Mont Blanc makes unbelievably gorgeous pens, but they also make terrific ink, high-quality points and smart refill technology. The pens cost hundreds of dollars; the refills, about $12. You can cut down a Mont Blanc refill with an exacto-knife and reap all its benefits inside an inexpensive Pilot G2.
The G2 is already a terrific gel pen, but do its refills have “a silicon plug insert to prevent air bubbles”? Are they “hand-inspected under a microscope” and made to submit to “a writing test to ensure it has perfect writing properties,” including whether they can “write up to 10,000 meters”?
Yes, much of this is manuscript gadget-speak designed to justify the pens’ exorbitant cost. There’s still no cheap hack to let either the Mont Blanc or the Pilot G2 run apps or record audio. And if you use this hack, you won’t have that beautiful Mont Blanc exterior proclaiming to the world how much better your writing instrument is than theirs.
But as Kingant points out, if you use a G2 with a clear case, you’ll be able to see the Mont Blanc label on the refill inside. For less than $15 and a few minutes of your time, that is not bad at all.
When we heard that the Motorola Droid 2 was the latestAndroid handset to nab the ancient magic of frequency modulated audio using Droid X files, we just had to give it a try, and sure enough, if you’ve got root, the FM Radio app can be yours with a quick download and just a few lines of code. Before you run off to void your warranty, however, you should know it’s got a fairly desirable feature missing — it only plays audio out of the right earphone. But hey, if we’re going old school, we might as well go all the way, right? Excuse us while we go listen to some glorious monoaural sound. Files and instructions at our source links, immediately below.
The new Apple TV could be Steve Jobs’ best sleight-of-hand trick yet.
During his modest introduction of the device, Jobs called the Apple TV “one more hobby.” But a closer look at the code and the hardware powering the Apple TV reveals that there’s a lot more going on under the hood than the CEO shared.
Interestingly, Jobs didn’t mention that Apple TV runs iOS, the same operating system running on its flagship product, the iPhone, and some other big hits — the iPod Touch and iPad. And there’s more, too: The Apple TV’s software may already be jailbroken, and some hidden software should eventually allow you to share the Apple TV’s media with other iOS devices.
These secret ingredients could be the recipe Apple needs to shake up the television industry. For years, Apple executives have labeled the set-top box a “hobby” product because of its mild success compared to blockbuster sellers like the iPhone and iPod. Now that Apple TV has been revamped into a streaming rental service with an arsenal of stealth features, maybe Apple has a chance to change the TV business — if not today, perhaps later.
“The most important hint of Apple’s real ambitions in the living room come from AirPlay, which puts iPhones and iPads in the driver’s seat and makes the TV just an output device for the Apple ecosystem,” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, in a recent e-mail statement. “Expect Apple to gradually push more and more in that direction, but as of this moment in 2010, Apple has not yet made a significant play for control of the TV.”
Here, we round up the juicy tidbits we’ve heard about Apple’s mysterious new set-top box.
iOS and third-party app support
There’s more than enough evidence proving that the Apple TV runs iOS. Dispelling any doubts, Apple recently posted a build of iOS 4.1 specifically for the Apple TV.
This piece of information about iOS is important because of a new feature called AirPlay, which streams media from your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to the Apple TV. When Jobs demonstrated AirPlay, he only showed the feature working with an iPad’s built-in video player, photo app and music library. Now that we know Apple TV runs iOS, it’s likely that third-party apps such as MLB at Bat or ABC Player will be able stream media to the set-top box, too.
DaringFireball blogger John Gruber confirmed that an AirPlay button is showing up in the MLB at Bat app, and he adds that apps using the built-in media controller will be able to integrate AirPlay.
Long story short, you’ll be able to wirelessly stream media from some third-party apps straight to your Apple TV with an AirPlay button. AirPlay is shaping up to be Apple’s secret weapon to reshape home entertainment.
In addition to AirPlay, the fact that Apple TV is running iOS means that — in principle, at least — it may someday be able to run applications from the iTunes App Store. For now, that capability is not included in Apple TV, but the underlying operating system certainly supports it, so Apple might open a TV App Store in a future software update.
Jailbreaking hacks
Third-party app support will probably be limited for the Apple TV, but that’s where the jailbreakers come in. In the same way that we’re able to override restrictions on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with a jailbreak, we should be able to run unauthorized apps on the Apple TV — something Jobs would never advertise, of course.
In fact, hackers already have a head start, because a tool called Shatter, which was used to jailbreak the newest iPod Touch, already works with the Apple TV, according to the iPhone Dev Team. That means we should be expecting hackers to code some unauthorized apps soon to unlock additional capabilities such as video conferencing via your Apple TV.
On top of that, existing hacks for the old Apple TV should work, too. Dev Team member Will Strafach explained that “the new AppleTV OS seems to be a mashup of the old AppleTV OS and iOS,” meaning “frappliances,” plug-ins that add functionality to the old Apple TV, should work as well.
‘Lowtide’ app
The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Erica Sadun, a popular iOS programmer, took a close look at the Apple TV’s software and discovered that it runs an application called Lowtide — the software containing the set-top box’s media interface.
Sadun dug deeper and found lines of code that suggest that Lowtide might eventually be extended to other iOS devices. In other words, you should be able to share media from the Apple TV to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, whereas originally we thought we’d only be able to do the converse with AirPlay. This functionality would be comparable to a Slingbox or an EyeTV.
Lowtide isn’t readily available for Apple’s iOS mobile devices yet, but iOS developer Dustin Howett has already managed to load Lowtide on an iPod touch running iOS 4.1, demonstrated in the video above. He recommended against doing it yourself, though, unless you’re ready to reformat your iPhone on a regular basis just to turn it back into a phone.
Sometimes hailed as the poor man’s iPhone, the iPod Touch has been a popular device for Apple geeks craving the iOS experience sans the hefty monthly fees. However, a new accessory promises to give the Touch the whole she-bang without the contract.
The Peel, a protective case packed with a SIM card, dock connector and battery, is designed to expand the iPod Touch into a device capable of placing phone calls and sending text messages. Chinese company Yoison Technology developed the gadget, and U.S. company GoSolar announced this month is has signed an agreement to bring the Peel to the states.
“As soon as they arrive, we’ll begin distributing demonstration models to retail buyers across the country,” said GoSolarUSA CEO Tyson Rohde, in a statement. “The amount of interest in this product that we’ve received from distributors has been staggering.”
GoSolar did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but its website suggests that the iPod Touch must be hacked (i.e. jailbroken) in order for it to operate as a phone. And any iOS user is familiar with the fact that Apple regularly wipes out jailbreak hacks with every new iOS update. So in short, as cool as this solution sounds, it sounds less practical than simply using the iPod Touch as a VOIP web phone with third-party apps available through the App Store.
GoSolar did not list a price for the Peel. However, Yoison was selling the gadget for $388 RMB in China, or around $57.
If you’re searching for a way to wreak havoc on an ex-lover or a rotten business partner, look no further than the video above. The 8-minute tutorial walks you through the steps to hack an iPad to run Windows 95.
That’s just wrong.
We’ve seen people hack iPhones and Windows Mobile phones to run the Android OS, which could prove useful. But if you’re even thinking about installing Windows 95 (not even XP) on an iPad, you’re just twisted. Demented. Messed up. Hellbent on revenge. And a nerd.
This article was written on March 07, 2007 by CyberNet.
Web Browser Wednesday
There are all kinds of Firefox tips and tricks available on the Web, and when I come across some of the cool ones (many in forums) I jot them down real quick. That way I don’t have to post about just one of the tricks, and instead I can show you a whole compilation of them. Previously I put together lengthy Firefox 2 tweak guide, and none of the tips that I am about to mention below are in that guide.
For starters, I want to mention that a lot of the tweaks below use custom CSS scripts that need to be integrated with Firefox. You can follow these directions on installing those scripts, or you can also use the Stylish extension which makes it a lot easier. When using the extension you just have to open the extension options and select “Write” to create a new script that you want to use:
Now let’s move on to the tips…
—Removing Menu Items—
Sometimes the menu items (File, Edit, etc…) just seem to get in the way and you never seem to use them. I’m sure many people, for instance, never use the Help menu. Or, if you have an extension managing your bookmarks, you might never use the Bookmarks menu. It is really simple to hide certain menu items using the Stylish extension mentioned above. Just create a new script and insert the following code:
The “50px” in both lines represents the width (in pixels) that you want the Search Box to be. I would probably use around 200px because 50px is pretty small.
—Block Blinking Text—
It is a sad day when you come across a site that still uses blinking text to try and get the reader’s attention. I still see them from time to time, but with a simple about:config trick we can prevent it from happening. If you’re not familiar with the about:config screen please see this quick tutorial I put together.
All you have to do is open the about:config screen, find the option browser.blink_allowed and double-click on it so that the value will change to false.
—Make JavaScript HyperLinks Noticeable—
I like to be conscious about the links that I am clicking on for a site, and I’m a even more careful when I see a JavaScript link on a site that I’m not familiar with. For that reason you should think about making the JavaScript links more noticeable, and an easy way to do that is altering the cursor when you hover over them. In this example the cursor will change to a crosshair whenever you hover over a hyperlink that actually contains JavaScript:
a[href^="javascript:"]{ cursor: crosshair; }
The result when hovering over a JavaScript hyperlink would look like this:
Find As You Type is one of my favorite features in Firefox. This feature will start searching a page for text as you type it, which makes finding something specific on a page a lot easier.
I like having the Find As You Type automatically begin as soon as I start typing so on every Firefox installation I always go in and change the setting to enable this:
Some of you may not like having it work like that, so there is a way that you can use the “Find As You Type” without setting that option. If you want to initiate a Find As You Type just press the forward slash key (“/”) on the keyboard and begin typing your query. You should see a box popup on the bottom of the browser window that displays the characters that are currently being searched for:
That Quick Find will search all of the text on the page, but what if you’re looking for a link? No problem, instead of typing a forward slash press the apostrophe (‘) key and that will initiate a Quick Find that will only search links. When would this be useful? Sometimes I use it if I have a hard time finding a download link on a site, in which case I’ll do the Quick Find (just searching links) for the word “download.”
—Overview—
Those are the tweaks that I have accumulated over the past few weeks, so I hope that you enjoyed them. One of the things that makes Firefox so great is the customizability that it includes. The deeper you dig, the more tricks you’ll find. Even with everything that I have found up to now, I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface.
In time I’m sure I’ll find more, but if you have any of your own tweaks that you use, make sure you let us know in the comments below!
Timur Civan is a director of photography for movies, and a photographer. He’s also a tinkerer, and he got his hands on an old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat, a hand cranked movie-camera lens from 1908. You see it above, wedded to his Canon 5D MkII. But where did it come from?
Civan got a call from his friend, known mysteriously only as “a Russian lens technician”:
He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside anther lens this gem. A circa 1908 (possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning, mostly brass, and not nearly as much dust or fungus as one would think after sitting in a box for over a hundred years. This lens is a piece of motion picture history, and at this point rare beyond words. So I say to him, “Wow… what do you have in mind?” he smiles, and says, (in the thickest Russian accent you can imagine) “I can make this fit EF you know…”
The results are astonishing. This century-old hunk of glass and brass makes a great picture. There’s vignetting at the edges, a softness and a lack of biting contrast. There’s also a color-shift in the non-black-and-white images. In short, the lens adds all the tweaks you might do in post-processing to Holga-fy your pictures. Civan is planning on shooting some footage with the lens, too, which is its purpose after all, and promises to share the results on the Cinema 5D forums, where he posted his photographs.
But aside from the great pictures, and the wonderful story of the mysterious Russian, we can learn something from this tale. Camera-tech comes and goes, but photography is really just about light. That’s why you should buy the best lenses you can afford. They will probably last longer than you.
Mikey Wally is serious about bikes. He’s also serious about gadgets, and he snapped this shot of an amazing but rather dangerous-looking iPad-powered bike stereo at June’s Subway Series Ride in Los Angles
The iPad handlebar mount, seen here on a BMX, appears to be as sturdy as the bike itself. It looks like nothing more than a sign-holder from a conference-center, with rubber strips slid in to offer a little protection against the rattling steel (take a peek at the full-sized picture, though, and you’ll see it is custom-built). It also shows just how perfect a ten-inch screen is for in-bike entertainment. Sure, here it’s just using iTunes to feed the stereo, but maps, movies and anything else would work great on the big (ish) screen.
So how serious is Mikey about his bicycles? First, he lives in LA and doesn’t use a car. Second, according to his Flickr profile, last summer he rode from New York to LA. That’s as bad-ass as the 40 Glocc track playing on the bike stereo.
“Dear Sir or Madam,” the email began, and we almost deleted it at once, but then we realized the gentleman who wrote that line was hawking the Yosion Apple Peel 520. A quick visit to his website did nothing to allay our lingering suspicions — it appeared to be a hastily-cobbled cash-in through and through — but still, the prospect of an iPod touch case with cellular capabilities sorely tempted our wallet. We evaded the siren call and left Peel520.net without attempting a purchase, but noticed on our way out several references to the practically identical website for the MicroSIMCutter. Google tells us their owners are one and the same, so if you bought one of those sim-cutting devices (not to be confused with the Cut My Sim) and got your product as promised, we suppose you’re liable to get a good deal here. But if you have qualms, well — wait for Go Solar to formally bring the product to market, or else steer clear.
There have been two mysteries about the new Apple TV. 1) Was it still running the old Apple TV’s “Back Row” version of OS X? 2) Just how small is its new pared-down hard drive? Mystery #1 has been solved: just like the iPhone and iPad, Apple TV is now running iOS 4.
This is important for two reasons:
Right now, there are no apps (and no app marketplace) for Apple TV. Now we know there could be — and not on some imagined next-generation device, but this one, in the not-too-distant future.
The new Apple TV could be amenable to the same jailbreaking techniques that have worked on the iPhone and iPad — so even if Apple doesn’t start a TV app store, someone could start their own if they’re willing to live on the wild side.
Both of these consequences, though, are still a teensy bit dependent on the answer to that other mystery. Until we get a teardown, nobody’s sure exactly how much storage the new Apple TV is packing. There might not be room enough to store a whole bunch of apps, even if you could sideload them through that teensy micro-USB port.
Apple stores configuration information about how various iOS devices can communicate with other devices over its dock connector in a file called USBDeviceConfiguration.plist. Entries in this file have revealed early evidence of new iPhone and iPod models, and an entry labelled “iProd” later turned out to be the first iPad.
An entry in iOS 3.2 was referred to as iProd2,1, and we suspected that it was likely an early prototype of a next-gen iPad. However, an updated configuration file in iOS 4.2b1 reveals the same numeric product ID is attached to an entry for AppleTV2,1, referring to the second major hardware revision of the Apple TV. This presents solid evidence that the new Apple TV is running iOS proper, instead of the other customized version of Mac OS X used for the previous one—that should save Apple from duplicated development effort.
So if Apple TV is running iOS now, why not announce it and invite people to start making apps for it? Wouldn’t that get everyone more excited about the relaunch of Apple TV? I could think of two reasons why they wouldn’t:
There’s no natural interface to run existing iOS apps on Apple TV: no touchscreens TVs, definitely no multitouch, no accelerometers, no camera, etc. Until one or more of those things change, or somebody writes some nifty code to make a remote control do the same thing, you can’t port apps over. If that changes, it’s off to the races.
The App Store is already fragmented; not all apps work on every device, or even the same device running different versions of iOS. Throwing Apple TV in the mix, with a bunch of TV-specific applications that might or might not work terribly well on the iPad or iPhone, just makes the store more confusing. And Apple’s trying to make its TV products, especially, as simple as possible.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
