I had always intended this blog to have some technical tips in the mix, but haven’t written up many, so here is one.
I manage an OS X environment at a school. We installed a new phone system that could email voicemail files as WAV files, and I wanted a way to set the default application that launches when these were double clicked from iTunes to Quicktime. This sort of thing is handled by launch services and can’t be manipulated by the defaults command. Andrew Mortensen (of the Radmind crew) to the rescue with a command line tool he wrote: duti.
This can be called a number of way, but I wanted to run it from a login script. It has to be run as the user whose settings you want to change, but loginscripts run as root, so one needs to call the actual binary as sudo.
I saw an article the other day that set off my peeve alarm when it discussed a plugin hybrid that got 100 MPG. Now most everyone knows that MPG is Miles Per Gallon. That means that for every gallon, you get 100 miles. But since this is a plugin hybrid, many of those 100 miles are coming from the battery being charged from the grid, not the gallon - so its just not fair to count those miles in a MPG rating. There are some ways to count kwH as gas equivalents - but no attempt was made to do this. Again, the key point is that in a regular hybrid, the only energy input is the gas. So MPG = MPG. But with a plugin there is another energy source, so you can’t calculate a simple MPG from Miles traveled per gallons used. Put another way, if I carried around a gallon of gas in an all electric vehicle - would that count as an infinite MPG car?
Just saw a couple clips of Google’s Android Phone OS. There are some things that are cool and improved (like the unlock pattern code). But I’m a bit baffled by this feature:
So if you are standing on a street, what exactly is the point of being able to pan around and see what is right in front of you on your phone? Now maybe around the corner is cool - but the compass part of that would only confuse you I think.
I’m sure this is going to circulate far and wide in the Mac blogging world, but it is worth giving it one more airing. I can’t imagine how long this must have taken to get all the timing right:
How can an iPhone screen be as large as a 42″ flatscreen, or a 13″ MacBook?
Picture of an iPhone, Macbook, and a 42″ LCD with approx the same scene from Lost lined up so that they “appear” the same size. I’ll let someone with more time figure out the pixel arc view resolution differences, but basically each screen can provide a similar viewing experience. The blurry iPhone screen? Evidence that this is not a photoshop fake as the camera is focused on the distant screen (some 4 meters away).
