Pricing: Subscription based. $20 for 6 months, $35 for 1 year, $45 for lifetime subscription.
The developers of Kate (formerly Caterpillar) describe it as being “a commercial package of tools and toys to extend your iPhone”. While offering an all in one approach and slick settings management, Kate doesn’t really bring much to the table that can’t be gained from using multiple free packages.
Admittedly though, there is a certain appeal to only having to install one program to do a bunch of things.
After countless failed attempts, I finally got my iPhone working last night. I ended up having to restore it to 1.1.3 and then upgrading it to 1.1.4 and jailbreaking it with Liberty+.
Now comes the time consuming task of reinstalling all those applications.
I installed some early beta software on my iPhone a few days ago, and apparently something went terribly wrong because I couldn’t use Installer.app after that. No problem, I’ll just restore to 1.1.4 and use ZiPhone to jailbreak it, right? Wrong.
After restoring the phone to 1.1.4 I ran ZiPhone, things went normally until it reached the “Installing base apps…” screen, where it decided to lockup. I killed the ZiPhone process and restarted the iPhone, it booted right back to the ZiPhone install screen again, and again, and again.
Next I tried booting into DFU mode. If you’re unfamiliar with DFU mode, you enter it by pressing and holding the home and the power button simultaneously, once the phone turns off, continue to hold the home button while turning the phone back on. It’s important that your iPhone is connected to your computer with iTunes running for this to work.
DFU mode led to moderate success, iTunes recognized it and allowed me to restore the firmware to 1.1.4. However when it restarted it now only displays a black screen with one white block in the upper left-hand corner.
My plan right now is to try restoring it to an older firmware and seeing if that yields any result.
I’ve often wondered just how bad Vista really is on system performance, so recently when I purchased a couple of Acer laptops I decided to install XP on one and leave Vista on the other for a few tests. Basically I’m just running Geekbench and a battery life test, nothing crazy.
For the battery test, I merely pointed the browser to a URL set to auto refresh every 30 seconds and disabled all power saving features.
Both computers are the follwing:
Model: Acer Aspire 4715Z Processor: 1.73GHz Pentium Dual Core RAM: 2GB RAM
[ Vista ]
First, I ran Geekbench. The system scored a moderate 1911, but of course the system shipped with a bunch of bloatware, so in the interest of fairness I removed all the pre-installed software and ran Geekbench again, it then scored 1922.
The battery life gave out after 1 hour and 45 minutes of doing nothing but browsing the internet, that’s pretty sad. [ XP ]
Running Geekbench on XP with no drivers installed, resulted in a score of 1939, only slightly higher than the Vista machine.
After installing all the drivers and re-running Geekbench I ended up with a much more statisfying score of 2168. Not as large of a difference as I expected, but still a noticeable improvement.
The battery life saw a huge jump though, ending with 3 hours and 14 minutes while browsing the internet.
On May 1st, equinux released their new TubeStick hybrid for the modest price of $129. The TubeStick hybrid is a new TV receiver for the Mac, designed exclusively for North America. It features two receivers: One to watch digital over-the-air HDTV broadcasts and one for digital HDTV (QAM) cable or regular analog cable TV.
It’s a pretty sweet piece of hardware, that actually makes me wish I watched TV, just so I could buy one.
$129 (with free shipping) will get you the following…
USB 2.0 Stick for ATSC, Analog and Cable TV
TV Software “The Tube 2″
Printed quick start guide
Extensive PDF manual
Antenna with magnetic base
External antenna adapter
Break-out Cable (S-Video; Composite)
USB extension cable
The TV software “The Tube 2″ seems pretty robust, offering a timeshift buffer that allows users to go back and record a show from the moment they started watching it. It also includes automatic synchronization with iTunes, so as soon as you stop a recording it converts it to your preset format and adds it to your iTunes library.
Another great feature is their free TubeToGo service, it allows you to upload clips to a web gallery and view them on your iPhone, iPod touch, or another computer. It also includes the ability to add, remove and even schedule recordings.
Turns out the TubeStick also ships with a Windows driver, and works with Windows Media Center. Not bad at all.
Last Wednesday AT&T started offering free Wi-Fi for iPhone users at all Starbucks locations, all you needed to do was enter your cell phone number.
Thursday, intrepid hackers (okay, really just people of average intelligence) started talking about how you could access the free Wi-Fi just by changing your browsers user-agent to Mobile Safari and entering any old phone number, didn’t have to be a AT&T number, or even a cell number. Good times. I even parked outside a local Starbucks long enough to confirm this, it nearly ruined my street cred.
Today, AT&T flipped the kill switch on the free Wi-Fi. Though no official statement has been made, numerous people are reporting that it is no longer accessible even on the iPhone. Nice one AT&T!
There’s a good chance we’ll see the service back up and running soon, though likely featuring an upgraded authentication process.
Looks like I complained a little too soon, Skyhook actually added my AP to their database and it now shows up on Maps. Seems like 19 days is the magic number.
