iPhone / iPod Touch v3.0 beta

The other day I saw a tweet from Stephen Fry saying he was enjoying using the iPhone 3.0 beta update with his iPhone. I tweeted in reply asking where I could get it. I got a tweet back from @tapthatapp pointing me to a page that explained the what, where and how of trying out the beta version 3.0. Check out these pages before you start doing anything.

The first thing I discovered was "Rapidshare" is anything but rapid. Unless you pay them at least a per diem charge, you getabout 15kbps....which is a slow go for 250MB of data. So downloaded from the free direct links at about 60kbps. Much better.

To upgrade an iPod Touch or iPhone, you restore the contents of the downloaded IPSW file onto the device via iTunes. This wipes out whatever was there, but don't worry too much, as I'll explain later. In order to ensure the device remains usable with iTunes (and isn't effectively orphaned forever from the Apple eco-system), you must also subscribe - directly or indirectly - to the developers program. The direct cost is US$100. I went instead for the indirect option, offered by Jarrad Hall, of US$5 and provided the UDID of my device and waited.

It took Jarrad just over a day to inform me I was ready to go and that my iPod Touch would be usable with iTunes. My first attempt to restore the update to my iPod Touch didn't work, with iTunes telling me my firmware level was wrong. I asked Jarrad via email if he could help and he quickly replied, saying I should re-download the IPSW from his web page rather than the one at the original link. I think the original link may have had me downloading the iPhone version even though I had clicked on the iPod Touch 2gen link, as the first download had a different name to the second one.

Whatever, the second attempt worked and beta 3.0 IPSW installed flawlessly. On syncing, it also installed all my existing applications and copied over my playlists. My apps, music and videos were quickly as they had been before.

The beta is clearly a beta. I have had some issues, some of them serious but oddly enough, none of them have been reproducable. Here is a short list:

• Power funkiness. A couple of times the iPod Touch has gone into suspend mode - sort of. The icons are still visible, but dimmed. I had to hold the top power-off button for 6 seconds to effectively force a re-boot. I can't reproduce this.
  
• Safari sometimes won't rotate the page to landscape. If I Home-button out of safari and go back in, it will them rotate the loaded page. I can't make this happen on demand, but this is how I get out of it when it occurs.
• Twitellater 2.0 couldn't open any web links on one occasion - either directly in Twitellater or externally in Safari (a settable option). Powering off the iPod Touch appeared to sor this out. I can't reproduce the behaviour.
• The worst problem by far occured last evening when I tried to copy / paste a URL from Safari into Twitellator. The paste didn't happen, but after the attempt almost every app started crashed immediately. Only a handful would run (Contacts, App Store and a couple of others). Powering off and on repeatedly made no difference. Everything else just went splat immediately. The device was all but unusable. After 90 minutes of playing around trying to get it to work properly - and failing - I thought I was going to have to restore back to v2.2.1. In preparing for that, I sync'd the iPod Touch with iTunes. Happily, following the sync, the iPod Touch resumed normal function. Everything worked again. I tried to reproduce the event by doing the same copy / paste operation and could not reproduce it. Copy / paste worked fine. The only difference may have been the use of the app Free Memory the first time around, several minutes before I attempted the copy / paste. Free Memory may no longer be compatible with v3.0. That would be no real surprise. I probably shouldn't have tried using it in the first place.
  

Other than these mostly minor issues, the past two days on the v3.0 beta have been pretty good. I'm looking forward to the final version when it comes out in a few months. Function without funkiness will be much appreciated.

Update: 10 minutes after posting the article above. I pulled my iPod Touch out of my pocket and it is lights-out. Dark and unresponsive. For the moment.....dead. I'll see if I can revive it.

Update 2: Googled and found this site explaining how to re-boot a frozen iPod Touch. Following these instructions, my iPod Touch re-booted after holding both buttons for about 45 ....long.... seconds.

Update 3: After almost 3 weeks on the 3.0 beta, I went back to using v2.2.1. The added function of the beta wasn't worth the continued instability of the beta and the failure of many or my apps to run at all.......sometimes. I couldn't work out how to make most of the bug repeatable, either, so work-arounds weren't possible as the behaviour was unpredictable. I suspect lots of memory leaks, which would be fatal in a device with 128MB of system RAM and no ability to swap to virtual memory when the real thing runs out. I'll wait for the final release of v3.0.

"The Cloud" and Ten reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows

Jack Whalen, of TechRepublic, blogs 10 reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows. Most of them are pretty good in my humble opinion, but I'm left wondering what the nature of the 'triumph" will be.

I ponder that point because more and more I find myself computing in "the cloud". My first choice for word processing and spreadshets is now Google Docs. I use Gmail for all my Internet email. My video comes mainly from YouTube and conventional shows are often via bittorrent rather than wait a year or three (if!) to see them where I live. For work, over the past 18 months, Google has more than proven itself to me through two campaigns involving dispersed teams of volunters. Google Docs doesn't care what your OS is as long as you have an adequate web browser.

My Apple iPod Touch is now my favourite portable computing device. Waaay sub-netbook! It provides ready, easy access to all the most important stuff the Cloud has to offer, either as-delivered or via downloadable applications that extend its function and capability. If it could cut and paste it would be perfect...and even there, there are work-arounds already. I think that soon there will be many such devices running a variety of operating systems: Linux, Android...whatever.  

It probably won't matter.

Absolutely there will still be a big market for conventional  PCs in roles like gaming and multimedia and as application and data servers, and for systems in environments where poor connectivity renders the Cloud too diffcult to employ for large amounts of data.

But the computing world is steadily creeping toward the kind of system that fits easily in your shirt or hip pocket....and the OS that devices run won't be of much concern to anyone. Most of the OSes will be open platforms in order to build the kind of ecology that will deliver choice, innovation and quality.

In that sense, the Cloud will likely be based on Open Source software of one ind or another....so in that sense, yeah, linux will be kicking kick ass, in spirit, as the greatest forerunner of the re-assertion of community and sharing for the benefit of all people in a given community....like human society usually was (technologically) for millenia prior to the stifling confinement  - even ownership - of knowledge in 'closed' sysems of all kinds from single vendors. If your neighbour made a better bone fish hook, he probably showed his family and his neighbours how to make it, too. That is how it should be. Thanks to Open Source.....that is how it is becoming once again - at least in the world of the Cloud.

'Linux beats Windows' is a metaphor for community trumping monopoly.

Linux: Atheros wifi can't see channels 12 and 13

Google Fodder: I had set my D-Link 624S wifi router to automagically select the channel with the least interference. It opted for channel 13. That was cool with all my systems except my laptop (Acer Travelmate 2483 with Atheros wifi chipset).

Googled around and found the bug on Launchpad. The key piece to sorting this out was adding this line to my /etc/modprobe.d/options and then re-starting my system (simple - brute force!):

options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom="EU"

"iwlist wlan0 channel" previously only reported channels 1 to 11, but now shows all of them. No problems connecting to the AP now on channel 13:

steve@steve-laptop:~$ iwlist wlan0 channel
wlan0 13 channels in total; available frequencies :
Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz
Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz
( blah blah blah blah )
Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz
Channel 12 : 2.467 GHz
Channel 13 : 2.472 GHz
Current Frequency=2.472 GHz (Channel 13)

Beats Per Minute (BPM) software on Linux

Google Fodder: This is one of those blog posts you write so people will find SOMETHING on the topic when they Google it.

I was trying to sort out a playlist on the iPod that would be suitable for a long (couple of hours) fast, walk. Heart pounding stuff for uphill or down, mindfull that music with at least 100 beats / minute was best for a variety of physical pursuits, including keeping time while administering CPR.

I Googled around a bit and found that Amarok had a "BPM" column, so using "sudo apt-get install amarok" in a terminal, I installed Amarok on my Ubuntu 8.10 Linux laptop system and found......that it was just a column. It wouldn't calculate the BPM's for me. I would have to sort that out myself. Ta.

Back to Google. Located "bpm calc 4 amarok". It's a script that drives 'soundstretch' to work out the BPM for songs for use in Amarok. It adds the info directly to the music database! Great! Sounds like what I need.

I installed "bpm calc 4 amarok" and found that the author only supports MySQL databases, not the SQLite database Amarok uses by default. Well, I'm not adding the complexity of MySQL setup, admin and network access to my chosen problem. Not yet anyway. Maybe another day.

I reviewed options and chose another path. Maybe Windows.

Pistonsoft's "BPM Detector" looked promising and it's free. I downloaded it and was going to boot to Windows Vista, but instead decided to install the "WINE" support for running Windows apps on Linux. I had recently been very happy with DosBox on Linux for running my old DOS games, so maybe WINE was as good as that by now.

The result was that both the installer and the app itself work well with WINE.

In \home\steve\desktop, I ran "wine BMPdetector_setup.exe" and followed the installer prompts. I de-selected adding icons or things to the taskbar. Not necessary without a real Windows desktop UI and an unnecessary potential source of error for the install.

Then, to actually run the installed program, I entered:

wine "C:\\Program Files\\Pistonsoft BPM Detector\\bpmdetector.exe"

...and the app runs and gives me BPM values for each song. That done, I created a shortcut / launcher on the desktop so all I have to do now is click on an icon to start BPM Detector. I don't appear to be able "Select All" in a list and batch the BPM caculations, but it works fine if I click on each song one at a time. It can play the songs, too. No problems. Now at least I can get the BPM value for a given song and manually enter it into Amarok. Overall, the MySQL solution and "bpm calc 4 amarok" would have been better and faster if I had MySQL already running and knew more about how to drive it. That "if" was too big for me today. This alternative will get the job done, too.....

Here's a screen shot. Click on it to see a larger version.

No more Apple at Macworld

Looks like the era of the big tech trade show is well and truly over. Apple have announced Macworld 2009 (January) will be their last. Killed by online business and their growing chain of retail stores.

The only Mac I've ever owned was an elderly B&W 7" screen Macintosh that was handed down. I tossed the 20+ veteran last year when shifting house and it refused to start no matter what I did.

It won't be last, though, as the new Macs have been calling out to me for several years and the urge to buy one has been steadily growing. A triumph of marketing, I may yet join that customer base. The product looks good and there is no shortage of content on the Internet that people have produced using their Macs. This last, more than anything, is what has impressed me.

Kino: Video editing on Linux

This morning marked a milestone of sorts.

It was the first time I have been able to successfully (and without major hassle) edit and render a video on a Linux system. In this case, Ubuntu 8.10 Linux.

Specifically, I used "Kino" to import an MPEG file from my digital camera. I then added a title at the start and a fade out at the end and rendered the amended video out as an MPEG which I then uploaded to YouTube. The only hiccup was Kino telling me I needed to install the "mjpegtools" package in order to successfully render the final product. One "apt-get install" later and the job was done.

For me, this is HUGE. Lack of useful and reliable video editing was the primary reason I had to move from mainly using Linux to mainly using Windows a couple of years ago. I had been almost exclusively a Linux user for the previous 5 years. I had tried everything there was at the time and it was all either flakey (Cinelerra) or didn't work at all (Main Actor, KDEnlive) or was impenetrably obtuse (Cinelerra).

Using Kino for the first time, I was able to work out, in just a few minutes, how to import a video clip, edit it and add effects ot it....then render it out.

There may be better programs out there, as I know there are several under constant development, but Kino is the first I've tried that meets my needs. Hopefully there are more.

Here is the first (very simple) vid I made with Kino: from video shot during a take-off from Auckland Airport on the 28th. Title effect added to the beginning and a fade out at the end.

Who says Windows isn't reliable?

Windows has a reputation for being flakey and needing to be re-booted at regular intervals to recover from "memory creep" and restore stability.

Not this baby.

This Windows 2003 Small Business Server has been running continuously for over 68 years.

Says so right here. Click on the image to see the full size.

Vista / Linux and windows file shares

I bought a new router the other day. It's a DLink DI-624S '108G Wireless Storage Router'.

It sits behind my other router and effectively gives me two firewalls on the way into my network from the internet. The new router, dubbed "Evermore", has a 16GB USB key inserted into it providing me with an ftp server and - I was hoping - a Windows file server ("DSERVER") with shares for making files available inside the network, independent of whether or not any particular PC has been booted up or not.

The only problem is, the Windows Vista systems in the house (2 of them - both preloads) can't see the router-based 'windows' server or the shared resources it offers.

But my Ubuntu 8.04 workstation has no problems at all seeing the server or the shared resources, as you can see from the image I've uploaded here.

Yet again, Linux proves itself to be (in ways that matter to me) a better windows than Windows.

Ogg Vorbis player for $29 from DSE

DSE 1GB Flash Drive - $29

I bought one of these flash-ram based "mp3" players today on a whim to find out if they support the open, patent-free, Ogg Vorbis sound / music format as well as the advertised MP3 and WMA formats.

To test it, I downloaded an interview Kim Hill did this morning with a Brasilian economist and copied it to my new device. Radio NZ's "Saturday Morning" program makes itself available as downloadable *.ogg files.

The *.ogg file played just fine. No problem.

The file name as rendered by the download was rather long, so I renamed it to a much shorter name prior to even attempting to play it. This was a precaution on my part. I did not test the full file name. One minor restriction is that the player limits itself to no more than 99 files in each folder if you want to able to hear the music / sound files.

The sound quality rendered by the player is actually pretty good considering how cheap it is. I think a $29 Ogg Vorbis player is a cool thing.

Windows Vista Selfishness

I was typing up a blog post when suddenly the web browser disappeared and the system shut itself down and re-booted....and installed some updates.

Despite autosave being on, I somehow lost the blog post.

*Sigh*

Thanks, Vista.

Google Chrome for Linux

If you're looking for a challenge, you can build the latest pre-release versions of Google's Chrome browser yourself. The best platform to do this on is Ubuntu 8.04 as that is the Linux distro that Google are using for development. It's an open source project, so they are making their source code available as they go along.

You can find the details here.

Google "Chrome"

I installed Google Chrome today and I have to say I like it. I'm using it right now. I find it fast and - so far - reliable. Idiot / Savant at No Right Turn likes it too, but for the lack of ad blockers. A show-stopped for him, but I've never bothered with ad blockers as I most often don't read the ads anyway...though do occasionally see one that is genuinely interesting.

I like the address space also being the search space. You can either enter the name of the web site or the words you want to search on. Nice.

Each tab being a separate process really appeals to me. That is what multitasking is all about. We'll just to see if it scales well when you have a lot of active pages open. How much do the ones in the background get? Enough? What effect will they have on a resource hungry task on the primary page....or does it pre-empt all others?

It uses almost all the screen for what you want to see. Unlike MS IE and - to a lesser extent - Firefox, you don't loose a quarter of the screen to toolbars of various sorts and dubious utility.

The only niggle I have about Chrome so far is that I can't remove the web site I went to by mistake (a type - "herlad" instead of "herald") from my "most viewed" sites on the front page without wiping the history for at least the whole day if not all the history. Maybe I can...but I haven't worked it yet. I did manage to get of it by wiping out all the history. Wiping each of the last 6 days (imported from Firefox) didn't do it.

Bottom line, though.....is that I like Chrome. I like it a lot. It feels good. Now I just have to wait for the Linux version.

 

Mozilla "Ubiquity": Try it. You'll (probably) like it

I don't load my computers down with useless toys. My systems tend to be somewhat basic and if I don't use an application much, I tend to get rid of it. Maybe that's due to my years as a Resource Management Analyst on the former NZ Dairy Board's mainframe systems, trying to better just a little bit more out of the hardware and software by making most efficient use of it.

Yesterday I discovered Mozilla's "Ubiquity". It's a sort of command-line for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

But much more than that. I've been having fun working out how to most effectively use it - particularly the ability to highlight some text on a web page, invoke Ubiquity, and watch it find resources, from a variety of sources, related to those selected words. There is much more to it than that, despite the first version being described, at v0.1, as a prototype.

Watch the video below and see how easily Aza Raskin is able to create a "mash-up", using Ubiquity, into an e-mail he's drafting. The potential for it to be a very powerful tool is there.

It's available on Mac, Windows and Linux. You can checkout the tutorial and it installs in a handful of seconds. It's only 185k. You can learn how to develop your own Ubiquity commands, too.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Ubuntu and cool stuff

My youngest daughter discovered his week that GIMP (open source equivalent of PhotoShop) runs better on Linux than Windows XP. She uses about a thousand brushes and as many fonts and after a few hours XP just grinds to a near halt. On the same system, Ubuntu Linux 8.04 stays consistently lively across several days with no problems doing exactly the same things.

I've been coming home to find her deep in the grip of the penguin....for hours...designing Bebo skins for her mates. I have to confess I've been seeking tuition on how to use layers and masks and collect brushes of all types for creating interesting graphics. I have a lot of catching up to do. She's been thrashing GIMP for almost 2 years now, to the point where she can do stuff that is REALLY cool....and be completely unable to explain how she did it. It just happens......part of her internal programming.

Still on Tux, she also found that on Ubuntu 8.04 she can preview her MP3 files by hovering the mouse pointer over the file in a folder. She was waving the mouse pointer around "creating" ad hoc sample 'concerts'. It must load them into cache or memory as the switch between songs was instant. Even I, somewhat jaded linux user for 14 years now, thought that was pretty cool. The system has 512MB of RAM and is based on an AMD Athlon 2200+ CPU (approx 1.8Ghz) that was new 5 or 6 years ago.

Microsoft Windows Vista experience

My 15 month old Acer laptop has Windows Vista on it and - overall - it has worked well. At least, it has since since I increased the system RAM from 512 megabytes to 1,536 megabytes.

I also own a Microsoft VX-3000 webcam. I bought that soon after I got the laptop as it was more or less the only mainstream webcam that has Vista support. The version I installed was v1.3. In the LifeCam software, there is a menu item that purports to check for software updates. It always says there aren't any. It lies. If I go to Microsoft's web site, I find that v1.4 is available and has been for a while.

Vista - by default - updates things. Sure, you can turn it off and orphan your system forever if you want. That makes no sense in the long run, though.

I found tonight one of the more recent Vista updates has broken the Flash video capture function in a web browser and it is now not possible to do live-video captures to YouTube. Ok, I can record a video via LifeCam, and render it via Windows Movie Maker. I have to, as LifeCam *.wmv files always have the sound out of sync unless you re-render them.

Updates to Vista have been my biggest problem. Things keep breaking.....then they may be fixed....then they break again. I have lost and regained the sound on my external headphone jack many times over the past 15 months in Vista-dom. Every time I boot Vista up, I can't be sure everything will work the way it did when I shut it down.

Ubuntu Linux, which I paid nothing for, has been far more reliable and runs much better on less hardware. But I want excellent video editing software....and that's what's driving my desire for an Apple iMac. Soon.

Consumer NZ review of Linux

Consumer NZ has posted a review of Linux as a consumer product.

Learn all about Linux and find out if it's right for you with our report into this powerful open-source operating system.

Sick of paying big bucks for Windows? A Linux operating system is free to download and use.

We explain its pros and cons, how to get started and take you step-by-step through burning and using an Ubuntu Linux LiveCD.

More please.

Gonna buy a Mac (or three)

I'm going to buy an Apple Mac.

I've never owned an Apple Mac before, other than a VERY old MacIntosh that I inherited for free gazumpty-hand. That one had a 7 inch B&W screen and 512kb of system RAM. But it really, seriously died this year at the age of roughly 25, so I binned it.

I'm going to buy a NEW iMac. Maybe this one or maybe THIS one.

Though if I go with a Mac Mini, I can buy TWO of these or maybe even three.

Or maybe I'll get an iMac AND a Mac Mini (or two) for the kids.

I've been down to the Magnum Mac store several times and played with the systems there. It feels a lot like Ubuntu Linux, but with more bells and whistles. I especially like the video-editing app on the Mac. That's the real reason I'll lay out the money for it.

Ubuntu Linux will remain the workhorse, doing stuff that a proprietary system provider of any sort would want serious money for.

My copy of Windows Vista can gather dust somewhere.

Ubuntu Linux

Awesome!

I've been a user of the Linux operating system since kernel 0.99 in 1994. I've watched it improve steadily over the past 14 years, but there was always some function or application missing that meant I had to keep at least one PC around with a current version of Windows on it. Linux could do 95% of the job, but sometimes I needed that other 5%.

Those days now appear to be over for me. I'm sure others got there before me, but now it's my turn.

Why?

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 Linux on two of my home PCs and I have to say it has exceeded all my expectations. I'm loving it.

I had tried the "live" boot from the Ubuntu CD (it's like a test drive) and a couple of things didn't work properly. That caused some hesitation, but one of my PCs is really just a sandpit to play in, so I threw caution to the winds and did a full install. The problems I had with the "live" boot did not occur with the full install. Everything worked right "out of the box". Video, sound, DVD, wireless network: all good.

I can do anything on Linux that I do on Windows: Internet browsing and e-mail, watch DVDs, rip and burn MP3 onto CDs / DVDs, watch videos on YouTube, whatever. Even better, the free Open Office suite replaces MS Office and does an excellent job.

Ubuntu is - at last - the Linux that does everything I need it to do.

Best of all, a program called "kdenlive" allows me to edit video from my digital camera and compose my own videos. This was the single thing - video editing - was what had kept me using Windows. Now I can do it all on Linux.

I'll happily recommend Ubuntu 8.04 Linux to anyone as a substitute for Windows. You can download a CD image from ubuntu.com and go for it. It's free as in free beer.

BACKGROUND: "Ubuntu" is an Open Source community-supported software project started by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African who struck it rich during the tech boom in the late 90s. Ubuntu is an African word that means: 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The name is in keeping with the Open Source origins of Linux, allowing anyone and everyone to have access to the source programming code for all parts of the system.

Linux is a community effort, not owned by any person or company. Ubuntu is just one of hundreds of linux "distributions". Shuttleworth's aim for Ubuntu linux is to create software for people who have little money so they can participate in technology. You can read the full story here.

Firefox 3.0 out on 17th

The latest version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is out on the 17th of June. They want to set a Guinness Book of World Record record for the largest number of downloads in 24 hours:

Set a Guinness World Record
Enjoy a Better Web

Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We're not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.

The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Join our community and this effort by pledging today.

You can click here: