Cameron’s Blog

This coming Saturday the 13th of December, nation-wide protests are being held in Brisbane, Hobart, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth, and Canberra against Senator Conroy’s internet censorship scheme.

More information about the protests (times, places): 13th December 2008 - EFP

Thread about the filtering scheme on the MacTalk forums: Coming Soon: Censored Internet

See the Electronic Freedom Project wiki for other links.

This post has also been posted at MacTalk, please also check there for a discussion on the protests: No Clean Feed protests - MacTalk Forums

This is it. At 7:30 AM GMT (5:30 PM AEST) The Large Hadron Collider will be switched on and, according to some, will create a black hole which will consume the earth. To pass the time, here is some fun stuff about the LHC killing us all.

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet? (Different to the above link)

Be sure to check out the source of both of those pages

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

I have created a small ut.ag bookmarklet. Simply create a new bookmark in the browser of your choice, and enter the following code in the URL field.

javascript:void(location.href='http://ut.ag/APIGetuTag.aspx?url='+location.href+'&email=example@cameron.moon.net.au')

(change the email address to your paypal email)

When you click on the bookmark in your bookmarks bar, it will create a ut.ag shortened URL for the current site, and display it in your browser window.

Enjoy!

At last count, there are 8 applications for the iPhone whose main feature is to display a white screen. More surprisingly, almost half of these apps want money to do what they do. I have not tried these ones, as I don’t believe that a flashlight app is worth even $1 (however if the developers of any of the paid flashlight apps want to give me a copy of their app, I would be willing to include it here ). Below, in order of when I tried them, is my verdict on the free flashlight apps for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Light, by Erica Sadun ★★

Light is very light on features. Ok, so it has no options whatsoever. It comes in the colours of white, white, and white, which can be changed by doing almost anything. This app has been removed from the app store.

MyLite, by DoApp ★★★★★

MyLite has by far the most features out of the apps I tried, with a slider to choose any colour you like, a brightness slider, and “Strobe”, “Trippin’”, “Police”, “Fire Truck”, “Caution Flare”, “Traffic Light”, and “Rock Concert” modes. Strobe mode flashes whatever colour you have set at speeds 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5 seconds. Trippin’ mode cycles through all the colours at the speeds shown above. “Police”, “Fire Truck”, “Caution Flare”, and “Traffic Light” modes flash through the colours red and blue, red white and blue, yellow and white, and red yellow and green respectively. “Rock Concert” mode displays a realistic lighter on the screen.

Flashlight, by John Haney ★★★★★

Flashlight is much easier to use than MyLite, without particularly limiting the features. You can change between 5 preset colours and 1 custom colour (set through the menu) by swiping left and right, and can change the brightness by moving your finger up and down. By tapping on the screen you can access a menu where you can choose between “Strobe”, “Trippy”, “Emergency”, and “S.O.S”. “Trippy” flashes between a random colour and black, “Emergency” flashes white, red, and blue, and “S.O.S” flashes SOS in morse code. Flashlights’ strobe mode can flash faster than myLite, however you do not know exactly what speed it is flashing at due to the speed being set via a slider.

SOS Flashlight, by Volker Funke ★★☆

SOS Flashlight has 3 colours to choose from: white, red, and green. Its main feature is that you can turn on SOS mode, which (surprisingly) flashes SOS in morse code. Unfortunately this mode crashes the app when enabled (for me). All these options are available through a menu. When I installed the new version, I had to restart to make it work.

FiatLux, by AbySoft ★★★☆

FiatLux can display 4 different colours (white, red, green, and blue), as well as a colour changing “Trippin’” style mode. FiatLux can also “dim” the light by lowering the contrast. The menu where these options are located sports lovely clipart, also seen in the icon.

The App Store has so many great apps. So many great US centric apps. To tide us over until the Mobile News Network app supports other countries, here is how to hack it to get news from your country, and perhaps city.

1. Download the Mobile News Network app from the App Store, and launch it on your iPhone (or iPod touch).

2. Bring up the “Search” tab - if you cant see it check under “More”.

3. Type in the name of your country (or city) and hit search.

4. Up should pop a screen with all the news items that mention your beloved country.

5 (the cool part). Whenever you go back to the search tab a list of your recent searches will appear. If you don’t search for much, then your country and/or city will be at the top, for easy access.

Was: JTk - Right Sidebar Mod is a modified version of the Was: JTk theme by JTk and Doc5. The theme has been modified to have the sidebar on the right instead of the left. It is my first publicly available theme modification. I am planning to make more as time goes on, but for now that is it. You can find all my themes and theme modifications here. The details of the Was: JTk - Right Sidebar Mod are below:

Theme: “Was: JTk 1.3″
Author: JTk/Doc5
My Modifications: Moved sidebar from the left to the right
Preview (Left sidebar version)
Download (Right sidebar mod)

According to this MacTalk Australia article Australian resellers have received word from Apple that they will release the iPhone in Australia in the last week of June. They told resellers the following:

• Last week of June release
• More than 1 carrier
• No contract lock in
• Current resellers will be able to sell iPhones

This means that Apple is taking a totally different strategy with the marketing in Australia, namely more than one carrier, and resellers selling iPhones. Perhaps Apple has decided to adopt Australia as a guinea pig for trailing new things? If so, you wont see me complaining…

- MacTalk Australia

So I decided to jailbreak my iPod touch when ZiPhone 2.5 and iJailbreak 0.54 got released. I thought it would be simple, Just plug in, hit Jailbreak, and have a jailbroken touch. I obviously did not read the fine print that said that it only worked for iPhones at the moment, and iPod touch support would be added later. Not knowing this, I downloaded ZiPhone, clicked jailbreak only, and watched as my iPod touch reverted to far superior state of repeating BSD root: md0, major 2, minor 0 down my iPod touch’s screen. I restore my iPod and, thinking it is just ZiPhone’s fault, launch up iJailbreak to the same result. So much for the easy jailbreak.

I decide that because I already have a fresh iPod with no music, webclips, or photos on it I might as well try the long way round. The long way involves downgrading to 1.1.1, jailbreaking, upgrading to 1.1.2, rejailbreaking, then either upgrading to prejailbroken 1.1.3 or 1.1.4 firmware. For the first part of this (up to 1.1.2) to I used the instructions at iphone.unlock.no to do this, but any instructions will do, as long as you finish up with a jailbroken 1.1.2 iPod touch.

The next step is to install a package from Installer.app though the ipodtouchmaster repo. Install the one for you and then you will have 1.1.3/1.1.4 Jailbroken.

That would have been my post.

Unfortunatly after that rather longwinded approach I screwed up SpringBoard.app so I had to start again. Daunted by this, I decided to wait until ZiPod ZiPhone 2.6 was released. Now that it is out I decided to give it a whirl, and it works perfectly. It says that you need to use a freshly restored iPod but my one with all my songs on it worked just fine.

For instructions how to jailbreak your iPod touch, click here.

Recently I bought an iPod touch, in anticipation of the “late February” SDK, and I wanted to make my email and my RSS feeds accessible from it, without doubling anything up.

For my email I used IMAP, which allows you to have two or more devices accessing an email account without the pain of reading an email on one device and having the email still show up as unread on the other device. Setting up IMAP on the iPod is very easy, and in Mail.app it is even more painless. Problem 1 solved: I read an email on my iPod touch and it shows up as read on my iMac, or the other way round.

Since upgrading to Leopard I have been using Mail.app for my RSS feeds as well. I really liked the integration with RSS feeds in Mail.app, like being able to send an article to a friend in 2 clicks. Unfortunately there was no easy way to have my RSS feeds in 2 places using Mail.app. My only option was to use an online RSS aggregator like Bloglines or Google Reader. I decided on Bloglines both because it has been recommended to me several times by different people, and because it has an iPhone/iPod touch interface. The only painful part of setting this up was adding all my RSS feeds into it, as it could not import from Mail.app. So now when I want to read my RSS feeds I can either go to i.bloglines.com on my iPod touch or go to beta.bloglines.com on my computer (I found that the beta interface is much nicer to use). Problem 2 solved: I read an RSS article on my iMac and it shows up as read on my iPod touch, or the other way round.

For a while now I have been trying to get onto Facebook, but when I first tried they would not let me join unless I either had a university email address or went to a high school. As home educated student this proved to be a problem, and after looking o the internet I found that the only way to get around it was to either say you go to a local high school or say that you are over 18. So I decided to wait, as I was not comfortable lying about something that would be public. I wrote to Facebook asking if I can use Facebook as a home educated student or not, but I got no reply.

During the months that followed I noticed that almost all the sites I visit on a day to day basis integrate with Facebook in some way, from iusethis to Kongregate and others. About three months after my initial attempt I decided I wanted Facebook, even if I had to lie. I decided to lie about my age as I could choose to only show my day and month of birth, whereas if I lied about my school it would automatically join me into the high schools group, which you cannot unjoin, and will show on your profile page. I decided first to try to sign up without lying just to see if it would work. And it did. Without so much as a warning dialog it let me sign up, log in, and start using it. I went to my profile page to double check that I put the right age, and I was astounded that I had and it had still let me sign up.

I don’t know if it was because of my email to them, or because they have stopped requiring anyone under 18 to be either in high school or university, but I am now on Facebook, without any falsities at all.