flop ya mac out

There comes a time in any teenage boy’s life when they feel the urge to measure their junk.

The same is sometimes true in day-to-day OS X living.

Sometimes when I’ve been on a rampant deleting spree through all my files, I want to know how many megs I managed to knock off my minuscule MacBook Air SSD in order to feel good about myself, before recycling them all to hell.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to check this from the Trash Can itself, but here’s another simple way:

From Finder, Go To Folder (Command + Shift + G) and enter:

~/.Trash

This will expose the otherwise hidden Trash folder, allowing you to do a quick Get Info (Command + I) to size it up. (Any folder with a leading period is automatically hidden in OS X).

Snow Leopard is expected to bring improvements to OS X’s Trash, including the ability to restore accidentally deleted files to their original location with one-click.

*Image not to scale

Is normal porn getting you fat? Change your diet! Find out how, as Barry Buckfist shows you some “real melons” in this mostly SFW screencast. On a Mac – no less.

As someone who is gearing up to head overseas, I’ve put my laptop into somewhat of a lock-down mode, password protecting everything to make sure that it can’t be molested if it falls into the wrong hands abroad.

However, the drawback of such tight security is that (with the omission of physical labelling), if my laptop falls into the right hands, there’s no way the finder can figure out who the laptop actually belongs to.

Enter this handy hint, sourced from Apple’s own Leopard Security Configuration Guide. The hack allows you to place a custom phrase in the OS X Leopard Login Screen, just above the user name and password.

Crank up the terminal, and enter the following:

su [your admin username]
sudo -s
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText “This laptop belongs to Jason Deacon, and you don’t.”

Of course, you may want to garnish your welcome message with maybe a contact phone number, email address or more impressive message than the example here.

The beauty of this hack is that as your contact details change when you travel, updating them is a simple as re-entering this into terminal. No more re-printing labels on the road, and you’re able to enter much more information here, too.

The Apple Security Guide is a good read, which I thoroughly recommend if you’ve got an eye for that sort of thing. We’ll explore more security tips in time!

Like many owners of the current iPhone, I’m going “fuck it off” once I get my hands on some juicy 3G iPhone goodness! There-in lies a first world kind of dilema… What do I do with my “old” iPhone?

Do I simply place it back in its box, so that in years to come I can look up to that dusty mantle and comment to my grandson, gesturing with my smokey pipe,

“Fucking look at that son! No, up there on the mantle piece! Underneath the dust! See that box? Best box ever – ‘cept for your Grandma’s! Ha ha.. But seriously – listening to me now, eyes this way son – that young man, that, is an original Apple iPhone. Best piece of technology you could buy back in the day. It may look a little bulky nowadays, but believe me, that piece of beautiful art did more than just look pretty – it was a Phone, an iPod, an Internet communications device!…”

Perhaps I could give my old iPhone a new lease of life – a change of career if you will – and use it to shave with and drink beer from… Though no doubt people would stop hanging around with me at the bar, as I bragged about how this was to the my 15th beer I’d chugged from my iPhone, and could still whoop everyones arse at pool…

Perhaps I should just keep my old iPhone next to my bed, in case I have had too many real beers, and I can’t quite seem to pleasure that special someone I picked up tonight; that’s when I have the phone fully charged, with finger poised over the iBrate app…

Having a jailbroken iPhone could never be more important, could it Steve. 

Well, seems like I sorted out this problem with a little “diary entry” work. Thanks for listening guys. 

The Google Van, or a subcontractor for Google (similar as Skyhook in the U.S.) has been trawling the streets of Melbourne and beyond in preparation for a looming Australian iPhone launch.

Choosing ‘Locate Me’ in the iPhone Maps app now reads location settings from Wifi hotspots in and around the city, in addition to using Cell Tower Triangulation, giving yet another ominous sign that the iPhone is just that little bit closer to launch here.

Locate Me data is becoming increasingly more accurate right across the state, with readers reporting being located to their nearest street corner, as far out of Melbourne as Croydon.

Using Locate Me with Wifi turned off.

Using Locate Me with Wifi enabled.

Although iPhone firmware 1.1.4 unlocked does not automatically support the Map app’s Locate Me feature, it can be enabled by loading a 3rd party app Triangulation app first, which somehow tricks the iPhone into enabling the Triangulation service on the device.

How far out have you found Wifi Triangulation in Melbourne?

In this week’s podcast, Dan & Jase look at Apple crash reports, 3G iPhone rumours in Australia, and other businesses using Macs to promote their non-Mac products! Click here to listen with iTunes.

And of course, what would Christmas/happy holidays be, let alone a totally new year, without a wonderful wish of happy everything from both of us – Dan & Jason – at flop ya mac out.

We hope you have sexy times, and wish you all the best for 2008! Happy listening! And buy ya self somethin’ pretty.

When iTunes 7.5 came out i eagerly downloaded it, as i have so many times before with all other Mac software updates. But for the first time, this one bit me in the arse.

I probably shouldn’t have thrown caution to the wind and updated, simply ’cause i’m running an unlocked, jail-breaked 1.1.1 iPhone as my main phone and organiser.

It turnes out iTunes 7.5 didn’t like to play with my iPhone, as when i connected them together in marriage, i got an error message (pictured) and was not able to access my iPhone – it simply didn’t come up in the side bar of iTunes.

So i searched for a way to downgrade back to iTunes 7.4.2 (which i was able to download), but couldn’t find a definitive guide or an answer to other people asking the same thing in threads.

So i decided to venture into risky territory and fix this via trial and error, as it was getting really irritating not being able to sync up new podcasts or contacts etc..

Firstly i sync-ed my iPhone’s contacts and calendar to my old PowerBook which was thankfully still running 7.4.2, just in case anything went wrong (so i could retain all the new info i’d entered into my iPhone’s calendar!)

I then copied iTunes.app to my desktop, as well as my “iTunes Library” and “iTunes Music Library.xml” so i could stick them back, in case they got written over with new old/new installation.

I then installed the 7.4.2 version and it went totally smoothly and totally worked! Fantastic.

Now i’ve just gotta remember not to update iTunes, as could easily be done via the software update without really realising, if you’re a little absent minded at the time.

But now what for the future? No iTunes updates for me and my hacked iPhone, forever? Perhaps!

Does 7.5 accidentally/on purpose now deny syncing with hacked iPhones, just like 1.1.1 stopped some jail-broken iPhones running at all?

Is this problem i had widespread enough that hackers are working on an iTunes fix?

Something else i wonder is if i was to update to 1.1.2, would iTunes 7.5 play nice with my iPhone?

Let us know your experiences or comments below.

The dealio is this: iPhone only knows how handle numbers of a certain length without an area code, and seeing as most of us are using iPhones with a US firmware, that length is the minimum American phone number length (much longer than that in Australia – 8 digits).

That means that when someone calls your iPhone from a home phone (or mobile) that doesn’t send the area code down the line (9### ####), and you have the number listed in your contacts with an area code (03 9### ####), then iPhone doesn’t quite cotton on to the fact that they’s the same thing.

Too many times I’ve received calls from friends, but iPhone didn’t clue on that they were in my Address Book, so I had to spend the first part of the conversation trying to figure out who they were without sounding like too much of a tool.

So you’ve done your Australian Phone Number Mod, what now?

Som people had reverted to adding both the area code version and the normal version of numbers to their contacts, but a better alternative is at hand! The chaps on the iPhone Dev Team have a workaround, by means of replacing the Springboard app. with a modified one. The modified one whispers sweet nothings into the iPhone’s ear about phone numbers being able to be only 8 numbers long and still cool.

Read up on the mod here.

For me this was an absolutely crippling problem, but there is surprisingly little info on the net about how to fix it.

Help share the love, and donate to the Dev Team if you find it of use!

I’m one of those 1.0.2 users who’ve been waiting waiting waiting for a ‘re-virginise’ method to come up, so i could re-lock my sim-unlocked 1.0.2 iPhone, to allow me to upgrade to 1.1.1 safely. And then sim-lock again.

And thank the lord for the iPhone Elite team! This week they came up with a method to re-virginise sim-unlocked 1.0.2, and further more, rather than users having to screw ’round in the terminal they put together an automated process(es) which makes the whole ordeal rather damn simple!

And even better, i can attest to the fact that it works! So if you indulge in some re-virginising goodness, be sure to donate some moola to these fine folks, allowing international peoples like mwa to enjoy the benefits of 1.1.1, and use of the iPhone as just that, a phone.

After i’d revirginised, i then followed this guide where it details upgrading from a re-virginised 1.0.2 iPhone to 1.1.1, and further more unlocking your updated iPhone. Thanks so much to the iPhone Dev Team for that beautiful solution, anySIM.

For those interested, i’ve posted some photo’s from my re-virginising escapades…

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You may or may not have already changed the default phone number format on your iPhone from the default American set to a more international standard.

If you’ve done this by replacing the ‘US’ value in the PhoneFormats file with that of your own country, you may have noticed that Apple’s interpretation of how your local numbers should look isn’t quite what you had in mind!

I certainly did, so instead of copying the default set of Australian values into the US spot, I pasted in the following:

04## ### ###
+6# ### ### ###
(03) #### ####
(08) #### ####
(02) #### ####
9### ####
8### ####
5### ####
1#00 ### ###

Now iPhone can tell the difference between a mobile number and a home number with an area code present!

Of course this list serves me well, for a Victorian, however you may feel free to make changes to suit your own locality. For those international visitors, play around with mixing hash signs with numbers in order to get the desired effect.

Using the Address Book as a testing ground is a great time saver.

Additionally, I ended up keeping all these filters into my Mac’s Address Book for smooth Australian action everywhere!

How to change iPhone’s default number format – a recap

If you need a recap on how to modify the number formats on your iPhone, here’s a quick summary, thanks to the numerous excellent iPhone blogs such as modmyiphone and hackint0sh:

Using SFTP (which you would have installed using iNdependance and instructions like this when you unlocked your iPhone), retrieve from your iPhone the file:

/System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBookUI.framework/ABPhoneFormats.plist in 1.0.x

or, /System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.f­ramework/Ph­oneFormats/UIPhoneFor­mats.plist in 1.1.1

Pop this file through this handy BINARY to ASCII converter, open with TextEdit and find the ‘US’ country value. Replace the values in it with those from your own country code (AU, for Australia) or even better, using your own customised version of the ones listed above.

Save and replace this file once again via SFTP, then restart your iPhone.

Viola! Now your iPhone speaks good fair dinkum Aussie, or German, or Spanish…

UPDATE: You may have noticed that your iPhone sometimes can’t quite tell the difference between phone numbers with and without area codes. This is because the firmware needs a little more ‘Australian’ tweaking to tell it that big long American phone numbers aren’t cool anymore. Find out about that one here.