1. Grab a copy of Spirit (has Mac and Win versions)

2. Make sure you have already activated your iPhone (i.e. turned it on and synched to iTunes and you are able to register with the cellphone network)

3. Connect the iPhone and run Spirit, hit Jailbreak

4. Install Ulstrasn0w and you have unlocked the iPhone

NOTE: I’ve discovered and confirmed Ultrasn0w doesn’t work with baseband 05.12.01 yet.

The difficulty for me with the 3GS was that the older methods of unlocking it didn’t work for me, because I have a native 3.1.3 model…which has intermittent success depending on the actual model number. Spirit worked though.

With my recent escapades into VOIP though, it quickly became annoying for me to have a desk IP phone and a softphone on my laptop, as well as my normal mobile and landline. Well, asterisk can route the landline as I want, so I guess that doesn’t really count. But given that I use my mobile for almost all of my calls (it is the number I hand out), it’s still annoying to have to swap phones.

Enter Siphon (click for screenies), a VOIP client for the iPhone. It is a real client, not a proxy like Fring (took me a while to figure that out :/). This means if you have a local Asterisk setup, you can use the local IP and actually get a reasonable latency The call quality is perfect with Siphon too. And it plugs into the addressbook in the iPhone, even better. The only down side is that apple don’t allow background applications to actually run on the iPhone, so incoming VOIP calls do not get routed through unless the application is left open. Oh well, it’s still a cool app

I wonder if I will have problems remembering when I’m calling someone over VOIP and when I’m calling over the mobile network given they are both made with my mobile phone device now…I don’t really want to spend an hour on the phone to a landline thinking I’m talking over VOIP only to discover a bill for $60

I have a mac, therefore, I can do “everything” out of the box…except resize an image. Or create an image. Or, edit an image in any way. There is no Mac equivalent to MS Paint. Not that paint is very good, but at least in a pinch you can save a screenshot to paint and then resize it. Sure, the Grab utility in Mac OS X is great, but it’s not very much good to me at full size. Ohhh, right, I’m supposed to buy Photoshop, because that’s the only well known program that PC users are going to recognize that is also on a Mac that can edit images. Or I Google a lot and find a bunch of new programs I’ve never heard of, none of which are endorsed by Apple.

So, anyway, I’ve settled on SeaShore, which is based on GIMP. I didn’t like GIMP because it runs in X11 and doesn’t interpret key commands “properly”. By properly, I mean the same way Cocoa apps behave. You have to click on a window before you can click on any buttons in X11 i.e. if you are looking at the image and want to change tools, you must click the tool twice. One click selects the tool window, and one selects the tool. Then you have to click twice in the image to start using the tool. Annoying. Oh, and all of the commands are mapped to control button, not the command button. Also annoying.

SeaShore is a very cut down version of the gimp, but it’s small, Mac friendly, and allows me to paste and resize my screenshot easily

I also stumbled across this blog entry from 2006 that discusses some of the free editing tools for Mac, all of which turned up in my search as well, but it’s easier to link there for a summary.

Problem 1) The Macbook Pro has line level inputs not mic level inputs. So when I bought a medium-range Logitech Clearchat headset, it didn’t work.

Attempted solution 1: I have an external Toshiba Dynadock which has a sound card in it, and connects up via USB. The mac detects the sound card. The Sound preferences control panel sees the mic and responds to it. No other application responds to the mic. I’ve absolutely no idea why. The only problem I could find on Google that remotely resembled this was when people are trying to get sound into a sound recording application, and the recording input is set at the wrong sampling rate. I tried modifying this to no joy. I can even hear the mic if I put the input on “passthrough” mode with Rogue Amoeba’s LineIn application, but I simply can’t get it to work in an application. The most simple test I have is using Audacity and recording off that input. Sigh.

Attempted solution 2: I un-clamshelled my mac to use the internal mic. So I have the internal mic and internal speakers and I’m talking and I can hear them, and they can hear me, but they are hearing an echo of themselves. Why? Because the internal mic in a Macbook Pro is in the speaker grill, next to the speaker. So the other person talks, it comes out my speakers, and the mic picks up on some of it and routes it back to the person.

Why put a mic next to the speaker? Lots of people say “oh I used it to record my voice and it was ok”. Yes, but you’re not outputting through the speakers at the same time. Even the normal Macbook has the mic next to the camera. It makes SENSE to put it next to the camera, because when people do video calling, they are looking at (and therefore speaking to) the camera.

As much as I like Mac OS X, I don’t think I’ll buy another mac. I might buy a Vaio instead. Windows 7 is quite nice, and even if it does “go slow” after a year and require a reinstall, I have discovered that a lot of what I do is server-based anyway, meaning that as long as I have a core set of applications on whatever PC I am using, I don’t have to back up / reinstall much.

UUID {b6e58671-d821-4dba-b723-f12defc2650a} of the medium ‘/home/admin1/vimages/zen.vdi’ does not match the value {c14b3de3-78c8-40a1-8106-badd0e0fb9c2} stored in the media registry (’/home/admin1/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml’)

I hacked the VirtualBox.xml file to reflect the new UUID but it still gave me the same error. I guess VirtualBox must cache it somewhere.

I ran:

VBoxManage internalcommands setuuid “/home/admin1/vimages/zen.vdi”

Which said it ran successfully, but then gave me the same error when I tried to start the VM. Weird. Cloning the VDI also fails with the same message, so I can’t generate a new virtual image from this one either.

I have in fact had this issue when using the Mac version of VirtualBox, and I removed the image from the HD listing and re-added it, forcing VirtualBox to accept the new UUID of the image. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find in the manual how to perform this step on the command line. Simly detaching and reattaching the media does not force VirtualBox to change the media registry.

Eventually after molesting Google to broaden my search way beyond my error message (effectively looking at everyone who had UUID errors in VirtualBox!) I came accross the unregisterimage command. Intuitively I discovered there is an identical reverse command called registerimage. These commands control the media library from the command line. They appear to be compeltely undocumented in the VirtualBox Manual. It’s quite stupid really, they should be in the same section where the GUI describes how to do this.
A quick detachment of the drive from my VM:

VBoxManage storageattach zen –storagectl “IDE Controller” –port 0 –device 0 –medium none

Followed by resetting the image registration:

VBoxManage unregister “/home/admin1/vimages/ubuntu.vdi”
VBoxManage register “/home/admin1/vimages/ubuntu.vdi”

And re-attaching the drive:

VBoxManage storageattach zen –storagectl “IDE Controller” –port 0 –device 0 –type hdd –medium “/home/admin1/vimages/ubuntu.vdi”

And all was good!

1) Mac OS 10.5.8 does not support the printer natively

2) The driver disc Dell included includes only the electonic version of the manual, in about 10 languages, in the Mac OS mount partition (obviously the Windows drivers are on the Windows partition).

Googling tells me there is no driver, and to use a Fujixerox driver that uses the same electronics, and so will print, but will not give any options. Great. I couldn’t even find the driver they were talking about. However, dispelling these myths and the myths of Dell’s lack of support for Mac OS X, they do indeed have a Mac OS X driver on their site. And it’s just the driver - 550kb download or so. The application has been split. I like this. It works perfectly now. Thanks Dell!

For security purposes, Mozilla applications block links to local files (and directories) from remote files. This includes linking to files on your hard drive, on mapped network drives, and accessible via Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) paths.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_do_not_work

The solution is to alter the security settings for the site in question, with the exact settings shown above. Note that the settings do not require using the user.js / prefs.js file and can be enabled in about:config, although doing that on many computers might be a drag!

Now I consistently have to put up with mds / mdsworker consuming my entire CPU. Even when it’s not, it is often spamming my hard drive, and since that is the slowest component in the computer anyway, my computer slows to a crawl again. mds is the process for spotlight that crawls the hard drive indexing the files. Apparently this situation can happen with a corrupt Spotlight database. This wouldn’t surprise me, because with my 200G hard drive, the Spotlight DB grows to 18G and doesn’t stop. I run out of space then, so I remove the DB for / and it starts all over again.

Now, I’ve noticed that mds is actually run by launchd (a variation of cron). And launchd actually allows limits to be specified:

launchd limit cpu 100

Limits the CPU usage to 100%. This should, in theory, help. In practice, it’s hard to tell. I can’t tell how the limit is achieved. If it’s an average, it would permit a spike of 150% if followed by a 50% usage interval of the same time. Then the question becomes how long the calculation envelope is (the time interval for the average) to determine how long a 150% CPU usage (more than 1 core) spike actually is. I don’t have the information. I can see that sometimes launchd / mds is still using >100% and sometimes it isn’t, but it moves too quick for me to see if the average is hitting 100% or not. Oh well, was worth the try I guess.

I have a feeling that running my CPU at full load and my HDD constantly being railed, and for some reason my GFX is getting worked over as well, resulting in system loads consistently above 2 and permanent temperatures above 70 degrees celsius for the CPU and GFX, is going to result in my HDD dying soon. I have everything important backed up, but I certainly won’t be forking out $3000 for another Mac Book Pro if that happens. I haven’t had any problems with Windows 7, and if I do, it won’t be unexpected so I’m prepared for a reformat in that case. And it will cost be $2k less.