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I had always heard that WEP encryption used on Wi-Fi products was easily cracked. Yet, I myself continue to we simply use 128 bit WEP encryption for my home network - but not anymore.
Check out this article on Tom's Networking, it walks you through a step by step guide on how to crack any WEB wireless network in a matter of minutes.
Time to switch from WEP to WPA or WPA2.
Cris Pierry
My excitement with iTunes 7 automatic album cover art download quickly waned after I asked iTunes to download the cover art for my music collection. iTunes was only able to retrieve less than 20% of the cover art for my CDs. A search through Amazon enable me to find another 40%, but it still left me with 40% of my music without a cover art.
A painstaking process of manually searching on Google, Yahoo, and Live yielded maybe another 20% and manual search on ebay and various Brazilian music websites yielded another 10%.
It would be cool if I could in turn "share" my cover art and music discography to other users on the net and save them the painstaking manual process of finding cover art on their own.
Cris Pierry
While living in London, I appreciated the fact that most (all?) wireless operators would text you the phone number and address after a call to information (411 here in the US). This was handy for various reasons - if the number was busy, if I needed to call again the next day, etc. It frustrated me that US carriers (t-mobile and Cingular at least) did not send the information to my mobile, forcing me to write it down or call again if I needed the number once more.
It turns out that Cingular offers this feature if you simply say "Text me" during the reading of the 411 information. Best of all, you can subsequently request that they always send the information via SMS for all future 411 requests.
Pretty neat. Too bad my Motorola Razr does not detect phone numbers in an SMS and enable me to click dial it like my Windows Mobile and Symbian phones did.
Cris Pierry
Happy 40th birthday Star Trek Enterprise! September 8th marks the 40th anniversary of the original television series' debut on NBC in the fall of 1966.
Star Trek: (1966-1969)
Star Trek: The Animated Adventures (1973-1974)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)
Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005)
How long will we have to wait until a new Star Trek series in launched? Please...
Cris Pierry
Technorati Tags: Star Trek
A favicon, short for favorite icon, is a personalize icon that is displayed with the website name/favorite listing. Most professional web sites customize the favicon with their corporate logo. Here is what my News favorite folder looks like -- you can see the personalized corporate logo for each favorite entry.
You can personalize your typepad blog with your very own favicon as well - as I have now done with my applepie blog.
That's it. Most browsers now will find and display the favicon automatically when the site is viewed in that browser.
You may need to clear the cache from your existing browser or to hard refresh the page (CTRL + F5 on Firefox) before your new favicon is displayed.
Cris Pierry
OS X includes a system wide dictionary and thesaurus, many native OS X applications make use of this feature to provide instant spell checking. Users can also benefit from it by invoking the dictionary or thesaurus at any point.
To access the thesaurus, select Oxford Thesaurus from the Oxford Dictionary drop-down menu.
Cris Pierry
Technorati Tags: Apple, Dictionary, How To, OS X, Software, Switcher, Technology
TorrentFreak has a series of articles on BitTorrent, it is good primer on the technology for those who don't know it yet.
Cris Pierry
Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, How To, Technology, TorrentFreak
I have to re-think what it means to me to email someone a photo. I don't send many photographs via email, certainly less than 2 per month. Most of the time the photos I send are related to a birthday or an event. The photos are always resized for quick access, they are always hand-selected and of high quality (no snapshots), and I only send a few photos at a time (less than 5 photographs per email).
The photos are sent to people with direct connection to the event or to the subject photographed. They often go to grandparents, uncles, ants, godparents, and the likes. Yet, without fail, 95% of the emails go unanswered - it is rare to get even a single reply. This really used to bother me, to the point that I started trimming down the email distribution to fewer and fewer recipients. If I keep this up, pretty soon I will be emailing these photos only to myself.
Maybe I am looking at this all wrong. I don't photograph because I expect others to comment. When I blog, I don't blog with any expectation that the entry will be read by anyone other than myself, and I don't blog with the expectation that it will be commented on or linked to. I blog because I like it, because it means something to me, because I think it will help someone. Maybe that's how I should look at the photo emails that I send - not expect a reply, not expect a comment, and certainly not expect a photo in return. Just send the email with a grandchild or a wildlife subject and hope that it will bring a smile to the recipient, that it will bring fond memories of the event, that it will bring a distant relative closer to our daily lives - no more, no less.
Cris Pierry
Technorati Tags: email, Photography, spam
Saft is a Safari browser plug-in that adds some much needed functionality to Apple's browser. I have heard of Saft ever since I switched to the Mac over 1 year ago. Until now, I had shied away from installing it as Saft can have compatibility problems when OS X is updated; but from what I hear, the Saft developers are always very quick to update the application soon after a revision to Safari is made public.
I finally broke down today and installed a demo version of Saft on my MacBook Pro. The key features that I am interested in are full screen mode, and the ability to save and re-open multiple browser tabs when re-launching safari. The full screen mode is particularly important to me as I like to read books online via O'Reilly's Safari bookshelf.
Unfortunately, the demo version of Saft is more irritating than any value that it brings. Saft forcefully displays a pop-up dialog box when Safari is launched, preventing Safari from being used until the user manually dismisses the dialog box -- extremely irritating. Instead of reminding me that I should upgrade my demo version, this dialog box reminds me that I must quickly and promptly remove this virus from my computer.
There is nothing wrong with displaying a credits dialog box, but it should be displayed briefly and quickly dismissed without user interaction. As it stands, Saft makes my browsing experience slower not faster.
If you are offering a free trial of your software, do so freely and do your best to provide users with the best customer experience possible. Give the trial a fixed time period when the product will stop working, and be confident in the value of your application to know that users will purchase it after they have a chance to experience its functionality. As it is, with Saft, I used its full screen feature only once, and I was bugged by the software at least 10 times before I finally gave up and uninstalled it. Instead of Saft bringing me value, it slowed me down - not really the experience the ISV wanted out of a free trial. It is too bad, because I really could have benefitted from some of the features available in Saft, but I won't give in to such poor tactics and purchase the final product.
Luckily, uninstalling Saft is quick and simple: move Saft in /Library/InputManagers to the Trash.
Cris Pierry
ImageWell is a free utility that makes it very easy for you to do simple image editing:
Very handy utility for creating and adding images to a web page or a blog! And better yet, it is free!
Cris Pierry
My iMac's hard drive has died - surface scan errors. A quick chat with Apple Care and another visit to Apple's Genius Bar has resulted in my iMac being sent for a hard drive replacement - a 2 to 5 day task.
The machine is just 4 months old and it has a factory installed 500GB hard drive. The repair cost, covered under warranty thankfully, is a whopping $660.00 ($525 for the HD, and $135 for the installation). Simply outrageously expensive considering that you can purchase a 750 gb hard drive for $335.
This is a good reminder that once the 1 year warranty is up, all service repairs will be done at home.
Cris Pierry
Technorati Tags: Apple, genius bar, iMac, warranty
Here is something you don't see in Seattle very often - Barely a drop of rain in August in Seattle: just 0.02 inches of rainfall, less than the 30-year average of 1.02 inches in August.
Cris Pierry
Technorati Tags: Seattle
Windows Vista RC1 is available for download now to Techbeta members, and more broadly available next week. I am downloading it now, the last build I tried was very solid, it will be fun to see what RC1 brings to the table.
I am still missing drivers for the built-in video camera on the Sony SZ laptops.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista
I visited my local Apple store today to get some help fixing a problem with my MacBook Pro. Before heading off to the store, I booked a 20 minute appointment at the Apple Genius Bar - ensuring that I would be seen by a technician when I got there.
Not only were they able to help me fix the problem with my Mail application, but I was able to replace my MacBook Pro battery (which had been recalled), and replace my power adapter which had broken. That's $180 is warranty parts! Great for me, not so great for Apple.
I also learned that my iMac hard drive must be replaced due to its "Invalid Node Structure" and "Surface Scan Errors", I need to book another appointment at the Genius bar and bring my iMac with me - bummer.
All in all, it was a great experience and a great value to be able to talk to a support tech face to face. Much better experience than any over-the-phone support person could have provided.
On the other hand, both of my computers are just about 4 months old, it was certainly unexpected to have hardware problems so soon. Not something that I am used to. Hopefully these are one off failures, and not a sign of general quality control issues at Apple.
Technorati Tags: Apple, genius bar
A trip to the Apple Genius Store fixed my Mail.app kernel protection failure. My preferences file was corrupt, and even thought I thought I had deleted all mail preference files I missed one of them. Mail.app stores preference list files in at least 3 locations:
The important one to reset is ~\library\Preferences\com.apple.mail.plist. Once this file was deleted, Mail was able to load again.
In order not to loose all of my email accounts, I moved ~\library\Preferences\com.apple.mail.plist to the desktop. Then I restarted Mail.app which caused it to recreate a default, vanilla, preferences file and re-set Mail's internal settings. I exited mail.app and then moved my original plist file to the correct location. Once I re-started mail.app this time, everything worked - and all of my email accounts were available once again.
Horrible error handling on Apple's part, and annoying behavior to store preference files (plist) all over the place.
Thanks to Tom at the Bellevue Apple Genius Bar for helping me get my system running again.
Cris Pierry
Technorati Tags: Apple, mail.app, Technology
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