Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Best free iPhone apps

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 10, 2010
in Apple, TV, internet and literature
. 1 Comment

   Captain Haddock

The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.

Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:

Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.

BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!

Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.

iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.

Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.

FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.

TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.

I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…

It’s no MagicSlate

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 27, 2010
in Apple, MacOS X and computers
. 3 Comments

iPad display

I have long dreamed of a neat, small computer which I called the MagicSlate and I was interested to read that this was one of the names Apple registered for their slate device. I even wrote a story about its developers. But that’s another, er, story.

But the iPad - it sounds like a sanitary towel for the late 20th Century, by the way - is no MagicSlate. It’s just a big iPhone. Without the phone. And not even a USB port as far as I can tell.

Steve Jobs has also dissed netbook users by saying they are “just cheap laptops”. Almost everyone I know has a netbook or has bought one for someone. And sometimes you need a cheap laptop and Apple laptops are not cheap. Apple could not make a netbook because there’s not enough profit in the hardware at those prices. According to BBC News his Steveness said:

“Netbooks aren’t better at anything - they’re slow and have low quality displays.”

Well my £245 netbook (running OS X, incidentally) has an LED-backlit display. Er, a bit like the iPad. And so much is on the web (and in ‘the cloud’) now that processing power just doesn’t count for that much any more.

One thing seems certain though - if the iPad is running on Apple’s own CPU, it won’t easily get hacked and ported to another make of device any time soon, if ever. But then why would you want to?

Hands on with the Lenovo IdeaPad S10

Published
by
blogmywiki
on September 13, 2009
in Apple, Linux, MacOS X, Ubuntu, WiFi, computers and hardware
. 2 Comments

Lenovo IdeaPad

Times are hard and my Apple PowerBook G4 is on its last pixels… its Firewire port doesn’t work, I think the Bluetooth is bust and the final straw was the screen - most of the time two thirds of it has bands of grey or garbage across it and I have to fiddle with the screen for ages to get a picture, like messing with a set-top aerial on an old TV. I can’t afford to replace it with a MacBook let alone a MacBookPro, so I turned my attention back to netbooks again.

Price Barrier

I was on the verge of buying the Samsung NC10 - it’s quite cute and the battery life is excellent - when Amazon shoved the price back over the psychological £300 barrier. I think netbooks should cost under £300, preferably closer to £200. Amazon then sent me some spam about the Lenovo S10 and I couldn’t believe the price - £255 inc VAT and shipping.

In many ways this is a very ordinary netbook - small, 1024×600 display, WiFi, WindowsXP Home Edition, ethernet, webcam, 3 USB ports and an SD card reader. But it had a few features that made me make an impulse purchase: its 160GB hard drive - the same size as my £1700 PowerBook’s - is removable, which is neat as it’s the thing most likely to go wrong. It also has Bluetooth and a PCI Express card slot, which is unheard of for a netbook this cheap.

It’s possible Amazon made a mistake with the price, as I then saw it listed at £320. But it is a lovely machine. Best of all is the display, which is very bright and crisp. I know my PowerBook was getting a little old, but it’s like someone has cleaned my glasses. Not that I wear glasses. The keyboard is fine, the trackpad better than some I’ve tried - not as good as an Apple one I grant you. It has a switch on the side to turn WiFi and Bluetooth off, useful if you are on a plane, want to save power - or you’re just paranoid.

I put this solidly-built little machine to good use yesterday, perching it in the kitchen, playing stuff off Spotify all day and keeping me entertained while I did battle installing the world’s most fiendish dishwasher (if Ikea made dishwashers, it would be the Fisher and Paykel DishDrawer, but that’s another story…)

Little boots

It boots fairly quickly into Windows, but I discovered that it also has a button marked QS; this stands for QuickStart, and boots the machine very quickly into a Linuxy SplashTop kind of OS, giving you a basic web browser, Skype, photo manager, MP3 player etc. It’s possible this will do enough to hold me off putting Linux on this machine… but…

I am the Cheese Photo Booth

The Linux Question

Now, I’m no fan of Windows, but I do admit I find it quite useful that I now have my first ever WindowsXP machine of my own and I can run all sorts of software. I want to keep XP on here, even if I add Linux. This should’t be a problem, but it brings us to one big drawback with the IdeaPad. Lenovo do not supply a system restore DVD or a Windows install disk. There is something called One Key Recovery - a button that rebuilds your machine, but this relies on code stored in a separate partition on the hard drive. Clearly if you add a new OS, you risk trashing this backup. Not good, expecially as you have paid for a legal XP licence - the key is stuck on the bottom of the machine.

So what to do? Firstly I need to get me a USB DVD writer and back up the hard drive and make a bootable Windows recovery disk - there are a few ways to do this, but frankly I shouldn’t be doing this, Lenovo should supply one. Another option is to get a new SATA drive, keep the old one intact, and muck around with a factory fresh one and then I can go back to Windows and the SplashTop Quick Start OS if I want. A third way is to use WUBI - this a Windows installer for Ubuntu that installs Ubuntu inside Windows without altering the disk partitions, although I fancy using the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and there is currently no easy way of installing this netbook-friendly Linux from WUBI (I was running it off a USB stick in the screenshot above).

Cake and eating it

And then there is OS X. Yes, OS X. Some people have got OS X running on the IdeaPad, admittedly with no audio and no ethernet but they do have graphics and WiFi working. This seems quite astonishing to me - I could have the best of both worlds: an insanely cheap and an insanely great laptop.

iPod Nano - 4th Generation

Published
by
blogmywiki
on October 23, 2008
in Apple and music
. 3 Comments

It’s like a piece of time travel… my first generation 5GB iPod is getting hard to charge and put new music on, as its Firewire connector is dodgy - and the Firewire port on my PowerBook is broken which doesn’t help.

When The Old and the New the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.

I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook - but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde - in the good old days it was all so much quicker.

All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac - which only has USB 1.0 - and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ - I said movies - and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…

WiFi forgetfulness solved

Published
by
blogmywiki
on September 24, 2008
in Apple and MacOS X
. 0 Comments

Following a security update, my PowerBook kept losing its wireless connection when waking from sleep or starting up. Wifi woes solved This was a pain as my WiFi base station doesn’t transmit its SSID and I had to enter its name and long hex WEP key each time I wanted to get online.

Turns out the solution was rather simpler than all the mucking around I’d been doing deleting com.apple.airport files and the like.

I just made a new ‘location’ - its location had been on ‘automatic’, so I went to System Preferences > Network and clicked on the locations drop-down menu and made a new location (called ‘foo’ of course). Since then it’s been rejoining my wireless network ok when it wakes up. Phew! Or should I say ‘Foo!’?

Super-connected

Published
by
blogmywiki
on September 23, 2008
in Apple, Uncategorized, Wii, computers and gaming
. 0 Comments

Did a security update on my PowerBook today; now it keeps forgetting my wireless network’s name and password. So it really is very bloody secure as it’s now mostly not connected to the internet at all any more. I forgave this behaviour in a £200 (now defenestrated) Asus eeePC but it’s a bit galling in a £1600 Apple pro laptop. Where’s the window?

Home alone and at a loose end, I Googled ‘cool things to do with a Nintendo Wii’ Wii Transfer (it’s been sitting in the living room not earning its keep) and discovered Wii Transfer. This allows me to stream iPhoto pictures and iTunes songs from the big fat old 320GB iMac in the back room which has all my MP3s on it. I had to shell out £7 for some Wii Points to download the Wii web-browser, but now here I am with a big stupid grin on my face dancing round the living room to the strains of That Petrol Emotion. Doesn’t seem to like long songs, though - the Wii says it doesn’t have enough memory and chokes. So we are spared The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds‘ for now…

Big fat hard drive in a 700 MHz G4 iMac

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 18, 2008
in Apple, MacOS X, computers, hardware, lowendmac, operating systems and thrift
. 4 Comments

Conventional wisdom says that any G4 iMac slower than 1 GHz cannot work with a hard drive bigger than 120 GB. But they were selling 320GB IDE drives in Maplin for only £59.99 and it seemed silly to pay ten or twenty quid less for a fraction of the storage - anyhoo if it didn’t work I could always bung the big drive in my USB/Firewire caddy and use it for backing up the backups of my photos…

So I opened up the iMac again, inserted the drive, had considerably more trouble getting it back together this time but got there. Expecting nothing (I thought I’d broken the IDE cable aside from the fact that most web sites said this would not work) I powered up. Bing! Flashing folder, as expected.

Inserted Panther install disc - installer ran but couldn’t find a hard drive. Well fair enough, it’s factory fresh and not formatted, so I used Disk Utility on the Panther install disc to format it as Mac OS X Journalled.

But the installer still wouldn’t install - it found the drive but it had a red warning triangle next to it and the words “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume”.

Game over, I thought. Either the IDE cable is broken or - as people say - the drive is just too big for an old Mac. But before I gave up I had a word with Mr Google (thank you Jamie Oliver) and found this page which told me to give it a reboot. And by jove, he’s right. It’s insane, but he’s right. After a swift kick the installer happily ran and here I am typing this on an ancient 700 MHz G4 iMac that cannot possibly work with a hard drive larger than 120 GB, and yet I have 300 GB free… ah so many things to try… more memory, video editing, installing a DVD burner, keeping all my MP3s, getting all my photos off my PowerBook which has run out of disk space…

look ma! 300GB free!

Repairing a G4 ‘Anglepoise’ iMac

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 17, 2008
in Apple, lowendmac and thrift
. 3 Comments

My son’s school was chucking out a faulty 700 MHz G4 Anglepoise iMac - apprently it had an intermittant fault where the hard drive clicked and it wouldn’t boot. Of course I couldn’t bear to see this become land-fill so I brought it home to my Macintosh Sanctuary.

At first it seemed fine but whilst installing OS X, the thing died. Click, click, click. All I could do was get it to boot into Open Firmware - it wouldn’t even eject the CD-ROM. I was convinced I’d killed it, but a couple of bright sparks at work suggested that the hard drive might have just finally kicked the bucket. As it shares its IDE interface with the CD-ROM drive this might also explain why the CD wouldn’t eject. Armed with some instructions from XLER8YOURMAC, size 10 and 15 Torx (star-shaped) screwdrivers and an old 4GB Bondi Blue iMac hard drive, I explored.

I actually found the whole thing easier than that article suggested. First using a small cross-pointed screwdriver you undo the base plate to get at the user-servicable parts - a memory slot and Airport card slot:

user servicable parts

Then the big Torx T15 screwdriver comes into play - undo the 4 Torx screws and pull the whole base - including the white plastic bit where the ports are. Be gentle but firm as you are unplugging connectors as you do this.

prising open

At this point you can swap its internal memory card if you like, but I was interested in the grey drive assembly. I disconnected its IDE connector on the motherboard and unclipped the 2 cables clamped to its right. Then I used the T10 Torx screwdriver to remove the 6 screws holding the drive assembly in place (click on photo to see notes):

drive assembly

I then pulled the drive assembly down and towards me.

fan and gubbins

I then removed the IDE and power connectors from the hard drive, peeled the strange white plastic wrapper off and removed the IDE drive from its caddy using a Torx screwdriver.

the dead hard drive

I replaced it with a 4 GB hard drive from my original 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac - one tenth the size of the one I removed but this was a temporary measure to prove that this was the problem before I shell out some real money on an 80GB drive. I put it all back together, forgetting the thermal paste for now, and turned it on:

Never so pleased to see OS 9!

I’ve never been so pleased to see the OS 9 splash screen! That old iMac hard drive must have been confused though - it fell asleep in a 233 MHz CRT G3 Bondi Blue iMac and woke up in a 700 MHz LCD G4 anglepoise iMac… I never liked the G4 iMac when it came out, but now I have one I think it’s a great machine. And easier to get inside than the Bondi Blue beastie…

Phew!

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 15, 2008
in Apple, Asus eee PC and computers
. 10 Comments

As an Apple fan who recently bought a tiny Asus eeePC laptop, I was frankly dreading today’s MacWorld Expo. Everyone seemed to be saying that Apple would also be bringing out a tiny laptop too. I could only hope it would cost a shade more than the £200 my Asus cost me.

Well, yes. Just a mere £1000 more than that. You can buy 6 eeePCs for the price of one MacBook Air.

Phew.

Oh, and unlike the eeePC, the MacBook Air has no ethernet socket, no microphone socket and only one USB socket (the eeePC has three). The eeePC weighs 920g to the MacBook Air’s 1.3kg. Both have built-in webcams and microphones. And I don’t see an SD card socket in the Apple gizmo…

I can’t really see who the MacBook Air is aimed at. PowerBook/MacBook Pro users are going to find its lack of connectivity a bit of an issue - I mean what’s the use of iMovie when there’s no freaking Firewire socket? Don’t know about you but none of my camcorders has super-fast wireless connectivity… And most other users are going to choke on the price tag, even if it does have far more storage than my eeePC and a much bigger display. But it’s the small footprint of the eeePC that makes it so appealing to me - I don’t care how thin it is, I just want to be able to rest it inconspicuously on my knee on the train.

Innocence lost

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 26, 2007
in Apple, MacOS X, children, computers, family life, lowendmac and thrift
. 2 Comments

old g3 tower gets exciting new featuresWith a slightly heavy heart I’ve had to install parental controls on the computer in the back room - which meant upgrading the G3 Tower of Power from MacOS 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).

The boys had been looking at some very mildly risque videos on a web site they’d got off some friends - eldest is only 7. The computer is in a shared room, but not a room where they’re very noticable, which is probably a bad thing but there’s nowhere else to put it, and I don’t like their sticky fingers on my PowerBook very much. Makes me nervous.

So, another little bit of innocence lost.

But the nerd in me was quite pleased to have figured this out: I had MacOS 10.3 installed on a 20GB drive that had been partitioned in two. I only have an upgrade installer for 10.4 that requires 10.3 to be installed before it’ll run. But once it’s found a 10.3 installation, you can use Disc Utility on the 10.4 updated DVD to repartition / reformat the disc that 10.3 is itself on. So all the files you need for OS 10.4 must be on the updater DVD. And I only had to spend an hour or two shovelling a spare DVD drive into it and updating the OS, and recreating everyone’s accounts and finding  wallpaper of James Bond and Thierry Henry and worrying about data I might have inadvertantly wiped…