It’s Just Poison…

I just read about a cool new tool on TUAW.com called WeatherCal.

This handy-dandy app is a Preference Pane add-on that adds weather forecasts to your iCal. Since it sounded kinda cool and the fact that it was made by BareBones Software (makers of the best ever text editor, BBEdit), I figured I’d give it a shot (30-day free trial).

Overall: Pretty Spiffy!

It’s nothing complicated at all, you just add the cities you want to watch in the PrefPane and they appear in your iCal as their own calendar (each city has their own).

In this pic, you can see the Blue is NYC, and Green is Berlin Germany.

i Like =)

.: Adam

I’m chillin in my hotel (a nice Marriott), and I signed in for the free wireless. When I did it, I had to choose from Basic Internet, Just Email, and Internet with VPN. So I chose the VPN one thinking it be the least restricted (ports wise).

Wrong!

The kicker is that it’s signed my computer under that plan for 48 hours… Crap! Now I’m stuck with crappy Internet service for 2 days!

Solution, spoof your MAC address!

Here’s the command for Leopard:

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr DE:AD:DE:FA:CE:D0

(put in whatever MAC address you want)

then just restart the wifi card and bam! You are a new computer to the network and you can pick the better service =)

Later!

.: Adam

I find the arrows irritating as hell, and you used to be able to implement a hack to have them point to the albums in your library. iTunes v8 broke that…

to just remove them completely, run this in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Just switch FALSE to TRUE to turn them back on.

Parallels Desktop 4 has a major issues with the OS X process prl_vm_app consuming 100% of a cpu core. This obviously causes all kinds of issues.

Here’s a fix I found on the Parallels forums:

Here is the detailed steps I used:

- shutdown the winxp vm
- right click on the vmname.pvm file and select show contents
- edit the config.pvs file with a text editor
- find the Hardware/Chipset/Type section of the XML and change the value to 1 from 0
- save the file
- start the vm and select cancel to all the new hardware setup windows
- wait until they stop (usually after the ‘some hardware did not install properly’ message)
- open add/remove software in the vm and uninstall parallel tools (this took foreever for me)
- reboot the vm when it completes (it will ask you)
- again, cancel all the new hardware setup windows
- delete any ‘prl*’ files in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers (including the prl_* files)
- in the parallels virtual machine menu select install parallels tools and wait until it completes (may take a while)
- if prompted to insert the xp service pack 3 CD, just browse to the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers directory and it will find the file it needs (I was actually prompted this way for two different files both times I’ve done it)
- reboot the vm when prompted
- enjoy the return to the version 3 speed

CAUTION: I’m just telling you what worked for me, your milage may vary… make backups!

ANOTHER NOTE: Uninstalling parallels tools and reinstalling took over 30 minutes for me; be patient.

Original Text

.: Adam

Why? Cuz I’m trying to learn Objective-C, and I need this for quick reference =)

%@ Object
%d, %i signed int
%u unsigned int
%f float/double

%x, %X hexadecimal int
%o octal int
%zu size_t
%p pointer
%e float/double (in scientific notation)
%g float/double (as %f or %e, depending on value)
%s C string
%.*s Pascal string (requires two arguments, pass pstr[0] as the first, pstr+1 as the second)
%c character
%C unichar

%lld long long
%llu unsigned long long
%Lf long double

Trying to learn it so I can make an iPhone app.

Word!

If you have a jailbroken iPhone and add a new mail account, then try to sync your existing mail accounts from your computer, you’ll prolly see this message:

“Could not sync mail accounts to the iphone because the iphone cancelled the sync”

It’s just a permissions issue, and can be resolved by either SSH’ing into your phone as root or using MobileTerminal and su as root.

Navigate to: /var/mobile/Library
then: chmod -R 777 Mail/

That’ll fix the permissions, and then you can sync away =)

This fix was originally found at This Blog.

.: Adam

This was a first for me, but today when I turned my computer on and opened up Mail, I received some error about the it being messed up and something had to be rebuilt. Don’t remember exactly, cuz I just hit OK and then Mail closed.

When I reopened Mail, all my “mail” was gone! Crap…

I checked the actual mail to see if it was still there: /Users/Me/Library/Mail, and it was all still there. So, Mail the program was messed up somewhere.

A little bit of messing around, and I figured it out.

There’s a file called “Envelope Index” I noticed that there was one a lot larger called “Envelope Index-1″, so I backed up the original and renamed “Envelope Index-1″ to “Envelope Index”. Started Mail back up, and all my mail was back =)

.: Adam

Last night I spent some time rewiring my entire sound system so that I could do something pretty awesome. I live in a duplex (2 story apartment) and I throw parties every once in a while at my place. Something that’s always bothered me was that I didn’t have a solid way to get the same music playing on both floors. I know I could just run speaker wire, but I have two separate stereos (1 for each floor). So how do I get them to play the same music in sync?

I ran across This Article on LifeHacker.com and it made my day. I was so giddy that I immediately started working on it when I got home from work.

In essence, it not only allows me to have the same music playing through both stereos, but I can also control the whole thing with my iPhone! How bad ass is that?! (oh, and I already had all the required pieces, so it cost me nothing =)

In the end, here’s what I did:

First I flashed my Linksys router with the Tomato firmware and set it up as a distributed wireless router (I also boosted the signal strength from 45mw to 100 =). Next, I found my Airport Express and configured that to link to my router. This stuff was pretty simple and worked the first time through.

To get the music to my stereo upstairs (where the airport express is), I was going to have my old Powerbook stream music through iTunes to the Airport Express router, which is hooked up to the stereo. iTunes allows you to connect to multiple “speakers”, so I streamed it, and I also plugged in a cable to the headphone jack of the laptop. This cord then connected to the stereo downstairs.

This took me a bit to get working (couple of hours), because the HDD on the Powerbook was fried and wouldn’t book. To get around this problem, I disassembled the casing of the laptop and disconnected the HDD. Put it all back together and then install OS X on an external HDD. BTW, to install OS X on an external HDD, it has to be connected via FireWire. USB will NOT work. I had an old 80gb external FireWire drive, so I just used that. Once OS X was installed I copied the contents of my iPod to the HDD so all my MP3′s were on the laptop. Should I want to upgrade later, all I have to do is copy over the OS to a new, larger FireWire HDD. Man I love OS X!

The last step was to hook my iPhone up to the iTunes on the Powerbook to control it wirelessly over the WLAN. Super easy with the Remote app.

That’s all there was to it! Now I can choose songs / playlists, skip through songs, control volume to both stereos with one fader… all from the phone in my pocket! ROCK!

While playing with the iPhone and all of the third party apps, there have been numerious occasions where either the app dumps or the phone does.

FYI: when I went to publish this blog with the WordPress app, the app took a shit =)

With some of the developers, they got a little whitty with there error controlls. Here’s a couple that I liked:

After I jailbroke my iPhone, my Push Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Bookmarks stopped syncing. The reason was because all my mail settings were reset. So I simply switched them all to sync. Didn’t work. I tried all kinds of stuff to try and get my accounts to sync from me.com, but nothing worked. Rebooted, toggled the switches a few more times… nothing.

What finally did it was to delete the MobileMe account completely, power the device off, power it on, and then re-add the MobileMe account. Sure enough, my iPhone was once again in sync with me.com. =)

.: Adam