I don’t think I know any Mac user who has ever complained about audio streams being inaudible on their computers. Maybe I have too much ear wax covering my ear drums. Anyway, since I’m possibly the only one facing this problem, what I do is I simply bump the volume to 150% or more on VLC(it lets me go all the way up to 1200% if I want to). Problem solved for all the audio and video that I have saved on my computer. But what do I do for the video that loads on sites that use Flash player(unfortunately, a whole lot of them)? I play it with VLC, of course!

Because of the weird behavior of Flash player on Safari, all the content I stream seems to vanish from its cache folder the moment I see it finish playing the first time. This is a pain because I’ll be forced to download the video all over again if I liked it the first time. In the beginning, I just ignored the problem. But then I just started downloading the video instead of letting Flash player save it and purge it later. This is easy – I find the page where the video is loading on my Activity window and double click on the stream to download it. Then I simply close the window where the Flash player is busy downloading the file to cache. I don’t know how this works on other browsers, but when I download a file using Safari it’s placed inside a package in my Downloads folder. To locate the package, I just right click on it’s icon in my Downloads window and click on ‘Show in Finder’. After the Finder window pops open with the package selected, it’s very simple to see its contents – right clicking on the package and clicking on ‘Show Package Contents’ does the trick. I always see two files inside the package – a plist file and the file that I’m downloading. If that file is the one I would like to stream, I just open it with VLC and watch the video while I’m downloading it. Since this plays like everything else does, I can use all the advanced controls that I normally enable. For me, it’s mainly the volume boost. But I sometimes also play around with the crop and aspect ratio options.

I mentioned that Flash behaves this way on Safari and a few other browsers. But Firefox still lets me access these files from its cache folders. So why shouldn’t I use Firefox? The main reason – I prefer Safari over other browsers and I don’t want to open another web browser just for this. The other reason would be that it’s extremely difficult to sift out garbage files from my cache folder and find the one I need. Since there are usually several files having similar sizes, opening many of them to spot the right one is too tedious a task for me. When I used Windows, it wasn’t this easy. I was forced to find it the hard way. Now, since time is of more value to me than it was then, I prefer to do it this way. I still see others spend time visiting third party sites to get them to send them direct HTTP download links via email but I think that’s still too much work.

Agree with Moby’s short post as well as most of the comments(if some of the things they’ve stated are true).

A relative of mine stayed at this hotel in Vadodara. He could even order his food, get room service and pay bills using an app they’ve built for the device. Wish they had posted screenshots of the app on their website.

Get Lyrical is this beautiful zero-configuration application for Mac OS X that retrieves lyrics and adds them to your tracks on iTunes. In the past, when I’ve tried to use similar apps on Windows I’ve always been greeted with termination errors. I don’t know why it took me this long to search for this app. Now I can sing along with all the tracks on my iPod.

Prashanth came to my house last morning to unlock his beautiful new iPhone 3G that his dad got him from Germany. Unfortunately, the contract-free iPhone wasn’t unlocked as he thought it would have been. This was disturbing because now he knew that once he unlocked his iPhone, he wouldn’t be able to use OS 3.0 on the 17th of this month and would instead have to kneel down in front of the iPhone Dev Team each time he installs an update. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any other option. What was more disturbing was that we couldn’t unlock the device even after spending a good five hours trying to. We were not aware about the changes Apple had made to the firmware to prevent us from using it with unsupported SIM cards. Only when we stumbled upon modmyi’s forums did we realize that we were wasting our time trying to unlock an iPhone that came with bootloader 5.9. We passed the ADC firmware ipsw of iPhone OS 2.2.1 through the PwnageTool several times but none of the suggested customizations seemed to work. Yellowsn0w would install each time and it accepted the SIM card each time too. Obviously, something else was wrong.

In all the guides we used, including the one on the iPhone Dev Team’s blog, we were asked to make sure that we were using Modem Firmware 2.28 but we didn’t bother checking as all these guides said that the ipsw that the PwnageTool would create automatically downgraded the firmware so that it would work. So while reading about bootloader 5.9 we saw that 5.8 had a vulnerability that allowed modem firmware downgrades. Obviously, this bug had been fixed on 5.9. So it was kind of pointless to spend time any more time on this. But that didn’t stop us; we did a Google search with the keywords ‘5.9′, ‘2.30.03′ and ‘unlock’ and we were redirected to YouTube where many people were advertising their SIM card adaptor hacks to get the phone to work with unsupported carriers. Shipping these $20 devices to India would cost us $50 or more, so we dropped the idea. Just as we were closing the tab, Prashanth spotted an eBay India listing on Google that was promoting one of these adaptors. When we called the seller, he said 5.9 had rendered his adaptor unusable and he said he would contact us as soon as he would come up with a fix. He also warned us about the other adaptors being sold on eBay as he said they wouldn’t work either. But we did call another fellow and he said his adaptor would work just fine with 2.2.1 and 5.9. I was pleasantly surprised as both these sellers were able to articulate really well unlike the other eBay sellers I’ve spoken to, though it was a little funny to hear both these competing sellers claim that they were iPhone devs to gain our trust. Both were contradicting what the other person had to say. Now Prashanth is running to Gaffar market to try out this adaptor hoping it will unlock the horrendous software lock on his new iPhone before he buys it from this dude in Bangalore. I was a little frustrated for not being able to achieve anything yesterday which is why this sudden post, but Prashanth will probably write a few thousand lines more on this as he didn’t think his iPhone would turn out to be this expensive an iPod touch. Plus, I’ve not been able to give even a hint about how intensely unpleasant he feels right now.

Update: Prashanth tells me that he was able to unlock his iPhone, not using the SIM adaptor but instead the Vietnamese way. The device used to program the hardware that holds his SIM card was the size of modern laser printer or Shuttle PC. Apparently, this guy was part of the iPhone Dev Team too and was working on the 3.0 PwnageTool. In India, all the people who unlocks iPhones think they can call themselves developers of the tools they use.

Update 2: Prashanth said all he wanted here. Not nearly as negative as I expected the post to be.

Looks like the wait for the beta is almost over. The good things like auto-update and incognito-mode seem to be working just fine. You might want to read the developer release privacy notes before you hit the download button though.

After reading this, doing a Bing search before you name your kid sounds like a good idea.

Bing helps you make the choice. They couldn’t be more honest.

When I know I’m writing a blog post because it is something I need to do rather than something I want to do, I know something is wrong. When I feel this way, I feel like cooking up some story or article that I know people using search engines would want to read. What I write doesn’t need to be about something that is of interest to me, it has to be about something that interests the thousand visitors I expect to get when I hit the publish button. When I see these visitors, I start thinking I’m a great entity on the web. I then feel like writing many more blog posts that I have no knowledge about. This process continues and I learn about CPM and advertising. I place a few advertisements on my blog. I see that nobody clicks on them. Then I place a few more. Eventually I can’t distinguish between what I write and what these external scripts place on my blog. I see my blog traffic skyrocket. I know my PayPal account balance is going up by the second. Now even though I’m this big idiot doing nothing useful online, I see that people start to think all the copy-paste content of mine is something I’ve produced myself. People start sucking up to me and say they want to become like me. I know these people aren’t lying because the money that this brings in is as inviting to them as it is for me.

You know who I am, don’t you?

I am today’s blogger.

I can’t do what bloggers did in the past. I can’t write anything genuine because it isn’t cool. It doesn’t help advertisers. It doesn’t help me. I write because I’m forced to. If I don’t write I wont be able to write in the future. I want to write in the future, therefore I write now. The first time you read my blog is also the last time you read it. So why not make this a good experience for both of us? Scratch that. Why not make your stay here as expensive as I can for my advertisers? I know I can get you to click on the link on my left sidebar or the one in the next line, so I’m not going to lose that opportunity. If you don’t do that I’ll make sure I place another ad spot after you leave for the benefit of my next visitor. Like it or not, it makes no difference to me whatsoever. Signing off, time for me to go and act like a social media expert on Twitter.

Inspiring. I thought I had posted this earlier, but I couldn’t find it in my archives.

With help from the Iconfactory, a step in the right direction.

I’ve been hearing a lot about DreamHost’s new Apps service lately. Today, I took the time to try out the service myself. It turns out that most of what I’ve heard or read about the service isn’t true. Mislead by their advertising and a few blog posts like this and this, I somehow created a mental image of an amazing service that would fulfil all my blog hosting needs, if I was ever forced to switch to such a service. But sadly, the pain of using the service started almost immediately after I logged in and tried upgrading to version 2.7.1 from the WordPress dashboard.

There are different things that people look for when they start a blog. Some want to force their visitors to waste time on their blogs. Some care a lot about how their blogs look and the level of customisation allowed. Some want freedom. DreamHost Apps offers none of these things. The only plus point of using DreamHost Apps is that you can map your domain to their servers for free and play around with a restricted version of the WordPress.org code that they host. The service doesn’t allow FTP access; this automatically cripples the theme and plugin installation web interface. It doesn’t even let you update existing plugins or core files. You can keep waiting for DreamHost Apps to perform the upgrade to a newer version of WordPress and the plugins they host, but it will never happen when you want it to. Then comes backups – you can create database backups and export all the textual content from your blog but since you don’t have access to the wp-content folder, you cannot create a backup of the media that you attach with your posts. All of that will be lost in DreamHost’s current setup forever if you choose not to switch to their premium hosting solution which runs for about $10 a month. Forcing users to switch is the main aim anyway.

I have now realized that there is no such thing as a free hosting service and hoping that such a service would come up without limits is being a little too optimistic about the whole thing. I think Blogger is the service I would switch to if I ever had to. It wont be FREE like the WordPress.org code I host right now but I’m sure I’ll be willing to live with the amount of freedom the service gives it’s users right now. All I’ll probably do is write a casual entry or two anyway. Another reason would be that Blogger still lets me edit my template HTML and point my domain to their servers like it did in the past and to do this, it has never asked me to empty my wallet or use credit. Tumblr is another interesting alternative that lets me do these things.

If Jim Goldman got a copy, I should too. But he probably didn’t and he might have just forgotten to mention that he’s a regular at The Pirate Bay.

I’ve realized that people who use Firefox on OS X frequently enough to dislike the default theme, start complaining about how it doesn’t feel right. Thankfully I heard about the GrApple themes and now I’ve made it a rule to install one of them whenever I install Firefox or upgrade to a newer version.

(via Aditya)

How many times have you pressed the back button on your browser to click on another link from your search results to find what you are looking for? Melzoo uses Yahoo! Search results and displays them while showing you instant previews of any link you bring your mouse pointer above inside a preview frame.