lummie.co.uk

Whilst browsing the net today in search of progress of the 1.1.3 jailbreak I came across a site with various comments from people wishing to downgrade after mistakenly upgrading to 1.1.3. On this site was a comment from a guy who’s brother works at apple. Well would you believe it, apple are loosing money and their share price has dropped $10 because of the jailbreak.

I fail to see how they can be loosing money. If anything they are making more money as they have realised that people want to use their touch for more than music so they are making 20$ from upgrades to get the basic iPhone apps. So they are quids in there. If there was not a jailbreak apple would not have seen the demand for the iPhone apps on the touch and realised they could make some more money.

Apple are just another microsoft produce something with great potential then do everything they can to duck it up justso they can make a little more money. As far as I am concerned paying £200 for an iPod is sufficient money to pay apple. I mean everybody i know has one if not more than one. Is that not enough apple?

So I wish all my success to the jailbreak team, crack 1.1.3.

my friend was “patching” his iPod touch up to 1.1.2 the other day. He had failed to patch correctly and had upgraded to 1.1.2 and lost, the nice enhacements to 1.1.1 that he had installed. So the procedure is to rollback to 1.1.1. However he was running on the mac and the latest version of iTunes was installed. When he selected the 1.1.1 ipod touch flash image iTunes promptly notified him of an error and deleted the 1.1.1 firmware off the disk, which was a bit rude. From this I guess iTunes now checks the firmware’s crc to see if it is the version with the tiff vulnerabillity in as I heard rumours they have patched the 1.1.1 firmware. So take a leaf grab the 1.1.1, 1.1.2 firmwares and an old copy of iTunes and archive as soon as possible.

Christmas day is full of surprises and this years was finding a joke in my cracker that I think is the all time best Xmas joke.

What is the most common wine at Christmas dinner?

“I don’t like sprouts…”

Mint…!

Santa was nice enough to drop off an iPod touch this Xmas. So far I am over the moon. As the purchased device its a mp3 player with a web browser and some eye candy for searching albums, but after jail breaking this beauty it comes into its own. Its a PDA on steroids. After a bit of searching I even managed to get it mounting under Linux mint using sshfs so I can now sync it with amarok so no need for Itunes at all.
Favourites apps so far are: IMAP email client, rss reader, etchasketch (where you shake it to clear like the real thing)
I wish safari mobile had flash support and I am still looking for a nice off line blog writer for wordpress.

Oh and it will play videos through the sat nab screen on my impreza… Now that’s mint.

After having a look at PCLinux OS then the latest Linux Mint KDE edition, I came to the conclusion I don’t like KDE.  I know there is a lot of discussions about kde and gnome, but in my opinion it does not look as clean, the file managers, dolphin and konquerer just don’t cut the mustard for me.  I know kde is “more configurable” as they say, and does some nifty things like having amorak plugins to the file manager so it’s always at hand, but I just think the whole thing looks more cluttered and after several attempts could not get the font rendering to look any good.  It’s all a matter of personal preference….

I finally settled on Linux Mint (Gnome version) which has all the benefits of ubuntu, which I used for several months but has some nice enhancements.  The Mint Menu is superb. It’s simple, uncluttered and allows you to have favourites. The inclusion of most codecs working out the box in mint also is a benefit and getting compiz going was the easiest process of all the distros.

1) install restricted-manager
2) enable ati driver
3) install xorg-server-xgl

It just works.

If you are coming from windows and moving over to linux, I heartily recommend Linux Mint (not the KDE edition though it’s still a bit buggy).

A nice article on getting my ATI Mobility x1600 working under PCLinuxOS 2007.

http://thecleverlynamedpage.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/how-to-ati-radeon-x1600-with-pclinuxos-2007/

I was having problems with something in Feisty, which was obviously fixed in Gutsy because I can’t remember what the problem was after the hour so of the upgrade had passed. And it all worked from then on… Well there must have been some reason I decided to do it, and I am sure something was not working… anyway as there’s only a couple of days left before Gutsy is released, I figured I might be pretty stable by now so minimal risk.

I wasn’t disappointed.  A couple of third party bits needed re-installing, specifically vmware and nero, but apart from that it all went well. XGL and compiz still worked (however the original Feisty compiz-config needed removing and re-installing) and you even get a nice little message telling you not to run the XGL session as it will just work in the gnome one.

Blinging your desktop has been integrated into a nice easy to use Appearance dialog under settings:

The new Screen and Graphics section doesn’t look to exciting to windows users, but it’s a god send when trying to use your laptop for presentations, at last an easy way to handle multiple monitors and resolutions.

More to come as I find stuff worthy of my attention, but to the Ubuntu team, bloody well done, it was such a smooth upgrade….

Rails Documentation for the Working Developer

http://rails.raaum.org/

• Database Conventions
• ActiveRecord

I am pleased to announce the release of version  1.0 of Unique Theme Studio for UIQ3. See www.unique.lummie.co.uk for more information.

So you want a cross platform Adobe Photo Shop that runs on linux ? Then look no further for an application that is at least as functional as CS2.

Pixel Image Editor

Pixel is running following platforms now: Windows, Linux/x86,
Linux/PPC, Linspire, Zeta/BeOS/x86, QNX/x86, FreeBSD/x86, MacOSX/PPC
and MacOSX/x86, MorphOS/PPC, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and DOS.

At the moment as it’s still pre v1.0 (not that you would know) it costs only $38!!!! with free upgrades up to version 2.0 and the license to run on any platform

Having used photo shop the interface feels totally natural. Everying is set out similar and there a few nice enhancements as well.

Some of the features:

Core

• Pixel is an extremely small and fast application
• it is easy to translate to any language as it supports full
  Unicode, all available translations are available at once (English,
  German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Slovak, Croatian, Swedish, Polish,
  Russian, Hungarian, Afrikaans, Brazilian Portuguese and others)
• supports TWAIN compatible scanners, digital cameras
• supports SANE compatible scanners, digital cameras and others (Linux, BeOS, eComStation)
• pressure sensitive tablets support
• printing support
• multiple color managed clipboards
• various image formats handling (GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PSD…)
• support for JPEG-2000 format
• support for OpenEXR format
• EXIF support

Image editing

• support for layers, paths, channels, masks and selections
• Color Management support for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale and CIE Lab modes (8-bit and 16-bit)
• support for HDR (High Dynamic Range) images with 32-bit/channel
  precision, HDR images in Pixel are editable in full HDR quality, not in
  8-bit RGB as in competiting programs
• realtime live effects for layers (adjustments, effects), sets of live effects can be saved as layer Styles
• image browsing and searching
• powerful text editing with spellchecking and support for IME/XIM (Asian languages)

Retouching

• includes variety of brushes, including full-color brushes and animated brushes
• brush retouching tools including special effects
• retouching set of filter plug-ins

Web features

• complex support for image slicing and image optimizations (GIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP)
• direct editing of generated HTML code without destroying user’s additions
• support for clickable maps
• support for small animations for your web pages (animated GIFs)