TechAgility

So here in Australia we might be one of the first countries to have the iPhone unlocked and provided by two Carriers? (Optus and Vodafone) BUT – only if you are prepared to wait until the end of the year? Please…..  anyone I know who is seriously interested in the phone has already arranged one from elsewhere.

BTW, a colleague recently found out how delicate the glass screen is, OUCH!!

So I would have provided more of a quote for this story but it appears that MISaustralia.com has come up with a mechanism where when you highlight a section of text it then drops every second character …. 

Optus confirms iPhone plans

MISaustralia.com – Optus confirms iPhone plans

written by dcaddick

As it often happens when browsing the web, you start out looking for one thing, and invariably you find something else entirely that you have been looking for a few weeks or months ago?

I have been looking for a decent Media Streamer device that can act as the intermediary between the PC/Server and the TV and I have been looking with these ideas (courtesy of "She who must be obeyed" ) in mind:

• Must be white or silver
• Must be quite small (Desktop PC won’t cut it, needs to be more like a DVD player or smaller)
• Must make no noise (or very quiet – this rules out the Xbox360, etc.)
• Ideally HDMI output
• Would very much like it to be able to record TV (Digital Video Recording) in HD
• It must simply work, not bleeding edge device!

So I did have another scout around the web and find things like TViX that really come very close with their M6500a based on what appears to be the latest Sigma 8635 chipset and this is a very neat unit that can also include the optional T430 HD Tuner to add HD recording to the mix – awesome, check out this thread for peoples opinions at The official DVICO TViX M6500A Discussion the only downside for me is that I can’t get one in Silver or White <see above> although I have considered buying one and painting it

The other thought I did have is to "borrow" a HP T5730 (with WiFi) from work and see if I can’t get a 16Gb USB drive formatted to run XP SP2 with Media Centre (or Media Portal) straight from the USB drive just to see what the performance might be like as it does have a 1Gb of RAM and AMD Semperon +2100 CPU, but the best bit is that the DVI output will support wide screen to something like almost 2056 x 1600 so this might just work?
(Although the sound output with this will not be brilliant, but I could always add the PCI expansion slot and add something else to it?)

And then yesterday I came across this little beauty and I’m starting to wonder if it might be a bit too early to see if it’s possible to pick one up while I’m in Houston in a few weeks time?

Anyway, I’m hoping to have a play with the idea of modding the T5730 next week and then see what happens? 

gPC Mini and Mac Mini Battle for the Bookshelf

By Rob Beschizza February 26, 2008 | 3:45:21 PMCategories: Apple

Apple’s Mac Mini hasn’t had much competition in the last few years. Shuttle and Aopen both make vaguely similar machines, but neither is as small (or as inexpensive) as the six-inch wonder. Enter the forthcoming Everex gPC Mini, a linux-powered lilliputian with similar specifications and displacement.

Lining up the stats makes for an interesting choice: the Mac Mini is still a little bit smaller (84.5 inches cubed to 99.4) and is more powerful, but has less storage. GOS Linux is no OSX, but with the gPC mini, you’re not paying for it either.

Think Mini [Everex]

gPC Mini and Mac Mini Battle for the Bookshelf | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

written by dcaddick

So is there anything you can’t do with the iPhone now? I might even have to reconsider and get one myself to see what all the fuss is about?

Video of the iPhone Pwned project in action

Posted Mar 29th 2008 8:38PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Cellphones

Those crafty kids on the iPhone Dev Team have already hacked the 2.0 firmware, but now they’re getting ready to release the oh-so-creatively-named PWNED tool, which takes iPhone hacking to the next level by patching the bootloader to let you load any firmware image you want — even images not signed by Apple. That means custom patched firmware can now be loaded directly from iTunes, which simplifies the jailbreaking / unlocking process tremendously, and also means that a patched version of the 2.0 firmware is coming soon. We’re putting the tool through its paces right now and we’ll have a hands-on with it (and the Dev Team’s patched 2.0 firmware) as soon as we get it all working, but check out some highlights after the break, and hit the read link for more info.

Video of the iPhone Pwned project in action – Engadget

written by dcaddick

So it would appear that Kyle at iFixit is something of a closet Mac Service guy? Really this is very nice to see exactly what is under the hood of this well hyped Laptop, this way you really get to see what’s under the hood and know what you are actually paying for.

It is nice to see that it is not that hard to get in to possibly replace the battery if needed?

 

• Look! We found the battery.
• Unfortunately, it’s no longer considered a user-installable part by Apple and is attached to the case by 9 screws:
• Four 3mm #00 Phillips.
• Four 3.8mm #00 Phillips.
• One 7.3mm #00 Phillips.

 

• The RF module, in all its blue glory.
• The Broadcom 802.11 chip had the markings BCM4321KFBG.
• Two other chips were enclosed in metal housings.
• And the backside had another chip marked with BCM94321COEX2.

 

• We found Intel’s new Core 2 Duo chip right beneath the heat sink (no surprises there). A temperature sensor sits on an external board glued between the CPU and graphics chips. A high-resolution image (632K) is available here.
• There are 16 RAM chips (eight one-gigabit chips on each side of the logic board) for a total of 2 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM.
• The large microchip in the center of the picture is a low power Intel North Bridge GS965 integrated graphics chip with the markings LE82GS965.
• Three chips adjacent to the North Bridge/graphics controller have a semi-transparent blue epoxy covering them, as part of the HDCP hardware requirement for digital video signals.

 

• The reverse side of the logic board. Many of these chips are for power management. A high-resolution image (708K) is available here.
• You can see the second half of the Micron RAM chips.
• We identified the Silicon Image SIL1392CNU HDMI video chip and Texas Instruments TPS51120 dual current mode synchronous step-down controller (power management).

iFixit — MacBook Air

written by dcaddick

So things have been quite quiet for me over the break in some ways as I took advantage of the fact that my Father-in-law made late changes to go over to Perth for the Xmas/New Year break and that unexpectedly left a 42 foot fly bridge cruiser at my disposal for use on the Sydney Harbour – but I digress….

Anyway, I’m now catching up on all the feeds from bloglines and I came across this tasty little snippet of all the work that Microsoft looks to be pouring in to developing the SmartPhone side of things – one might almost surmise that they have been stung in to action based on the hype around Apple’s iPhone? Surely not?

Way more at source…

Microsoft is currently developing Windows Mobile 7, the first revolutionary change to its mobile device operating system. Recently, I was given a document by a source inside Microsoft that details the touch and gesture plans for Mobile 7. This document is a confidential internal use only document, used to explain the plans for Mobile 7, and contains well over a hundred pages of designs, ideas, and changes to the way we interact with our mobile devices.

Below, you’ll find over 3,000 words detailing my notes from the document. I can’t publish the document here, at least not until after the product is announced, to protect my sources. I will provide the document to trusted journalists in order to share and show proof of this information. If there is anything I leave out, please don’t hesitate to ask and I will try to provide a screenshot or answer.

The document appears to be from the past summer, and some of the details may change before the product is announced. However, the touch and gesture plans appear to be set in stone, and will be the focus of Windows Mobile 7.

What’s New

Windows Mobile 7 will dramatically change the way we use mobile devices. It will emphasize the use of touch on the device, as well as motion gestures created by using the device. It is, absolutely, Microsoft’s effort to beat back the iPhone, and the iPhone is referenced several times in the document.

Windows Mobile 7 will use touch gestures, similar to how the iPhone does. You will be able to flick through lists, pan, swipe sideway, draw on the screen. A lot of emphasis has been put on making navigation easier and doing away with scrollbars, including a new scroll handle that allows for multiple ways of finding items extremely fast.

Windows Mobile 7 will use motion gestures, something the iPhone does not. It will not use an intricate and complicated series of gyroscopes and accelerometers. Instead, it will use the camera on the phone to detect motions and create appropriate actions. You will be able to shake, twist and otherwise manipulate the phone and get things done. The phone will be able to perform actions when placed face down on a surface, and it will know when it is in your pocket or bag.

Windows Mobile 7 will have an exciting locking screen, that will allow you to play around with it, draw on it, shake it and completely otherwise mess with it.

Windows Mobile 7 will have dramatically improved visuals, different from the iPhone and much more similar to the dark and futuristic visuals of Windows Vista. It will feature graphical transitions, subtle effects, and other things to make it more interesting to look at. This is not detailed in the document, but featured in the multitude of screenshots.

Windows Mobile 7 is designed to use the finger, not the stylus, though many devices will be required to include a stylus. It is designed to be easy to use with the hand, including one-handed, and to be fun to use and easy to understand. It is designed to be used on devices with no buttons, few buttons, lots of buttons, full keyboards, and devices without touch screens.

Windows Mobile 7 is clearly designed for better media playback, with screenshots indicating a much-improved Media Player and photo gallery application. There is talk in the document of a games mode. Mobile Internet Explorer runs full-screen web pages in a minimalistic interface, and has “tabbed” browsing, except you can switch tabs by shaking the phone.

The keyboard has been improved, but plans for a full touch keyboard, a la the iPhone, have been shelved until a future version of Windows Mobile.

Below are my detailed notes. Some of it is raw, some of it is very detailed. It is accompanied by screenshots direct from the document which show off other features planned for Windows Mobile 7.

Click on any image to view it full-size. They’re all high quality images.

more at source…

» Exclusive: Windows Mobile 7 To Focus On Touch and Motion Gestures » InsideMicrosoft-part of the Blog News Channel

written by dcaddick

I’m currently looking for advice on how to make Ubuntu look like Vista, but in the meantime I also came across this very nicely detailed guide on how to get Linux/Ubuntu to imitate the OSX look and feel – very nice work.

Linux desktop imitating OSX

This is my second article about how to modify your Gnome Linux Desktop to look like OSX desktop. My first article is one year old and since that, there has been many changes in both, my knowledge and availability of the software and themes. This article is not written in such a detail than the first one. Remember that you can always take a look at the old article too. And I have also written Orange-look guide for Ubuntu which contains some good tips. This article answers better to question WHAT than HOW. What do I need if I want to imitate OSX? And not so much "how can I change my wallpaper" stuff.

Original design of the user interface that is
imitated here was created by Apple inc.

you can discuss about this article and OSX-modifying in general at Ubuntuforums in this thread. There is also a discusson thread in Finnish.

I decided to write another guide, because my first guide became surprisingly popular. There are about 1000 unique visitors per day on my site and 26000 unique users per month. That is a lot more than I suspected and ever hoped. Thank you all!

Why I wrote this article?

Ok, there are almost always misunderstandings when people modify their OS to look some other OS. This is NOT about "I want a mac" or "I want OSX". If I would want a mac, I would go and buy one of those. No, this is simply about having fun by imitating and finding the limits of Gnome desktop. I often read that Gnome is considered very plain and not very configurable. I can’t agree with that. Gnome is usable and simple, but yet very powerfull and it is possible to modify Gnome into anything you want. Now, I challenge KDE and OSX users to do the same. Can you make your KDE to look OSX as well as Gnome can imitate it? Or can you change your OSX to look Gnome, KDE or Windows? I doubt it, but I love to be proved wrong!

Just to be clear, I don’t want that OSX-look would be the default look of the Gnome. Gnome is beautiful with Tango icons and it should continue to follow it’s own clean and usable style. I’m glad I made that clear. Now, let’s begin…

Desktop Effects

OSX has some nice desktop effects like expose and magic lamp. Those not only make your desktop look good, but also improve usability. Of course, not all effets are good for usability and that’s why Linux gives you a choice of which effects to use. Recently Compiz and Beryl were merged back to one project that is called Compiz Fusion. Compiz Fusion is a program that creates those amazing effects.

Screenshot illustrating "magic lamp" effect when window is minimized to the dock.

Basic elements of the OSX desktop

OSX has a desktop with icons as almost all desktop environments has. What gives OSX it’s unique look is a dock that works as application launcher and taskmanager at the same time. Another element is an application menubar that is located on the top of the screen. This bar displays current application’s menu and some system tray icons, clock etc. This differs from all the other desktop environments as fas as I know.
Emulating OSX Dock

Screenshot of Avant-window-navigator emulating OSX-dock.

There are many open source projects that aims to offer OSX-dock style dock for Linux desktop. There are KXDocker, Avant-window-navigator, kiba-dock and Gnome-dock (which is actually a techology demo). My favourites are Neil J. Patel‘s Avant-window-navigator and Gnome-dock that was written by MacSlow. In the screenshot above you can see Avant-window-navigator that is my current choice. It can be easily modified to look like OSX-dock and it works as application laucher AND taskbar. There are also nice plugins for it that allows applications to change icon on dock. This allows Gaim to use status icons on bar and Rhythmbox to display alubm art as icon.

Screenshot of Avant-window-navigator emulating OSX-dock.

Screenshot of Gnome-panel that is modified to look like OSX menubar

• Background for 800×600
• Background for 1024×768
• Background for 1280×1024
• Background for 1366×768
• Background for 1440×900

Now that we have a panel with nice and shiny look, it’s time to add some gnome-applets to it. To imitate OSX I recommend you to use clock applet, notification-area applet, deskbar-applet, macmenu-applet and some menu-applet to add that apple logo. Deskbar is a user interface for Tracker and Beagle that you can use for desktop search. Macmenu-applet is the trickiest one here. Gnome doesn’t support this kind of behaviour for default so you’ll need to patch GTK-librarys with some code that AqD provided to the community. You can read more about macmenu-applet and patches at Ubuntuforums. System tray icons are based on the current icon theme. So the correct way to change them is to change the icon-theme.

There is deb-packages for Ubuntu Feisty users available at Ubuntuforums. Just see this post. There is a download link and installation instructions. These packages improve AqD’s patches even more. For example, underscores ‘_’ are removed from menuitems.

Boot screen

I couldn’t find a decent OSX-look-a-like bootpslash theme for Linux. So again, I did it myself. This is the great thing with the Linux. You can always do things by your self if it’s not provided already. I created an usplash theme that tries to imitate OSX boot screen. There is one difference though. In real OSX boot screen there is a nice round animation and in my theme there is a progress bar. Maybe in the future I’ll learn how to make that animation to Linux boot screen. I think that it’s possible to do it with usplash.

I’m not a usplash theme guru yet, so this theme is not perfect. Especially it doesn’t support widescreen resolutions. If you have 4:3 resolution monitor then everything is ok. If you have widescreen resolution then there will be black bars on both sides of the bootimage. If you know how to fix this, please contact me. Below is a screenshot of my current usplash theme, which you can download from here.

Screenshot of my usplash theme. This image is lacking the progress bar.

Wallpaper and desktop icons

Wallpaper isn’t really a part of OSX, because everyone can change that. It still creates a nice illusion if you use the wallpaper that is used to see on other OS. That’s why, if you want real OSX-look then you should also use OSX-wallpaper. Get the wallpaper from here.

Well, I don’t have much to say about desktop icons. There are only few and there is nothing special about them. Just create desktop icons as you have used to.

Screenshot of clean Gnome desktop that is modified to look like OSX.

Fonts

OSX uses Lucida Grande font. You can download this and other mac fonts from here. Below is a screenshot of my font settings. I also recommend you to add this .fonts.conf file under your home directory. It improves font rendering after X has been restarted.

My font settings on Gnome.

Login screen

Gnome uses GDM as a graphical login screen. There are many nice OSX-looking themes available, but none of them was good enough for me. So I took the best one and modified it a little bit. Only a little, but it’s all about details. You can download GDM-theme from here. It’s not perfect, but I really don’t care. It’s about 5 seconds on my screen and that’s it. This theme is based on AppleLinux theme.

Screenshot of GDM-theme.

System themes

I didn’t find GTK-theme that would imitate OSX as well as GTK allows. That’s why I decided to create my own theme that I based on Glossy P theme, which was a good starting point. I used some of the graphics directly from Glossy P and some I did by myself. It’s not a prefect copy of OSX, because there are some limitations in GTK that I can’t get around. You can download my GTK-theme from here.

At the moment I use Beryl compositing and it’s emerald window manager. There is a great OSX Tiger theme for emerald which you can download from here.

Application specific themes

Unfortunately, not all GTK-applications uses icon-theme icons. For example Gaim, Terminal Server Client and Liferea has their own icons, which cannot be affected by changing the global icon-theme. Also Firefox and Thunderbird has themes that are out of the scope of global Gnome themeing. I don’t have time and energy to write guide to all of those programs, but you should read my two previous articles, which discuss this in more detail. Here I will just offer few links and that’s it.

• iFox theme for Firefox
• Apple Mail theme for Thunderbird
• OSX-theme for Gconf-editor
• OSX-theme for Liferea RSS-reader

Icons

Icons are essetial part of the desktop design. OSX has nice glossy icons and Gnome has… well… gnome has icons. I’m glad to see that Gnome started to use Tango style icons which is a huge improvment, but those doesn’t really fit to OSX look that we are trying to imitate here. I have created a nice and full covering icon-theme for Gnome that uses real OSX icons and other cool icons made by talented people. Only the problem is, that I don’t have copyrights and I’m uncertain can I release them here without gettig problems to myself.

I advice you to create your own theme by collecting OSX-style icons from the internet. There are plenty of icons available for example at DeviantArt.

Polishing user interface

It’s all about details. Espesially when you are trying to imitate something or someone. So here are some final tips that I recommend you to do. First remove that gnome-splash screen. There is no use for that and it’s not very elegant. Below is a screenshot where "Show splash screen on login" is unchecked. Do the same. Notice that in latest Gnome this has to be done with gconf-editor since it’s not an option in session window anymore.

Another thing that I did is that I removed icons from menus. This gives a cleaner look, but it also might make your desktop less usable. At least in Gimp those icons are very handy. Anyway, here is a screenshot of my menu & toolbar settings.

All in all, keep things simple! Do not add dozens of icons to your desktop.

Emulating OSX menubar
OSX has only one menubar on the screen at the time. This menubar is displayed at the top of the screen with clock and system tray icons. Gnome doesn’t have this kind of bar at default, but it is possible to make one. What you need is gnome-panel that is 24 pixels high. Use OSX-like background image for your panel. You can download it below. Just select the one that is correct to your resolution. If there is not version available for your resolution, it’s not difficult to create one with GIMP.

I won’t discuss installing and configuring Compiz Fusion in this article for two reasons. First, there are dozens of HOWTO-guides, which tell you how to do that. Second, it depends a lot of which graphics card you have, which distro you use etc. So, I recommend that you take a look of OpenCompositing forums for more information.

Linux desktop imitating OSX – now if I can only find the Vista Theme?

written by dcaddick

I have a little time on my hands at the moment while searching around for another job and have managed to get the Jas 10.4.8 ISO loaded up in VMware 5.5.3, for those who need the link try this at http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Vmware_how_to and if you need more info try this InsanelyMac Forum / Homebrew Macs (Home of OSx86). / Windows + VMWare + Hackintosh

Now for those new to MAC’s (like me? then you might also find this interesting at http://www.osxfaq.com/index.ws

But the real treat is that it might be possible to install something similar to VMTools in the MAC by visiting Get it while its hot: VMtools for MacOSX I’m afraid I can’t verify that it works at the moment because this is a fresh build and I haven’t got the ethernet working yet……

UPDATE:
I’ve got the Ethernet working, but in all honesty I’m not sure how, I’d read in one of the Forums that by setting the Ethernet to be e1000 it should just work, someone else said they could only get it to work under NAT and not bridging – so I flipped over to NAT, then the Ethernet appeared in the System Panel, then I was able to set the DHCP (which didn’t work) then went Manual in Bridged mode and it’s all working…… go figure???

The other main winner I had was discovering this little gem at http://www.lyingonthecovers.net/?p=81 that not only details the install procedure, but more crucially for me (because I’ve been searching for this for quite some time) is how to manipulate the screen size above and beyond the standard 1024×768 as there is not VMTools to make this work.

So I can now have MAC OS X 10.4.9 running full screen at 1280x1024x32………..  nice!!

Post Install Notes:
1. After a full install I was able to add journalling to the disk with the basic MAC GUI disk tool.
2. There was only 1024×768 available under display options and my LCD screen was of course 1280×1024. This was quickly fixed by adding 2 lines to the boot loader configuration file /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist:

Graphics Mode
1280×1024×32

(Picture of boot config file)
http://share.brixtonjunkies.com/graphics.jpg

MAC OS X 10.4.8 on VMware – I know it’s been done already, but how about an attempt at VMTools for MAC?

written by dcaddick

I have a little time on my hands at the moment while searching around for another job and have managed to get the Jas 10.4.8 ISO loaded up in VMware 5.5.3, for those who need the link try this at http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Vmware_how_to and if you need more info try this InsanelyMac Forum / Homebrew Macs (Home of OSx86). / Windows + VMWare + Hackintosh

Now for those new to MAC’s (like me? then you might also find this interesting at http://www.osxfaq.com/index.ws

But the real treat is that it might be possible to install something similar to VMTools in the MAC by visiting Get it while its hot: VMtools for MacOSX I’m afraid I can’t verify that it works at the moment because this is a fresh build and I haven’t got the ethernet working yet……

UPDATE:
I’ve got the Ethernet working, but in all honesty I’m not sure how, I’d read in one of the Forums that by setting the Ethernet to be e1000 it should just work, someone else said they could only get it to work under NAT and not bridging – so I flipped over to NAT, then the Ethernet appeared in the System Panel, then I was able to set the DHCP (which didn’t work) then went Manual in Bridged mode and it’s all working…… go figure???

The other main winner I had was discovering this little gem at http://www.lyingonthecovers.net/?p=81 that not only details the install procedure, but more crucially for me (because I’ve been searching for this for quite some time) is how to manipulate the screen size above and beyond the standard 1024×768 as there is not VMTools to make this work.

So I can now have MAC OS X 10.4.9 running full screen at 1280x1024x32………..  nice!!

Post Install Notes:
1. After a full install I was able to add journalling to the disk with the basic MAC GUI disk tool.
2. There was only 1024×768 available under display options and my LCD screen was of course 1280×1024. This was quickly fixed by adding 2 lines to the boot loader configuration file /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist:

Graphics Mode
1280×1024×32

(Picture of boot config file)
http://share.brixtonjunkies.com/graphics.jpg

written by dcaddick

Update:
One of my colleagues has got it working, and I have also now managed to confirm just this morning that it is possible to see Mac OS X running on a VMware Workstation sitting on a Server 2003 Host. I haven’t really had time to play with it as I’m a bit rushed leading up to a 2 week holiday, so things will be a bit quiet this month.
So it is out there…… just keep looking. The one that I found worked "straight out of the box" was a highly compressed 1.29Gb *.tar.bz file. I say highly compressed because my 3.06Ghz HT P4 spent 16 – 17 mins to uncompress the 6Gb VMware Disk file.
Have fun and good luck

written by dcaddick

Well that didn’t take long did it?

And if you are interested in emulating this feat then you may find the following links useful…
http://www.osx86project.org/
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCLPart
http://www.xplodenet.com/blog/
http://buildyourownmac.com/
http://www.win2osx.net/forum/
Just one note of interest is the first link to pearpc.net is also the home of a program that will allow you to do run an emulator for running the pukka MAC install, but I’ve heard it’s quite slow, although I haven’t tried it myself.

written by dcaddick