Tech blogs have done a pretty good job of drilling down into iOS4’s new features, both big and small, but here’s a very minor one they’ve missed (I think).
Until iOS 4, the iPhone stored photos in a seemingly random fashion within any number of folders inside the DCIM folder — a quick check on my old iPhone with iOS 3.1.3 shows two folders, called 100APPLE and 999APPLE, that both contain photos. iPhones with several hundred photos apparently had several such folders, numbered 100APPLE, 101APPLE and so on.
Continue reading →
Posted in: Apple.
Tagged: iOS4 · iPhone · Tips
All of the UK mobile operators have now announced their iPhone 4 pay-monthly tariffs and most tech web sites seem to have posted something about which is the best deal. Many are mistakenly assuming that the lowest monthly payment or lowest up-front price is the best value though, so I thought I’d analyse the tariffs in a little more detail.
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Posted in: Blog.
Tagged: iPhone 4 · Tariffs
As I write this, a gaping security flaw has been found in Facebook that allows users to spy upon their Friends’ chats. The flaw looks like it’s in the process of being fixed, but this is just the latest in a long line of problems with the social networking service’s privacy.
The security hole in the chat tool was undoubtedly accidental, but Facebook’s repeated slackening of its privacy controls is deliberate and each change puts the personal data of its users at increased of unwanted exposure to third parties.
This erosion of privacy for Facebook profiles is leading many users to close their accounts, but here’s a question — how do you do it?
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Posted in: Blog, How to, Web.
Tagged: Facebook · Privacy · Tips
QuickBoot is a free utility that fixes that annoying problem of forgetting to hold down the Alt key when you restart your Mac to boot into Windows via Boot Camp. It sits in the menu bar and let’s you restart your Mac and boot into Windows with a mouse click.
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Posted in: Applications, Mac OS.
Tagged: Boot Camp · Hacks · Utilities
Apple released iTunes 9 yesterday and along with a bevy of new features, it also put the Genre column back into browser view — and the old trick for hiding it doesn’t work.
Fortunately, Apple has evidently listened to our cries of despair and there is now an easier way to disable Genres. Just go to View > Column Browser > Genres to toggle the column on and off. Thanks, Apple!
Posted in: Apple, Applications, How to.
Tagged: iTunes · Tips
This is just a heads up if you can’t get your Samsung ML-1510 laser printer to work with Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. The current Samsung driver for Mac OS 10.3 doesn’t work with Snow Leopard and Samsung’s advice to reinstall the 10.5 driver isn’t much use — there is no 10.5 driver.
With regard to your ML-1510 and the recent issue you have experienced with Mac OS 10.6, as with previously released versions of the Mac OS, Samsung Electronics will provide support for this platform and will provide drivers for the new OS once they have been refined. In the mean time a number of our users have reported that simply reinstalling the 10.5 driver will allow users to continue using their printer.
Once the drivers have been refined for this latest Mac OS release they will be posted on the download centre of our website, we suggest that you monitor the website for their release.
Fortunately, Samsung is at least working on a 10.6 driver for this cheap and cheerful laser printer, but there’s no word on when it will appear. When it does, look for it here.
Posted in: Mac OS.
Tagged: Drivers · Printing · Samsung · Snow Leopard
I’ve just (thanks Royal Mail!) installed Snow Leopard on my iMac and immediately ran into problems with applications not behaving properly. In some cases, they wouldn’t run at all and crashed upon launch.
For example, Activity Monitor reported some apps as using 16,777,216TB of hard disk space (I have no idea which SI unit that works out at – yottabytes..?) and Disk Utility crashed as soon as it was started. After a few minutes of panic about having to wipe and reinstall due to some mysterious bug, I figured out the problem — it’s all due to the Snow Leopard installer. Continue reading →
Posted in: Apple, Applications, Mac OS.
Tagged: Snow Leopard · Tips
Here’s another Firefox I discovered the other day. On a MacBook with a multi-touch trackpad, you can use a three finger up/down swipe to move instantly to the top/bottom of a web page. It doesn’t work in Safari, sadly.
Posted in: Apple, Applications, How to.
Tagged: Firefox · Tips · Trackpad
These are very old news (I’m sure), but I’ve just stumbled upon two useful keyboard shortcuts for Firefox.
- ⌘ + L — jump to and select (ready for overtyping) the contents of the location box.
- ⌘ + K — jump to and select (ready for overtyping) the contents of the search box.
In other words, you don’t need to reach for the mouse when typing a new URL or searching for something. I’m sure everyone’s been using these for ages, but they’re a revelation to me…
Update: Thanks to Mark for pointing out that ⌘ + L also works in Safari — but ⌘ + K doesn’t…
Posted in: Keyboard shortcuts.
Tagged: Firefox · Safari · Tips
I love Mac OS X iCal, but there’s one thing that bugs me — the pale blue highlight that denotes ‘Today’ in the month view is all but invisible.
There’s no way to tweak this colour in iCal and the best the internet could suggest was to tilt the monitor back a bit… In fact, looking at the screen from a lower angle does make the pale blue more obvious, but not obvious enough.
While hunting around for a hack to fix this, however, I stumbled upon a partial fix. Continue reading →
Posted in: Apple, How to, Mac OS.
Tagged: Frustrations · Hacks · iCal · Tips
