on the net. I thought I'd try to find it from the office intranet, to my non-surprise, the intranet said that it has to be paid for. In any case, I have told my wife that I am not paying for this. So, that's the end of that.
In any case, MS Office Webmail works fine on Firefox, although it does not have the full functionality as when run from Windows IE (Mac IE 5 is the last version of IE for the Mac and does not work well with MS Office Webmail). This should be good enough.
This is the one thing so far which I could not replicate for my wife from the old PC.
In any case, MS Office Webmail works fine on Firefox, although it does not have the full functionality as when run from Windows IE (Mac IE 5 is the last version of IE for the Mac and does not work well with MS Office Webmail). This should be good enough.
This is the one thing so far which I could not replicate for my wife from the old PC.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Security Update 2008-002 v1.0 (Leopard)
I noticed today that there is a Security Update available
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate2008002v10leopard.html
downloaded it and executed it. Very smooth and fast. In less than 5 minutes, the security update was installed and machine restarted. I wonder if there is a concept of SP (Service Pack) for Macs and how long they would run.
I downloaded the Vista SP1 which was made available for download today. Tried to install it but got an 0x80070005 error. Went to the Microsoft website but could not find anything about it. Maybe I'll redownload the service pack at a later time and try again. Typical Microsoft, I suppose.
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate2008002v10leopard.html
downloaded it and executed it. Very smooth and fast. In less than 5 minutes, the security update was installed and machine restarted. I wonder if there is a concept of SP (Service Pack) for Macs and how long they would run.
I downloaded the Vista SP1 which was made available for download today. Tried to install it but got an 0x80070005 error. Went to the Microsoft website but could not find anything about it. Maybe I'll redownload the service pack at a later time and try again. Typical Microsoft, I suppose.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
DVDs
One of the 1st things I usually do when I get a new DVD drive for my PC is to find an RPC-1 firmware for it. I've never had any issue finding RPC-1 firmware. Today, I thought I'd do the same for the MacBook Pro. Guess what, I can't find any. After googling a bit, I find that people used to be able to use VLC to bypass the Mac's region code but somehow when the drives were upgraded, this VLC function was broken and has never been fixed since.
This website http://macnewbie.wordpress.com/2006/04/21/region-free-dvd-on-macbook-pro-all-you-need-is-a-windows-xp-machine/ indicated that the solution is to use an XP machine to stream the DVD to the Mac. This kinds of defeats the purpose of having a Mac.
Just goes to show, the Mac still has a long way to go to match what is available on XP. It is also very unfortunate that Apple would still try to keep region codes working on the Mac. In this day and age of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
I'll continue to check for whether people managed to find a solution to this but it looks like I have to get my wife to watch DVDs via the XP machine and not the Mac.
This website http://macnewbie.wordpress.com/2006/04/21/region-free-dvd-on-macbook-pro-all-you-need-is-a-windows-xp-machine/ indicated that the solution is to use an XP machine to stream the DVD to the Mac. This kinds of defeats the purpose of having a Mac.
Just goes to show, the Mac still has a long way to go to match what is available on XP. It is also very unfortunate that Apple would still try to keep region codes working on the Mac. In this day and age of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
I'll continue to check for whether people managed to find a solution to this but it looks like I have to get my wife to watch DVDs via the XP machine and not the Mac.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Time Machine
Officeworks is having a sale on WD 1TB external HDD. They are going for $299. But they are only USB2.0. After giving it some thought, I decided to take one home. It was not on display and you had to ask for it and the sales personnel had to go to the back of the shop to get it. And the sales people would not leave it with you to check out and think about. I was thinking about it for several minutes and the sales person just refused to let the HDD out of his sight. Anyway, I decided to take it in the end.
Once I took it home, I plugged it in and the WD software showed up. Time Machine then prompted me whether I wanted to use it as a backup drive, I said yes and it started backing up. It took a bit of time, apparently, almost 80GB of the disk is already in use (for a 200GB machine, that's a huge chunk, I suspect a big chunk of it must be iPhoto duplicates.)
The issue with Time Machine is that it just takes over the entire disk. What a waste if I have a 1TB disk serving no other purpose than as a backup. So, I decided to see if I can use it on my Windows desktop. I plugged it in and nothing shows up. I went into Disk Management and saw it but it is not assigned a drive letter and is marked as something called GPT, not NTFS or FAT32. No idea what that meant. I tried to assign a drive letter to it but none of the right click menu items are active.
After googling a bit, I decided to go into CMD and do a DISKPART -> CLEAN -> CREATE PRIMARY PARTITION. After that, I went back into Disk Management and was finally able to assign a drive letter to it. Of course, this meant that the Time Machine backup information is all gone!
I took the disk and plugged it back into the MacBook Pro, again, it sensed it and asked whether I wanted to use it as Time Machine. I decided not to but instead went into Disk Utilities and Partition. OS X has a relatively user-friendly Disk Partitioning software, but not as good a PartitionMagic. For one thing, I can't see how you can do non-destructive partitioning or partition resizing, unlike with PartitionMagic. It also has a limited set of File System support. It only support the Mac File Systems + FAT (not sure if FAT 32 but I assume it is).
I decided to go ahead and partition the disk, I partitioned 331.51GB as backup (roughly 1.5x the 200GB disk size in the MacBook Pro), not sure if this is the right size but I'll read more about how Time Machine works and what better recommendation there are for sizing the Time Machine disk. Until then this should do. The balance 600GB I formatted as Win32.
I have not tried the WD HDD in the Windows desktop PC since then. But I am assuming I should be able to use it for storing Windows files. If not, I'll worry about it when I get to that.
I wish Apple would provide a bit more information (through prompts/help/whatever) about how to size the Time Machine backup and then prompt you if you want to partition the disk if it is quite big (or advise you that you may not have enough or whatever). Then provide you with a utility which can do non-destructive re-partitioning of the disk.
Ah well, maybe some day. I can't really fault Apple here, at least the partitioning software and Time Machine came with OS X. PartitionMagic is a separate purchase in Windows. And I don't do backups on my Windows machine, except the occassional copy to DVD, which can be quite tedious. So, overall, I guess OS X breaks even with Windows with regards to this.
Once I took it home, I plugged it in and the WD software showed up. Time Machine then prompted me whether I wanted to use it as a backup drive, I said yes and it started backing up. It took a bit of time, apparently, almost 80GB of the disk is already in use (for a 200GB machine, that's a huge chunk, I suspect a big chunk of it must be iPhoto duplicates.)
The issue with Time Machine is that it just takes over the entire disk. What a waste if I have a 1TB disk serving no other purpose than as a backup. So, I decided to see if I can use it on my Windows desktop. I plugged it in and nothing shows up. I went into Disk Management and saw it but it is not assigned a drive letter and is marked as something called GPT, not NTFS or FAT32. No idea what that meant. I tried to assign a drive letter to it but none of the right click menu items are active.
After googling a bit, I decided to go into CMD and do a DISKPART -> CLEAN -> CREATE PRIMARY PARTITION. After that, I went back into Disk Management and was finally able to assign a drive letter to it. Of course, this meant that the Time Machine backup information is all gone!
I took the disk and plugged it back into the MacBook Pro, again, it sensed it and asked whether I wanted to use it as Time Machine. I decided not to but instead went into Disk Utilities and Partition. OS X has a relatively user-friendly Disk Partitioning software, but not as good a PartitionMagic. For one thing, I can't see how you can do non-destructive partitioning or partition resizing, unlike with PartitionMagic. It also has a limited set of File System support. It only support the Mac File Systems + FAT (not sure if FAT 32 but I assume it is).
I decided to go ahead and partition the disk, I partitioned 331.51GB as backup (roughly 1.5x the 200GB disk size in the MacBook Pro), not sure if this is the right size but I'll read more about how Time Machine works and what better recommendation there are for sizing the Time Machine disk. Until then this should do. The balance 600GB I formatted as Win32.
I have not tried the WD HDD in the Windows desktop PC since then. But I am assuming I should be able to use it for storing Windows files. If not, I'll worry about it when I get to that.
I wish Apple would provide a bit more information (through prompts/help/whatever) about how to size the Time Machine backup and then prompt you if you want to partition the disk if it is quite big (or advise you that you may not have enough or whatever). Then provide you with a utility which can do non-destructive re-partitioning of the disk.
Ah well, maybe some day. I can't really fault Apple here, at least the partitioning software and Time Machine came with OS X. PartitionMagic is a separate purchase in Windows. And I don't do backups on my Windows machine, except the occassional copy to DVD, which can be quite tedious. So, overall, I guess OS X breaks even with Windows with regards to this.
iPhoto
As part of the 1st phase of migration from the HP/Windows laptop to the MacBook Pro. I had transferred all the photos into the user/photo directory in the Mac. iPhoto is quite user-friendly and I had no issues importing it into iPhoto and iPhoto actually creates "events" based on the old directory structure in which the photos were arranged in Windows. There are separate directories for each trip/event photos and iPhoto just took the directory name and use that to name the "event." Cool, I love it.
But I still have a gripe with iPhoto. It seems to have created duplicates of the photos in the iPhoto directory. But since the iPhoto directory structure is not so obvious (at least not yet), I am a bit concerned about deleting the files in the user/photo directory. But it is eating into the available disk space.
I will figure this out in the future.
But I still have a gripe with iPhoto. It seems to have created duplicates of the photos in the iPhoto directory. But since the iPhoto directory structure is not so obvious (at least not yet), I am a bit concerned about deleting the files in the user/photo directory. But it is eating into the available disk space.
I will figure this out in the future.
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