Tag Archives: Apple

Odd iPhone Behavior

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I decided that I’d take this weekend off from my 2nd job. While I’ll miss the money, it isn’t something I do often and I needed a break. Today I decided I’d take the wife out for lunch. Everything was good, we ate, I dropped her back off at work, and headed home. While stopped at a light, I was going to check a few things online… With 4 bars, I opened up Safari and got an error I had seen before, “Safari is not connected to the server.” I had seen this error a few times before, and restarting my iPhone always solved the issue. So, upon restart, I was surprised to see my iPhone telling me I needed to connect it to iTunes to activate it. What the heck??

Connect to iTunes to Activate

I’ll admit, this kind of ticked me off. What the heck was going on. Well, guess I have to go home now and reactivate my phone. This sucks. As I get closer to home, I decide that I’ll restart my phone again. It shuts down, I turn it on, and everything is working just fine.

I really have no idea what was going on. My only guess is when I restarted the phone the first time, it didn’t have a good enough signal to communicate with the AT&T network.

Oh, and for those wondering why it says “Para Emergencia”. When the iPhone is not active, it still allows users to make an emergency call. The text there in the slider will change between a dozen or so different languages. It just happened to be the language displayed when I took the screen shot.

New System

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So, it’s been an incredibly long time since I last built a PC, or really done any kind of hardware work. Heck, where I work we have to wait 2-5 days for a union electrician to come and install a new HDD in a removable rack, and if we try to do the two minute job we’d get a grievance filed on us. It sucks, but thankfully I spend my days stuck inside of PHP code and an Oracle database.

After making the switch to OS X, I really didn’t think I’d ever be inside a PC again. Oh, sure, I opened up my Mac Mini and added some memory and swapped out the HDD, but that’s no big deal. Well, a few weeks ago I had a mysterious package arrive at my doorstep. After ensuring there was no white powder or explosives inside, I opened it up to find half a computer system courtesy of Dave, an old friend at OverclockersClub.com.

With the parts he sent me, and the graphics card I received from the OCC Christmas Contest, I had the beginnings of a damn nice PC. Just needed a few more things and it’d be good to go. Once everything was ready, I dusted off my old custom Lian Li PC70 Disturbed case, and shoved all the components in.

And, nothing… no video, no error beeps, no post, nothing. My first build in ages would power up and proceed to do nothing. A few hours later, I had given up. Actually, I thought I may have damaged the CPU or motherboard when installing the heat sink.

This afternoon, I decided to give it another try. Took the video card out, and nothing. Took the memory out and the system beeped at me. Hmm… so I put the memory back in, put the video card back in, and magic the system booted. Stupid PC! :p

So, now I’m up and running. Vista (Ultimate 64) is grinding away downloading the first round of updates, all 84 of them. I now find myself wondering, what the heck am I going to do with this system? My wife chirps in often with the same question. Truthfully, I have no idea. I’m not crazy about Vista (or the much improved Windows 7)… everything I do these days is on my Mac.

Perhaps I should blow it away and install Linux (it’s been a while since I’ve messed with Slackware). Maybe this will become a test web server, or some kind of FTP/file server. Though it really would be a waste of that Radeon HD 4870. Hmm… MythTV maybe?

Mac World Expo Keynote 2009

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So the Mac World Expo is over with now, and if you haven’t heard yet there are a lot of people that were rather disapointed by the event. Why? Two main reasons, first there were a lot of rumors floating around as to what would be announced. People expected these rumors to be true, and when they weren’t, people felt let down. The other reason, is the event was pretty boring.

If you hadn’t heard, this is the last year that Apple is attending the Mac World Expo. In addition to that, there was also no Steve Jobs to present the keynote, instead it was handled by Senior V.P. Phil Schiller. I don’t know if it was just Phil, or if it was the products he was announcing today but the event was boring. He spent half an hour along talking about iPhoto 09. iPhoto might be nice, and there may be a lot of new things in it, but half an hour? Really?

So what was covered during the keynote? If you fell asleep, or just missed it, here is a recap: Continue reading →

2008 Best App Awards

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I just saw this on TUAW, voting is now underway for the 2008 Best App Awards. Apparently nominations were done a while back and over 18,000 apps were submitted. Voting remains open until Janurary 6th, and the winners will be announced next week at the Mac World Expo.

There are a lot of really nice apps on the list, and a lot of apps that I have never heard about. Guess I should get busy trying some of the other apps. ;)

Apple Media Server

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It’s no secret to anyone that I recently switched to a Mac, and absolutely love it. While it does just about everything I could want it to do, I still had some issues with the way iTunes is set up… specifically sharing a single library among multiple users (i.e. me and the wife) or among multiple computers (gasp, a Windows system!).

The same holds true for iPhoto, and until I can get the issues worked out with that all of the family digital photos still remain on my Windows XP system under Google’s Picasa software. — Why isn’t this available for OS X yet??

Looks like my problems may be solved, if the latest Apple rumor is true. According to 9to5 Mac Apple may be working on a Apple Media Server similar to current offerings from HP.

Based on 9to5 Mac’s speculations, the device would essentially be an extension of the Time Capsule product line. Heck, if it allows centralized network storage of iTunes, photos, and movies I’d be happy. At that point, it really wouldn’t matter what else it offered for me.