Sunday, February 6. 2011
TiVo iPad App
| After some iPad tcpdumps (instructions for an easy way to do that), I finally was able to get the TiVo iPad application to detect my TiVo Premiere XL. In my case, what the tcpdumps showed is that the application is using mDNS (multicast DNS) for the detection which my firewall happened to be blocking. Once I tweaked my firewall, all was well. (Note: other users have mentioned having Bluetooth enabled on the iPad will also interfere with the auto-detection process and/or slow down performance of the application). Generally speaking, I am pleased with the application - the only thing additional thing I wish it would do is let me drill down into Netflix from the application. Note: For those only interested in HTTP traffic, here is an easy way to capture that as well. Update (7/18/11): There is now an app for the iPhone as well. Yay! |  |
Monday, December 27. 2010
Serendipity 1.5.5 Released
Sunday, July 11. 2010
2010 World Cup: Congrats Spain!
| Much congratulations to Spain, the well deserved winner of the World Cup after a.) being head and shoulders above the other teams in the competition and b.) outplaying a Dutch team which employed very negative tactics. |  |
Thursday, June 10. 2010
Ready for the 2010 World Cup!
After much wrangling with Comcast and nail-biting (trying to get Tivo installed so I could save all my HD recordings, I am now at last ready for the 2010 World Cup to begin.  A month of solid soccer watching (& Tivo'ing on tap.  ), with the added treat of the US playing England in their opening game.Go Yanks! | |
Wednesday, May 5. 2010
Delicious Monster Syncing Issue
Tripped across an unusual issue when trying to sync my Delicious DVD library to my Delicious iPhone app - part of the library would download and then it would disconnect before completion - leaving me with an empty DVD library.  After a lot of Googl'ing it turns out that if you have Bluetooth enabled on your phone, it can interfere with the syncing process. As soon as I turned off my Bluetooth - instant success!Note:Unfortunately the Delicious iPhone app is no longer available in the Apple App store, due to it conflicting with the Amazon updated TOS. |  |
Sunday, April 25. 2010
Life with the iPad
| After numerous remonstrations of stating that I wouldn't be buying one, I have now owned my iPad for two weeks. Likes: • Web browsing (even with the Adobe-Apple-Flash war going on) • (Related to the above post) Stunning screen - definitely makes browsing/eBook reading/pics viewing much nicer • Battery life • Responsive CPU - this helps lessen the sting of lack of multi-tasking support (see dislikes below) • No heat build-up when used for long periods of time • Portability - definitely much nicer and easier for showing family pictures • iBooks app - IMHO superior to the Kindle for reading eBooks (of course, the fact that the iBooks app supports color helps )• Impressive Apps - Elements, ABC Player, AP News and IMDB are just some of the apps that spring to mind as far as doing an excellent job of creatively taking advantage of the platform. Dislikes: • Still too much stuttering when trying to watch streaming media (doesn't matter if it is YouTube, Apple's Trailers site or the Netflix app • Double-dipping price-wise on iPhone/iPad apps - somewhat frustrating to get hit with full prices for both the iPhone and iPad version - would be much more willing to pay an incremental fee if the app was already purchased for another platform. • Lack of charging over USB (even given the increased power requirements, this still seems silly) • Lack of multi-tasking - this should be remedied with the release of iPhone OS 4.0 (one of the announcements that tipped me towards purchasing this earlier than planned )Overall, I am definitely using the iPad far more then I thought I would (and so is my family for that matter - it is often hard to get it away from them ). Probably more surprising, is that I have not missed Adobe Flash at all - over 95% of the web pages that I visit do render satisfactorily on the iPad (needless to say, I was verifying this in the Apple store which yielded yet another factor that tipped me towards purchasing this earlier than planned ). Typing, either in portrait or landscape more, has not posed an issue either, to the point that I am probably unlikely to get a bluetooth keyboard for this in the near future. That being said, it would still be nice to have a camera on the device as well as allow other browsers (i.e Google Chrome) to be installed on the device (either that or enable better plugins for Safari). |  |
Life with Google Chrome
| I have been using Google Chrome as my primary web browser for several months now and have been very impressed by it's speed and very much liking the fact that each tab runs in it's own data space (so one hung tab won't crash the entire browser. Firefox, are you listening? ). Now GoogleChrome just needs to catch up on the extensions front. |  |
Thursday, April 22. 2010
Serendipity 1.5.2 Released
Wednesday, February 17. 2010
iPhone: undocumented side-effect
| An interesting undocumented side effect that I ran across on the iPhone - if you have more than 11 pages of applications installed (i.e. over 176 apps), the option to "Save Link to Home page" will be disabled (unless you free up a space on the 1st 11 pages). And yes, it is sad that I know this... |  |
Thursday, February 4. 2010
iPhone 3.1.3 Firmware Update Released
| Apple has released version 3.1.3 Firmware of it's iPhone firmware to address 3GS battery accuracy levels as well as issues with 3rd party apps launching. The Apple support site also has full details of what is included. Note: it is a 291MB download. Just finished getting my iPhone updated.  | |
Friday, November 13. 2009
Safari 4.04 Released
| Safari 4.04 has been released with the promise of performance improvements (with improved Javascript performance being the most touted one) as well as stability improvements. For the interested parties, here are some of the security details of the Safari 4.04 release. |  |
Friday, September 11. 2009
Parallels Beta 5
| Parallels Beta 5 has been released and since I have been having numerous problems with the cut-n-paste in Parallels 4, I decided to give it a try. I must say that after running it for 20+ days without a reboot (using Windows 7 as my guest VM), I have been very pleased with both the performance and the stability. Also, I have not had a single issue with cut-n-paste between OSes. (Note: there is also a forums thread with other user's experiences on with the beta release) The after 21 days, the 1st issue that I had was the Parallels Networking Daemon crashing (must say that I love the CrashReporter on the Mac OSX ). The easy fix is just to restart the daemon:
Note: without the above daemon running, Shared Networking will not work (all other Parallels Desktop networking options will work however). |  |
Monday, August 24. 2009
Nice tip for speeding up Firefox
Found a nice tip via the LifeHacker website on yet another way to speed up Firefox, via vacuuming your database:
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Saturday, August 22. 2009
Twitter backup script
| In my earnest endeavor to back everything up ;-), I hacked together a quick script to back up the last 3,200 tweets (making use of the curl command provided here): • Back up last 3,200 Tweets:
I tripped across the above site thanks to the nice article by Lifehacker detailing some handy utilities for backing up your online data (Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, etc). In addition, here are some easy to use remote backup utilities: (fyi: if you are really into statistics & Twitter, you can view your tweet statistics on TweetStats). |  |
Wednesday, August 12. 2009
Delicious Monster Mandatory 2.2 Update
| Compliments of Amazon API Terms, there is a mandatory 2.2 update to users of Delicious Monster. Evidently Amazon is requiring all apps to use their API if they want to be able to do searches. Even though the Delicious iPhone app has been pulled from the Apple App Store, if you already have it, the wireless synchronization process will still work with the new update. | |
