When I first read a rumor about Apple converting the 13″ unibody MacBook into a Pro model, I was worried, assuming that meant the price point would be going up. Surprisingly, the price dropped!  Within 7 hours of last week’s announcement mine was on order.

It should go without saying, but I love it!  It was well worth the wait.  This thing feels so solid and has some great features.  The glossy screen actually doesn’t bother me, but I was already accustomed to a glossy iMac and Samsung TV.  I’ve also quickly gotten used to the multi-touch trackpad.  For the first day or two I kept wanting to use my thumb to click, but now I have the new gestures and click methods down.  Also, the battery lasts a surprisingly long time on a single charge (Apple advertises 7 hours which seems to be quite accurate).  It’s also supposed to have a longer life, which would be much appreciated.  I know my iBook battery got pretty bad by the end.

I bought an Incase Neoprene sleeve for it (thanks to Devin for the review). This way I’m able to reuse my excellent Brenthaven bag that was intended for the 12″ iBook.  I found that the 12″ section collapsed quite well after I removed some padding from inside the bag.

Now I just need to think of a name as good as iTramp…

After returning from vacation last week, I noticed that a portion of the screen on my iPhone was not responding to touch. It covered the whole width of the screen, but less then a quarter of the screen height. It made certain funcitons impossible, like starting apps that were in the second row of the home screen.

I tried a number of things in an attempt to resolve the problem (including reseting and restoring), but couldn’t fix it. It was obviously a hardware problem. As a last resort I asked Apple for help. Using their online support tool was super easy, and I was actually able to have them call me! This was perfect considering I was unable to dial the top row of numbers on the phone keypad.

The Apple Support Rep was awesome. He was extremely knowledgeable, and was even in the US. Right away he apologized for my problems and told me they were going to make it right. Even though my phone was 100 and some odd days out of warranty, they were going to replace it for me. The only catch was that I’d have to wait about 5-7 days until they got my phone and shipped me another. This wasn’t a great option for me, since my mobile is my only phone. It turns out that for only $29 Apple was willing to rush me a new phone, as long as I shipped mine to them afterward.

Within 2 days I had my new phone (potentially refurbished internals, but looked brand new). The packaging was awesome, nothing short of what I’d expect from a new Apple product. It even contained the packing tape needed to seal up my broken phone in the same box. I also got the special SIM card removal tool – a pseudo paperclip.

This experience was awesome, and definitely the best that I’ve had with a technology company. I’ve also had a great look at a refurbished Apple product and am very impressed. I’m now definitely leaning towards a Macbook for my new laptop. I may even get a refurbished one with AppleCare.

Thank you, Apple!

After taking a spill, the internal display no longer works, which some certified repair technicians tell me would probably cost one half to two thirds the price of a new MacBook.  That rules out the repair option.  I’m thinking about getting a cheap netbook (running Linux of course, no Windows) to satisy my couch web surfing needs.  More research is needed on that matter.

My amazing wife bought it for me as a gift, and I’ve been nipping at the bit to get this thing going. This little guy has a low-power Intel Atom processor on-board and appears to be plenty of power for my needs. Also, I won’t need to purchase any additional hardware. I already have 200-pin DDR2 RAM that I pulled from my iMac, and I have a few SATA hard drives laying around to choose from. To start I’ve configured it with a 2.5″ laptop hard drive since it will consume less power and be less “loudy” (something a college professor of mine used to say – still cracks me up). I may add a larger drive in the 5.25″ bay for some storage if I need it later. I opted to leave it without an optical drive, since I can easily install GNU/Linux from a USB drive. I’ve installed a server configuration of Ubuntu 8.10 so far. When idle, the server only consumes 21 watts.

Here are some of my plans for the server, which I may write about in the future:

• Run a VPN server for my home network, possibly OpenVPN
• Build a web-based Wake-on-LAN system so I can wake up my iMac from an iPhone shortcut on my home screen, even while on Edge connectivity
• A backup relay, to upload important data from my network to an off-site location

This question came up during a discussion a few days ago and I felt compelled to find the answer. Apple included the ability to remotely wipe an iPhone when they released version 2.0 with Exchange support. They also gave the ability to force the use of a passcode lock. But does that mean your corporate data is secure?

Each time a user syncs their iPhone with iTunes, the contents of the device are backed up onto their computer’s hard drive, in which your employer’s IT department has no control over. This means that someone could potentially obtain this data from their computer, which may not be password protected, encrypted, or have basic security controls like patch compliance or a firewall.

I wanted to dig into the backed up content to see what was hidden there for an “attacker” to find. I used a tool called the iPhone Backup Extractor. It allows you to extract the backup data for specific iPhone applications. For this topic, I was only interested in the Mail and Calendar apps, since that’s all I sync with my employer’s Exchange server. The data for the default Apple applications was all located under the application “Other”. To my surprise there was no information stored in the Mail folder other than some configuration information. This, at least, is excellent news.

However, inside the Calender folder I found a SQLite database file. I simply opened it up with a text editor to see what was easily visible. Right away I noticed information that was obviously from appointments on my work calendar. Since I only used a text editor, I was unable to determine if any attachments were included in the backup.

It appears that the answer to the question above is yes, however this would depend if there is any sensitive information in the synced calendar (and potentially contacts, since I didn’t evaluate it). One problem here is that in the event of a lost or compromised personal computer, the employer’s IT department probably wouldn’t be informed, and would have a hard time determining what was in the backup.

This entire post, with the exception of adding the hyperlink, was created with WordPress for iPhone. The photo feature is very nice, allowing you to add photos from your Photo Library or take new ones.

This is precisely what I have wanted, and I think it will greatly increase my number of posts. Even if I want to do some touch-ups from a desktop browser before I publish a post, it will be waiting for me as a draft.

UPDATE: I also discovered that it has a helpful recovery feature that can recover changes to a post that were not uploaded/saved properly before the application was closed.

The number one feature that I think is very important, is the easy no-hassle upgrades. When I see that there is a Tomato software update with the help of Google Reader, I simply download the file and upload the contained .bin file to my router. I don’t need to reconfigure any settings, unlike all of the other firmwares that I’ve used in the past. Having to reconfigure a crap ton of settings with a software update is not acceptable in my book.

Brilliantly, Tomato incorporates bandwidth monitoring right into its web interface. When I used the DD-WRT firmware, I had to get Cacti installed on a separate Linux box to achieve a similar goal, and it wasn’t nearly as convenient. With Tomato, I just configured it to save the bandwidth data to a CIFS/Samba share on my Linux server (for lack of size and not wanting to burn out my router’s NVRAM by saving all of the data there). The bandwidth graphs make use of AJAX and SVG, which work well and look pretty cool.

Multiple DDNS (dynamic DNS) client configurations can be entered, so I can have both DynDNS and OpenDNS updated if my public IP address changes. Friggin’ brilliant…

Last but not least is the GUI. As I mentioned before, its web-based like other firmwares, however this one has a clean and fast interface. AJAX is used to give it some nice on-demand features. My favorite is when I’m selecting a channel for my wireless network and it actively scans and displays the strongest SSID neighbor for each channel.

I think I’m going to donate some money to Polarcloud.com for this incredible product. The only feature that I’ve been slightly missing with Tomato is a VPN server. With DD-WRT, I used the PPTP server and was able to remotely connect my laptop into my home network from anywhere on the Internet. I did have some security concerns with it, so I’m not sure that I’d still be using the VPN configuration, but it would make a nice addition to Tomato’s great feature set.

Now go out and install Tomato on a compatible router near you…

For quite awhile I’ve wanted to develop an evolution simulator. The problem is that there would be so much involved in this, it’d be nearly impossible for me. I try to ignore the fact that no scientist has done it, maybe it’s that no one has had the vision. Most likely it’s entirely impractical.

In the simulator, I’d love to to see a diverse existence of lifeforms that interact with each other and their environment. Below are a few features that I think would need to be part of the simulator:

• Inherited traits
• Mutation of the traits (or the “genetic” material)
• Natural selection (simulated, of course)
• Environmental factors like geographic isolation
• Speciation

Here are a few simulators that are interesting, but not nearly to the level of sophistication that I’ve wanted:

• Evolution Simulator-Java
• Evolites – not sure about this one, haven’t tried it yet.
• Spore – a game by Maxis which looks awesome, but I’m skeptical that it will actually involve evolution. To coincide with Darwin Day, today they announced a release date of September 7th, 2008.

Obviously, there’s a long way to go on this one. From my perspective, this application would need a lot of intelligence. Maybe I should start a SourceForge project and start recruiting!

• 5 stars: my favorite songs at the given moment – these are usually ones that I could listen to over and over again
• 4 stars: great songs
• 3 stars: good songs
• 2 stars: mediocre songs – ones that I want to hear infrequently
• 1 star: songs that I don’t have any interest in listening to again, or tracks that I wouldn’t want placed into a music mix, like a stand-up comedian or skit from Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.
• 0 stars: not rated – doesn’t mean I don’t want to listen to it, but I just haven’t listened to it at all or enough to rate it

When I first started rating my music, my rating spectrum was much more symmetrical. I quickly realized that I needed more variation for the music that I liked, and I’ve been using this modified rating structure since. After the break, I’ll discuss some smart playlists I’ve created.

As you’ll see below, some of my playlists build upon one another. I’ll discuss them in the following order: Good New Music, New Selections, Good New Selections, Automagic Mix, and Highly Rated Mix.

Good New Music

In this smart playlist, I have the following criteria:

What I’m doing with this playlist is trying to capture music that is new to me and I already enjoy. I’ve added the comment rule as a way to get rid of an old song that I just added to my iTunes library. I just need to add the %old% tag to the comment field of a song to keep it from entering the list.

New Selections

I’ve found a number of situations where I got some new music, but didn’t really listen to it much at first. Later, I release I want to listen to the CD but it’s no longer in my Recently Added playlist. For these instances, I have the “New Selections” playlist, which is static and not smart. I can add the tracks to this playlist and be sure that they’re tranferred to my iPod.

Good New Selections

As you might assume, this playlist builds off of the previous one. It’s goal is to capture the songs I like from the New Selections list. This smart playlist has the following conditions:

Automagic Mix

This playlist is my favorite because it incorporates my favorite music at the moment and the fresh music that I like. I find myself listening to it at least once a day. As the 5 star songs get old, I simply reduce the rating. Here are the conditions:

Highly Rated Mix

This playlist is a good revolving list of great songs. As you can see below, it includes the 4 and 5 star songs that I haven’t listened to in some time:

That concludes the example playlists. You may find that certain aspects of this configuration don’t work for you. I realize that people can have very different music listening habits. If anyone has some iTunes techniques that they enjoy, please share them in the comments.

I did some searching and found this guide which describes hplip, a tool developed by HP for linux and their printers. The tool seemed to be installed but gave me an error that the GUI was missing. I had to run the following as root to install the necessities:

yum install hplip-gui PyQt 

Then, as root, I ran hp-setup. This will take you through setting up the printer. Mine was already listed, so I actually ran hp-toolbox and deleted the existing one. Then I ran hp-setup again and recreated it with the desired settings. After that the printer was accessible from the Macs!

To get it accessible in Windows, I just had to install Bonjour for Windows (from Apple). Then the Bonjour Printer Wizard found the printer. The first time through I tried the latest HP driver for Windows that I had installed, but that didn’t work. Doubtful that it would make a difference, I tried the Generic Postscript driver and it actually worked! So now my network printer is working again.

I have a feeling that Fedora 8 has better Bonjour support (if Fedora 7 had any), so that could also be part of the solution. Hopefully this experience helps someone else!