Throw the Mind [dot] Com » Apple

Why There Will Not Be A Tablet Announced By Apple On The 27th

Nathan — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:29:26 +0000

The web is all a twitter about a tablet they think Apple is going to announce this month. They have also been saying a tablets been coming for years. This is the same thing that happen with the iPhone, the difference here, is Apple has nothing to revolutionize by making a tablet. Look at the iPod. Companies were making mp3 players, but Apple came in and did it better. Same thing with the cell phones. They revolutionized both industries. How will this work with the tablet? Are they going to revolutionize the Kindle market, or the Windows tablet market? Either one you choose, they have already done it with the iPhone. The iPhone is a tablet, its just small. So maybe as @FrankSnyder pointed out its going to be a dock for the iPhone. This is all great and wonderful, but the iPhone doesn’t multi-task. Why do you need a 10inch single processing low power machine.?

Nothing about this whole tablet thing makes sense. Apple doesn’t officially have any events coming up. Everything online right now about the tablet is speculation. I say its not going to happen. I don’t see a market to for Apple to revolutionize.

Update: Looks like there is going to be an Apple Event on Jan. 27th. I’m still saying the tablet isn’t coming.

Tags: Apple

Apple Store Why Not A Linux Shop

Nathan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:23:47 +0000

I was listening to Twit this morning while they were discussing Apple Stores and why people go into them. All of the speakers on Twit said people go to Apples Stores because they get to play with the computers and talk to knowledgeable people. While this is true, but I think the main reason is that Apple computers are different from what most people are used to. They get to break away from Windows and try something new. Then if they like it, they can purchase it right there. I don’t think its the fact that the computers are there to use, but more the fact that the computers are different.

This also got me thinking, what if there was a Linux Shop. A place with computers set up running different kinds of distributions, showing off Open Office, InkSkape, The Gimp, and many other open source programs. It would be just like an Apple Store, but for open source. Computers could be sold at a cheap price because of the free operating systems. The employees could answer Linux questions, and help new comers. I think this sounds like a good idea, but not a good business idea. Maybe something Makers Local could do.

Tags: Apple, Linux, MakersLocal

Rockbox Sucks for Podcasting

Nathan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:07:05 +0000

The other day I noticed my iPod was almost filled up, but should have only been about %50. So I decided to give Rockbox a try, and manage my own music directory. I figured it would be easy to just use rsync to synce the Music on my computer with the music on my iPod. Installation was easy as pie and after a reboot I was using Rockbox. I immediately went to look for a podcast menu. To my surprise there was nothing in rockbox for podcasting. After doing a little Googling I ran across a way to insert a menu into the batabase section. Which gave me a listing of “All Podcasts”, “New Podcasts”, and “Old Podcasts”. This was kind of cool, I was able to modify the interface to my liking. But when I clicked on “All Podcasts” saw about half what I was suppose to. This was because some podcasters don’t modify the ID3 tags correctly. After modifying the tags accordingly I still didn’t have all of them. This was because the database had to be updated. All this and I finally got podcasts to show up, only to find out bookmarking only works on playlists which I couldn’t get working, other than the dynamic one, which consists of my current directory. GAAAA!!!!!!!!

List of Suck for Rockbox

No podcasting support out of the box.
Bookmarking works on playlists, though I can’t verify that because I wasn’t ever able to save a playlist and go back play it again.
Battery didn’t seem to charge while plugged in and syncing.
Rockbox can’t sleep, only turn off, so you have to wait for it to boot before it can play your track. Though you can make it continue on start up, which is nice.
Every game/app has a different way to exit, and doesn’t ever tell you what it is.

Basically if you want to just play music, you might find this useful. Though in my weekend of playing with it, I found it to have a huge learning curve. I’ve gone back to gPodder and gtkpod. That is until my iPod breaks, in which case I will look for a different podcast device.

Tags: Apple, iPod, RockBox

iPhone updating

Nathan — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:36:12 +0000

So last night I decided to update my iPhone to the newest firmware. Well it all went find but one part. Because I bought the iPhone with no intension of using it as a phone I have to activate it with third party software. Here comes the problem. After updating the firmware to 1.1.1 and getting RW access to the file system, I installed ssh. Great right? The thing is, I need my phone to connect to the wifi so that I can ssh into it. Now in order to connect to wifi I need to activate the phone, but to activate the phone I need to ssh into it. Nice isn’t it. I don’t know if other people are having this problem as no can seem to help me.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, Wifi

Hack the iPhone with a PSP Exploit

Nathan — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:35:51 +0000

Looks like the same Tiff exploit that was used to downgrade the PSP from 2.0 to 1.5 firmware, is going to be used to run code on the iPhone. This news is kind of funny since Sony fixed the Tiff buffer overflow problem a year and a half ago. Guess Apple didn’t get that memo. Ups!!!

Tags: Apple, Hacking, iPhone, OSX, PSP

Bioshock and the Mac Adventure that Ensued

Nathan — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:32:59 +0000

This weekend I bought a copy of Bioshock. A Microsoft only game. This was fine as I thought all I would have to do is install Boot Camp. When I got home I fired up the MacBook Pro and went to installing boot camp. After burning the driver disc I was stuck waiting the the drive to be partitioned. I went to grab a sandwich and came back to find that the partition had failed. OSX said it couldn’t move some file and I would have to reformat the drive before I could partition it. Looks like this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought I said, and went to get out my external hard drive and peruse a reformat. After booting the OSX install disc I went to Disk Utility and made an image of my drive. Then booted back into my system and mounted the image just to verify that all my data was there. All the data was copied, so I reformatted the internal drive. All well and good so far. After the format I went to restore the drive from the image I had created, but to my surprise I was unable to do so. After spending a few hours online trying to figure out how to restore the image Apple.com left me with two options.
One: install OSX on another external drive and boot from that, then restore the internal drive.
Two: boot my Mac into disk mode and connect it to another Mac and restore from the image.

Neither of these options where going to work for me, so I decided I would just mount the image and copy everything to the internal drive. After that was finished I rebooted to find a black error screen. This wasn’t what I had hoped for. By this time my sandwich is long gone and its getting really late, so I say screw it I will just reinstall the OS and spend the next week getting things back to normal. Off I go on another long operation when I find an option that will copy my old system to a folder and reuse my User folder. About and hour later I was sitting at the Log In screen for my user account and everything was pretty much back to normal. Unfortunately I was out of time and didn’t get a chance to try Boot Camp again. But I would assume it will work.

What I Learned.
1. I am going to need to find a better way to back up.
2. Through all the madness I somehow gained 5-10GB of extra data.
3. Games are not always worth it.

Tags: Apple, OSX, Windows

Which IPod should I get?

Nathan — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 21:11:04 +0000

So I have been using my little shuffle for a few months now waiting for today, the day Apple released the new IPods. Let me fist explain what I use my IPod for. I listen to podcasts everyday, some music, movies would only be on watched while waiting in line or something. I don’t think I need to carry my entire library with me, as I can’t have an IPod at work, and most listening I do is of podcasts. You may say, just stick with the shuffle, but I like to see what I am listening to, as well as being able to move about my files efficiently. Could you help me decide.

IPod Classic – Comes in 80gb ($249), 160gb ($349). I would be able to carry my entire library with me, but its like an old IPod. Although having 160gb would be nice for just backups and other files.
IPod Touch – Comes in 8gb ($299), 16gb ($399). Like an IPhone, but with only Wifi. I would only be able to carry podcast and some song. Probably hackable, but not sure right now. Also as with the IPhone, its all touch. I don’t know if I like this for use in a car.
Iphone – Refurbished 8gb($349) It’s an IPhone, so its got bluetooth, wifi, and even the phone part if I wanted to get data for it. Also Its only $50 more than the 8gb Touch, and I know the IPhone will be hacked up and awesome.
Achos5 – Comes in 80gb ($329), 160gb ($379). It has wifi, touch screen, browser plugin, DVR function (I wouldn’t use) and some other stuff. Take a look and see what you think. Also the size on this seem large to me.

I am leaning toward the IPhone, just because it has more goodies for about the same price as the IPod Touch. Although if i remember correct, you need an adapter to use regular headphones on the IPhone. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Nathan

Tags: Apple, MP3_Player

Mac Resource Selling the Apple

Nathan — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:40:05 +0000

Mac Resource here in Huntsville is selling the Big Apple sign on the front of the building. The auction is up on Ebay. I think I am going to take some pictures of it, if its still up.

Tags: Apple, Ebay

iPod Shuffle and the Manual Sorting Hell!

Nathan — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:06:13 +0000

At the end of May Apple upgraded iTunes to version 7.2, which included DRM Free music. I was so excited about this that I upgraded right away. The next morning, I found myself yelling at the computer, seems as though Apple made it so that podcasts couldn’t be manually sorted on the 2nd generation Shuffle. Podcasts always move them selves to the top of the shuffle and sort by newest. This problem is irritating, but I figured someone probably already complained and Apple would fix it in the next release. Then a couple weeks ago Apple released a firmware upgrade to the 2nd generation Shuffle. What did that fix? Hell I don’t know, they didn’t release any information about it. The firmware upgrade didn’t fix the podcast problem. Then last week the new version of iTunes I had hoped would fix the manually sorting issues came out. But unfortunately it didn’t fix the problem either. I can now move podcasts around on the shuffle, but the manual sort doesn’t get saved to the shuffle. I have found many others that having the same issues, here are a few links to discussions about this problem.

Tags: Apple, MP3_Player

iPhone without mp3 Ringtones!

Nathan — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 16:03:37 +0000

Yep thats right, looks like the iPhone won’t be able to use mp3′s as ringtones. Does anyone else find this rather crazy. You will have 4-8gigs of music, but you can’t use any of it a ringtone. I would figure that if the damn phone did one thing good, it would allow you to have any audio file as a ring tone. Engadget has a nice listing of shitty things about the iPhone. Enjoy!

Tags: Apple, phone