My favourite little thing about OS X Mavericks is the fact that the sleepimage file in private/var/vm is no longer the size of your complete physical RAM anymore! It’s much smaller, like only the active part or a compressed version or something. My sleepimage used to be 8 GB, now it’s only 1.1 GB! For someone like me who is always running low on hard drive space, this is a big relief!
Category: Technology
My new favorite little thing about iOS 7
My new favorite little thing about iOS 7 is the new sound it makes, when you connect the device to a power outlet ^^ It’s so cute and easier on the ears than before!
About Passwords
According to this Mashable article, the most common – and therefore worst – password is, you guessed it, “password”.
There are more eyebrow-raising and questionable password choices on that list. Read the article if you like, but don’t follow their instructions for creating secure passwords, follow these instructions instead:
Thank you Aaron Collegeman
OK, last silly post for today, promise.
That SharePress plugin worked nicely, and as a side effect, I know have my own app on Facebook! Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=327187054006218
Isn’t that awesome?! Well, all it does is redirects you to my blog. That’s it. But hey, I created my own Facebook app! You can even find it when searching in the Facebook search bar!
The following is not an add, just a personal recommendation.
In honor to Aaron Collegeman, creator of SharePress, here are the instructions to get it working with your own WordPress: http://aaroncollegeman.com/sharepress/help/how-to-setup-sharepress
I am not affiliated with Aaron in any way, I just think he does a good job ^^
XBOX 360 died and resurrected
Now that the brief excitement about The Beatles becoming available on iTunes is over, I have your full attention to tell you the story of my resurrected XBOX 360 and the outstanding telephone support from Microsoft (though it had nothing to do with the resurrection).
So on November 12, 2010, my XBOX 360 caught a common “disease” like so many other consoles of that model before: three of the four lights on the front were lit red, indicating a general hardware error, better known as The Red Ring of Death. Of course that name didn’t come from Microsoft, but it was born out of the masses that experienced this error. I myself had only heard about this behaviour, but had never seen it happen anywhere. Then again, having to do with failing hardware almost every day, I had thought about the possibility that it might happen to my XBOX 360 as well, but hoped it would never do so.
I’m not gonna go into detail here. You can google this, look it up on Wikipedia, watch videos on Youtube, etc. I don’t blame anyone, because mistakes happen, or to be more precise: shit happens. I welcome Microsofts decision to extend the warranty of every single console of that specific model on this planet, therefore standing up and indirectly saying: “Yes, we fucked up.” Because nobody deserves my respect more than somebody who admits failure. Admitting failure is not a bad thing (like this guy demonstrates), but staying down and not tackling a failure is failure.
So I thought about replacing my XBOX 360 with a new slim model, not only because it would make less noise in our living room, but also because I thought about going all the way and getting a Kinect bundle. But that would involve spending a lot of money, which wouldn’t hurt my wallet that much, but still it would have been a considerable amount. So I dug up my receipt to find out, if the date of purchase lied more than 3 years in the past. Interestingly enough, my receipt said September 22, 2007, exactly 3 weeks outside the extended warranty.
“Tough luck”, I thought to myself, but tried out the online selfservice anyway. Entering my consoles serial number, it told me the warranty had expired in February 2009. That must mean it was lying around in stock somewhere at GameStop, waiting to go through point of sale, but the warranty clock was already ticking, despite not being in any customers hands already. The website told me, that if I disagree with this date, I could call customer service. So I did.
After a bit of number punching and waiting in line, I was greeted by Carsten. Knowing how it is to be in his position, I explained my situation in a clear and non-angry manner. Like expected, he looked up some of my information, said that he understands that my situation is frustrating, and explained that there is no wiggle room, even if it’s only 3 weeks. Fair enough, I asked him about the price of a repair and also how to transfer my data to a new console, should I purchase one. And this is where I give thumbs up to him and the supporters at Microsoft. Carsten was able to answer all my questions, give me exact numbers for anything to do with money and/or gigabytes, and remain relaxed all the way!
After this, I decided to look up a few auctions of classic XBOX 360 like mine, that would potentially cost less than a repair. But shortly after that, I was sure to find countless guides and tricks on youtube that showed how to repair a RRoD. Some of them were detailed, others were not. Some of them suggested opening the console and replacing the thermal paste and some screws, others did not. But all of the methods involved overheating at least the graphics processor in some way.
So I opened it up, staying grounded all the time (unlike all other electro-stupid people on the videos). Grounding yourself is important, dudes! Of course I broke the warranty seal, but it was worth it. At first, I just wanted to open and prepare my XBOX for thermal grease replacement, which I planned to get later. But after that and concluding from all the videos and different guides I had looked at, I decided to just go ahead and try overheating it without replacing the thermal paste, while the case was open. Sureley enough, that seemed to have sufficient effect already because after overheating (two red lights) and cooling off again, the green lights returned and my resurrected XBOX 360 proudly output the bold startup sequence on our 5.1 surround system and 47-inch TV!
Sweet!
I still have no idea what happened, but because hot material expands, I guess the overheating was to refasten some wire connection on the board that had broken, pushing and bonding it together again. Anyway, I’m glad it worked, though I have a bad feeling that this might only be a temporary fix. Let’s see what the future holds!
Bebot: wheeeeee!
Thanks to TUAW, this app by Normalware grabbed my attention and turned my iPhone into the most amazing synthesizer, Theremin, toy and cutest thing ever.
Bebot is what all the fuss is about. Bebot is an App for iPhone and iPad (and iPod touch, duh) which plays different sounds depending on where and with how many fingers you touch the screen. And based on different settings, you can alter its behaviour completely. My favourite setting is the Syntharp. Enough talk now, see for yourself:
Bebot Robot Synth for iPhone and iPod Touch
It’s so much fun! For just playing around as well as making really good music, as the following video shows:
Rudess Meets Bebot
I grabbed both videos from Normalware’s homepage. Kudos! Bebot is available at the App Store for CHF 2.20, $1.99, € 1.59, ¥230, or in whatever country you may be. It’s absolutely worth it! Yes it is!
The fat undersea internet cables
Ever wonder how information travels through the world? How a website you call from the other side of the earth gets to your screen? How the internet works?
Well, the answer to the latter question would involve a little bit more explanation, but taking a look at the following website gives you a broader understanding of the first two questions:
This incredible javascript (not Flash!) by Greg maps out all the cables that are running under the sea to connect continents with each other to bring them the joy of world wide information. He states that “…[this is] an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the undersea communications infrastructure. The initial data was harvested from Wikipedia, and further information was gathered by simply googling and transcribing as much data as possible into a useful format, namely a rich geocoded format.”
The biggest, fattest, fastest cable I found so far is Unity with a capacity of 7.68Tbps (that’s 7’680’000’000’000 bits per second, or 894 GB/s, in other words ~190 DVDs you have to carry and swim across the Pacific Ocean every second), though it seems according to this source it is not running at full capacity. Thank you Greg, thank you corporations, thank you to all the people who made it possible to send spam and pr0n at high speed across the entire world and let us view lolcats and stupid youtube videos wherever and whenever we please.
Another map of this kind, which also shows some oversea cables and satellites, is available at tatacommunications.com (this one uses Flash, but is less flashy).
Indestructable USB flash drive by LaCie
This has been out for some time now, and I wanted to show it to you already, but never got around to posting it.
LaCie calls it the XtremKey. It’s a USB flash drive / thumb drive. But it’s not just any ordinary USB storage, it’s nearly indestructable (like the Terminator)! Check out this video and see for yourself. It withstands extreme temperatures and pressure situations!
World’s Most Adventurous USB Flash Drive – LaCie XtremKey
I am not endorsing LaCie or their products of any kind, but man they really did an awesome job at this little thing. Why hasn’t anybody come up with this before? Like Panasonic and their ToughBooks?
Find out more on the LaCie page.
Bricked Mac – a Mac made out of Lego
Bricked Mac – Time-Lapse
This time lapse video shows some talented people building a full size Mac Pro (or PowerMac G5) housing out of Lego! And they install the actual hardware! Amazing if you ask me.
According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, where I found this amazing video a long time ago, the case was submitted for the 2008 MacMod Challenge. Unfortunately, I’m blogging about this so late, that the link leads to a 404.
The original TUAW article is still up though: www.tuaw.com/2008/10/01/not-quite-the-brick-but-fun-anyway
Connecting Twitter and WordPress with Twitter Tools
On twitter, I am known as @dikk (duuuuh!) but I don’t use very often, but still more frequently than my wordpress blog. I have 307 tweets now compared to 138 blogposts. Don’t underrate the blog though, for you can type an unlimited amount of characters as compared to only 140 characters! The purpose of each is different.
One of the purposes of twitter is for example to inform your twitter followers of things you have to say that take up more space than just 140 characters, and may even include multiple graphics (yay!), like my friend @oliverattweetin and his blog oliver @ blogging. He uses twitterfeed to auto-post a blogpost to his twitter. I also want to auto-post to my twitter, but will try a different tool: Twitter Tools, a wordpress plugin. Let’s see if it works.
Ok, didn’t work the first time. Let’s try this again.
Now it’s working!
am Tinu sin blog 