Hijinks Inc.

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  • I am Iron Man

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    I am Iron Man. Those could be the lyrics of a certain Black Sabbath song, or maybe a little quip from Tony Stark. Or maybe both. You’ll have to go see the movie to find out for sure I guess.

    And that’s exactly what I did last night. In a bit of a hasty decision, I ended up going to see the movie and honestly, had mixed expectations. It looked like it could be good, but I wasn’t expecting TOO much (if you’ve ever heard me talk about the upcoming Dark Knight movie, you know I’ll probably be disappointed by the movie because the expectations are simply through the roof). Comic Book movies are usually good to go into with lower expectations, because as good as some of them have been, some have been downright painful.

    But which did Iron Man end up being? Find out after the jump (more…)

  • equinux releases TubeStick hybrid

    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.

  • AT&T pulls the plug on free Wi-Fi

    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.

  • Hard drive problems

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    Greetings, and thanks for reading my first post as a Hijinks Inc. author! My name is Jared, and I hope to be posting fairly regularly, but I have a busy schedule, so we’ll see.

    My rant today is about my computer, which apparently lacks the capacity to be scanned by Ad Aware or AVG without hanging. I have a 160GB SATA drive partitioned for my operating system and programs, and an additional 500GB SATA drive for storage. I figured since it always hangs while scanning the C: partition on the 160GB drive, that there was something wrong with the 160GB drive. I tested my theory by loading a fresh copy of XP Pro on an 80GB ATA drive, thus running on a completely separate hard drive on a completely separate controller, and it still hanged while scanning the C: drive. I then proceeded to un-plug the 500GB storage drive and then it scanned fine.

    What’s confusing me now is why it hangs when scanning the C: drive when it seems that the 500 storage drive is the problem. Or course, then I thought I’d figured it out, so I plugged the 160 back in, kept the 500 un-plugged and assumed it would work, but this time it hung. So now there’s either a problem with both drives, or it’s having a problem with the fact that both drives are over the magical ‘137GB’ mark.

    What’s really weird is that it’s successfully scanned with the newest 8.x version of AVG when I scan manually, but when it runs the scheduled scan, it hangs for like 20 hours.

    I’m stumped, irritated and tired, so we’ll tackle this one another day. Was that too negative? Probably, but it’s truth, and I think the truth is what we need a lot more of in this world. 🙂

  • 19 days to Skyhook

    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.