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Compact Calendar 2012

Lifehacks — Comments Off

January 27, 2012

One of the most simple and useful lifehack: A single page with minimalistic calendar for the whole year, organized by weeks: http://davidseah.com/compact-calendar/

You just have a stack of those pages at your disposal, and use as needed to plan stuff.

I have been using this for some years, and it had been very useful. It is smartly built as a full Excel macro, so fully editable, and future compatible to next years.

I augmented the excel to be more Israel friendly. the holidays are US – probably can change to IL holidays later as well. If you are interested please ping me.

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Social Medial Explained

Bits — Comments Off

January 27, 2012

Tags: Funny

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CloudOn Launch – A Week in Images

Tech — Comments Off

January 15, 2012

Here are some of the comments I collected last week on our new CloudOn iPad app.

I will let the images and tweets speak…

Tags: CloudOn

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A Day Made of Glass

Commercials — Comments Off

September 16, 2011

An inspiring promotional video by Corning, a glass and ceramics manufacturer.

Not very far from the realistic future depicted in many Sci-Fi movies (The interface design of Avatar comes to mind) – but made more realistic with every passing year with the innovations from the like of Apple.

Good to keep this reference around and check back in 2021, to see what of this happened.

Tags: Ideation, Imagine, Innovation

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Imagine A World Where Everything Runs On Gas

Commercials — Comments Off

September 14, 2011

An innovative ideation and brilliant execution. Funny and scary as hell.

The horrific world expressed so vividly in this commercial obviously makes you wonder why do we agree to burn fuel anywhere. Obviously, an electric car only hides the fuel burned to generate the electricity – but its a step in the right direction.

Tags: Brilliant, GreenTech, Imagine, Innovation

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Cutting the cord for iOS

iOS — Comments Off

April 17, 2011

I already complained in the past about the fact that the “post-pc” devices still require a PC to function. I was not the only one.

Joh Gruber wrote an awesome piece about this, with some great analysis.

The announcement many people seem to be waiting for is for Apple to tell iOS users they no longer need iTunes on the Mac or Windows. The announcement I’d like to see is for iOS users to no longer need to pay for MobileMe to wirelessly sync calendars, contacts — and any other small bits of data from apps from the App Store.

Tags: Cloud, iOS

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My Hackintosh upgraded to 10.6.7

Hackintosh — Comments Off

April 14, 2011

As usual, I was deferring upgrading my hackintosh for a very long while (since 10.6.4), as there are always scary issues to deal with. But as the new Xcode required Snow Leopard 10.6.6, I had no choice.

Bottom line: It works, and it was not very hard. Here is how.

Backup to a fully working partition

I consider this a must-have for any serious tinkerer. I always go for the complete, workable partition with a duplicate version of the entire OS. Having a live ‘original’ version of the entire OS on the same machine / HD (as opposed to an image, time machine, etc.) allows fast iteration in case of a broken install (which is almost a certainty for the first boot): When the unavoidable kernel panic hits the screen, reboot into the backup OS, research the issue, and then immediately change and replace files in the broken OS from the working one. Reboot, repeat.

In order to create a fully functional backup partition, you need to do the following:

Startup from the OS X Snow Leopard boot CD. On Hackintoshes this actually means that you need to start from the Chameleon boot disk, replace the disk with the SL install disk, hit F5 and select the SL Install disk.

When the installer shows the first dialog, select Utilities->Disk Util.

Select the current (working) OS X partition, and click ‘New Image’. Save it to a reasonable place. As the cute girls from French Maid TV say: “This might take a while”. (Warning: NSFW).

The most important step now is to select the newly formed image file and select Images->Scan Image for Restore. (I never fully understood the need to separate the two actions, but whatever). As before, this might take a while.

Still in Disk Utility, create some place on the same HD you have your original partition, with exact size as the original, and Restore the new image to this new partition. You don’t have to have it on the same HD, but if its on a different disk you will need to create a fully working Chameleon boot on the other HD – which is a hassle all by itself, so you might want to avoid this if not really required.

Must do: Boot into your backup partition. Check that it works. Turn off Time Machine there – you don’t want backups from this snapshot anymore.

Must do: Boot into your original OS and rename the new partition – when you restore to the new partition it has the same name as the old. Under the hood they have different file names, but you can’t see them, which can lead to utter confusion.

OK – ready for upgrade!

Scary first boot

The first boot immediately crashed with the following:

panic (cpi 0 caller 0x2ab7a2): “Version mis-match between Kernel and CPU PM”@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1504.9.37/osfmk/i386/pmCPI.c:707

Don’t panic. This is usually caused by the SleepEnabler.kext which was built for the previous kernel version. Once removed from the Chameleon /Extra/Extensions directory the update proceeded to a running OS.

Sound Not Working

The upgrade replaces the AppleHDA.kext in /System/Library/Extensions, and causes sound to stop working. To fix, replace the new AppleHDA.kext by the old one from the previous version of the OS (now isn’t it handy to have a file-level access from one OS to the other?). This assumes, of course, that you had a working sound before.

Other issues

I had a (seemingly random) system freeze, which is not very healthy. If this persists I would need to figure this out.

Enjoy!

Tags: Hackintosh, Mac, OS X

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Stop relying on “free” services

Open Web — Comments Off

April 10, 2011

I never understood why people use Gmail.

That’s a lie. Actually I do understand. Gmail is convenient, works nicely, even perfectly, and above all – free. so why not use Gmail?

Marco Arment nailed it:

That said, there’s never any guarantee that a service that has been good in the past will always be good in the future. Siegler’s (and TechCrunch’s) problem isn’t that Gmail has been unreliable (which really isn’t new), but that there’s no good alternative once you’ve invested heavily in it — either by giving out a @gmail.com email address, depending on features that other providers don’t support, or growing accustomed to (and dependent on) the Gmail web interface.

For something as important as email, I’ve never trusted everything to a proprietary provider. My email address has never ended in someone else’s domain name, and has never been hosted in any way that would preclude me from easily switching to another provider.

This is a clear case of sweet honey pot. As time passes it becomes increasingly more sticky and painful to get out, in case a you want to (or required to).

I am using Fastmail for the past 10 years (even longer then Marco). $40 a year is a negligible price to pay for a crucial service. After changing email addresses due to internet providers switch long ago, I vowed “never again”; The show-stopper feature became “Does this provider allow for my own domain”?

I have my own @arielbloch email domain, and have complete indexed backup of all mails directly on the desktop – either Thunderbird or OS X Mail app. And of course due to IMAP, full access to the same email from my iPhone, iPad, home and work desktops.

Thanks Marco for illuminating this point!

Tags: Email

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Crossfire!

Games — Comments Off

April 6, 2011

A happy find today! One of my fondest 80′s Apple II games, Crossfire, found as a complete running version on VirtualApple.

The whole thing runs inside a browser plugin, which makes it pretty neat – no need to download disks and manage the emulator.

Playing Tips

As the game does not have any instructions, here are some tips:

For the game to receive your keyboard input, make sure you click on the play area to give it the focus.

Press Caps-Lock for the keyboard to work. I am not sure if this is a particular bug with this game or with the entire emulator, but it wont work otherwise.

Two hands on the keyboard: Move with JKLI, shoot with SDFE

You have to press SPACE a lot – this is how you stop on the next intersection.

You have 30 bullets. Once this runs out, you need to get to the blinking 4 white dots to reload. The problem is – you don’t have any more ammunition…

For your highscore OCD, the 4 hidden bonuses are unlocked and briefly emerge in a timely fashion. Each one gives progressively more points, so try to get them all.

All in all, this is quite an addictive game – even till this day. The sounds are unique and memorable, and even the funny Apple II graphics are OK with this game.

Enjoy!

Tags: Apple II, Emulator, Games, Retro

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Invisible Instruments

iOS . Music — Comments Off

April 4, 2011

Tim Soo, a charming young musician which happens to be also a gifted hacker, created the following video to raise funds for his innovation.

I was surprised mostly by the vocal talent, actually. Which of his careers – music, technology or singing will lead him forward?

More details on Mashable:

“Originally, I built an extremely simple ‘invisible violin’ in part because I left my violin back at home and needed to perform a short composition for an intro music theory class,” he says. “I thought it’d make for an easy grade. The concept, however, took hold.”

Tags: Hack, iPhone

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