By justin, on January 11th, 2010
I somehow attract issues whenever I build a new computer or do a fresh installation on my desktop. I currently dual boot between Windows XP 64bit and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) which has served me well the last 3 years. My current setup is running atop a fakeraid mirror which at the time, was a PITA to get configured as it involved using a live cd and following a really long howto while crossing my fingers it would work. Today the installer supports fakeraid out of the box so no poor soul would have to go through those installation steps.
I got a new 1TB hard drive for the holidays and I had been meaning to redo my setup for some time and finally took the plunge this weekend. I also decided I was going to give Windows 7 a go. With my current(now old) setup, I couldn’t install iTunes in Windows XP 64bit so I had to do all my iPhone syncing using a 32bit Windows XP install inside a Virtualbox VM inside of Ubuntu. I would run into issues anytime I would have to do a firmware upgrade on my iPhone since the iPhone would disconnect from the VM during the firmware upgrade process and the USB filters I had in place to pass through the iPhone to the VM would run into a race condition with the OS while it tried to mount the iPhone as a photo device. This would end up leaving my iPhone as a brick (but upgraded) and I’d have to restore from backup and re-sync all my music, a process that would take up to 4 hours. The last time I did an iPhone upgrade, I learned my lesson and did the upgrade from a Mac, no restores needed and I didn’t need to do any syncing after.
With my new setup I was planning on doing all of my syncing in Windows 7, without having to worry about any issues with USB pass through or performance issues of doing the sync through a VM. Once I got my Windows 7 install up and running, I installed iTunes and added my music to the library. I went to go ahead and perform my first sync and noticed it began syncing then about 5 seconds later it would just finish. I tried this a couple more times and noticed it was still not behaving right. I figured I’d try to atleast backup my iPhone incase anything went wrong. I began the backup process and went to go play some CoD MW2. I came back an hour later and noticed no real progress on the backup of the iPhone. I cancelled the backup process and then tried restarting the backup. I let it sit for a couple of hours and it never completed. Normally a backup will take maybe 10-15 minutes so I knew something was wrong.
I began Googling and right away I came upon this thread on the Apple forums. The thread described a varying amount of issues with Windows 7 64bit and iTunes syncing. Issues with people having their iPhone not recognized to certain chipsets causing sync issues. I tried jumping around the thread a bit looking for some simple answers related to my issues, but most of the solutions were geared towards BIOS updates. After some more Googling I found a thread on one of the MS support forums (sorry I lost the link) where a representative from MS was actually contributing to the thread and seemed to be working with developers on a hot fix for the issues. The thread talked about users with issues with USB hard drives and iPhone issues as well. Later in the thread MS eventually came up with a hot fix for the issue so I figured I’d give it a go. The hotfix can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976972 . I installed it and low and behold, it actually fixed my issue. This is the first time I can remember downloading a hotfix for an issue I’ve had with Windows and it actually fixing the problem. I’m now finishing syncing up my music to my iPhone which is syncing A LOT faster than going through a VM layer. Hopefully someone will stumble across this blog post facing similar issues and it will solve their iTune woes.
By justin, on January 7th, 2010
… has to be the biggest waste of space on the interwebs. Clearly Yahoo doesn’t give a shit about them since they are not policed in the slightest and riddled with spam, trolls, and crazies. There are absolutely no insightful conversations going on for any stock. I wonder why they even bother keeping them around.
By justin, on December 8th, 2009
Edit: The title of this is great engrish… ok read on…
I predict cameras in the near future will begin shipping with wireless , 3G antennas or both. The cameras will be tied into social networking sites so that you can take photos of events and upload them as they happen. There will be a settings page in your camera to enter your Facebook, Myspace or Flickr account info. An option would be available to auto upload all photos taken or to prompt the user after each photo is taken for upload, and finally an option to just bypass that and worry about the uploading only when you are in review mode. The camera will auto resize (user setting on adjusting size) the photos and upload in the background so you can live blog events without thought. I know some cameras today already have built in wireless and can upload directly to a computer or an FTP, but the cameras that have those features are attached to SLRs, usually coming as an add-on . They are mainly for professionals wanting to instantly review photos during photo shoots, not for frat boys wanting to live blog a kegger.
Sony attempted this with their DSC-G3 model but failed miserably in it’s implementation. From reading reviews, the act of connecting to a WiFi access point is cumbersome and they were too eager by including a browser in the camera which IMO is a bit overkill and just needs a simple menu interface to select the social networking services you wish to use. All photo uploading must go through Sony’s portal page and photos have to be chosen one at a time, no seamless uploads, too much thinking involved.
My ideal camera would be a mash up of how the iPhone handles WiFi access points, a 3G provider that is not AT&T (bonus points if it’s free to use, but highly unlikely), and the ability for the manufacturer to add social networking services through easily installable firmware upgrades. The camera should also make all of it’s connections over a secure protocol so users won’t have to worry about their login information being compromised over an unsecured access point.
A couple of downsides to this may be that some people really don’t want to have photos available to the public before they can really look at them to make sure they don’t look like an idiot and that they are even appropriate enough to be made public. It wouldn’t really draw as big of a crowd if it just has WiFi. You are then limited in where you get to use the cameras main draw of being able to instantly publish photos to the world. A couple other short comings I could see with this camera would be the battery life not lasting too long. Users don’t give a shit that WiFi and 3G suck up more battery life, they just want their battery life to be the same as if those components weren’t there to begin with. The iPhone has people complaining about battery life all the time, comparing it to their old phones. If you are listening to music on it all day long, while checking facebook, the battery is not going to last more than a few hours. People aren’t using iPhones the same way as they did with their snake playing Nokia phones of early decade. The way people use their “phones” has dramatically changed over the last couple of years and battery technology has not been keeping pace.
I hope Canon or Nikon will integrate these features into a camera soon, and hopefully their implementation won’t suck.
By justin, on October 13th, 2009
Before I had an iPhone, I had just your average flip phone, didn’t care if it had a web browser on it or if it did anything else besides just have a decent battery life. This summer I finally took the plunge and bought my first Apple product ever, the iPhone 3GS. I had been waiting for some time for them to come out with a version with more storage before I even considered getting one and 32GB was just good enough for me (64Gb would have really been the sweet spot). So far I’ve been pretty happy with the phone , not counting all the AT&T issues.
As I’ve come to realize with Apple products, they always seem to leave out the most obvious of features to people and dictate to the user what their experience and usage of their products should be. A couple quick examples off the top of my head, you cannot turn off the monitor on the iMac, iTunes doesn’t support the ability to monitor your mp3 folder for changes in the library (iTunes 9.0 did a weak attempt of supporting this by adding a folder you can drag things into).
Apple does seem to be listening…. a bit, to their users with the iPhone as everyone is so vocal about them and it’s one of the most widely used phones out there. I remember in the past if I had any issue with my flip phones there would almost certainly never be any firmware release to fix the issue and the product would be abandoned all together by the company within a year. Calling support about the issues was pointless, they would just try sending you a replacement phone or just file a bug report that never got corrected unless there were enough people using the phone to complain about the same issue (there never was). I just accepted that as the norm if you were not using the most popular phone out on the market at the time. Then I got an iPhone and all of a sudden I started caring about my phone working perfectly. All those little nuisances suddenly needed to be fixed dammit, I paid a lot for this phone! A few things still remain that I’d love to see get fixed/added as an option in 3.2…
- Timestamps on all text messages sent and received. Currently you only get a time stamp on a message if it’s the first message that’s been sent after 15(or some other time) minutes of inactivity. The data is definitely there, but they are choosing not to display it for whatever reason. Makes them look sleeker? F that, just give users an option to turn them on and off. Friends text me all the time saying “I’m on my way” and I always used to use that to judge how long its been since I’ve heard from them.
- A global option to turn off auto-rotate. A couple of apps have this built in currently, mainly e-book readers. I, like many other people, use their iPhone in bed, or laying on the couch and end up turning on our sides only to have the current item we are reading rotate along with us. I then end up trying to play a game with the phone on how I can move it slow enough not to trigger a rotation and still be able to read what I wanted to while laying on my side.
- Video and Podcast titles are cut off that are too long. If you download any podcast or video with a title more than 11 characters long, it is truncated on the listing. Guess what? Every single video and podcast I’ve come across has a title longer than that. The first few words in every video and podcast title appear to rarely have any information relevant to the episode you are wanting to watch. I can never find particular episodes of videos or podcasts because of this, unless I happen to know the date of the item. Please just give us some sort of way to scroll horizontal in the title box to see the rest of the title.
- An accurate signal strength indicator. I’m not sure if this falls in AT&T’s lap or not, but my phone seems to have either 2 states, full bars or no bars, and there are countless times when I have full bars that I can’t make a phone call, send a text or get any data service, but the indicator does not change.
- Ok this one is a stretch but…. The weather icon always says 73 and sunny and I’m constantly fooled into thinking that’s the actual weather outside. It seems like the iPhone supports dynamically changing the app icons as it can add a progress meter during an install and an unread message counter for apps with inboxes/notifications. It would be nice if the weather icon could dynamically change instead of mocking me all the time.
- Edit 12/09/2009: Would like to see the ability to snooze Calendar events that go off, and also have them accumulate with a count on the calendar icon for unread events that have gone off.
- Ability to select “Emergency” contacts on your phone to call if phone is locked. I lock my iPhone and in the event of an emergency or if I lose my iPhone and some good samaritan happens to stumble upon on it, I’d like the ability to choose a few emergency contacts that can be displayed without having to unlock the phone that can be contacted in an emergency or to return my phone.
By justin, on October 4th, 2009
Normally when a partition fills up, you remove some files, freeing up some space and watch your disk usage drop in
The first time recently I ran into a situation where that wasn’t the case. I had filled up my root partition and after removing some files and moving some others to another partition I noticed no change in my output of
Applications were crashing since they couldn’t write to the partition but I knew I had removed at least a few GB’s worth of data. What gives?
After some frantic googling I stumbled upon something I hadn’t heard of before, known as “Reserved blocks”. Paraphrasing the man page on tune2fs, Reserved blocks are a set of filesystem blocks set aside for use by privileged processes to avoid fragmentation as well as allow system daemons to function after all available disk space has been used up. By default the filesystem sets aside 5% of the filesystem during formatting for use in reserved blocks. If you have a large hard drive, 5% may be a bit much. You can adjust this amount with the command
where X is the percentage you wish to change to and /dev/sda1 is the partition you wish to modify. In order to get out of the hole I dug myself, I used the command
to reset the block count to 0 and thus giving me back my space I had freed up. Be sure that you have freed up space before running this command, as the reason reserved blocks exist is so in the instance when you have completely filled up your partition, you will still be able to run important daemons and commands without them crashing.
Maybe I will finally add some monitoring to my own desktop to prevent this from happening to me. So far I’ve been bitten by this twice, I noticed each time when pidgin began crashing and firefox wasn’t saving any cookies when logging into any sites.
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