Twinkle, Twinkle, little star…
By alex | May 4, 2008
If there is not a lot of activity currently on this website, that’s because I’ve discovered Twinkle : a combination of twitter + location awareness using the iPhone.
For those who don’t know what twitter is : it’s sorta like sending text (sms) messages to friends, but you can see them all at the same time. You can choose to just post status messages (going out with some friends, now out for a bite to eat, preparing for a big presentation) so that people interested in you can follow your ‘tweets’. But those other people are doing the same thing, so you can decide to ‘follow’ their tweets as well. And that’s when it becomes interesting.
Twitter allows you different views : your personal view which shows your tweets and those you follow, and a public view, where you can see ALL the tweets from that current moment, from all over the world. It’s easy to read something and just fire a few words back, and then you get interested in that persons life, and you start ‘following’ them as well.
And suddenly you are in this microcosmos of lives of other people where you get glimpses of what they are doing and how they are feeling, and man! is it ever addictive !
You can even use it from your mobile phones and cell phones, if you set it up right.
Twinkle for iPhone adds location awareness (using triangulation of the cell phone towers your phone connects to) and by doing so takes Twitter to the next level. You have an additional view where you can specify the range around you (unfortunately, so far only in miles) in which you want to see other people who are using Twinkle.
That plus the ability to post a picture next to your post allows you to discover a lot more friends or similar-minded people who are living in your neighborhood, and are using Twinkle as well. And suddenly you have a lot more things to talk about. The weather, where are you hanging out, cool picture I didn’t know that place before.
It’s a friend (or at least contact) making machine !
You can find me via twitter with my handle “Lexstok“.
Topics: Blog News | No Comments »
Upgrade to Wordpress 2.5
By alex | April 18, 2008
I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 - the interface is a lot more streamlined, but as in any good product that gets an upgrade, there is always an accomodation phase where you suss out where your favourite menu options have gone to.
I took me 10 minutes to find the plugin section again ! I can blame my large 24inch screen though. With my browser window stretched across almost the width of my screen they are completely on the right end of it, in plain view all the time.
I’ve also disabled self-user registration. Since the xmlrpc hack, there are several spammers/robots who sign up and test if they can use you for sending spam. Comments can be made on any of my posts without signing up, so user registration is nog longer needed.
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48 hours of interruption
By alex | April 6, 2008
Should you’ve passed by the last 48 hours or so, you might have noticed that my domain boschmans.net had been parked, and that you arrived on a meaningless advert page. My apologies for that, this was none of my doing.
So far I have not received an explanation from my website provider (I have been with Priorweb since 2002 or so). I can only guess that the problem was with them thinking I hadn’t payed my bills, as my renewal was up for begin April.
Apparently there is something like paying too early, as I had already paid somewhere in February !
Anyway, the technical reason is fairly simple. If the domain name is not renewed, the name goes up for grabs again. This is why my domain name suddenly pointed to an advert page. There’s a grace period of several days before someone else can claim the name, so I got it back after complaining furiously. The DNS name change needs to be propagated across all the DNS servers, and is normally set to update once a day. So that means that it took at the very least or so one day when the domain registry lapsed, and one more to reset the DNS correctly.
I’ll wait for a better explanation from Priorweb.
Topics: Blog News | No Comments »
Playing Mass Effect now
By alex | March 24, 2008
Woooo. It’ certainly captivating, making me loose a lot of sleeping hours.
A nice engaging storyline. Lots and lots of side quests, which let you beef up your armour, weapons and technique so the main quest runs easier. No rush except if you want to. Save when you want, almost, except for in combat (logical).
I do have a blue light effect which bothers me from time to time, but that’s the only big complaint I have.
That and the time spent of course. I feel guilty spending all those hours enjoying myself with this game 
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Crackdown for the XBOX 360
By alex | March 16, 2008
I’ve just finished Crackdown on the xbox 360, and I’ve been stunned by it.
The sheer joy of running faster than cars, jumping higher than small city buildings, creating extreme explosions and generally wreaking havoc on the gangs using a whole arsenal of weaponry while keeping a tongue-in-cheek approach is something worth treasuring this game for.
And this comes from somebody who does not like the Grand Theft Auto series ! Obviously, there are a lot of similarities to GTA, but for me the best thing about it was the superman feeling you get while playing. The sense of being damn near invulnerable or always getting closer to that free internet casinoonline gambling casino,best online casino gambling,gambling casino onlinevideo poker gratuitsjeu roulette casinojeu video poker,jeu video de poker,jeu video poker a telecharger gratuitesjeux casino gratuijeu en ligne gratuitesjeu flash casinojeux de casino roulettenouveau casino avec bonusbonus casino 770jeu jack blackbonus pour casino 770jack black school ofplay slotswww jeux casinoblack game jack onlinecraps comjeu flash roulettevideo poker onlinegagner à la roulette en ligneles jeux du casinocasino tropez comcasino avec bonus sans depotmeilleurs casino en lignejeu keno en lignewww casino vacances frjeux casino bonuscasino machine a sous gratuitescasino bonus sans depotpoker en ligne bruelpoker texas gratuitespoker gratuites sans telechargeraprendre a jouer au pokerjeux 7 card stud gratuitestélécharger texas holdem en lignepoker en ligne argent virtueljeu au pokertelecharger poker holdem gratuites7 card stud gratuitesjouer au poker argentpoker telechargement gratuitespoker tracker gratuitesdes règles pokerpoker en ligne francepoker pc gratuitespoker machine gratuitesjouer poker tour gratuitesregle du jeu poker texaspoker en ligne sans argent was a real push to finish the game. The second best thing : the humor of the game, and the over-the-top melodramatic voice that accompanies you throughout the game.
Rating : recommended, even for dads !
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If Cydia installer jumps back to Springboard - fix
By alex | March 15, 2008
I recently updated the Cydia package installer, and something went wrong. It crashed back to Springboard while updating itself, and refused to start up again.
All is not lost however. Remember that Cydia is actually a graphical front-end to the iphone port of apt-get, so you can still install applications via the command line. So drop down into Terminal and issue the following command :
<quote>apt-get install cydia</quote>
If you receive a permission denied, you are working as user ‘mobile’ and you need to be user ‘root’ to do this. So before you type in the above command, type ’su root’ and the root password and then the apt-get command.
Of course, if the problem is the install package itself, this will not solve it. I tried the above a few hours later, and there was already a new release waiting to be downloaded, and this fixed the problem.
Topics: Apple | No Comments »
installer.app ‘main script execution failure’ & moving your Applications
By alex | March 4, 2008
Firmware 1.1.4
If you have moved your Applications to your mobile directory (/private/var/mobile/) you might have problems with your installer.app permissions.
Howto move your applications from your small root partition :
- cp -r /Applications /private/var/mobile
- mv /Applications /Applications.old
- ln -s /private/var/mobile/Applications /Applications
CD into your now-moved Applications folder and do the following :
- chmod +s Installer.app/Installer
- chown -R root:wheel Installer.app
This worked for me. YMMV, of course.
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Firmware 1.1.4 and Ziphone
By alex | March 3, 2008
I don’t know if Apple is giving up, or if the hackers are getting better and better, but this is following the same hacking curve as that of the psp : the first few firmwares were really hard to hack, and then it got easier, and after it there was nothing to it (at least, at the time I stopped following the psp scene firmware hacks often occurred the same day or week.
Firmware 1.1.4 for the iPhone is available, and the hacks are available as well.
Upgrading is easy : for best results, restore to a clean 1.1.4 and then launch ziphone (I did not try independence). One click is enough to jailbreak, activate and unlock your phone, including Youtube ! So far, I have not found any bugs or workarounds that are needed.
Topics: Apple | No Comments »
Messing about with the options theme
By alex | February 27, 2008
Oooooh. This looks so cool, with so many bells and whistles, I just have to play around with this.
Please close your eyes, we’ll be back to normal soon enough. Perhaps.
Update : back to my old theme, for now. I just love 3-columns themes.
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Upgrading Wordpress to 2.3.3
By alex | February 27, 2008
We live in a fast-changing world. For the past few weeks, I had neglected to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, and this suddenly came back to bite me in the behind.
I was wondering why suddenly, after all these years when I no longer require commenters to sign up first as a user, I suddenly had 3 new users. What tipped me off was the third one, who named himself ‘Free P…rn’. Finally, I did what I should have done in the first place : I really read why the upgrade to 2.3.3 was necessary. In short, “a user can change blog posts of other users via an xml-rpc attack”. Ouch. So that was why I had 3 new users so suddenly.
So I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, deleted those 3 users, and am going to do some spot checks on my posts and comments to see if any have changed.
That’ll teach me to be complacent in this always-online, web-based world. Nowadays every spam-wannabe-king has a script that scours the internet for potential vulnerabilities and you just can’t upgrade whenever you feel like it.
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Selfcleaning clothes
By alex | February 26, 2008
This is amazing ! Researchers in Australia (woot!) have discovered a way to coat wool (and seemingly other keratin-based materials) with titanium dioxide crystals, in a way that, using sunlight, organic dirt is ‘burned’ and removed. This is dissimilar to other methods that repell water, oil or dirt in that the dirt is actually consumed by the reaction between the crystals and sunlight.
True, you need several hours of sunlight for the material to clean itself, so it is not instant, but still, this would be great : hang your clothes out in the sunshine, and they’ll clean themselves. Apparently it is harmless, though I would need to have proof of that before wearing it. And I’m wondering if you could coat your hair with it; self-cleaning hair, anyone ?
On a side note, a way to repel oil on a glassy surface like my iPhone touch screen would certainly help in keeping it smudge free !
Topics: TechScience Future | No Comments »
Youtube Activation on iPhone Firmware 1.1.3
By alex | February 25, 2008
I’m struggling to activate Youtube on my iPhone, now running on firmware 1.1.3. When using firmware 1.1.3 this used to run just fine, but ever since I upgraded, it seems I no longer can use it.
I wasn’t exactly using it a lot, but it rankles me to have an application that is not working. So I’m looking for a fix.
So far, there seem to be some certificates that you can install from i.unlock.no. Just add this source link to your installer.app sources, and refresh. You can now see a folder unlock tools. However, the “Youtube activation” fix in there does not seem to help.
I’ll just need to continue looking, I’ll let you know when I find it.
[Update] It does work, with some extra mumbo jumbo. What worked for me was the following procedure. I don’t know if this you only part of these operations did the trick, or you need to do all of them. YMMV.
- First of all, you need to go into settings, general and disable ‘Auto-Lock’ (this seems to be required !)
- Connect it to iTunes via it’s cradle
- Install the Youtube Activation fix found under unlock tools
- If it wants to sync, let it sync with iTunes
- After that, still cradled, reboot the iPhone
Afterwards, out of the cradle and on wireless, I tried Youtube and it worked.
[Update] This link has a guide for firmware 1.1.4
Topics: Apple | 4 Comments »