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.
You see something like the new ThinkPad X Tablet and you just want to touch it, right? I know I do. Apparently though, that’s exactly what Lenovo is expecting you to do.
In addition to being a pen tablet, the screen also sports a MultiView/MultiTouch interface, allowing you to “use your finger or the pen to interact with the notebook, open applications, etc.”
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.
After two days at the factory, Apple has informed me that they could not reproduce my problem. I knew I should have included brightly colored stickers and instructions. Now I’m stuck driving two hours to my nearest Apple store and hopefully having them replace my iPod for me.
I’ve been using NewEgg for the past several years as my main source for computer hardware and almost refuse to buy anywhere else. Between personal and business I’ve purchased close to $15,000 worth from them and still counting.
Their prices are hard to beat and their shipping is some of the fastest I’ve ever seen. They have an egg-cellent search engine for drilling down exactly what you’re looking for and the user interface is simple and no-nonsense.
They specialize in electronics and computer hardware and software but sell a variety of other products including household appliances that range from refrigerators and microwaves to washers and dryers. Imagine Best Buy being crushed by a giant egg falling from the sky and you get a good idea. Oh, and for all you Mac fans out there, they’ve got those too.
*Disclaimer*
NewEgg.com is not in any way associated with this, though maybe they should license it as their theme song
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.
So I was running late to work last week, on a day that I really couldn’t be late, and of course, that was the day I got a speeding ticket. Now, I haven’t been ticketed for a long, long time so I qualify for STOP class. But the ticket was for only $69. STOP class is $75, and will cost me a Saturday, of which I don’t have many available.
I’ve never actually gone to court for one of these, but does it work? Will I actually have a chance to get out of my ticket if I go? I had a friend tell me that alot of times the cops don’t go, and if they aren’t there, you can’t get charged. Which makes sense when you think about it. What about those speed traps, a month later, do those cops go sit in court all day long and wait to see if anyone shows up?
I’ve also heard this interesting theory. I was told that if you send in your payment for the ticket, plus an extra $5 or so, they end up sending you a check back for the overpayment. If you were to then throw away the overpayment check, the ticket doesn’t go onto your record as a citation, but rather as an incomplete transaction. What?
That can’t really work can it? Well, we’re about to find out ladies and gentlemen because I am writing and sending a $75 check to those lovely people down on that county court. Keep your fingers crossed.
What do you think I should do? Let me hear about it in the comments.
Meet Tony and Jeff. They’re a couple of video game characters. Supporting characters. Tony is enrolled in a boarding school, and Zero is, well, a robot. The above image is a very old comic by yours truly (although since the copyright doesn’t include a date we don’t know how old, but I digress), in which I was expressing my frustration at people on the internet postulating theories about these characters’ lifestyle preferences. It’s so old that it predates Shigesato Itoi, the creator of the game EarthBound (which Tony is from) pretty much saying in an interview that, yeah, Tony subscribes to an alternative lifestyle.
