One of my favorite applications for the iPhone was called Darkroom Pro. When Apple updated their OS to version 3.0 last week, this application and many others, did not update with it. I since came to find out that this is more of Apples quirky decision making about what can and cannot be sold through their app store. The Darkroom camera application has been there for some time now, and has over 700,00 users, and most of them give the app a very high rating as do I. Apple recently discovered (I guess) that the way they harness the image stabilazation in the 3rd party app may not be 100% in line with their interpretation of the application (interface) rules. The link above (Darkroom) gives all the details, and it seems very trivial to me. Darkroom is one of several apps like this being banned, and potentially affects millions of users. My image of Apple is rotting fast with this and several incidents like this in the past month or two. They just seem so cold, callous, and unconcerned, even when potentially millions of people are involved. I can’t be the only one that feels this way, but it probably doesn’t matter as they likely have enough money to survive many years of public discontent. And for some reason there are a host of drones that believe Apple is god, and if Apple banishes an app from grace to the outer darkness beyond the app store, then so be it. Apple has spoken.
Once a week I boot into Windows 7 to sync my iPhone with all the latest podcasts, songs, shows, etc… It has been a fairly painless experience, better than Vista, but not much difference. When I boot into Windows, I usually just log in and then do something else for a while, giving it time to install security updates, do a virus check, and let all of the 3rd party apps check for updates too, like Firefox, DropBox, and such. After a while I come back and do my syncing. The last two weeks the experience has been more annoying. For one, a damn backup kept trying to start and bugging the crap out of me. I finally clicked around and found out how to disable it. Two, iTunes just drives me bonkers. Any other program I can click on something and instantly it responds. Any program instantly. Except iTunes. The damned iTunes just sits there like an idiot; if it could talk it would be saying “dohhhhh… whaddaya clicken on me for? Whaddaya want? Duhhhhh….” and then after 5, 10 seconds or more it slowly moves to comply with my click.
2.6Ghz, dual-core, 2 Gigs of RAM, seems to me like it should move faster. I know Apple can do better than this. If I could find a way to sync my phone in Linux I would be soooo happy. I guess I could consider an Android. I wonder if the Linux powered Palm Pre will sync on Linux?
Linux only… This is just geeky, not too useful, but fun. Anytime your PC can talk to you in a voice like the PC in War Games, that’s just fun.
Found this on http://www.commandlinefu.com – one of my favorite sites.
Make sure you have curl and festival installed. (for most linux users: sudo apt-get install curl festival)
Copy the command below, change username:password to your Twitter acct info, then save to a file and make it executable (chmod +x filename).
Then just run it… Every 300 seconds your computer will read you the top 6 posts in your Twitter Friends timelines. As you can see, you can change the 6 and the 300 to suit your taste. I feel sure this will probably work on identi.ca as well with minimal tweaking.
while [ 1 ]; do curl -s -u username:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss|grep title|sed -ne ’s/<\/*title>//gp’ | head -n 6 |festival –tts; sleep 300;done
I mashed up a couple neat ideas – namely the curl updates for Twitter and identi.ca AND the nice PHP script for Facebook, fbcmd, into one quick CLI tool for updating multiple accounts at once. This post is available in my Tips section permanently.
In a nutshell: Create an executable file /usr/bin/clit and use the lines between “code start” and “code end”, editing the bold text to be your own username:password. You can add or take away account lines as needed.
You need curl to complete the commands for Twitter and/or identi.ca, and fbcmd to complete the Facebook commands.
fbcmd available at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~davet/fbcmd/
Curl available in Ubuntu repositories or here: http://curl.haxx.se/
Once the needed programs are installed, follow these steps:
- sudo touch /usr/bin/clit
- Make it executable… sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/clit
- sudo gedit /usr/bin/clit
- copy and paste the lines between “code start” and “code end”, editing the bold text to use your username:password
- Add or remove account lines as needed
- Save and exit gedit
To use, just type clit and your message.
Note: Be careful with symbols, like ‘ ” ( ! / \ etc… they can stop the code. Just the text please.
Example:
jjbfg@trouble:~$ clit I am updating Twitter and identi.ca from the command line… why?
#———————-code start—————————
#fbcmd available at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~davet/fbcmd/
#Curl available in Ubuntu repositories or here: http://curl.haxx.se/
#Twitter Account 1
curl –basic –user “PapaGeek:secretpassword” –data-ascii “status=`echo $@|tr ‘ ‘ ‘+’`” “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json” -o /dev/null
echo Message sent – PapaGeek status updated on Twitter
#Twitter Account 2
curl –basic –user “BigFatGeek:secretpassword” –data-ascii “status=`echo $@|tr ‘ ‘ ‘+’`” “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json” -o /dev/null
echo Message sent – BigFatGeek status updated on Twitter
#Twitter Account 3
curl –basic –user “jjlapierre:secretpassword” –data-ascii “status=`echo $@|tr ‘ ‘ ‘+’`” “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json” -o /dev/null
echo Message sent – jjlapierre status updated on Twitter
#identi.ca Account 1
curl -u papageek:secretpassword -d “status=`echo $@|tr ‘ ‘ ‘+’`” “http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml” -o /dev/null
echo Message sent - PapaGeek status updated on identi.ca
#Facebook
/home/jjbfg/fbcmd/fbcmd.php status “`echo $@|tr ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘`”
echo Message sent – John LaPierre status on Facebook updated
#———————-code end—————————
OH NO! OMG No! No, no, no, no, no o,o,o,o,o…
OHHH the humanity! My iPhone… my poor little iPhone!You were so pretty!
Its, (sob sob) its been Killed! I woke up (sob) this morning and it’s dead… Someone killed my (sob sob) iPhone! IT WAS THAT DAMNED PALM PRE! IKNOW IT WAS! All the reports said the Pre was an iPhone kil…. oh, wait, hang on. Heh, never mind. I forgot it was turned off.
I’ve been watching the Internet buzz about the launch of the Palm Pre. It’s amazing the hype. Leo LaPorte had an un-boxing video cast that lasted over an hour and he was googoo-gaga over the phone. I’m sure it’s a great PDA. I loved my Palm Treo, and my Sony Clie before that, and my Palm III before that. In fact, the iPhone I love right now is the first non-Palm PDA I’ve owned in 14 years of PDA use.
Still I have to laugh when I Google up recent news results for Pre. There are 12 people in line in New York City at one Sprint store, while a store in Denver remains … empty. I really do hope it’s a blockbuster seller for Palm. It is Linux now, after all.
One thing the hype has done is led me to the Sprint Website. If you go there, keep in mind that Sprint has claimed to down-play the release of the Pre due to limited supply. That is the least down-played web site I’ve ever seen. Click into the “Now” section if you go there and watch as an amazing amount of live gadgets play all at once!
In the screenshot below, look at the comparison between Internet Buzz of PRE and iPhone. I just had to type that in and try it. The result is predictable, and fun.
Microsoft will give you 25GB of online storage for free. Microsoft will give you Windows 7 for free until June 2010. Yes Microsoft, yes free.
The “SkyDrive” works from Linux using Firefox or Opera just fine. There is a 50MB per file upload limit, but thats about it.
I think it’s great… It looks like MS is working hard(er than before) to give value-added services to us, the users. It’s good to see tactics changing rather than continuing on with the same boring business-as-usual we’ve had for so many years. Competition is heating up big time – and for the first time in a long time is actually threatening Microsoft, and that’s good for us. Microsoft will be just fine but they will be forced to offer better products (read any reviews on Windows 7?) and services.
The Internet, how we access and use it, and communications in general, are changing so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up. Who knows, Google Wave may become a true game changer. As secret as it was I find it impossible to believe that Microsoft didn’t have some knowledge of it. The ad campaigns, the free stuff, the new search engines (www.bing.com), playing nice with Open Source (This is one example, Google or Bing for more) all add up to big changes on the horizon.
I am becoming more and more dependent on Google’s cloud offerings and an unexpected fan of cloud computing. Not just GMail, but many of the other services Google offers. (Google Docs rocks!)
These are exciting times…
