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

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. 

So if you ever have a problem with Soundtrack Pro 2 like i did (not being able to open or close the left, right or bottom panes), then i suggest just deleting the program and re-installing. I couldn’t find any solution to the problem i was having.

I tried trashing the permissions business – didn’t help. So i literally just deleted only the Soundtrack Pro application file and re-installed it from the discs. Which took over 5 hours (and it estimated it would take over 12 hours! Had the installation lived up to it’s estimation, I would have screamed a little).

Installing the full Final Cut Studio takes at least a whole day of swapping between 6 or more DVD’s – craaaazy shit – and re-installing just one program really didn’t take a proportionally shorter amount of time! It still asked for each of the DVD’s to be loaded – even though only one is labeled Soundtrack something.

Soundtrack Pro has been such a stable audio editing solution that i edit fymo and bwym on, so this was rather dissappointing. It delayed me getting out ep 22 of fymo, and killed my cat.

Pro-Tools M-Powered i find easier to use as far as the actual editing goes, but you have to have an m-audio hardware interface plugged in, along with the Pro-Tools USB dongle… Then there’s the random crashes and problems with opening the bloody thing to begin with… And i can’t dedicate a machine to just Pro-Tools alone…

Soundtrack Pro means that i can truly have a portable, cable/dongle free editing solution on my laptop that gives me the option to export to an MP3 without having to fork out more money, ala Pro-Tools cockfag style.

So with Soundtrack Pro, if there’s a “next time” – which there better not be (’cause i’ve forked out good money on these programs) – i’ll just be trying a Time Machined version of the app… But hang on a sec… Mother f.. To save space on my smallish Time Machine HDD, i don’t back up applications.

Sounds like this could well be a good argument to spend more money.

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!

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.

So the iPhone kicks butt as far as pre-saving map data in the cache goes.

When you’re at home on your wifi, you can preload all the map lovin’ that you can handle to save yourself downloading it over EDGE (or GPRS on Australia’s Virgin network! Rock on!) when you’re on the road and need those directions pronto!

What’s equally supurb is the way that the Maps App handles routing directions.

If you plug in two locations to check out where you’re heading off to (I find I’m not so much using the Maps while driving, but more to suss out the journey before I leave home), while you’re on your speedy wifi, then iPhone automatically pre-loads all the intersections into its memory.

Even the iPhone knows how bad EDGE/GPRS speeds are, and tries to save you the download time!

So if you’re planning a trip, be sure to pop all this in before you leave home and the maps will be hot to trot before you’ve even tied your shoes.

Of course this has little bearing for me, as I’ve pretty much already cached-up ever square metre of my state at every detail level anyway! No, I am not a nerd!

I wouldn’t have to do this if the iPhone were 3G. But, well, that’s not till next year.

I’m unashamedly a big reader of Fake Steve. I like his slant on real-life news, and terrific ability to bag people out.

Often on this site, and many others like it, the author will link to numerous relevant and interesting pages as part of a blog entry.

On my Mac, I like to load these in seperate tabs while I continue reading the main thrust of the blog.

Have you tried opening a link in a new window on your iPhone yet? Unless the web developer lends you a helping hand, it can’t be done.

Enter Richard Herrera of Doctyper, with a genius workaround that will have you getting it on like there’s no tomorrow!

Click here to see his solution (not in a new window, I might add)

In a nutshell, you simply add two bookmarklets to the top of your boomkmarks menu (for easy access). One is called ‘Open in New Tab,’ while the other is aptly named ‘Open in Same Tab.’

If you want to load a link in a new ‘tab,’ just pop up the bookmarks menu and tap ‘Open in a New Tab,’ and automatically all the links on the page will be set to target=”_blank.” Tap the corresponding bookmarklet to revert the page to normal if desired.

So so simple! And to make matters even better, Safari keeps you in the loop by automatically putting a ‘new window’ icon beside all of the links.

This certainly has just made my day!