Shane Sveller

Somewhere between happy and total f**king wreck

AT&T iPhone 3G Versus Verizon Blackberry Curve

Having used a Blackberry Curve 8330 on Verizon’s network for many months, I feel I can provide a fairly deep comparison between that and my new iPhone 3G. Let me preface the following by saying I am neither a Mac nor a PC. I am both, and neither. I use OSX Leopard just as often as I do XP SP3 and Vista x64 SP1, along with Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10. I am an OS-aholic. So I have no strong ties to any given platform.

What inspired the change was this: Up until the last month or so of my Verizon service, e-mail delivery on my Curve was nigh instantaneous. We’re talking 5-10 seconds average. I would get a little “ding!” out of my phone quicker than on my desktop e-mail client at my desk at work, and I should point that I am wired to the server by a single switch and a physical distance of perhaps 30 feet. That should clue you in. It was fast.

For the last 3-4 weeks, however, deliveries to my phone have been going slower and slower. I can verify that yes, e-mails are arriving in a timely fashion, as my desktop client is still showing work e-mail arrivals in the time you would expect. Same with Gmail. But my phone was frequently 10-15 minutes behind, and getting worse. I had full signal, according to my phone’s indicators, at all times.

Snippet: Update Your Local Git/Subversion-based Textmate Bundles With Sake

Gist

Install this with Sake and run sake textmate:bundles:update to update any local bundles you have checked out through svn/git.

More OSX Apps I Love

  • TextMate - Programmer’s text editor
  • 1Password - secure password and information manager that integrates into your browser(s)
  • AppZapper - clean up behind software you decide to axe
  • Boot Camp - Yeah, there’s still some Windows apps I use. (built into OSX)
  • Camouflage - hide those pesky desktop icons for focus and clarity
  • CoverSutra - iTunes tool for keyboard shortcuts, album artwork, Spotlight-like search, and Last.FM integration
  • Cyberduck - FTP/SFTP client with drag-and-drop and Growl notifications
  • Firefox 3.0 - only in release candidate status, but already a contender to finally replace Safari
  • Fluid - turn any website into a .app
  • Handbrake - DVD-ripping tool for converting DVDs to digital video files for your iPod, AppleTV, XBMC, etc.
  • iStat Menus - monitor your CPU, memory, and network usage in your menu bar
  • MacPorts - install Unix/linux tools using a tool similar to apt-get
  • NeoOffice - good, free replacement for the ****slow and bloated MS Office
  • Parallels Desktop - run Windows or Linux inside OSX
  • SquidMan - run the Squid HTTP caching proxy on OSX
  • SuperDuper / Carbon Copy Cloner - great backup tool
  • ted - Torrent episode downloader - track your favorite TV shows!
  • Time Machine - great, simple, configure-and-forget backup solution (built into OSX)
  • Twitterific - Twitter client
  • WhatSize / GrandPerspective - a graphical overview of what’s eating up all your harddrive space (hint: pr0n.)

OSX Apps I Can’t Live Without

  • Adium Multi-protocol IM client; supports AIM, Yahoo, MSN, MySpace, Google Talk, and loads more.
  • Growl pop-up notifications for anything and everything
  • Safari - included with OSX
  • Mail and Address Book- included with OSX
  • Quicksilver keyboard-based launcher; hard to explain what it does, but useful as all hell
  • Firefox browser, though I don’t use it nearly as much on OSX because of Safari
  • Schoolhouse homework manager or iProcrastinate
  • Colloquy IRC chat client
  • Google Mail notifier
  • iBackup
  • NetNewsWire RSS reader
  • Skim PDF reader (Preview is good, Skim is better)
  • The Unarchiver for zips, rars, aces, etc.
  • Transmission bittorrent client
  • VLC media player for files Quicktime won’t handle

Quick Tip: Ubuntu Default Runlevel

If you, like me, use sysv-rc-conf to change the services that run a particular runlevel, i.e. so that runlevel 2 is actually only networked and not GUI as tradition holds, you can set the default runlevel to boot in Ubuntu by editing:

/etc/inittab
1
id:3:initdefault

The number in the middle is the runlevel to start by default.

All Kinds of New Stuff

I got the idea for this post from Robby on Rails

Things I’ve been using/playing with lately:

Things I’d really like to learn more about:

Things that sound cool but I know nothing about:

  • StrokeDB - an embeddable distributed document database written in Ruby.
  • Using gmail with linux daemons - anyone have any good tutorials? I’m specifically looking for using something like exim, sendmail, fetchmail, what have you with a Google Apps domain

ASUS BIOS Woes

Yesterday I attempted to update the BIOS on my motherboard in anticipation of eventually picking up an Intel E8400. I read on ASUS’ website that the newest 45nm Intel CPUs are supported in the latest BIOS revision, 1502/1503. 1502 was available on their downloads page, so I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. I was coming from what my motherboard shipped with, revision 1203. Now, my motherboard has a nifty LCD display on the back that displays POST codes, letting me know where exactly it stops, if and when it does. And it did.