October 15, 2007 by Santaduck.

I have my vista laptop (and xp box) networked into my Mac OS X network on my Airport Extreme. I finally got both XP and Vista machines on the same “WORKGROUP” (by changing XP from MSHOME to WORKGROUP). And my Vista machines could access my Macs, and vice-versa.

However, here I am a couple Vista updates later in mid October 2007, and my saved passwords no longer work: I can’t access my Macs from Vista. The old saved passwords simply don’t work. These used to be of the form:

MACHINE\USERNAME (or machine\username)

For example, say my Mac is named “NORTHPOLE” in the Computer Name field of Sharing in System Preferences, and say my username is rudolph.

My login from Vista would be: NORTHPOLE\RUDOLPH
My password would be normal.

Well it was no longer working. I even tried the same via typing in my IP in the Network App in Vista: \\10.0.1.xxx\NORTHPOLE, then trying the same login.

Well I finally figured it out. Now it requires a MIX of caps and lowercase. The machine name must be caps, and the username (which goes to the Mac OS) must be lowercase.

So, in the above example, the correct login would be:
NORTHPOLE\rudolph

Go figure.

Posted in Vista, Windows, networking, OS | No Comments »

September 14, 2007 by Santaduck.

Did everyone notice that first song by Beck that Steve Jobs played on the iPod-touch during the Apple special event?

The song’s title is: “Cellphone’s dead”.

How apropos, as it’s an iphone without the cellphone, hahaha.

Posted in iPhone | No Comments »

August 18, 2007 by Santaduck.

I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Skype functionality has come to the iPhone.
See MacDailyNews and Informationweek.

But the conspiracy theory? Obviously AT&T doesn’t want Skype on iPhone, and neither does Apple, at least not yet until the AT&T deal is done.

So is it coincideence? Just as Skype is kludged onto iPhone, the Skype network goes down worldwide. Software misconfiguration my arse =) I guess they the Skype techs haven’t heard of the concept of “restore from backup”.

Posted in Apps, iPhone | No Comments »

July 19, 2007 by Santaduck.

The iPhone has been hacked to be an AT&T pay-as-you-go phone by the folks at the infamous iPhone IRC. A little terminal hacking, and the use of their new tool iASign, you can use your prepaid card. For example, buy the $100 plan with the free Motorola C139 at your AT&T store, and you’ve bypassed the 2 year $60/mo minimum obligation to AT&T. Most everything still works, but of course data is incredibly expensive, but WiFi functions such as web browsing works fine, and is of course free. For more information see the tuaw Unofficial Apple blog, and easy-to-follow instructions over at hacktheiphone.com. Of course you may end up with a brick, but we’ll know more soon as reports filter in.

Posted in iPhone | No Comments »

July 14, 2007 by Santaduck.

In Japan, the gigantic cell provider NTT DoCoMo is planning an wireless 300Mbps service experiment for cell phones, a “Super-G” configuration, in another step toward 4G.

Yes that’s an “M” for mega. This cellular service will be faster than wired home internet. By several orders of magnitude. Imagine the iPhone on this.

My ADSL is consumer grade, with 1.5Mbps DL speed, which is pretty standard for much of the US, with some regions at double that speed (3.0Mbps), or half that speed, 768 Kbps.

In related news DoCoMo is helping fund AT&T’s 3G network in the United States, specifically on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, which is a destination for many Japanese tourists, who find they cannot use their handsets because NTT’s 2G is proprietary and incompatible, and GSM is not included on their 3G phones. Read more here at PC World.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

July 4, 2007 by Santaduck.

Apple is almost officially sold out of iPhones at their brick & mortar stores. Checking Apple’s iPhone availability page this Fourth of July holiday evening revealed that all stores are sold out except for just one on the west coast (Tigand, Oregon’s Bridgeport Village store), and one on the east (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Shadyside store). And that means 162 Apple Stores are sold out, and bets are on that it’ll be 164 before tomorrow evening.

Of course AT&T’s outlets have been sold out completely for days, and since Apple’s online store is still showing a 2-4 week shipping estimate, look for prices on Craigslist and eBay begin to rise, at least until new production arrives.

UPDATE: Looks like this Friday July 6, many Apple Stores in some states (but not Texas or California) have received more units and are again in stock. If you really want a unit, and your area is sold out, hang out next Friday as that is the end of the 14 day unopened return policy. You’ll likely see many speculators returning their units then.

Posted in iPhone | No Comments »

July 3, 2007 by Santaduck.

On a cursory survey, it looks like perhaps that more than 50% of 8GB iPhone auctions are eventually canceled by eBay security due to fraudulent buyers with hijacked accounts.

Try this: Go to eBay and open up say 20 different 8GB iPhone auctions with bids that are about to end soon in different browser tabs. You can check the ending prices in an hour or whatever by refreshing each tab. Then leave the browser tabs open. Check back in 24 hours, refreshing each tab again, and most of the auctions that ended over $750 will be canceled by eBay security, which apparently has over 2000 investigators currently on the lookout for iPhone fraud. When I checked early morning July 3rd, about 70% had been canceled in my (quasi) random sample. Results may vary on auction close time depending on the time zones the scammers are from.

Closing prices for legitimate auctions may inch higher as availability at Apple Stores becomes more scarce, but the scammers (with hijacked eBay accounts) may not tire, because once they win the auction, they receive the seller’s direct email address. Even if the auction is canceled by eBay security, they may try to get the seller to ship anyways through phishing.

See my own experience with a hijacked buyer in “eBay iPhone Fraud: Sellers Beware: Update 3 below). This scam attempted to convince me in dead earnest to ship the item to a specific address in Nigeria.

UPDATE 1:
Looks like eBay security is finally making a dent in the iPhone scammers. I tried another survey today for auctions for 8gig units ending later afternoon today (July 3) Pacific time. Out of about 15 auctions, only 1 ended suspiciously high, over $800. Yesterday a full two thirds in my small sample ended over $800, and were subsequently canceled.

UPDATE 2:
24 hours later on July 4, all auction ID numbers in my new sample were still valid, none canceled by eBay security. Looks like these past 36 hours, it’s been getting more probable that legitimate buyers and sellers would hook up with each other. Good job to eBay; I’m sure they dealt with a similar process with the PS3 and Wii.

Posted in iPhone | No Comments »

July 1, 2007 by Santaduck.

Like many of you, I live on both sides of the fence. I’ve had Apples through the ][+ and SEs and PCs since the original 8086 and XT.

Currently I have a Peecee, specifically a Compaq laptop. However I <3 the Apple GUI.

So I wanted to share one teeny Apple-like tweak that gives me pleasure on my Peecee, a Dashboard jury-rig. If you have a Compaq, you may very well have those “One Touch” buttons along the top. I have one of these buttons set on something like Exposé. XP has a “show desktop” function, and that’s what I’ve set it to; it’s not exactly the same, but the essential gestalt gut feel of it is the same: If I’m sick of overlapping windows, I just reach for a physical button, without thinking, and they are gone. I push it again, and the windows are back.

To set it, do the following:
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Posted in Hardware, OS | No Comments »

July 1, 2007 by Santaduck.

Well the auction ended. At first I was happy, I got more than the iPhones were going for. Currently iPhones are not sold out at all the Apple stores yet (and the waiting time at the online Apple store is 2-4 weeks), so people can just walk into a local store and buy one at cost. Consequently, eBay prices have been low the past 24 hours, but I’d gotten more.

But something was fishy.

The red flags: I had a reserve and the auction ended right at the reserve. I looked closer. The second place bid was in the range of what iPhones were selling for today, which was way below my reserve which I had set back when they were selling for more about 36 hours ago. That meant the winning bidder just bid WAY above the going price. Red flag number one. Then I got the email from eBay that I had sold an item. The email address of the winning bidder looked like a spam email, a senseless 15-long jumble of random letters and numbers @ jetable.net. That’s #2. I checked out jetable.net, and it’s an email REDIRECT service. That was red flag #3. I looked at the bidder’s account. Feedback was low, only 5. I looked closer and the last transaction was 2 1/2 years ago in January 2005. That was red flag #4. Damn. Well I’m nervous at this point, but figure if the PayPal address is truly confirmed, then who knows. I post a question to the eBay answer center and think. I’ve received no payment yet.

As I’m fretting with my capitalistic greed, I receive a new email.
It was from eBay’s security department and here’s what it said:
Read the rest of this entry »

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June 30, 2007 by Santaduck.

If you are interested, I’m selling an 8GB Apple iPhone on eBay. I’m mainly mentioning it for anyone looking out for fraud, and is interested in a known seller from whom to purchase a unit.

Click here for auction. The auction lasts 1 day and will end on Sunday at 11:45am Pacific time.

BTW it was interesting to note that eBay instituted a wise set of iPhone selling restrictions. The gist of it is: 1) no Pre-sales; the seller must have an actual unit in hand. 2) The auction must be accompanied by a photo of the actual unique item. 3) The seller’s eBay account name must also be visible in this photo, along with the unit to be sold. It must be part of the scene (i.e. physically written), rather than Photoshopped in. 4) PayPal is the only method of payment for the iPhone.

Even still, there are risks for the sellers. Therefore most sellers are requiring buyers to list shipping addresses that are PayPal confirmed as being the same as the billing address of one of their credit cards. Whew. I noticed that the eBay staff was very proactive, and taking down auctions that did not comply; I’m sure they are trying to avoid any bad publicity, for which the potential does exist wiht this madly-hyped item. I also noticed that the earliest auction I saw was taken down or removed– before that happened, I saw it had an auction price of of $20,000.

Posted in iPhone | No Comments »

June 24, 2007 by Santaduck.

Browsing this article at the NY Times led to a bright “AHA” moment.

Video content on phones was controlled tightly by the cellular providers, much as the “Big 3″ networks controlled television long ago. As technology grows, consumers are able to get their content through new channels.

Jump to Apple’s YouTube-on-iPhone news. The new channel here is the iPhone’s use of WiFi, which broadens the ways users can get video content, even without the cellular network. And now for the AHA moment: it’s not just video… WiFi can do the calls too. What about Skype on an iPhone…

Read the rest of this entry »

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June 17, 2007 by Santaduck.

This is a bit of old news, but the old Mac Install Kit for Kamek’s AW7 mod for Apocalypse Weekend singleplayer expansion for Postal 2: Share the Pain is now hosted here. Apparently our file hosting via Macologist has not been maintained, so I wanted to make it available again.

As a reminder this includes Mac INI files, and a launcher application for OS X.  You still need:
1) Kamek AW7 Mod zip download
2) Retail Apocalypse Weekend expansion
3) Retail Postal 2: Share the Pain (probably updated to the latest v1409.2).

No I haven’t kept up with Postal recently so I’m not sure what the status of the AW7 that is included in the ‘fudge pack’ version is.  In related news, the controversial ban-magnet Postal franchise is being updated, and Postal 3 will be out for Mac OS X. Read more at Macologist.

UPDATE: The new bundle includes the AW7 mod, which has been renamed “A Week In Paradise”, or AWP. I’m not sure if this Mac Install Kit will work with that, or if the Mac kit was included in the bundle. I’ll have to check with RWS one of these days and ask them.

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

June 14, 2007 by Santaduck.

Tetris may be the best-known gaming export from the USSR, but before western exports of arcade games poured in after the fall of communism in 1991, there were indeed arcades in Russia. I was reading an interesting article in PC World about a new arcade museum in Moscow that is attempting to resurrect cold-war era cabinet arcade games from the 70s and 80s, from periscope sea battles, pinballs, and more. Check out the museum’s official site (named after their version of the quarter, the 15 kopek coin), and especially its exhibition page gallery, which stirs a nostalgia we never had in the west.

Posted in Games | No Comments »

June 13, 2007 by Santaduck.

The fallout for Safari’s uber-beta-ness is beginning. Many recent articles have centered on security vulnerabilities. I will for now assume these have a high priority within Apple and will be largely plugged. Usability issues are more problematic, and are the major blocks for adoption by the vast target userbase, who are not necessarily power-users, but more powerfully are creatures of habit.

Ryan Paul of arstechnica had a great read on Safari beta here. As for usability, I’ll cite two of his gems:

1) Safari’s window resizing is, like OS X, only by the bottom right corner only. Apple, don’t highlight the quirky limitations of your OS!

2) Moving through tabs is not adjustable, and is permanently mated to the idiosyncratic CTRL-SHIFT-] and CTRL-SHIFT-[. I really dislike this on OS X, and I dislike it in Windows Safari as well. Why not use the now-standard CTRL-TAB? At the very least, let the user set it.

Anyways, read Ryan Paul’s article, he has an incisive commentary on Safari’s stubbornly alien use of anti-aliasing technology as well.

And why is Safari on Windows now anyways, furthermore why is it such a barely-developed version, unlike OS X for Intel which was polished on launch because of years in development? For the record, my money’s on the hypothesis that the decision to port Safari was a recent one– actually the FULL measure of the decision was to sell Apple computer hardware with Windows pre-installed, but with Apple apps instead of bloatware. If true, the engineers in Cupertino are currently scurrying in secrecy to cobble together an iLife for Vista: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garageband.

Posted in OS, Safari | No Comments »

June 13, 2007 by Santaduck.

Well I downloaded Apple’s new Safari beta for Windows on my XP box, and first of all I’m happy it’s there. Second, note the “Bug” button on the navigation bar, it’s there for a reason. Safari for Windows is still Chock Full O’ Bugs. I’ve submitted 5 or 6 already, and I found them in my first 10 MINUTES of browing:

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Posted in Safari | No Comments »