Software utilities

While listening t music on your iPhone you suddently discover that the right spekear does not work. Before going to the nearest Apple Store, you should know that the right speker does not produce sounds becaus it’s not a sepeaker! It’s the microphone! If you look carefully, you won’t see any other opening which could work as mic!

Some time ago, I forgot my memory stick in an internet café. I was half-way home when I realised, but I ran back anyway in the hopes that, by some miracle, it’d still be there, that it would have grown sharp teeth and barked at anyone who tried to take it.

Did I find it? Erm, no.

I have now come to the conclusion that it’s my memory stick’s fault it got stolen. Because it wasn’t a MacBook. If it was a MacBook and someone stole it, I’d have much better luck getting my Mac back.

Let me explain:

In New York, there was a woman whose Macbook got stolen last month after thieves broke into her apartment. It wasn’t just her Macbook though – about $5000 worth of electrical equipment got stolen, too, including another Macbook, two iPods, two flat-screen DVD’s and game consoles.

The police had no luck tracing the thieves. However, Apple have this clever little feature on their Macs (called ‘Back to My Mac’) that allows you to access your Mac remotely (using another Mac).

The woman was able to tap into her stolen book remotely, activate its camera, take pictures of one of the thieves who was using it at the time and forward the pics on to the police. The two guys were subsequently caught and arrested and most of the items were recovered.

Turns out the guys were friends of friends who had shown up at a party the woman had held several weeks before the robbery.

Though ‘Back to My Mac’ wasn’t invented for the purposes of catching thieves (how could Apple have known?), it sure came in handy, didn’t it?! Very!

(p.s: I bet the woman won’t have another house party for some time to come).

Finally I got my iPhone!! Come back for more news soon!

With the latest update of the iTunes software for Windows, Apple suggests users to update Safari (even if they didn’t previously installed it!). This move has been criticized by many, as Mozilla CEO, since they compare Apple to Microsoft, when it added Internet Explorer pre-installed to Windows systems. Updated statistics say that Safari has a share of 5.7 % in the Internet, just after IE and Firefox. With this move maybe Apple wants to gain a bigger share in the browser war, and it does this claiming that Safari is

“fastest and easiest-to-use browser for the PC. It displays web pages faster than any other browser and is filled with innovative features — all delivered in an efficient and elegant user interface”

as states by the updater program in a pop-up screen. Some report that Safari is really a more standard compliant and faster browser, maybe with this move Apple will significantly increase the Safari market share over the main two competitors.

Apple iPod have a lock that prevents legal transfer of MP3’s to your iPod if you don’t have iTunes installed. Since there is no iTunes for Linux, you cannot use your regurarly purchased multimedia gadget if you choose Linux. But there are around a few guys (see here or here) that breached Apple’s lock, letting you use alternative tools, such as gtkpod, to transfer MP3 to your iPod. Very interesting is a porting of Linux to iPod, available at http://ipodlinux.org.