Custom messaging ringtones

Originally, iOS only allowed you to assign ringtones to people in your address book. Now you can assign custom ringtones to events such as text tones, email sending and receiving, tweets, and voice mail.

Double-tap the home button while locked for camera and iPod access

The one thing that annoyed me the most about the iPhone was the time it took to get to the Camera app. You had to unlock your phone, click the Camera app icon, and wait for the aperture to open. Now, all you have to do is double-tap the home button and you have instant access to the Camera app. You also have limited access to your music.

Notifications

One major annoyance about iOS in the past was the way the phone handled notifications. If you got more than one, there was no way to look at the history of the notification that were sent to you. Now, you’re shown all your notifications on your home screen that came in since the last time you checked. What’s better is you can now swipe down from the top of your screen and see a longer notification history. You also get a scrolling stock ticker at the bottom of the notifications list.

If you get a notification while using your phone, instead of a giant dialog box intruding on your work, the top 100 pixels or so will “rotate” down like the answers in Family Feud, and display your notification that way. You can then choose to tap the notification to read it, or simply ignore it.

iMessage

Instead of sending messages over SMS, Apple has created a new system called iMessage which allows you to send text, pics, and movies to anyone else that has iOS 5 with iMessage. Now you no longer have to send messages over the clunky SMS system, you can do it all over 3G and Wifi. You can even send messages to multiple people. If the person you’re sending the message to has iMessage as well, their name has a blue bubble. If not, they have a green bubble.

Reminders

Originally, all you could do in iOS to remind yourself about anything was to use the Notes app. Now, iOS 5 has a Reminders app that not only keeps your list of reminders, but also pushes everything to iCloud, so it wirelessly syncs across all your devices. You can set priorities, and tell Reminders how often to remind you about your…reminder.

Photo Stream

When you take a picture on your iPhone, or add one to your iPhoto library on your Mac, it’s automatically sent to all your devices.

Camera updates

One of the first things you’ll notice when you launch the Camera app is the grid lines it puts up by default. This is an excellent way to make sure your pictures are as straight as possible. Nobody wants their pictures to look crooked, as if they were taken in a villain’s lair from the old Batman TV show. HDR is also an option now so that you can take the high dynamic range pictures along with regular pictures.

Some people didn’t like that you had to touch the camera icon in the Camera app to take the picture because it was in an awkward position, so you can now use the volume up button on the iPhone 4 to snap the picture.

Software updates over the air

While beta testing iOS over the last few months,

I was able to update iOS over the air. I found that iOS will pull the update for you and let you know when it’s ready so that you don’t have to wait for it to download. You can, of course, do it manually. I was at a concert one evening when I got the notification that there was a new update available. I told my iPhone to proceed and was updated in less than 15 minutes. The downside is that if something does go wrong, you want to be close to your computer to restore from a recent backup. I would suggest not doing an over the air update unless you’re backed up and near a computer in case something goes wrong.

Sync and backup over Wifi

This is one feature that’s long overdue. I didn’t like that I had to attach my phone to my Mac every time I wanted to do a backup. Now, you can tell your iPhone to do its backup over Wifi. It has to be done over the local network where your computer resides, or at least have some kind of VPN access to it over the Wifi network you’re connected to.

While some people might not think that iOS 5 is a major upgrade, I saw a lot of little things that I absolutely love about it. iTunes Match won’t be ready for another few weeks, so watch here for our review of that service.

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Post tags: Apple, Camera+, iMessage, ios5, iPad, iPhone, iPod, photo stream, reminders

Private messages

You can send a private message to someone by typing in their name in the destination field.

Adding multiple people to a circle

You can add people to a circle by creating an empty circle, and then single-clicking people in your contact list, and dragging them into the circle.

G+ saying you have people in common is misleading

When you roll over a new person’s name, G+ can tell you that you have multiple people in common with that person. In reality, that person may have simply added your friends to their circle, it doesn’t mean your friends added that person to their circle. Take care in adding people.

Organizing your circles cleans up the noise

When I first started using G+, I was adding everyone into a giant “Friends” circle. This proved to get very noisy, especially when you have someone like Robert Scoble in there. You may want to read what he has to say, but not necessarily all the time. Add circles for people that may get noisy. G+ doesn’t allow a subset of your circles yet (eg: “Everyone minus <a specific circle>), you have to build that yourself, but then you lose the ability to use the top-level “Stream”.

You can format your text

I found that some internet-based formatting works in G+. To make something bold, put *asterisks* around it. To make something italic, put _underscores_ around it. For a strikethrough, put -dashes- around it.

Mentions in G+

Just like in Twitter, you can add mentions in G+ by using an @ or + in front of their name.

Handling mail notifications

G+ will automatically send you emails when you’re added, mentioned, and something is shared with you. This can fill your inbox with a lot of junk you may or may not want. There are two ways to handle it. If you want the emails turned off, click the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of your G+ window and select “Google+ Settings”. There, you can select which types of emails you want sent. If you want the emails but not in your main stream, create a filter in GMail.

Right-clicking on the timestamp gives you the post’s link (like Twitter)

Drag and drop media from your desktop into G+

The only stipulation to this is that you have to have the edit window already open.

Click on “Disable reshare” to…disable resharing

If you share something with a limited number of people, they can reshare it outside the intended circle. By clicking the triangle next to the post and selecting “Disable reshare”, they can’t easily share the item without copying/pasting it manually. However, you have to do it fast because you can’t set that until after the post is created.

Click on the +1 to see who +1’d the post or comment

People can’t see your circles. Make what’s good for you.

Keep the Hangout video on one person

If you highlight someone’s video on the bottom row of thumbnails, Hangout won’t auto-switch the video to the person currently talking. When you first click the thumbnail, there will be a green border around their thumbnail. Click it again for Hangout to auto-switch again and the green highlight will disappear.

Send feedback

G+ has an amazing feedback system. You can highlight or block pieces of the page you’re on when sending feedback which will help in their understanding of the problem.

You don’t have to add everyone back

Just like Twitter, you don’t have to follow everyone back that adds you to G+ as a contact.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2011. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: circles, g+, Gmail, Google, google plus, hangout

I tried to find a plugin for Safari that did the job but couldn’t find one, so I turned to Firefox. The first plugin I found was Check4Change and it did the job easily. After installing, all you have to do is highlight the text you want the plugin to check for changes of, and the interval you want the plugin to refresh the page. If the text changes, it plays a piece from David Bowie’s “Changes” to let you know that the text has updated.

Here, I have what is now the updated text on the iTunes download page to show how the plugin works. Highlight the text, right click, and set your interval.

So, I highlighted the text on the page that said “iTunes 10.2.2 for Mac OS X” and set the refresh for 5 minutes. About two hours later, the addon played its little tune and sure enough, the page said “iTunes 10.3 for Mac OS X”.

You can change the intervals on the popup menu to your liking, and you can change how the notification is made, and change the notification sound. It’s a great little plugin which may not be of use every day, but is handy when you need it.

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Post tags: addons, check4change, Firefox

While finally removing the HD-DVD player from my system this weekend, I gave myself a quest to figure out how to get the HD versions of the movies off the discs so I can watch them on my own until they’re finally released on Blu-Ray. I have the original Toshiba HD-A1 player and the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive and my best bet would have to be the XBOX 360 drive since it connects to a computer via USB. The Toshiba drive inside the player wouldn’t be practical to use.

The following instructions work on Windows, tested on my Windows 7 system using the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive. I couldn’t find simple solutions or tools for the Mac.

As I stated before, your best bet would be to use the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive. You can find these dirt cheap now, either in clearance bins at electronic and game stores, or on eBay.

The first thing you need to do is to get the movie file onto your hard drive so you can work with the files without the encryption. SlySoft’s AnyDVD HD does this for you, and even has drivers for the XBOX 360 drive so that you can plug and play the drive and go. SlySoft offers a 21 day trial so you can see if it works on your system. After you install the software and reboot, you can read the file system off the XBOX 360 drive. Pop in a disc and AnyDVD HD will copy the contents of the disc to the hard drive. Be sure you have three times as much space that the movie takes up because you’re going to need to do a three-step process with large files. So, if your movie takes up 15GB, you’ll need 45 GB of free space, for a 50GB movie, you’ll need 150 GB. You may want to use a dedicated free hard drive for this.

Once the disc’s contents is on your hard drive, you’re going to look for the HVDVD_TS folder. Inside there you’ll see FEATURE.EVO. That’s your movie. Grab a piece of software called EVODemux, and drag FEATURE.EVO to it. It will analyze the file for a few seconds and then be ready to split the .EVO file into separate video and audio tracks. Click the “Demux” button and let it do its thing. If everything goes well, you should have FEATURE.VC-1.stream.0.mpv (the video file), and one or more FEATURE.DD+.stream.00 files (.00 for the first audio stream, .01 for the second, etc.).

Now you’ll need to put those files into a container that video playback software can understand. For this we’re going to use the well known .ts container. Get tsMuxer, and drag the video and audio files to it that were created by EVODemux. The app is smart enough to know what to do with the files so they don’t have to be dragged in a specific order. Click on “Start Muxing” and let it go. A bit later, you’ll have a filename like “FEATURE.VC-1.stream.o.ts”. Grab a copy of VideoLAN and drag the .ts file to it. VideoLAN should play the movie back fine. You can rename the .ts file to whatever you want at this point.

There are other steps you’ll have to take to put in chapters, and there are some posts I found to reburn the movie to a Blu-Ray disc in a proper format so that the movie will play in the Blu-Ray player. I have a burner, but haven’t yet tried this step so if I get it working, I’ll post a followup article on how to do that.

So if you have a stack of HD-DVD movies that you think are impractical to own, here’s a way to watch them without being tied to a dead piece of hardware.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anydvd hd, evodemux, hd-dvd, red2blu, tsmuxer, videolan, Xbox 360

I installed Mac OS 10.6 on the same Mac to work on some new iPad development and found that the DNS didn’t have any delay at all. Switching back to 10.5 had a delay, so it didn’t seem like a hardware problem. I tried my iPhone which was fast, my iPad was fast, and my Windows 7 machines was fast, and they were all going through the same router. This led me to believe that there was something wrong with the 10.5 OS itself, so I did some digging and found that, in a nutshell, Verizon’s DNS servers don’t like Mac OS 10.5. I’d switch to 10.6 full time but due to driver issues that haven’t been updated for 10.6, I had to stick with 10.5.

Mac OS 10.5 does what’s called an SRV-based request when you ask for a site. The problem is that the Verizon DNS servers don’t know what to do with it, so the OS times out, tries again, times out again, and then falls back to the old A-based request which finally works. The way around this is to use OpenDNS IP addresses, bypassing Verizon’s.

Be warned that when you switch locations, any apps you have running will break their internet connections.

Find the Network icon in the System Preferences.

Select “Edit Locations…”

Click on the + to add a new location and call it “OpenDNS”

Here you can click on the + to add new DNS entries. The DNS servers are read from the bottom up so add them in this order:

208.67.222.222

208.67.222.220

Click “OK” and you’re done.

If you’re like me and stuck in Mac OS 10.5 with this problem until you can upgrade to 10.6 on a regular basis, this solution should work for you.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dns, leopard, mac os 10.5, slow dns, verizon

I’ve always loved movies and I wanted to recreate the theater experience at home, and not just for watching the movie itself, but to also watch some of my favorite trailers before the movie started. Before DVDs were released in 1997, I was using VHS to record trailers from laserdisc and strung them together. It was crude, but it did the job for the technology we had at the time. When DVDs came out, I put together a home theater PC for upscaling my DVDs to 720p. The side effect of that was having the opportunity to string individual video files together to simulate seeing trailers in a movie theater before the main attraction started. It was a fun addition to just watching the film, and I wasn’t forced to watch the trailers that came with the DVD I bought. Over time, the HTPC I build became harder to use since it didn’t play HD very well.

I knew that the PS3 had the ability to play back different video formats, but it wasn’t until recently that I found out just how versatile it is. I own a Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-Ray player, the first one ever released. It’s slow, but it got the job done. Over time I found that more and more movies wouldn’t play on it, and it seemed like my investment in the player wasn’t as good as I originally hoped. Early adopter syndrome, I suppose. I used the PS3 for watching movies on the upstairs HDTV using HDMI, but the downstairs media room was built before HDMI existed, so everything is in component 720p. Avatar wasn’t playing on the Samsung, even after upgrading the firmware on it. What I found was that the firmware upgrade forced Avatar to run in HDMI only, and wouldn’t allow the movie to play back using component. The only other choice I had was to try the PS3, and it worked perfectly, even in component. I tried every single movie that didn’t work on the Samsung, and they all played on the PS3, and even started faster.

The PS3 plays video files in order. Here are trailers for Forrest Gump, Final Fantasy, and the Cimarron THX trailer. All three are VOB files.

Stringing trailers together is easy. Since firmware 3.1, the PS3 has an option to play files in sequence. Turn that on, and play the first file. The others will play in sequence. Usually I’ll play a few trailers and then a THX logo. The PS3 will play vob, m4v, mp4, avi, mpg, ts, divx, wmv, but not mov. If you have Quicktime, you can export mov files as MP4 by simply exporting the mov as MP4 with the audio and video set to Pass-Through. The PS3 will even play back files that have AC3 and DTS.

Out of curiosity, I tried the copy of Star Wars I converted off my TiVo on my Xbox 360 which is supposed to playback MP4 video after downloading the free codec. Well, you can see the result for yourself. The error stems from the fact that that Xbox 360 can’t play AC3 audio embedded in an MP4 file. The PS3 plays it back just fine.

The XBOX 360 can't play MP4 files with AC3

The Playstation 3 plays MP4 files with AC3 just fine. In fact, this file has a second stereo track as well. The PS3 allows you to pick which one you want to listen to.

For it’s price, the PS3 is a great investment for the home theater enthusiast. Oh, and it plays games, too.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1080p, 720p, avi, component, divx, hdmi, htpc, m4v, mov, mp4, playstation, ps3, vob, wmv, Xbox 360

And, don’t worry… if you don’t play WoW or you’d like to choose an alternate gift we’ll donate $5 to your favorite charity and send you $5 to spend on Amazon.com. So, want to know how to win?

To enter, leave a comment below answering the following question:

“What keeps you playing your favorite MMORPG?”

For example, I collect achievements, non-combat pets, and (currently) faction rep – but, maybe you keep playing for the rush of raid adrenaline or because your friends are in-game. Do you stick with your game to see how many PvP kills you can get or how many feats of strength you can pull-off? Does the loot tempt you to keep logging in?

Whatever the reason, tell us why you keep playing and you’ll be entered! Want one extra entry? Simply make a public blog post or send a Tweet answering the question and include the link “http://bit.ly/winloot” and the hashtag #winloot or #geekistry and your name will go into the hat twice.

We’ll announce the first winner (chosen at random) on December 6th and the second on December 13th – just in time for some holiday fun with your new puppy Moonkin Hatchling.* Be sure you leave a current/valid email address so we can let you know if you’ve won.

Thanks for geeking out with us and happy holidays, everyone!

———-

*All entries added by 11:59pm EST on December 5th are eligible to win the first round. Entries from midnight December 6th through 11:59pm December 12th and first-round non-winning entries will be included in the second drawing. First-round winner not eligible for the second drawing. Only one comment entry per person (more than one comment by the same author is encouraged for the sake of the discussion, but only one will count as a giveaway entry) and one additional entry for a public blog post or Tweet that includes the URL and hashtag above. Please direct comments and questions about the giveaway here.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard Store, contest, geekistry, giveaway, lil ragnaros, Make a Wish, MMORPG, moonkin, Moonkin Hatchling, non-combat pet, win, World of Warcraft, WoW

Not only does this thing popping up distract you, it takes over your keyboard focus which can mess up what you’re typing. At first it goes away for a while, but the more you dismiss it, the faster it reminds you that you need to reboot NOW! Pretty soon you’ll be cursing Microsoft and whoever thought this was a good idea. On more than one occasion, the dialog popped up when I happened to be clicking the mouse for something in Windows, right as the dialog popped up, and because the mouse was where the “Restart Now” button is, the PC rebooted, breaking my workflow. Thanks, Bill.

After a little digging, I found that the Windows Service Command tool will make sure that dialog doesn’t pop up again for you. The dialog is running because of the Windows Automatic Update service, called wuauserv. Just tell Windows to shut it down.

Open up a Command Prompt (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt, or Start -> Run and type “cmd”), and type this in:

sc stop wuauserv

And that’s it!

Now, you should be a responsible employee and reboot your Windows machine as soon as you can, but in the meantime you can get your work down without any more distractions.

sc stop wuauserv

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Post tags: annoying, dialog, restart later, restart now, Windows

iTunes 10 dropped for us around 10pm on Wednesday night. I quickly downloaded it, set up my Ping account, and was completely underwhelmed. At first it just gave me a list of artists to follow. I followed Lady Gaga, and that was about it for me. What I was expecting was a service similar to last.fm where the songs you’re currently listening to are listed in your friends’ feed. Although this feature wasn’t stated during Steve’s keynote, it just seemed like a logical extension of an iTunes-based social network.

There needs to be an option to not list these people

Ping gives you a list of genres to pick from, but you can only select three. I found this to be extremely limiting since I listen to a wide range of music types. I had to settle for the three I listen to the most, but would have liked five, or more.

I tried liking albums in my library, but I found that you can’t do that from your library. Despite what Apple claims about this being a social network, it’s more than that – it’s more about turning its users into promotional tools, and they prove that by forcing you to like items that are only in the iTunes Store. That means I can’t like anything by AC/DC, nor can I like “The Wall” since it’s not in the iTunes Store.

Liking albums and songs aren’t very well thought out either. In order to like an album or song, you need to go to it in the iTunes Store, and then click on the little triangle next to the price. There you’ll find the “Like” item. The same goes for songs, just click on the triangle next to the price for the same menu.

Pro tip: If you want to Like albums by a specific artist, search for that artist and click on “Show All”. There, you’ll see all the albums by that artist, and it’ll be much easier to click on the triangles of the albums you want to like.

Once I liked a bunch of albums, I took a look at my own feed. It was nothing but a list of individual “likes” for each album. I was hoping to maybe see them bunched up, but I think Apple set it up that way so you can post comments on each one. The problem is that it looks spammy, and if you like more than ten albums, the list starts to fall off since it only shows you ten per page. I would like to have a section for each artist or genre I like. There, people can see all the Rush or Nine Inch Nails or Iron Maiden albums I like.

I remember seeing that Ping allows you to see what concerts your friends are going to. I clicked on “Concerts” in the Rush section above and the show I’m going to tonight was listed. You can click on a button called “I’m going!” and the concert will be listed on your profile.

After Krissi and I tested the system out for about an hour, I was very unimpressed. This is supposed to be a music-based social network! I want to know what people are listening to, what their favorite albums are, what praises they’ve sung for specific songs, and have it all grouped by genre or artist. I’d also like a list of matching favorites; I may not know that someone listens to NIN also. Friends should also feature albums to their friends with a post saying “this is why I think this album is freakin’ awesome!”. You can add a post to an album, but once that liked album falls off the current list, friends won’t see it unless they find it on the page it’s on. I’d also like Apple to allow us to list albums that aren’t on the iTunes store. Not only does that limit what I can post, but it makes the service as a whole seem a little disingenuous since I feel they only made this to sell music, and not because they love music as they claim.

I’ll continue to use Ping, but I’m not as excited about it now as I was two days ago. Apple should listen to its userbase now that they’re in this space and build the network to something that we’d all expect from Apple.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, iTunes, Music, ping, social network

Now with Aero Glass for Windows Vista and 7, you can put a Glass look on your Command Prompt. Komalo on DeviantArt put together an executable which places Aero Glass on your Command Prompt when you run it. There’s even source code available to see how he did it.

This is great for people like me that need to get down into the command line of Windows, but don’t like the cold look of the black background.

Click here for komalo’s Glass CMD for Windows Vista and 7.

Click here for komalo’s Glass CMD for Windows XP (may be buggy).

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 7, command prompt, translucent, vista, Windows