Rick's World

Last night I 'jailbroke' my iPod Touch. What is jailbreaking? That's the term for when you take the iPod Touch (or iPhone), which is normally locked down tight to prevent any third party applications from being installed on it and you break into it and modify it to allow third party applications. In a sense you break it out of being locked up 'in jail' (hence the name).

Jailbreaking is certainly not authorized by Apple. In fact, they've put a lot of effort into stopping people from doing this. They have locked down the OS on these devices very tightly, and provided no documentation on how to access the OS or write applications for it. However, despite this, hackers have been able to not only break into the OS, but to figure out how to write applications for it. I am truly impressed by what they have been able to accomplish.

Now you may ask, why did I bother to jailbreak my iPod Touch when they are announcing an official SDK for it next month. The reason is, that I know that this little device is a VERY powerful computer, and I know you can do A LOT more with it, than what Apple provides. I wanted to see what will be possible starting next month, and I have to say that the possibilities of what can be done with this device are staggering. If they can accomplish all I've seen with NO documentation and no SDK, imagine what they can do with full documentation and an official SDK! I can't wait to see what happens.

Yep, I'm back after a long period of not blogging. Why? I don't know. Just never got around to it. Other stuff to do. Anyway, yesterday was Christmas, so here's my summary of the day.

The day started at about 8am with my furry alarm clocks (Tiger & Jewel) waking me up. I got up, had breakfast etc. I was out the door around 9am or so. I arrived at the parents house around 930am. After greeting everyone and bringing in my pile of gifts, we proceeded to take some family pictures. For the next 20 minutes or so, it was a game of rearranging the family to every possible combination of two people, three people, and even a few of all four of us (taken using the timer function of the cameras. After everyone had their own family picture, we proceeded to the gifts.

As usual, its the war between the parents insisting the kids open their gifts first and the kids insisting the parents open their gifts first. Of course the kids won and we had the parents open their gifts first. Mom got a CD of games for the computer and a copy of Planet Earth from me. For dad, I got a copy of Windows XP Professional (We don't need no steenking Vista!). Yes, that's right. After all these years, my parents are finally 'legit' with Windows! My brother gave my dad a new jacket to wear, and a large new Ikea cutting board that he liked. He gave my mom a new light fixture for her ceiling fan and a gift certificate to JoAnn Fabrics (Mom's a quilter!). From both of the 'kids' we give dad a wireless keyboard and mouse for the computer. Mom also got a new ring to wear from Dad and Mom gave Dad a nice new Sealy Posturpedic computer chair. Man that's a comfy chair! I want one! :)

Once the parents were done unwrapping their gifts, the 'kids' got to open their gifts. I got a nice battery powered screwdriver, an Ikea Poang chair and footstool. I also got a copy of Animusic 1 and Animusic 2, but one of the DVDs was loose in the case and got badly scratched. The DVD was unplayable and so I had to mail it back to Amazon.com today for exchange. It'll likely be a few weeks before I get the replacements. What a bummer! Those are some really neat movies. My brother received several seasons of TV shows on DVD, another copy of Windows XP Professional, a remote control helicopter, and a Nintendo Wii. Yes, that's right. My bro managed to receive one of the most sought after gadgets of the year. I gotta thank my friend Dave for finding that Wii for me. I spent weeks looking but was unable to locate one.

By now, it was past noon and the presents were finally all opened. I went off to help the parents change the CD Key on their copy of Windows XP to use their new legit CD Key. I was able to get this changed and their computer completely updated. However, once I set the new CD Key, AVG Antivirus suddenly started complaining that it's serial number was invalid! This is weird, because I was using the free version of their antivirus and it never asked for a serial number. It just generated one. Apparently, it must generate that serial number based on the Windows XP CD key. I had to uninstall and reinstall AVG Antivirus to get that to work again. Grr. I also had a ton of trouble with their network printer. It refused to print from Windows, though it oddly printed perfectly from my brother's Mac Mini. I was never able to figure out how to fix that yesterday. My father and brother did manage to fix it today though by reinstalling the printer drivers.

Later, around 6pm we ate dinner. Dinner consisted of a Honey Baked Ham, mashed potatoes (made by me!), veggies and rolls. A very good dinner. I left later in the evening and took all my new stuff home. I was really tired. I went home and went straight to bed.

I also found out that a cousin of mine discovered my blog and hopefully is a regular reader now. Hi Miki!

As for that photo up at the top, that's the Ekle family. I'm the guy on the left. My brother, Bob is standing to my right, followed by my dad and my mom.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas!

*sigh* Even when I have legal copies of Windows XP, it still seems to enjoy aggravating the hell out of me.

I use a Mac Pro at home. I've written in the past about how great it was and how I could run Windows XP in a virtual machine so well that I never needed a separate PC anymore. I'd been running XP happily in the virtual machine for several months, using a legal, registered copy of Windows XP, that I bought just for this purpose. I never had a problem with this setup. A couple of days ago, I decided to take the next step. That's when the fun began.

The next step that I decided to take was to use Boot Camp to install Windows XP on a separate hard drive. This would allow me to reboot into full Windows XP whenever I need to, and have full access to all the computer's resources in XP. VMWare Fusion has the ability to take a BootCamp partition and run it as if it was a virtual machine from inside OS X. I figured this would give me the best of both worlds. I could run full blown Windows in Boot Camp if I needed more power, and I could run that same copy of windows in VMWare Fusion whenever I just needed to do something quickly.

I ran the BootCamp Assistant and was able to easily install Windows XP to the spare hard drive. Leopard's install DVD even contains a program that autoinstalls Windows drivers for all the hardware on the Mac Pro. Windows XP is up and running perfectly. I then spent the rest of the evening reactivating that copy of XP (to replace the one I had activated in the virtual machine), installing updates, installing software etc. I spent hours setting this thing up. It was running perfectly.

Last night I decided to try running the BootCamp partition in VMWare Fusion. Here is where XP ruined my day. XP's activation system is based on doing an inventory of the hardware on your machine. If a lot of hardware changes, it decided you must have changed computers or perhaps installed a second copy on another computer. If it detects too many changes, it deactivates your copy of Windows and gives you three days to reactivate. This is exactly what happened to me when I ran it in BootCamp for the first time. XP's activation system noticed I was running in 'different hardware' now (i.e. VMWare) so it deactivated itself and told me I have to reactivate. This reactivation is a slow, annoying process you need to do over the phone.

So assuming I reactivate XP in VMWare, then it will work. The problem is, as soon as I go back to running it in Boot Camp, it will detect hardware changes again and deactivate itself again! In other words, everytime I switch between running it in Boot Camp and running it in VMWare, I'll have to reactivate it again!

Screw this crap! I'm going back to my VMWare virtual machine I had before and wiping that hard drive! ARGH!

For the last several years I've had an ongoing problem with my garage door opener. Several years ago, the garage door opener that came with my house stopped working right, so I got a new one. My dad came over to help me install it (I'm not exactly Mr. Handyman). We proceeded to replace the motor only and left everything else alone. There was no need to change anything else, because the motor was the only thing that was bad.

For the last several years I've had a problem where the garage door opener refuses to close properly. It would close part way, stop, and then reverse itself and open up all the way again. At the end, the light would blink repeatedly, as if there was some kind of error. For a long time, I just forced it to go down by holding the button until it closed all the way. This really annoyed me, though because I could never close the garage door unless I was inside the garage. It makes it kind of useless.

This past weekend, I asked Dad to come by so we could swap out the old electric eyes that were left over from the previous garage door opener, with the new ones that came with it. I figured that the old electric eye wasn't working right. This would cause the eye to think something was blocking it, so it would refuse to close the door.

Dad came over and after some experimentation with the old and new electric eyes, we finally figured out what the problem was. There was nothing wrong with the old electric eye. The problem was we had connected it wrong to the motor! This was no doubt screwing up the signal causing it to not work right. It took some trial and error and reading the installation instructions (which weren't very clear), before we figured out the wiring was wrong. Finally, after fixing the wiring, the old eye worked perfectly with the newer motor. It's worked flawlessly ever since.

The moral of the story - Read the instructions! Don't assume you know how it works! :)

In short: It SUCKED!

I just got back from seeing Beowulf, or should I say, I just got back from seeing part of Beowulf. I walked out about 20 minutes into the movie and demanded my money back.

The movie starts and I'm sitting there watching it. Right from the beginning, I'm thinking that something is not right about this movie. It doesn't look right. I can't quite put my finger on it at first. After a few minutes, I realize the truth. The entire movie is CGI animation! Not just the occasional CGI monster, but everything! This would not be a bad thing in and of itself. The CGI animation was the most amazing, most realistic CGI animation I've ever seen. Unfortunately, that's the only good thing I can say about the movie.

Not more than a few minutes into the movie, Grendel the monster shows up. Now, I rather expected there to be some build up to this. Nope. We get a very good look at Grendel. He is the stupidest, most pathetic looking monster I have ever seen. Not scary at all. He looks like a giant, deformed man who seems to be missing his skin. He looks like a goofy skinless giant. Once Grendel finished his attack by killing everyone in sight, he leaves and returns to his lair. There he talks to an unseen character (Angelina Jolie's character?) and then he starts talking in Italian or something. Huh? It made no sense.

We are also treated to a very high quality CGI animation of an obese Anthony Hopkins staggering around as the drunk king, wearing nothing but a toga. At one point we come perilously close to seeing a CGI animated full-frontal nudity shot of an overweight fat guy. Um, no thanks.

The CGI animation was also very inconsistent. At some points, it was nearly flawless. Unless you looked closely you couldn't tell it wasn't a live action person. At other times, I thought I was watching a bad rip off of Shrek.

This movie was supposed to be your typical, intense, serious action movie. Lots of cool sword fights, big scary monsters, etc. I kind of expected another '300' style movie - stylized violence. Instead we find a movie where the entire audience was laughing at everything! It's a very bad sign when the audience of a serious action movie is laughing at the utter ridiculous stuff they are watching. At least I can have faith in the fact that the rest of the audience clearly was thinking the same thing I was - This movie is pathetic and stupid.

This movie deserves to bomb.

I grieve for the obscene amount of CPU cycles that went into rendering this movie. From a CGI point of view, this movie is ground-breaking. It's just suck a pathetic movie, that this fact will likely be forgotten.

This past weekend, I went to the Miami International Auto Show. Below is a picture taken of me sitting in the car I wanna buy!

Last week, on October 26th, I met with my friend Dave to buy our copies of Leopard. Not long after we finished installing we started trying out the various features of Leopard to see what was new.

At one point, we got to trying out Apple Mail. This is Apple's email reading program that comes with OS X. I had been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years and was curious about how Apple Mail worked. One feature that I used all the time was Thunderbirds 'View only Unread Mail' setting. This was a setting on the menu that changed it so it only showed the unread mail in your inbox. I liked this setting because I like to keep my old mail around, but after a while, all that old mail starts to 'clutter up' the list and it's hard to find the new email to read.

We loaded Apple Mail, and searched everywhere in the menus for this 'View Unread Only' setting. It was nowhere to be found. This of course made me mad. How could Apple leave out such a common feature that exists in all other email programs? This sucks! Back to Thunderbird for me. But then Dave came up with a solution. Just create a smart folder that displays all the unread mail in your inbox! Suddenly I understood why Apple left off this obvious feature. It wasn't needed and it was a poor approach to the problem. Why waste menu space creating a feature that not everyone is going to use? Why not simply add it as a feature of smart folders. This way, people like me can add the feature, and the rest who don't care about it, never have to see some confusing menu item. Everyone wins.

Nice job Apple. Once again Apple is forcing me to 'think different', but in a good way.

Last night, my friend Dave and I got together for a sort of Geek's Night Out. It was a fun evening.

Yesterday, at 6pm was the big release of Apple's OS X Leopard - their new operating system. Both of us had been anxiously awaiting this for some time. Since we are members of ADC Select, we'd both already tried the early betas of Leopard, so we knew what to expect, but it was nice to finally be able to be 'official' with it. I left work and headed up to Boca to meet with him at the Apple Store up there. Why did I drive all the way to Boca just to go to the Apple Store, when there is an Apple Store located much closer to were I work? I did this because I wanted to get together with Dave to help him put an eSATA cable into his Mac (which I'd already done on mine), plus, we figured that the Boca Apple Store wouldn't be as busy.

I got to the Apple Store at about 6:30pm. Even though I left at 5:45pm, it took a good 45 minutes to get there, due to the bad traffic and the fact that it had been raining all day, so the roads were wet. Dave got there before I did, so he had already gone through the line, bought his copy and got his t-shirt. Since he got there before I did, he got an extra t-shirt for me. Of course, I didn't know this, so I got in line, bought my copy and got my t-shirt. Now Dave has two Leopard t-shirts! :) Oh well. The store was very busy, even for an Apple Store which is normally busy. I was surprised how few people seemed to be there to buy copies of Leopard. Maybe there were a lot, and the line just moved really fast. I don't know, but I was surprised how fast I got in and out with my copy. I don't think I was in there more than five minutes.

I left the store and met Dave outside the store. We walked over to the food court and grabbed some dinner. We chatted and sat watching the 'scenery' for a while and then left the mall. We headed over to a small computer store he knew of down the street. I was going there to pick up an external eSATA enclosure - the same one that he had bought previously that I tested on my Mac. His enclosure worked, but the one I had bought before didn't, so I wanted to pick up one that would work. I bought my eSATA enclosure and a cable to let you plug an internal HD in as USB. That's a very handy cable to have when fixing computers. We left the computer store and proceeded to our next stop - Best Buy. We looked around a bit in Best Buy. Dave bought a program for his computer. I didn't buy anything. Next, came Borders.

We went over to Borders and looked around for a while. Dave bought a novel and I bought another computer book. From there we drove to his house.

When we arrived at his house, I brought my toolbox in. I was going to help him put the eSATA cable into his Mac. I had the same cable and I'd already put it in my Mac, so I knew how to do it. It's a tricky bit of 'surgery' to do. I also had all the tools we needed to do it, so that's why I brought the toolbox. Granted that toolbox was way more tools than we needed, but I just brought the whole thing just in case. Dave brought his Mac down and we got the cable installed pretty quickly. It was much easier the second time around. The first time I did it on my Mac, I took about an hour to do it. I was very nervous about taking a part a $2500 computer, so i was very slow and careful with it. This time, it only took maybe 20 minutes to do, since I was much more familiar with it.

Next we brought the Mac back upstairs and installed Leopard! Dave was planning on installing it to a empty 500GB HD, so he did a clean install. The install itself went pretty quickly and with no bumps at all. Smooth as silk. Once the computer restarted, it offered to copy all his stuff from the old HD. He told it to go ahead and it started chugging. It was going to take about an hour or so do do that, so we just sat and chatted for a while. An hour later, the copy completed and it fired up. Dave was stunned on how fast it was running and how flawless the upgrade went. This new version of the operating system was running noticably faster on the same hardware than the old one did. As Dave said, "When's the last time you upgraded Windows and your computer got faster?" He was very happy. We played with Leopard for a while to make sure all his stuff got properly transfered over. With the exception of his iCal calendars, everything did. You can read his story of the evening here. With that, I left and drove home. It was an enjoyable evening.

I installed Leopard on my machine earlier today... I'm typing this on it now. I'll have another blog later with my impressions of Leopard, once I've had a chance to try it out for a little while.

Ok, this has to be the first time I've ever had a bug in my iPod caused by the case!

A while back, I ordered a silicone case for my iPod Touch from eBay. Last night it arrived and I put it on the iPod. Today, I turned on my iPod and started listening to it. I noticed an odd problem. As soon as the iPod comes on, the screen lights up, but then a second or so later, the screen dims, but it still visible. It was never doing this before. What the hell? Now my stupid screen isn't lighting up like it used to? This damn iPod is nothing but trouble! Grumble, grumble.

Turns out it wasn't a bug in the iPod. The iPod has built into it an ambient light sensor. In other words, it detects how dark the room is and depending on how dark it is, it dims the screen brightness. I think what is happening now is that since the entire iPod is in this case, it blocks the light sensor, so the iPod thinks it's dark outside and it dims the screen! It's still usable, but I'm wondering whether this problem will cause me to have to not use this case. I'm not sure where on the iPod this light sensor is located, so I don't know how I can fix the problem by cutting a hole in the case or something.

Weird.

Update: I found a solution. If you go to Settings and click on Brightness, there is an Auto-Brightness setting. If you turn this off, I think this turns off the light sensor, and the iPod works as before. Of course, now you'll have a really bright iPod all the time.

Yesterday, I took a trip down to my local Circuit City to buy a copy of 'Transformers' on DVD. As I picked up the box in the store, I heard some noise coming from it. It sounded like the DVD was sliding around inside the sealed box. I didn't pay much attention to it. I just bought it and brought it home.

Last night, I sit down in my nice comfy recliner, cranked up my thumping surround sound system and fired up the movie. About 20 minutes or so into the movie, it just suddenly pauses and jumps ahead a good 15 seconds in the movie! This is usually a sign that the DVD player is having trouble reading the DVD. I knew instantly that I had bought a bad DVD. I took the DVD out, turned it over, and sure enough there were several large scratches on the bottom of the DVD. Darnit, just when the movie was getting good, I had to stop, pack it up and head back to Circuit City to exchange it for another one. I brought the DVD in, and went back to grab another copy to exchange it for. I picked up several copies, only to hear that same noise of the DVD sliding around inside the box on each. Finally I found a 'silent' box, so I exchanged it and brought it home. I checked the DVD and it was perfect. No scratches and the movie played flawlessly.

The moral of the story is, when buying DVDs in the store, shake the box a little. If you hear a DVD moving around inside the box, don't buy it! Buy another copy that doesn't make any noise when you shake it. It turns out that the DVD I originally bought was not properly seated in the holder inside the box. This caused the DVD to get bounced around inside the box and get scratched up. From now on, when I buy a DVD, I'm going to do the 'shake test' before paying for it.