ExpanDrive

For me, one the biggest disappointments about the original iPhone was the lack of a mountable file system. Not that the iPhone needed any more hype, but how sweet would it have been to tack on “portable drive” to its laundry list of features? Well, thanks to ExpanDrive, now you can.

All of a week after the release of the iPhone 3g, the iphone dev team released its pwnage tool, allowing you to jailbreak your phone. There’s a pretty exhaustive step-by-step of how to use the 3g pwnage tool here; the only thing I’d add to it is this bit about how to fix a DFU mode bug:

The error that everyone has been googling since the tool was released: “Failed to enter DFU mode”

The fix for this was difficult to find. There are hundreds of posts out there from people trying to find answers, but very few useful solutions. However, the solution is a simple one:

Fire up Terminal on your Mac and fire of these two commands:

cd ~/Library/iTunes
mkdir “Device Support”

If the Terminal is scary, you can do the same thing by going to your Home folder, opening “Library”, opening the iTunes folder inside Library, and then creating a new folder called “Device Support” in that iTunes folder.

Jailbreaking the phone does lots of fun things for you. But the ones that matter for this article are enabling root access and SSH support. After the jaibreak is complete and the phone has rebooted, open the Cydia app that has just been installed on your phone.  Scroll down to “OpenSSH Access How-To” and follow the the directions there.

After the last step, and while still in the terminal window, type “passwd root” and enter a different password, one hopefully hard to crack than the default, which is “alpine”.  This will prevent people from messing with your phone while you poach their wireless networks.

Once all that’s done, go over to Expandrive and enter whatever IP address you just typed into the Terminal, along with the username “root” and the new, secure root password I just told you to make. The drive should pop right up on your desktop. Open it, and it should look something like this:

You can drag and drop stuff onto and off of that as you would any other ExpanDrive-mounted disk. Unfortunately, it only works over the Wi-Fi connection, so it’s still not as fast as a disk-use iPod, and I still haven’t figured out how to add and delete media and apps this way.  I’d also be careful filling the drive to capacity, since it seems to have no idea how large it really is.

Windows users can find similar instructions here using our SftpDrive product.

I’m no idiot. I realize that relentless pursuit of the counter-intuitive is the implicit goal of every snooty, left-leaning publication in existence—the latest New Yorker cover ought to assuage any doubts about that—but for crying out loud, I wish the highbrow media would just get over itself about the iPhone.

Don’t mistake me for a slobbering Apple fanboy.  Back when Jobs announced the thing last year, there was a definite need to reign in expectations.  It should have been obvious how bad EDGE would suck. Triangulated GPS was clearly going to be imprecise. And for those insecure enough to demand a GWAM of 70 or higher at all times, a Crackberry will always be the mobile of choice. Verily I say unto thee, speedtexter, you have your reward in full.

But a year after the shortcomings became clear, magazines and web pages still as full of iFap as ever.  This piece at Puffington Host yesterday stated with alarm that “Hundreds of iPhones have cracked and have had to be replaced because of the glass screen”. Hundreds?  Out of 4 million sold?  Good lord, that could mean a failure rate as high as .024%!  Look, I’m as klutzy as the next guy,  but the iPhone isn’t fragile,  and repairing it ain’t exactly rocket surgery.

It’s not so much the inanity of the counterarguments that gets to me, though—it’s the presence of the comparison itself. Slate’s PauI Boutin wasn’t quite direct enough last year when he termed iPhone “less a phone packed with extras than a full-fledged computer for your pocket”. The iPhone is a full-fledged computer you can put in your pocket.

People who bemoan the lack of AD2P in the iPhone 3g seem to have forgotten that until OS 10.5 came out, no Apple product had AD2P compatibility. It was a feature added by a software fix; the same sort of software fix hackers, and latter Apple, employed to open up the iPhone to “third-party apps”, or, as most people would call them, “programs”.

Yet, for some reason, technology writers continue to whine about trifles like AT&T’s lousy network. Once hackers crack the iPhone 3g open serve up the iPhone’s soft interior on a silver platter, you’ll be able to use whatever network you want, or install any iPhone-compatible program you can find to download.  Your computer doesn’t care if you connect to the internet through Verizon or Comcast, or whether you surf with Firefox or Safari. It’s high time that your phone started thinking the same way.

I’ll be the first to admit that, going by the specs written on the box, iPhone 2.0 doesn’t offer anything more impressive than a 3g chip. But that’s missing the point. This phone runs a computer’s operating system; it can do anything your computer can, within reason (e.g., no Halo). You could even mount its file system like an external drive to bypass the iTunes store, if only iPhoneDisk weren’t so frickin’ buggy.

Anyone out there know a software company that might be into fixing that sort of thing?

Slate talks about Wall-E today, and they’ve made me angry.

http://www.slate.com/id/2195126/

This is a very bad representation of the movie’s themes. In Wall-E, the environment didn’t collapse because people were fat and lazy. In fact, the movie makes pretty clear that people didn’t get fat until they’d been living in space for hundreds of years. This progression is shown several times (think of the successive captains’ portraits). It’s well-established science that you will get fat and lose bone mass floating around in space. The movie explicitly states that the Axiom’s denizens have grown obese under the effects of micro-gravity (it’s unclear why this would be, since the Axiom appears to have artificial gravity, but it is stated in the dialogue, so we’ll have to take their word for it) and more dramatically, technology. It may be true that some people are genetically predisposed to being obese, but if nobody has to walk anywhere anymore, everybody is going to get fat.

And everybody does get fat, but that’s a symptom, not a cause. The movie’s link between “obesity and environmental collapse” is much more circumspect and thoughtful than the Slate author insists it is when he says “Wall-E tells us that if we don’t change the way we live, we’ll all get really fat and destroy the world”. That chain of events actually happens in the opposite order, so finding the idea that “we gain weight and the Earth suffers” in the movie is bordering on fabrication. The same bad habits caused the environmental catastrophe and the bloating of humanity, but to suggest that the blame is laid at the feet of the genetically obese is a deliberate misreading.

Earth becomes uninhabitable because humans are wasteful, negligent, and encouraged into over-consumption by the giant corporation that also serves as their government, not because they’re fat; we’re even shown that they’re not fat when they leave Earth. No amount of FUD is going to change that very obvious (maybe too obvious) thematic statement from the creators. You can argue with it, but don’t don’t raise straw men and invent themes that just aren’t there in order to more enhance your offense. If you see the movie and come out with the idea that Pixar is decrying compulsive consumerism exclusively because it will make us all fat, then I will suggest you are missing the point entirely. If you come out thinking that Pixar believes obese people are destroying the Earth, I will begin to judge negatively your comprehension skills.

You saw the commercials and you got it: you are a Mac.  So you went out and bought a Mac. And you love it. You love it so much that maybe you’re even camped out waiting for an iPhone right now. But I doubt it.

Anyway, you’ve got this problem. Your Mac is the same as everyone else’s. And you didn’t scribble all over your Vans or put magenta Deep-Vs on your fixie because you wanted to be the same as everyone else. Not being unique is unspeakably lame. Lamer than Coldplay.

But of course, being new to the Mac, you don’t want to do it wrong. And I get that. Modern fashions are tough. These are dangerous waters we tread, are they not? But don’t worry, bro. I’ve been rocking this look since the days of MacPaint, and I’ve got your back.

• DON’T move all the icons to the left hand side of the screen. You’re a Mac, remember?
• DO put your dock over on the left. Icons on the right, dock on the left. Easy.

• DON’T leave anything on the computer actually named after yourself except your user name. This goes double for shared music.
• DO taunt anyone dumb enough ignore the previous rule (let’s call them Person X) by changing the name of your shared music to “[Person X]’s Music is trite and predictable”
• DON’T use any of the lame default screen savers. Replacing them with pictures of your own still won’t make them cooler.
• DO use a retro screen saver like the Flying Toasters or PongSaver. Trust me, it’s ironic.

• DON’T overdo it on the widgets.
• DO get iStat menus so you can see how much the widgets are slowing you down.
• DON’T complain about the beachball. Chances are it’s your fault.
• DO max out your RAM. It costs $100 and makes your computer run at least that much better.
• DON’T use Spotlight unless you’re looking for a specific file you rarely use, but know the precise name of.
• DO use Quicksilver for everything else. Even text messages.

If you’re thinking in terms of a couple hundred dollars, your app probably isn’t even going to get listed in the App Store. The App Store isn’t going to be like VersionTracker or MacUpdate, where every piece of junk gets listed as it’s submitted.

-John Gruber, Friday, 27 June 2008

What. The. Fuck? http://xrl.us/kkkdy Productivity?

-John Gruber, Thursday, 10 July 2008

“Anyone mind if I reboot Builder? It’s being a real bitch.”

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/salesguy.html

One of the most irritating signs of my advancing age has been the recent deterioration of my eyesight. Not that it’s especially poor (somewhere between 20/50 and 20/75), but it’s bad enough that without eyewear, I find myself squinting hard at the screen a couple of times a day.

Fortunately, OS X has some pretty neat tricks built into it for those who need a little extra help in the vision department. In the Keyboards & Mouse System Preferences panel, you can enable a screen zoom with ctrl+scroll wheel (or ctrl+two-fingered scroll on a laptop). The Universal Access panel also has a bunch of squint-relieving features, including the ability to make the cursor friggin’ huge.

3rd-party eye support isn’t bad, either. Despite being kinda ugly and uncreatively named, Computer Glasses allows you to zoom into a localized area, rather than blowing up the entire screen. And Switch Res X is a fantastic way to get at screen resolutions that the Displays preference panel doesn’t want you to see. It’s handy for nailing down the happy medium between pixel count and legibility, or for setting up your Mac with an HD TV.

For web browsing, the recently-released Firefox 3 does wonders for my fading eyesight. While most browsers use the “Apple+hyphen” and “Apple+equals sign” commands to decrease and increase text size, the new Firefox does them all one better by re-rendering the entire page—and all its independent elements, like movies, graphics, etc—in a slightly smaller or larger size. I think that’s pretty impressive.

I also really dig Noctournal. It’s a customizable screen inverter from the makers of Quicksilver that saves wear on the eyes, and can also make your batteries last a long, long time. Caffeine, while it does nothing for battery life, does a tremendous service by preventing Energy Saver from darkening/turning off your screen without warning. Greyish screens might save energy, but they are murder on the eyes.

(After the 2009 NBA Finals, I revisited this topic with some suggestions for the second half of Kobe’s career.)

There’s a lot of crap in my life that I’m sick of. Websites that make you register. “Green” vehicles that get 22 miles per gallon. Stores that call you a “guest” instead of a customer—I mean, WTF? If you were a guest at my house and I made you pay $10 bucks to use my wireless network, would you ever come back?

Anyway, with the NBA Finals underway, there’s a lot of talk about whether or not Kobe Bryant is as good as Michael Jordan. After Game 4, in which the Celtics stormed back to win from a 20+ point deficit in Los Angeles, while Kobe got shut down faster than clicking hardrive at an IT convention, most of that is gone.

But, being the objective guy I am, I’ve decided to compile a list of things at which Kobe Bryant is superior to Michael Jordan:

1. Whining – after every drive that couldn’t have been made with a blindfold on, even the ones where he scores, Kobe turns to the ref and shouts, making some gesture to indicate that his jersey was tugged or his arm was held. Jordan just backpedaled down the court and played defense—better than Kobe does.
2. Retiring – Kobe could still blow this one. He currently has zero failed retirements to Jordan’s two, but he’s just so freakin’ unpopular with teammates and standoffish with fans that I can’t imagine anyone would want him back.
3. Dodging Rape Allegations – Honestly, this one might just be a trick of circumstance. I feel like if Jordan ever had to dodge any rape allegations, he would have done so better than Kobe.
4. Gambling - I could be way off on this one, but numerous people claim to have won tremendous sums of money from MJ, including one claim in excess of $1,000,000. Kobe might have similar losses that I just don’t know about, but in my experience, only interesting people gamble.
5. Stonewalling - Seriously, if I were to engage in some sort of criminal conspiracy with with either Kobe or MJ, I would go with Kobe, since he’s really good at being cold, unfriendly, and not talkative. That’ll come in handy, should he be taken into custody. Jordan would be all garrulous, charming the cops and trying to sell them McDonald’s or Nike or whatever.
6. Wearing an Arm Sock – Grasping for straws, I know. But Jordan never wore an arm sock. Kobe wins by default.

Now lets compare this to the list of things in which Jordan’s skill exceeds Kobe’s:

1. Basketball – No contest here. 6 titles, 5 MVPs, and no 20+ point comebacks in the Finals by opposing teams on his home court vs. 1 MVP and no titles without Shaq (though a 2008 title is still possible). Jordan also did it against tougher competition.
2. Marketing – The fact that Kobe plays with a friggin’ undershirt on but MJ remains the Hanes spokesman speaks volumes about the divergence in natural salesmanship between the two. Kobe couldn’t sell smack to a junkie, where Jordan could get one clean just by flashing a smile.
3. Acting – Jordan has a number of film credits (though not quite as many as Shaq), including the 1998 feature Space Jam, a film that was built around the MJ brand. He also appeared in real movies like He Got Game. Kobe just does a lot of talk shows.
4. Baseball – During retirement #1, Jordan played poorly on a minor league baseball team. He also bought them a bus, but still, he didn’t look entirely out of place on that level. Kobe has yet to play professional baseball.
5. Changing Jerseys – “When I come back like Jordan, wearin’ the four-five“ . MJ briefly played with the #45 jersey upon his return to the Bulls because his signature #23 had already been retired. I don’t see any #8 hanging from the rafters at the Staples Center, do you?
6. Being a Teammate – Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Horace Grant – Jordan made all these players better. He pressured them to succeed, but he never lectured them or chewed them out. He earned their respect. Kobe, not so much.
7. Trivial Pursuit – This is just a guess. But Jordan has three years of study on an academically-eligible-to-compete level at North Carolina. Kobe did not attend college. (Related – how sick would it be to see a fourth Jordan comeback to play and complete his degree at UNC?

So yeah. Clearly no contest here. LeBron is already a better comparison to MJ, and he doesn’t even have titles yet.

Now if only I could get the New York Times to stop making me register.

So in the coming days/weeks/months, ExpanDrive is getting a new icon, both because the current horseshoe-shaped magnet isn’t particularly unique, and because really big magnets and hard drives don’t exactly play well together. Obviously, I’m excited to see what we get, but would like to make one request: no birds.

Seriously, they’re freakin’ everywhere. I remember back in the day when I first stumbled across Adium. I was like “huh, the icon’s a fruity little duck”, but with OTR chat support and totally customizable user interface, who was I to complain?

A few years later, before ExpanDrive made my choice of SFTP client utterly moot, I brought Cyberduck, which sports yet another birdy little icon, into my apps folder. Shortly thereafter, Gaim, Adium’s Windows doppelgänger became Pidgin, and another avian icon hit the software scene.

Around 2006, they began popping up everywhere. ZeFrank, for example, suddenly developed a sweet spot for duckies, which kind of seems a step down from his previous infatuations with kitties and stirring the pot of love. I’ve been using NeoOffice (which rocks a sweet pirate ship icon) for a while, but just the other day, as I was rooting through an old harddrive, I noticed the subtle bird references inserted into OpenOffice.

I decided things were getting downright Hitchcockian when I started looking for something lighter than Wordpress, but equally hackable, for my homepage blog. Chyrp fit the bill perfectly–with one tiny exception.

So, yeah. I’d prefer an icon with no birds. In fact, I’d like to maybe see something that kills birds, like DDT or an automatic shotgun. Y’know, just in case. I realize bird-killing things don’t have all that much to do with SFTP or hard drives, but that’s what you pay designers for, right?

Until then, just be careful what sort of information you reveal over Twitter. The birds are everywhere…and they’re watching.

Syntax Highlight Code in Less
Jeff and Matt both use cat, presumably because they’re so tough that they can read long documents faster than Terminal.app can print them to the screen. On the other hand, I use less, and now I use less with pretty colors. I’m superficial like that.

“Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer”
“Cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancer. There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer.”

Magnetic Fields Movie
Let me start by saying that I’ve heard a lot of people talk about magnetic fields, and I’ve never heard them described as a hairy ball. There’s a hairy ball theorem, and magnetic fields are sometimes said to act like hairy rubber hands (field lines “want” to be shorter, and further away from each other). But there’s no hairy ball magnetic field. The “hair” on the sun is really a magnetized plasma, and so I think it’s unfair to call it simply a “magnetic field” (it’s really much more complicated). And finally, all of the animations of magnetic fields seem to ignore the Earth’s own intrinsic magnetic field, which would likely dominate the room unless they hard some really impressive currents going through those pipes. In short, I wasn’t impressed.

The Big Picture
Stunning photos at Boston.com. Just go look. Do it now. Make sure you catch the high res photos of the Amazon undiscovereds.

Black Cab Sessions
Musicians driving ’round Trafalgar Square, playin’ a little tune, innit?

“One More Thing” An oldie-but-goodie from The Onion.