Hijinks Inc.

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  • Disable the Ping Sidebar in iTunes 10.0.1

    iTunes 10.0.1 replaced the Genius sidebar with a Ping sidebar, and while you can’t currently restore the Genius sidebar you can disable the Ping sidebar.

    Simply fire up Terminal.app and enter the following:

    defaults write com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar 1

    Want to take it a step further? Enter this two commands in Terminal to disable even more of Ping…

    This disables the Ping buttons:

    defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown 1

    This restores the previous old-style arrow buttons:

    defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-link-arrows 1

    If you change your mind, just change the 1 to a 0 (again, all entered in Terminal).

    defaults write com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar 0
    defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown 0
    defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-link-arrows 0

    If the thought of using Terminal scares you, just download this AppleScript from Doug Adams.

  • Week In Review: September 19th – 25th

    Top 5 posts for the week:

    Peak number of RSS feed subscribers: 103

    Number of Facebook Fans: 62

    Busiest day: September 20th, with 994 unique visitors.

    Top browser: Firefox with 32.09% market share.

    Top operating system: Windows with 65.34% market share.

  • Hijinks Movie Reviews: The Other Guys

    I mentioned last week in my review of The Expendables that my wife had received some free movie passes and we’d planned to use them for that movie but I ended up on a guy’s night instead, you remember that? Well, since we missed that one, we decided instead to use them on The Other Guys because we’d heard so many good reviews of the movie from friends.

    I went in with very low expectations because so many of Will Ferrell’s movies have been downright terrible lately. His movies have turned into extended versions of the commercials because all the funny parts fit into the trailer. But the movie was holding onto a high 70s rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which put it ahead of the all-time classic Anchorman, so I had to keep reminding myself to not get too excited for this one. Did it work? Was it any good? What kind of movie review would this be if I didn’t cover that! Join me after the jump to find out. (more…)

  • Colbert interviews Google CEO Eric Schmidt

    Been really busy this week and I need to veg, so I’m going to opt out of thinking this weekend.  However, I feel like if I don’t post something this week, I won’t be upholding my duty in this relationship that we’ve established, and then I’ll have guilt, and I don’t need that.  So in review… I’m doing this out of selfish reasons.

    Anyway, here’s a great interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt by the brilliant Stephen Colbert.

    Have a great weekend!

    The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
    Eric Schmidt
    www.colbertnation.com
    Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News
  • AirPlay Laying the Framework for AirPlay+?

    AirPlay Laying the Framework for AirPlay+?

    Now this is all just a theory, not a rumor, certainly not a fact, just an idea.

    That said, does any remember Lala.com? That little company that Apple bought out and then shutdown, which let you stream your music library to any computer using your web browser. Pretty sweet stuff.

    Of course everyone thought iTunes 10 was going to bring Lala’s streaming framework into play, but that didn’t happen. Apple did announce AirPlay which lets you stream media from your iPhone/iPad to AirPlay compatible devices (such as the AppleTV), while cool, this isn’t quite what the masses had hoped for. At least the people that I know.

    Enter AirPlay+. Here’s my theory, Apple wanted to get the media streaming down in a local area network type setting, where they don’t face the same bandwidth constraint / requirements as with internet streaming before they even touched it. Admittedly this isn’t much of an issue with music, but what if AirPlay+ let you stream videos as well?

    Once they get things working well in that environment I expect us to see Apple roll out AirPlay+, probably as a $9.99 a month subscription based service that allows you to stream any media purchased through your iTunes account to any iOS device, or computer with iTunes installed. We’re talking movies and music videos, as well as your music library. At the same time we’ll see a refresh to the AppleTV software that will enable the same streaming functionality.

    This would also be a prime opportunity to increase the value of MobileMe, by including AirPlay+ at no additional charge to MobileMe subscribers. And if we’re lucky, wireless syncing for iPhone/iPod touch/iPad will debut at or around the same time.