Category: Personal

Playing catch up

Personal

I’ve yet again managed to allow my website to plummet off the deep end. I let it go for a few good reasons though. I had been extremely busy with Holdfire, and ended up focusing most of my energy towards it to get things accomplished. As usual it took me a little longer than anticipated, but regardless I got it done.

8187415 The past few months have been pretty decent. My previous relationship ended, only to have someone else come back into my life again (on my accord.) May 8th I celebrated my 23rd birthday with my best friend Amy, Steve, and another good friend, Davia. Although the best part was receiving a text from Steve telling me I had a delivery. So I went to my front door only to open it and see a package from ProFlowers. I opened it up and it was a gorgeous bouqet of 24 roses that were yellow, pale orange, pale pink and red. This alone was probably the only thing I needed to enjoy the rest of my birthday. We ended up going to Houlihans for dinner, and then to Durbins for drinks and good times.

Steve and I went to a park for a picnic on Monday after dropping off his Macbook Pro at the Apple store to get fixed. It was a gorgeous day out, and what made it better was that he ended up asking me to be his girlfriend. One thing I have to admit is that I have honestly never had a guy ask me out to his face. Majority of the time it was maybe through the internet, or a text message but nothing as great as this. Things have only gotten better since then. He’s the first boyfriend in my life to have actually taken the time out to hang out with my friends, and receive the seal of approval from the one person who mean everything to me, my best friend Amy. My mom and dad love him, and he’s gotten along quite well with my siblings.

Aside from that we’ve been up to so much. We went and saw Star Trek last weekend, and went to the Angels & Demons 12:01am showing on Friday. Last night we went out with my friends and his brother and friends to a local bar and had an absolute blast. I believe Friday we’re going to the 12:01am for Terminator Salvation so that’ll be flipping sweet.

So, how’s that for actually updating my website and actually writing about something personal rather than some bullshit iPhone jailbreaking, or what software alternatives I’ve come across. I’m definitely going to try to update this more… That and I’m actually working on getting this site fixed up and active again.

Trying new things out

Personal

For years I’ve stuck to the same software. Firefox for a browser, Thunderbird for email, iTunes for music, and Quicktime for movies. Recently I’ve gotten pretty tired of Thunderbird for it’s lack of other in-depth features. Then I ended up stumbling upon Postbox (Mac and PC). It’s built off of Thunderbird, but definitely has more bang for it. The biggest thing I liked was that when you loaded up an email in the bottom pane, it would have a sidebar of any media or links included in it that you can access right away without having to skim through the email to find. There’s a lot more features, but you know, I’m just a tad too lazy to blog about it.

After that I decided I wanted to try to find other replacements for some of my software. I’ve replaced iTunes with Songbird (Windows XP or Vista), although the main factor being that iTunes was not too fond of Vista 64bit. My favorite part is that it’s built around Firefox so I can download other add-ons to enhance my experience. It’s linked to my last.fm account (which is integrated already), and I’ve got a few others like coverflow, showing last.fm data about the artist playing, and a few others for skinning. It has no CD ripping or burning features yet, although that’s on their to-do list. That was another problem with 64bit and iTunes, the CD rip/burn was inoperable. 😐

My HD capture card came with proprietary encoding software from Arcsoft which was really lacking in any major functionality. The biggest problem was that encoding took longer than it should have. Armando, ended up finding an awesome free alternative to it, Super ©. It’s perfect because I needed to be able to encode to MOV with H264 video and AAC audio, and be able to chose the resolutions for it and fine tune a few other specs. Encoding is also about 75% quicker than what I experienced with Arcsoft’s prepacked bologna.

Majority of my interest in trying out new software has mainly developed after I joined Wakoopa.com. It tracks the software (and webapps) that you use, and charts them for you. They do have up a recommended section for you and while it’s in beta, it hasn’t given me some decent choices. Majority of those were based on popularity and I was already aware of, so from just randomly browsing other users’ profiles I was able to find some other software to look at.

Other than the few I’ve changed over I still haven’t (or won’t) find alternatives to my main programs like Photoshop, After Effects, Intype (well technically this replaced Notepad++), and Firefox. 😛

Jailbreaking your iPhone 3G (or iTouch.)

Personal

I’ve had my iPhone 3G since September, and for months I had been reading articles on jailbreaking the iPhone. It felt like so much work when reading through all of the articles found, but the process was so easy and quick. Since I’m using a Windows machine, I went ahead and decided to use QuickPWN to jailbreak my phone. If you’re using a Mac, you’ll want to Pwnage.

img_0028 It’s not really pertinent to include the steps of what I did with Quickpwn. It was a matter of plugging the iPhone into the USB port, and letting the software recognize the phone. Then you just follow the instructions listed (holding the power button a few seconds, then power+home, then home), and voila, it boots up with your jailbroken iPhone.

You’ll want to backup just in case something goes awry during the process. However, I had no problems at all. Apps, contacts, and all files stayed in tact and no corruption. The main purpose for doing this was because I wanted to take advantage of a bunch of apps that are available through Cydia. Installer.app is included as well, but I prefer what is offered through Cydia at the moment.

img_0033 One thing I would recommend before you download any app on your device, is that you google it online. I didn’t do this, and had some issues that I can’t resolve unless I restore my iPhone. There are some that are going to be buggy, and might not work entirely as it should, and there are some that are going to interfere with other apps that may be loaded as well. One website/forum I have been relying on heavily to find out any issues or recommendations has been modmyi.com which has a bunch of mods for iPhone, iPod, Mac and who knows what else. They are also very involved with apps through Cydia, so there is definitely a chance you can get help for something, or even request an app.

One app that I would stay away is called Kate (RiPDev). Prior to configuring i I went to make a call only to have the mobilephone.app crash on me after 5 seconds of loading. It kept doing this repeatedly since at first I though it was a bad jailbreak, but then I remember I installed Kate. So I went to remove the app, only to still have to problem. Perplexed, I added it back. I then went and googled mobilephone.app, and one of the first results was from modmyi.com: mobilephone.app crash. Someone mentioned that Kate was the culprit on their phone and provided suggestions on how to remove it.

I’ve been through a bunch of threads and have been unsuccessful at this point. Granted, I did get mobilephone.app working once I applied a trial license to Kate. However, once that trial expires you receive no warning and then you better get used to things crashing again. I’ve tried a few of the fixes to undo Kate’s fuckup, but none of them worked, and I didn’t want to resort to restoring. So I went ahead and just purchase a license for it, but don’t go through the trouble I did. Just stay away from it altogether.

img_0030 Granted, the largest advantage of having Kate installed was being able to modify a lot of settings on the phone (but I should mention that there are certains apps that will achieve various effects–you just need to search for their names to get ’em.) But with Kate you can have 5 icons in your dock (there’s another app that can do this, but I don’t know it off hand), change the icons used for a good portion of apps, add privacy settings (eg: no content shown when a text message is received), and a bunch of others I have yet to take advantage of. So if you are interested in paying for the app, there is a chance is will be of value to you. Otherwise you get a short trial (I think a week) so if you don’t want to pay for it, skip out on it.

Some of the other apps I have downloaded and enjoy:

Live.com Spambot, I hate you.

Personal

A few weeks ago I read Jem’s blog “Live.com Fake SERP Referrals Are Pissing Me Off” but at the time never had the issue myself. Well, shortly after her post I’ve been having the Live.com spambot hitting up a couple of my domain with one-keyword search referrals. 100% of the Live.com “traffic” has been from spoofed referrals, and it’s not stopping.

I really don’t care to contact Microsoft in regards to the issue–I’m just going to go all out and block the bot from accessing those websites. I’ll end up settings up a robots.txt file, but apparently that might not be enough as some user(s) are still experiencing issues with the bot avoiding the robots.txt file; Time to dig up the IP addresses being used so I can deny those too.

If I honestly had some real results coming from Live.com’s search, I’d be apprehensive to blog anything associated with it, but so far I’ve yet to ever receive one legitimate search referral from it. I frequent my Mint statistics more than I should on a daily basis, so I can see what keywords I need to work on.. I just can’t afford to waste my time with fake hits. Stop skewing up my shit!

I found a nice little tutorial on block bots on various levels ranging from an .htaccess redirect that sends them back to their own site, blocking their IP address, and a couple other variations. An anonymous comment from another entry, Live.com’s Referrer Spam Has Left Me In Despair provides a snippet you can add to your .htaccess file to also block the bot, given that it seems to ignore any robots.txt settings.


SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^msnbot" bad_bot
<Limit GET POST>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>

Present Crisis Avoided!

Personal

3133555915_286cbd4a5c_b For the first time in years I actually went Christmas shopping before Christmas Eve. Okay, so it was the day before but that still counts, right? I even went despite the fact that it had snowed 6.5″ throughout the day, and was still falling on the ground. Not to mention that it would eventually turn into sleet and add about 1.5″ of ice to everything.

My youngest sister Nicolle wanted to tag along, and even though I had to shop for her I was definitely looking forward to her company. Seeing as though her and I are the closest, and we always seem to have fun it was a no-brainer. We ventured out to Target so we could take a look around to see what was on sale, and played it by ear. Picked out a new coffee pot for my grandma, and was a nice one at that! Got a few odds-n-ends for the kitchen as little stocking stuffers for dad. For Nicolle’s gifts I found this cute gold makeup bag with two little cases to go inside of it… So that’s when I told her to run along and go buy us some Starbucks. Ended up filling it up with about $60 worth of makeup and a few hair accessories. Hopefully she’ll like it.

After that we headed off to Best Buy to pick up a thing or two, which I refuse to mention here for Armando’s safety! It should have been a 5 minute run but it turned into 30 minutes since we both ended up playing a bit of Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2. By that time the snow was piling up even more, although it was starting to turn into sleet. We only needed to hit up a couple more stores, and I left my Paypal credit card at home, so we went back home. Spent 30 minutes shoveling our monstrosity of a driveway, and made our way back out. Went to Kohl’s and oh gosh, so many sales going on. 3133555599_894640c591_b

I’m a sucker for huge sales so I definitely spent time wondering around the entire place. Found some nice cubic zirconia earrings for her (she likes those huge ones, blech!) that were 60% off, and a Fantasy by Britney Spears perfume set that was 50% off regular price. Only person left for gifts at that point was just my dad. I was still a bit stuck on what to get him, but he was adamant upon having new sweatshirts, t-shirts, and socks so why deny the man some comfy clothes? T-shirts were $6 a piece (from $12), and some sweatpants that were 50% off. Although the one upset was that the set of Bobby Flay BBQ tools were slightly damaged. It was $75 normally, but again on sale for $30. It was almost too good to pass up, but Bed, Bath & Beyond was next door.

3134375934_ccca75f3f2_b I think my entire total at Kohl’s was just $97. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use my 15% off coupon since it had to be with a Kohl’s charge card, which I didn’t have… 🙁 But hey, I did get $10 back, since they had a promotion for $10 for every $50 spent. I was still feeling like my dad’s presents were shortchanged compared to my mom’s new Tom Tom GPS so Bed, Bath & Beyond was next. Didn’t find much there especially since we were keeping on eye out for a Fiestware milk jug thingie but didn’t find such thing. Picked up some more wooden spoons (and ironically enough while dad was cooking some pierogi and smoked Kielbasa he asked where all the wooden spoons were!), a BBQ set, and silicone spatulas.

When we were waiting in line to check out, you can’t help but be completely focused on the items all around the endcaps of the registers. Candies, little random trinkets, those “As Seen On TV” items, and god knows what else. But my damn eye had to fall on the PedEgg. Yeah, seriously, how many other items have I seen on TV that I’ve wanted buy? The Magic Bullet, SmoothAway, ShamWOW (dad said he was buying this for mom as a gag gift but it was mainly sold out in stores! ha!), Debbie Myer GreenBag…. I could go on but you get the point!

3134219629_75df7e8043_b So I ended up picking up the PedEgg. I only did that because a month or so ago I was in her room while the infomercial came on and was just watching it in awe… Primarily due to all the shavings that they’d dump out of that damn PedEgg. Although the reaction wasn’t as classic as when we saw the infomercial for the Kinoki foot pads which looked like your feet was on it’s period… All in all I’m pretty ecstatic with the gifts picked up, so I’m hoping everyone likes it. I think I’m most looking forward to my mom’s reaction to her GPS, since she thinks she’s not getting it! K well it’s time to finishing wrapping up the presents, and then off to take a shower (so you know, I don’t look like shit when I’m forced to open presents on video camera…)