Archive for category Apple
Steve Jobs at the D8 Conference and His Comments on Journalism
I was just watching the interview with Steve Jobs at the D8 Conference on iTunes. Around 41 minutes into the interview, there is a discussion about how the iPad is going to help journalists.
Jobs makes his second hint in the interview of his distaste for bloggers. His first happened earlier when they were discussing Gizmodo's blogger who published pictures of the new iPhone. One could tell that he was a bit bitter about that situation, and he made comments that showed that in his opinion blogging is not journalism.
I totally agree with this point. Blogging isn't journalism by default. As the interviewers pointed out, however, many journalists have turned to blogging as their medium of choice.
During the discussion of the iPad, Jobs points out that he doesn't want to see us become a nation of bloggers. He states that he wants to help publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post sell their news.
Here is what I don't agree with. These publications are failing because they have not been providing good journalism. All I see from the media, including news papers, is biased rhetoric or celebrity junk. Bloggers are doing the same, but I've found that in the bee's hive that is the blogosphere, there is actually some good content. Some of that content is much better than the junk our fine journalists at CNN and such have been reporting.
If these publications want to make money, they should advertise. That's where most of their money comes from anyway. They don't make a ton from News Paper sales. They make enough there to pay for the materials and printing costs. Advertisements are where the money is at. They know that. They should just work on their advertising model.
How to buy a Mac
Posted by Randy in Apple, Good Deals, Hardware, technology on September 29, 2009
I've bought a few Macs from Apple, recently. I bought a Mac Mini about 1.5 years ago and was very pleased. My company bought a MacBook Pro for me a year ago, so I sold my Mini. I left the company about 6 months ago. I was left without a Mac, so I recently bought a MacBook Pro.
So, that's my history with Macs. I've found that ordering a Mac from Apple is fine and all, but there are a few things that are lacking.
1.) It sometimes takes days before items are shipped. Most of these items are coming from China. The shipping process itself takes too long. People can go to Wal-mart and buy a Dell. They can also order a Dell straight from Dell. Chances are, the product will ship a lot fast than a Mac. Of course, you can buy Macs at your local Best Buy or Apple Store as well. Shipping is not really an issue there. It just happened to seem strange to me that it takes so long to get the product straight from Apple when ordering from their online store.
2.) While Macs themselves aren't overpriced when you step back and look at what you are getting for the money, the upgrades for Macs are ridiculous. They are actually unbelievable to anyone who follows hardware prices at all.
For instance, to upgrade a Mac Pro from the standard 3gb of RAM to 16gb of RAM costs $1850. Someone should tell Apple that RAM has been dirt cheap for at least 5 years. One can buy 16gb of 1066mhz ECC PC8500 RAM from Newegg for around $620, or as noted later in this article, one can get the same Ram for as little as $400. That's 4 chips at 4gb each, exactly what Apple offers.
Some may argue that the quality of the RAM is better from Apple. People please...It's the same stuff. Apple doesn't make their own RAM. They order it from the same RAM manufacturers that companies like Dell and HP order from. The same thing goes for hard drives, video cards, and DVD drives. Each of these are not better just because you ordered them from Apple.
I like MacBook Pros, Mac Minis, and iMacs, but I wouldn't advise anyone getting an Apple upgrade for any of them except for the processor. Even with the processor, I would advise to stick with the standard. If you need to upgrade anything else about your Mac, buy the hardware online. Get the specific type needed and buy from an online retailer.
Here is 4gb of 1066mhz ECC memory for just over $100. Get 4 of those and you have saved around $1400 compared to the Apple upgrade.
So, when buying a Mac, it's best to buy from a source other than Apple's online store, if you like getting your packages in a timely manner. If you must get your Mac straight from Apple, do not purchase upgrades from them. Buy your upgrades the smart way, from someone else.
Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration
Posted by Randy in Apple, Internet, Programming, Web Development, technology on September 24, 2009
If you've seen that error message you've probably happened upon a security feature that your shared web hosting provider has enabled. There are a few work-arounds for this error but most require you to have certain privileges on the server that you probably don't have. Quite frankly, if you are getting these errors you probably don't have the ability to change these settings yourself.
Rather than try to get the provider to change these settings (let's face it, they have this enabled for a reason and surely someone else has already tried to get this changed, right?) one can easily get around this with Curl. In most cases, curl will be enabled on the server. So here is the quick and dirty way to get around it:
Create a PHP file and name it anything you want. For the sake of this article we'll refer to it as curl_functions.php. In this file put the following functions:
<?php
function setupMyCurl() {
$myCurl = curl_init();
$temp = curl_setopt($myCurl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
return($myCurl);
}
define("myCurl", setupMyCurl());
function curl_get_contents($url) {
$temp = curl_setopt(myCurl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
return(curl_exec(myCurl));
}
?>
Include or require this file. Then, all you have to do is use the curl_get_contents($url) in your code to pull in the xml to a string. Then use the simplexml_load_string() instead of simplexml_load_file(). This will give you the same results but works around the url fopen feature. If you don't have curl enabled on your host, GET ANOTHER HOST. 
Slow wifi on iPhone 3GS
Posted by Randy in Apple, Internet, Networking, Tips, technology on July 24, 2009
I bought a new iPhone 3G S yesterday. These things are very nice, and I'm not an Apple fan boy by any stretch. One thing that was bugging me, however, was the slow speed I was getting from the wifi. I was getting faster speeds from the 3G network than my home wireless, and this is while I was sitting right next to the router, so it wasn't a signal problem.
I found the solution to this after reading through many, many forum posts. I saw others were having the same problem as me and were getting responses from people like "reboot the router" or "reset your network settings on the iPhone." This is all well and good and I'm sure those people meant well but there was a big problem with their responses.
First of all, everyone having this trouble said that the wireless worked fine on their computers but not on the iPhone. Secondly, there aren't many settings to "reset" inside the iPhone's network settings. There's just not anything in there that would cause this type of issue.
The solution to the problem ended up being an advanced setting on the router itself. From what I can tell of the issue and it's solution, the iPhone's wifi is just a bit more picky than a standard PC wifi device. Here are the settings I eventually had to change on my Netgear router.
The important items here are the fragmentation threshold and the CTS/RTS threshold. Each of these were set to their max value previously. After changing these two settings, my iPhone started working like a champ.
If you are experiencing the same problems with your iPhone or iPod Touch's wifi, change these settings on your router. Also note, these settings have slightly different names on some routers. Refer to your router's manual for more info.
Edit: I've gone much lower with these number with much success for my less powerful mobile devices. Going too low does seem to cause issues with more powerful computers on the wireless network. Test this out with lower settings and post your success or failures in the comments.
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APPLE G4 125 GHZ MAC MINI 1GB RAM 40 GB HD COMBO 105 |  |
20 Bids | US $173.00 | 2h 2m |
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Apple Mac Mini 142GHzCombo M9687LL B 142 GHz 51 | |
8 Bids | US $201.00 | 41m |
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Apple Mac mini G4 M9686 B 125 GHz 512 MB 40 Gb | |
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US $250.00 | 4h 41m |
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Apple Mac mini ILife 166 GHz 1 GB 80 GB Intel w Hub | |
8 Bids | US $280.00 | 2h 56m |
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Apple Mac mini MB139X A 2 GHz 1 GB 120 GB Mac | |
0 Bid | US $500.00 | 5h 28m |
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The Best Dock for Linux
Posted by Randy in Apple, Linux Stuff, Open Source, technology on July 5, 2009
I've been looking for an OS X-like dock bar for Linux for many years. For a while, I used the launcher applet in gdesklets. It works without x-composite and pretty nice, but gdesklets can be a resource hog at times. Most of the gdesklets are written in Python if I'm not mistaking and Python, being an interpreted language, uses much more system resources than a native compiled application.
My next dock was AWN, or Avant Window Navigator. At one point, possibly the present, Google was involved with this project. Again, this is if I recall correctly. AWN is very nice, however, it only works if you are using the composite extension in X, as in Compiz/Beryl/Compiz Fusion. It's very customizable and behaves much like the OS X dock.
There's one part of the OS X dock that I really like that isn't quite the same in these docks however. The fish-eye zoom of icons on the dock is a trademark of OS X. AWN and the launcher in gdesklets both have a zoom function but it's just not the same.
I recently discovered that there is a great dock pretty much hidden away in a program called Gnome-Do. Gnome-Do itself is a cool search app for gnome. It's somewhat like a KDE app I remember that lets you launch programs by hitting a keyboard shortcut and then typing the name of the app. I can't remember the name of that app at the moment though. Gnome-Do does exactly that. One can type super(windows key) and the space bar to bring up Gnome-Do.
Of course, you will have to install it first though. After it is installed, simply run the application and go to the preferences for it. Change the appearance to "Docky". Voila, the best dock you've ever had in Linux will appear. Play with it and you'll soon see that this is very close to the OS X dock experience.
Where can I purchase an iPhone?
Last month I bought a Nokia N810. At first, I debated getting an Apple iPod Touch. To be honest, if the local retailer would have had some 16gb versions in stock, I would have probably went ahead and purchased one there. After going over what I wanted out of that type of device, I decided on the N810. For most other people I would suggest the iPod Touch or an iPhone.
There are a lot of people looking for iPhone's and iPod Touches on the net. Everyone wants a good deal on them. The deals aren't hard to find, you just have to know where to look. For instance, these are about the best one can find (clicking the links will take you to a site full of iPhones of all types):
No items matching your keywords were found.
Anyone who wants to purchase an iPhone online, should check out these deals first. Plus, a lot of these phones have already been unlocked. Unlocked iPhones can be used with any carrier.
There are many imitation iPhones as well. The BlackBerry Storm is one of them. Blackberries are much more popular with the business crowd, or at least have been in the past due to the full QWERTY keyboards. They have also been integrated into the business environment much better. A company I used to work for used Blackberries along with their Lotus/Domino servers for mail, calendar, and other databases. This allowed people on the go to access all their appointments and contacts from anywhere. Unfortunately, the Blackberry Storm hasn't recieved the best reviews, and it doesn't have the features that business users looked for and received in the past with a Blackberry.
iPhones make great personal media devices, PDA, and (don't forget) phone. If you're in the market for one, go grab yours today. Also check out this site for more great deals.
Cheapest Mac Mini
Apple's products have always been known for their expensive pricetag. However, a few years ago Apple introduced a product that didn't require a second mortgage to buy, the Apple Mac Mini. The mini was and still is revolutionary in its design. The latest generation of mini offers a lot of bang for the buck.
It has a sleak curvy shell. It is roughly 6"x6"x2". It contains a Core 2 Duo Intel processor. It come with a minimum of 1 gb of ram and an 80 gb hard drive. It has built-in wifi, bluetooth, and a speaker. It's also has USB, Firewire, speaker, and mic ports. Finally, it comes with the latest incarnation of Apple's Unix-based OS X.
OS X is a great OS and the main reason I bought a mini. I was interested in what OS X was like and I wanted to develop applications for it. I bought my mini straight from Apple, and even though it was pretty cheap, I could have found a better deal, like these:
No items matching your keywords were found.
That is a small sample but it's easy to see why the Mac Mini is a good deal. It's a powerful computer with a powerful OS for a very good price. You just have to bring the keyboard, mouse, and display.
Here's a list of even more Mac Mini at great prices.
Cheapest Mac Mini
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