A while ago I was looking at my router’s log and noticed a funny thing related to DHCP entries, namely those of Nintendo Wii. Apparently Wii acts a little weird when it comes to DHCP, making constant queries to the server on short intervals.
My Wii has the WiiConnect24 on, so it should make Internet connections regularly, no problem there. There’s just no need to bombard the router with address queries every few minutes. Compared to other devices on my network, Wii sure makes itself heard.
Opera Labs presents: Face Gestures. Forget those silly mouse gestures, now you can browse the internet with your face.
Hilarious announcement at Opera’s site accompanied by a brilliant video demonstrating these. Still, I’d never use another browser again if it only were true…
When compared to today’s console games, the 20 year old ones might look like crap, but they have a few aces up their sleeve (such as quality and playability). Still, I’m not here to start rambling about modern games with no soul or challenge. I’m here to ramble on modern games not working, introducing the modern players to such joys as freezing, requiring constant updates and bugs.
Granted, these have been issues PC-gamers – myself included – are used to, hardware incompabilities, crashes, flawed code and such. Consoles used to be carefree – never heard of anyone not completing, like, Super Mario Bros because the game kept exiting to title screen every time you picked up a mushroom. That just didn’t happen on consoles.
One thing that always seems to rain on my iPod Touch’s parade is iTunes. Not only it backs up the software for ages every time I sync with my desktop computer, it also plays its mind games with me when it comes to applications. It sticks already uninstalled apps back, messes your updates, anything to make your life easier. Fortunately the upgrades can be installed from iPod as well.
Still, I can’t remember how many times I’ve actually managed to update apps succesfully with iTunes, but I bet it’s not a very large number.
Usually it pulls the good ‘ol 5 step jedi mind trick:
Besides this, there’s also the “gotcha”-game: let the user think everything is in order after he or she presses the “update everything”-button. Bonus points if the user finds out that nothing’s been done only much later. Scored big yesterday.
In all seriousness, my wishlist for year 2009 includes reliable app update and uninstall process on iTunes and I hope I don’t need to pay for another firmware upgrade just to see it…
I’m glad the App Store software on iPhone/iPod supports installing all updates on single click instead of the tedious separate click for each update-scheme it had going early on. Saves me from iTunes. Oh, and I’m also glad they added a setting for turning off the text prediction feature. Yay, no more me sounding like a Swedish chef (although I admit that writing sometimes in both english and finnish might be too much for it to handle reasonably)!
A while ago I praised the iPhone/iPod Touch Software 2.0. Despite of its share of problems, the software update unleashed the true potential of the iPhone/iPod Touch software platform.
Now it’s been a few months since the App Store was opened and since then Apple has managed to release a few software updates. The latest software version currently is 2.1 and the updates have fixed a few problems, but the package is still far from being ideal. Nonetheless, progress has been made. How is the mobile OSX doing now?
Apple updated their laptop product line this week, giving the Macbooks a shiny new aluminium enclosure as well as a hardware upgrade for all existing Macbook, Macbook Pro and Macbook Air models. Although, somewhere in the middle of the switch to those new aluminium cases, Apple apparently forgot to cut the opening for Firewire (IEEE 1394) port.
Previously Firewire – a standard Apple itself has helped to build, promote and support – has been present on all Macs, desktop and laptop. Most Macs came with a single Firewire 400 port while the recent high-end models (Mac Pros, MacBook Pros) also featured the high-speed Firewire 800 port.
The new Macbook Pro-model still includes the Firewire 800 port, but the Firewire 400 port as seen on the previous MacBook models vanished somewhere. Lost to the sea of half-assed excuses like “nobody used it anyway”, “all cameras use USB 2.0” and “just buy the Pro model” probably.
I own, let’s see, a one camera and three hard drives that use Firewire. I intentionally chose drives with both USB and Firewire, so I’ll be able to still use them if I upgraded, but the camera would be a no go. If I upgraded to MacBook, that is. No matter how nice the design, I have to say that this has me eyeing for good deals on previous generation models…
This is not a good sign, probably they’ll axe the connection from Mini and iMac next. I’d understand if they’d just upgraded the port to newer FW800, as it’s faster and still backwards compatible when used with an adapter, but this makes no sense.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog asked their readers for feedback on this issue and apparently this is a big deal for many. It should be, as many consumer-level PC laptops carry Firewire and it’s rather hard for a firewire device owner to replace perfectly good devices and switch to an inferior connection type. For example, USB is much more processor intensive than Firewire. And yes, USB 2.0′s theoretical speed indeed is better, but the real world-performance is far from that of FW400, let alone FW800.
Bye, Firewire. For now. I hope Apple someday again affords the $2 it costs to implement you on low-end models as well…
Today I found out that Google has added CalDAV support to their calendar. Now CalDAV compatible clients are able to both view and edit Google calendars and the sync goes two ways.
What makes me a happy camper is that now I can finally use iCal and gCal together. I could subscribe to the Google Calendar before, but it wasn’t possible to edit the calendar on iCal. Now it works both ways, so all iCal users can rejoice. Or at least the iCal 3.x users (OS X 10.5 Tiger) as earlier iCal-versions do not support CalDAV. And, of course, there’s always that Mozilla option for those not liking iCal.
Read Google’s instructions for configuring iCal with Google Calendar.
Though iPhone 3G’s release pretty much stole the spotlight, all iPod users can also sing and dance as the new 2.0 software brings the joy of App Store to iPod Touches all around the world. The iPhone you can’t call with just got a bit better.
After playing with the new software for about a week, I can say that while the iPod Touch software version 2.0 is a great ugrade, it leaves room for plenty of improvement. Recommended for all iPod Touch owners nonetheless.
