World Readable: a personal blog about anything that comes to mind for anybody who cares to read it.
When Microsoft released the Developer Preview of Windows 8 last fall, I played around with it a briefly in a virtual machine but tired of it quickly. Well, now that the Consumer Preview is available for download I decided to give it a serious shot and get a jump on learning my way around Microsoft’s upcoming OS. For the past week I’ve been using it as my main OS at work and here are some of my observations.
If you have a TRENDnet webcam that is accessible over the internet, a serious security vulnerability has been discovered that allows anyone to access the video stream without having to login/authenticate! I got an e-mail from TRENDnet about this earlier in the week, but not everyone registers their products so not everyone may be aware of the problem. Be sure to download the latest firmware update for your camera and apply it ASAP!
It’s been about a week since I upgraded to iOS5 on my iPhone 3GS (and performed the untethered jailbreak) and I’ve since been learning my way around some of its new features.
Ok, now for the stuff I actually do use (why did I upgrade again?). 😉
Unfortunately, I have run into some problems since upgrading. Slow/sluggish performance and poor battery life were the initial indicators. Sometimes the phone is so slow it takes one of my taps as a tap-and-hold, or just ignores the tap altogether so I end up tapping multiple times on the same element. I’ve gone through some of the tips to improve battery life, which did help, but it still seems like my battery drains faster than it did on iOS 4.3.3. I’m going to stick with it, though (I don’t feel like attempting to downgrade back to 4.3.3 and setting up everything again). There may be a new iPhone in my near future anyway …
The iOS jailbreaking community got a nice holiday/new year’s gift the other week from pod2g and the dev-team: the untethered iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and original iPad (iPad 2 and iPhone 4S users might get their own jailbreak soon too). I’d been running iOS 4.3.3 on my iPhone 3GS since last May so I decided to take the plunge to upgrade to Apple’s latest software and then re-apply the jailbreak.
If you owned a personal computer in the 80s and played computer games, you probably played at least one Infocom text-based adventure game like Zork or (my personal favorite) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Known as interactive fiction, or IF, these games used the most powerful computers on the planet for their processing engines … your imagination. Instead of fancy color graphics and digital sound effects, Infocom games were just white text on a black screen controlled by you typing in commands like “go north” or “examine the small box” and usually involved solving complicated puzzles to win.
I’m actually a little surprised I haven’t written about IF before on this blog considering how fond I was of playing Wishbringer or Moonmist on my Atari 800XL back in the day. Even my daughter had even gotten into playing IF games on my iPad with Frotz. She’s an avid reader and also loves playing games, so IF games are a natural fit for her. Back in late August I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing her a personalized game which eventually evolved into the idea of making the game a scavenger hunt of sorts for her birthday in December. That gave me about four months to plan, design, write, and test the game.
For the past few years I’ve been trying my best to keep Galleon’s weather app running, but it appears the end-of-life for it has arrived.
One of the first apps I put on my iPhone 3GS was Stanza, to replace iSilo from my Treo for reading e-books. At that time, Amazon had just acquired Lexcycle and I remember wondering they would end up combining the Kindle and Stanza apps. Well, now we know the answer: nope. A recent update to the Stanza iOS app (version 3.2) added iOS 5 compatibility, but effectively killed the app on iOS 4.x. It just crashes immediately.
I learned my lesson last time and decided to hold off a few days before upgrading to the new release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot.
That was a smart decision since the upgrade took just under two hours this time instead of over eight. I did have one (self-induced) snag during the ‘do-release-upgrade’ step. I was trying to copy some text and accidentally used Control-C in my screen session which killed the process! Luckily I was able to resume it with a ‘dpkg –configure -a’ command and I haven’t noticed any problems due to my screw-up (yet, whew!).
I also had fewer post-upgrade problems this time than with Natty. In fact, both issues were related to the newer version of Perl in Oneiric. They were easily fixed by re-building ZoneMinder and MRTG so I was back in business relative quickly.
Since I run Ubuntu on my server I don’t normally see (or care about) any of the user-facing changes like the Unity interface so I can’t comment on those features. The only real change for me is the new 3.0 Linux kernel.
Up next in April? Precise Pangolin.
This week at the Build Conference, Microsoft released a freely downloadable developer preview of Windows 8 (you can download the ISOs here). If you’re an avid reader of this blog (and which of the five of you aren’t? ;-)) you know I like to jump on new technology early so of course I downloaded the 64-bit version and installed it in a virtual machine via VirtualBox.
Today, just six short months since announcing a slew of new WebOS devices, hp announced they are discontinuing the entire WebOS line. The successor to PalmOS and its related devices like the Pre just never took off and the TouchPad was pretty much dead-on-arrival, crushed by the iPad only 49 days after its release. It’s a sad end to a long, (relatively) proud line of Palm devices, dating back to the original Pilot 1000 in 1996. I can’t really mourn the death of hp/Palm devices though … since switching from my Treo 680 to the iPhone almost two years ago I never considering going back.
But …
HP’s press release doesn’t say that WebOS is dead. The wording instead suggests that the company will find some ways to extract value from its $1.2 billion Palm purchase, even if phones and tablets are off the table. In fact, according to a report yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, HP plans to expand webOS to household appliances and automobiles.
So while you may not be using WebOS on your new smartphone, you might be using it to wash your clothes. 😉