Category Archives: Apple

I was doing some drawing tonight on my Macbook Pro using my Wacom graphics tablet. I left the machine running when I had my dinner and when I returned I was unable to wake the machine from sleep. After trying the keyboard, mouse and power button to wake the machine I unplugged the tablet and tried the power button. This time the machine started a long pause on a blank blue screen. When the machine started I noticed the battery had been half depleted and the CPU/GPU were both at 65c. The backtrace error report seemed to indicate the bluetooth module which is odd because I wasn’t using any bluetooth devices. Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0 Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies): com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothFamily(2.0f20)@0x9af000->0x9e5fff BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task

I witnessed today how easily the tiff exploit in the ipod touch could be used to install software. It was both impressive and scary at the same time. The jailbreakme.com team claim they’ve patched the tiff exploit once the installer application has been placed on the device, which I guess gives relief from future attacks. It’s a very slick process and I didn’t see any problems with the ipod afterwards.

I was surprised to find that the fairly expensive Airport Extreme suffered from crashing every few hours. I have recently aquired one with the hope that it would solve the problem I had with my Dlink Gamerlounge DGL4300. The DGL4300 suffers from a problem whereby whenever I’m doing heavy copying across the internal wired network, other network access would be completely unavailable until the copying action was complete. This was getting to the point where it was just getting ridiculous and I hoped the Airport Extreme which now supported Gigabit would solve my problems. Copying files over the network seems to work fine with the Airport Extreme but at it introduced a new problem where the router would drop out entirely overnight and require a hard reset to bring it back. The solution it seems was to turn off IPv6 … Continue reading →

After installing Leopard I had a trial attempt at creating a widget using Dashcode. True to the blurb I was able to make a countdown widget to a specific date/time within minutes and had applied several customisations. It really has simplied the process of creating simple widgets and allows people with extremely low programming experience to produce useful little programs without getting their fingers dirty. I hope to use this to springboard into some more interesting widget development. If you’re looking for the Dashcode application it isn’t installed by default. You’ll find it on the Leopard dvd and once installed it is located in the /developer/applications directory.