Giguhbite Random Musings

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Free software is always nice. Two days left in the deal.

Yesterday I had the experience of setting up a Verizon email account on a mac using Apple’s default client Mail. Verizon’s online instructions were extremely vague and were geared towards windows users. Their only help topic relating to OS X was for Outlook 5 & 6. I was experiencing problems sending email, not receiving email. To get it working set the incoming server to:

incoming.verizon.net

Set up your login as username@verizon.net and enter your password.

For outgoing use:

outgoing.verizon.net

In the advanced tab make sure SSL is not checked and change authentication to “password”.

If you need more help, feel free to comment.

Today I jailbroke my iPod Touch to firmware 1.1.4. I previously had it jailbroken to 1.1.2. The 1.1.4 jailbreak has to be the easiest jailbreak so far. There are probably more than three different tools created just for this purpose (Liberty+, and Ziphone are the only ones I know of). I jailbroke my phone using Ziphone, and it was a simple procedure of restoring to 1.1.4 and running a program on your computer (Mac or PC). Compared to what I had to do when the touch just came out, this is cake. No more typing in commands in the terminal or running DOS apps that have a chance of bricking iPhones/iPod Touches, just a simply GUI interface with large buttons.

After reinstalling all the applications including the Apple January update, some games, some network tools, and some utilities, I tried the new Maps application. I was interested in seeing the Locater function of Maps. I tried it, and it was spot on accurate (within 250 feet). I first assumed that it looked at my name and retrieved my home address from the entry. But after a few more tests, I realized the scope of the area it determined I was in directly correlated the strength of the wifi.

After digging around on the internet, I found that Apple runs their location based service through a company called SkyHook. According to them, they have cars drive around and pick up wifi networks (wardriving) and store them in a “self-healing” database. While I don’t live in the middle of nowhere, I don’t live in a city either. I was surprised it was that accurate because I live on a dead end of a street that leads to another dead end. Other websites such as ip-adress.com which base your location off the ipaddress of the computer showed that I was in the closest town to my house. SkyHook also allow you to submit your location and mac address of your wireless router also enhancing the accuracy of the system. If you don’t have an iPhone/iPod Touch, you could also use a nokia n95, a symbian enabled phone or even a computer capable of running Firefox (IE also, but FF preferably). There is an extension made by Skyhook called Loki that installs itself which also locates your location based on wifi access points.

It, indeed, is an interesting service. On Loki’s site, they said they hope to expand to incorporate local advertising into browsers by locating your current position.

As much as I love Xandros, it wasn’t fulfilling my wants in an operating system and I have switched over to windows XP. Trying to install Windows was a pain. I nlited my install disk using the information found here and I used eeeguide.com’s thumbdrive install. After copying the install files, which took around 30 minutes, and rebooting I got the famous hal.dll error. But booting back into the thumbdrive into the GUI mode seemed to take care of it. I’m now trying to setup DUN with my v3c, but I may have to trash the install because I chose to remove the modem software in the nlited copy.

I’ve had the eee pc for about a month and a half and I’ve love it. Despite it’s underpowered 900 Mhz processor, it’s pretty zippy (it runs some applications faster than my two year old 2.2 GHz ppc iMac g5). Unfortunately, one of the problems I’ve experienced with it is it’s problems with online video. Youtube, metacafe, google videos, vimeo, etc. all work fine. The problem occurs with movie files, such as mpgs and movs

One of the big problems is due to Mplayers lack of video codecs due to copyright protection. If you try to play a video codec that isn’t supported only the sound will play through. After trying numerous times to downgrade Mplayer to get those codecs I succeeded, but many videos I played were extremely choppy, to the point that they weren’t watchable. To circumnavigate this problem I downloaded the videos and watched them using VLC without any problem, but I was unable to play videos within Firefox.

Just today I figured out how to get VLC as the default video plugin for firefox. Simply type:

sudo apt-get remove mozilla-mplayer
sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc

And that’s it. If you ever need to restore the default video plugin to mplayer just type in:
sudo apt-get remove mozilla-plugin-vlc
sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer

So far, it has worked great, but I’m not positive it will work on all sites. Please leave a comment if you find any problems.