slow with one point five GB

Apple OSX

So, my MacBook Pro has one and a half Gigabyte. Plenty, so I thought. After all I have been crusing those internets -and thats pretty much what I am doing with the machine- happily with 640MB a couple of years back.

Still, it started swapping. You can always tell: things get really slow, specially when switching back to firefox for instance. Activity monitor sure enough showed that dreaded almost all yellow circle with just a token line of green left.

Then I realised what had changed: I had re-enabled spotlight in /etc/hostconfig. Spotlight is a waste of many things: screen real estate, hope, memory, CPU cycles and mind space. I have never ever seen somebody use it happily in real life, or telling me: “I found my stuff again, thanks to Spotlight”. Good idea, ill implemented. To say the least. But wait, Apple can not make bad software. That’s impossible.

iPod touch compatible with Interdubs

Apple interdubs technology

Good thing that the new iPod touch from Apple is compatible with Interdubs. Quiet a nice player for all those commercials being made that are hosted in Interdubs. And, upside: you get to see how things will look on this player from day one.

at&t is a waste of time

Apple marketing

So, trying to talk to AT&T about those outragous data charges is a complete waste of time. Their client service is as nightmarish as it always has been. I will now start telling Apple at all possible moments how badle AT&T sucks. After all, they forced me to deal with them. AT&T does not care. They never did, and will never. But Apple got where they are by caring. One would like to think.

drivesmart s.m.a.r.t. utiltiy for OS X

Apple technology

Tried DriveSmart today. Bad software. TumbleWeedWare for lack of a better term. Install is fancy. Application crashes. Uninstall shows empty dialog box. Clicking yes tries to reboot the machine. So, not a good idea.

iPhone data roam shock

Apple malware

The iPhone worked in Germany. Which is good. I was worried about roaming charges, so I left it off most of the time. But during four days I was out of reach of any wifi network, and Vodafone’s data network did work. It was painfully slow, hardly hardly usable. I checked my email during those four days. Maybe 8 times in total. Now I returned and got the bill: 358.18 US$ in data transfer charges. The roaming cost for data transfers comes down to almost twenty dollars per Megabyte! Imagine the connection would be faster. I certainly wanted always to pay a hundred dollars to watch a youTube movie. Can be done easily.

I am not very pleased how big corporation error on side of blatant rip off. Almost 400 US$ for checking my email a couple of times. Finding out what those roaming charges would be on the website of AT&T? Good luck. That’s impossible. I should have called them. Would only take ten to fifteen minutes of voice mail hell to find out I would guess.

So if you are abroad: DO NOT use the iPhones data mode. Twenty dollars a Megabyte is steep.

keys for brightness don’t work on OS X laptop anymore

Apple OSX

Somehow it always seems to happen after using a laptop for a while: the screen brightness control via function keys stops working. No idea why, no any of those modifiers like ‘alt’, option, fn command don’t help either. It’s probably a pretty strange hack, but Amit’s code to control the screen brightness works like a charm.

apple laptop displays

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher technology

A brief history of Laptop displays leading up to a close look at the current LED backlit Laptop displays. Interesting how the real story with Apple technology will be happily revealed once there is a happy ending to it. With AAPL @ 131 -and that might be a bargain- it does not seem that the people in Cupertino need allot of help in spinning news the right way. But old habbits die hard. I don’t think that the good people at Rob Galbraith are specifically behaving like this. I think it is a general pattern. One that I am certainly part of. Selfishly I really wanted to continue to have pretty laptops that run unix and applications. And I will continue to buy them. Just that I run out of relatives to give the hand me downs to.

apple, a rotten one

Apple technology

So, the iOhne does not have an SDK. Instead one has to write safari web pages. Sucks, is lame. But I can live with that. Writing webpages is pretty much what I do all day. Main official cool-aid soaked argument for the lack of SDK was security.
Now somebody claims to have hacked the iOhne. In that hack they seem to have access to allot of data. It would be nice if legal and above uses would have access to that data. Maybe you can even hack to get access to the “note pad” application on that thing. Because right now the info stored in there does not go anywhere.

What revs me up about this is Apple’s arrogance on these matters. They just claim that iOhne is perfect. While it’s pretty much a version 0.5. Getting away with lying is nothing that gets my sympathy. I don’t care if it’s Apple, Microsoft or AT&T. Or the current administration. It is very wasteful to spread wrong information. Specially doing so knowingly.

iOhne in the old country

Apple

So that Apple Phone works in europe. Choice of 4 providers pop up on the screen. Of course it’s not that easy to find out how much roaming charges they will be added to the bill. Running the iOhne on wifi only is not possible.

Everybody who chews back Apple’s PR mantra that the thing ‘runs OS X’ must be seriously on drugs or has no idea what an OS actually is. It might be that some of the iOhne code started life in some OS X libraries and routines. But calling it ‘OS X’ would be calling a radio flyer kids toy a Fire Engine. Just because they have both four wheels and come in red.

Only if should there ever be an SDK that allows the creation of standalone iOhne applications one will know better how much OS X and the phones software are alike.

I started to use the iPhone nano again, which works much better as an iPod. It will for instance play another podcast, after one has finished. Imagine that. The iPhone can not.

god damn stupid iphone piece of shit

Apple marketing technology

so, got an iPhone. Pretty much had to: one in 150 hits on Interdubs is from those devices. Wouldn’t I have been so busy with a job that could not be rescheduled then there would be a special Interdubs version for iPhone already. But at least I know now that Interdubs does work with iPhone. If you drank enough cool aid and read enough Apple press releases then you will drop ‘the’ from a sentence like then one before this one. I don’t. The, the. Just to make up for it. The the the. Take that Steve. The!

Sure, sliding your finger over the surface and the content moves along, that’s kind a nice. Of course that screen is really pretty. Really bright too. Glaring california sun? Phew, it shines right back atcha.

As a phone the Razr worked better though. Reception is not good. Bad in many cases. Not sure if it is AT&T or the device. Holding that big (and occasionaly pretty darn hot) thing to your head needs some getting used to. The head phones can be used as a headset. But I don’t want to run around like that, and they pick up a decent amount of ambient case.
Visual voicemail leaves me unimpressed, since I had callwave before. Which stopped working. And there was no way to make it work again. Thanks, AT&T! Idiots. Let’s see how roaming will do, and how much it will cost.

Telco’s in general seem to be the modern day incarnation of a Kafka book. They sell two things: technology and service. First one does not really work that well after all. Second one is a joke beyond belief. I spare you the details, but having dealt with Sprint, Cingular and AT&T as of late I think they are all the same. Verizon was not any better either.

Enters the iPhone. And everything was supposed to get better. Yeah, right. Still a cellphone. Edge is pathetically slow. While it’s taking a minute or sometimes 3 to get my gmail email people calling will get voicemail. Which I will receive. Maybe an hour later. Using Wifi is kinda ok. Other things aren’t. I have allot of international numbers. Those start with +. At least they did on the Razr. Not so in AT&T land. Even though they get recognised as caller ID I have to add 011 in front of them. Maybe there is a setting for that, but why should there be??? Changing a number is not possible where you have the interface. You have to go back into contacts. Not even Microsoft writes such cumbersome interfaces these days. There are countless examples where the the iPhone (double the on purpose to rub in) is more stupid than -let’s say- a zune. Which is supposed to be pretty dumb+dull.

Then I dropped it. In a way I dropped my Razor daily. Of course it hit the little volume up button. And now the button is stuck, which means that I have the ‘Volume up’ overlay on the screen. I went to the apple store. They told me that I could by a new one. Such were my options. They are all gluttoning about ‘their’ success these days. Apple people are pretty full of themselves. Some are. Well, they don’t have to use that darn phone, since they will wait since they get their free one that Herr Jobs has promised to them. When they have one, there might have been even be an update that fixes all those idiotic problems. Like safari crashing. Like trying to make a call and the thing jumping into your face like a bad windows popup asking which closed wifi network you would like to join. Like not being able to bookmark a location in Maps that you have navigated to. Like Weather information going away if you are not connection to Edge. Like not being able send to photos with one of these Apple error messages telling you: “An Error has occured”. No shit. Coverflow, great. Actually not. It would be nice if the stupido phone would play podcasts one after each other. Like all the iPods do that I owned. Battery life? We need shorter days. Like 18 hours? So that the phone lasts a full day. Wifi seems to be biggest battery eater, followed by listening to the iPod. Not sure about Cover flow: I don’t use it. And frankly I think it’s pretty darn stupid. Like so much on this phone. As I am writing this aapl is at 138. I will not give the phone back. But it aint so great – right now. It just gets to show how low the phone bar actually is. Oh, on my razor I was able to change ring tones. The camera in it is a joke. They are all bad. But this one in particular. The Razr could record video. Maybe the iPhone should have an audio recording capability?? or how about GPS? At least via triangulation. It’s pretty lame that I have to tell it where I am. Since it knows, when it has connection to cell towers. The calculator? Another Dieter Rahm rip off. But, please, can we have a bit more functionality? Maybe if people turn the phone they get a scientific one? The stop watch if ok. I need one. Of course it is dumbed down like crazy.

Overal I would say that the iPhone is about 17% there. Make that 17.3%.