Category Archives: Tech

Verizon Wireless’s ETF policy

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To prepare for the iPhone 3G I looked up Verizon’s Early Temination Fee policy, they were the first carrier to introduce a declining ETF, basically it starts at $175 and for every month you’re with them they take $5 off. My contract expires on 7/18, so if I terminate tomorrow, which is a week til end of contract, I pay $60. I guess I’ll wait a week and hope they will still have them.

I bet they’re getting a ton of calls on how ETF works today… I love the coverage and quality of service, EVDO kicks ass, but that new iPhone is just too cool to pass up.

root caused my Leopard wifi problem

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Short version: disable and/or remove the JiWire dashboard widget if you have it.

Since I got my MacBook Pro with Leopard pre-installed I’ve never had a usable SSH connection. When I worked in the semi-conductor industry I worked over SSH 100% of the time, as the CAD tools only ran on company servers. Now I do local Rails development so I just avoided using SSH, like I edit files with TextMate over CyberDuck connection vs login and vi files. This works okay but I am a huge VIM user and it bothered me a little that I got a brand new Mac with unusable SSH connections. I’ve googled a lot about this and could never figure out why.

I also found out the problem was not just with SSH, but it was with my wifi. First the problem went away when I’m plugged in with an ethernet connection. Also I was not able to sustain any wifi connection without lags, all my Skype voice and video calls were getting chopped off. This really drove me crazy as I use Skype a lot. So last Friday I scheduled an appointment at the Genius Bar to see if the genius could help me with this. The guy was knowledgeable with all things Macs and he could tell that I am sorta a power user by the stuff I had running, so he skipped the usual debugs and he suspected it was either that I had something running that interfered with my wifi or it was a hardware problem. He created a new account, we logged in with that account, and the SSH problem went away. I tested a Skype voice call and it worked great. I logged back into my account and the problem went away. He even said he didn’t do anything but if it comes back bring it in again and we’ll debug more.

I didn’t occur to me until this morning that the difference was that my Dashboard widgets weren’t running. With most Macs the dashboard widgets aren’t loaded until you look at them the first time after you login. This morning I got into the office and my SSH connection was slow again, I looked at all the widgets I had running, and disabled the JiWire wifi hotspot locator widget, and boom, my SSH connection was normal again. I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out earlier, the JiWire widget scans for nearby APs and it was probably scanning way too often. I had the same widget on my PowerMac running Tiger for years and everything was fine though.

Just thought I’ll post this up in case someone out there has the same problem. I had tried everything from adding a SRV record for the SSH service to my domain, to SSH’ing to IP addresses to avoid all DNS problems, nothing helped.

the lack of blogging

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I don’t blog as often as I did, I think much of it has to do with other services I am using now, they kindda replace having to blog about stuff I find online. And I don’t really have time to publish original content. If you’re interested, you can subscribe to these:

  • Twitter
  • Google Reader shared items
  • del.icio.us, already “burned” with this blog’s RSS feed with Feedburner
  • FriendFeed,I linked my accounts there, but don’t really use it. It also gets redundant, like I included my Tumblr and Flickr there, but I already included my Flickr on my Tumblog, so you get repeated content at times. Also my Twitterrific updates my twitter statuses to Adium, and the Twitter Facebook app updates my status on Facebook, so most of the times my Facebook, GTalk, and Twitter statuses are the same.
  • Too many others to list, so check my FriendFeed

steez changes

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If you look at my blog in your browser, you might notice subtle styling changes. I had the default stylesheet since I changed the theme, but some things never looked right, so I messed with it with Firebug and TextMate and now it’s a little bit better. Like now the code blocks get smaller font-size and they won’t overrun the div.

Flip Ultra and easy way to make Mac icons from images

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So we got a Flip Ultra, when you plug it into the USB port it shows up with an ugly default USB drive icon in the desktop. I wanted to change it to a picture of the Flip Ultra itself. I googled on how to make Mac icons and found this post. It involves using either a PS plugin or Icongrapher. I tried that and it was a bit too much work to just make an icon.

It then occurred to me that I can just look at the info (?-I) on any image file, clip on the icon in the File Info dialog, ?-C that, go to the File Info dialog of thing I want to change the icon for, and ?-P to paste that in. Real simple!

FLIPVIDEO Info
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Now I should really make that image transparent so it looks better. We love the Flip btw, super easy to use, quality is pretty damn good too. If you get one use one of these links…

😉

(your RSS readers might not show embedded iframes so see the post in the browser if you don’t see anything)