Firehed’s Blog

It took a little bit longer for iPhone apps to show up (relative to day one) than i’d expected, but they’re now available to the point that most people can get things installed with ease. You need to run one command in the terminal, but it’s not exactly complicated and the rest is automated.

Being able to SFTP into my phone in order to upload NES ROMs (of games I own) so I can half-play Super Mario Bros is pretty cool too. The NES emulator in particular is a bit iffy, but it’s amazing progress in next to no time (MAME is half-here by the sounds of it, too).
(more…)

Has just been demonstrated by Netflix’s recent announcement of lowering their prices again. As Gizmodo notes, Netflix just dropped their monthly three-movies-out fee by another dollar after having recently done so, dropping the price from $17.99 to $15.99 per month in a short space of time. This is, of course, a move done in order to better complete with BlockBuster’s online service.

And this is the Free Market (TM) at work. When there’s genuine competition between companies, their customers win. While the two services are effectively a duopoly in the market, they’re direct competitors. Furthermore, the services are close enough to each other that they’re interchangeable; with no contracts to lock in their customers, people can easily switch between the two if the cost of one is better than the other. This is just one of the many demonstrations of competition being a Good Thing.

(more…)

It turns out that if you have the right mouse - or at least the right software, Microsoft has an Expose clone! I just received in my new Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000 (yes, for all the hate I have for Microsoft, I still like their peripherals; though, admittedly, this was partly due to lack of options) and the Intellipoint binds their Instant Viewer to the middle mouse button. Not as pretty as Expose on the Mac, but almost as practical - much more so than the prettier thing that Vista has where most of the window is obscured.

(more…)

Yes, a mere few hours after a MobileTerminal emerging, we’re now seeing a TextEdit of sorts out of TUAW. Sure, it wasn’t as quick as the AppleTV hacks, but from nothing but reverse-engineering and some damn smart coders, it’s pretty impressive work.

So, while I certainly don’t have any evidence for it as of yet, I’m guessing an official SDK could well be “one more thing” at Tuesday’s upcoming event. It sounds like the event is pretty small and not something where that would happen, but it wasn’t long after the original Windows on Intel Mac hacks that Boot Camp was released - by a margin of mere days. Why not again?
(more…)

Okay, that remote access thing is even crazier than I’d realized. Of course, it’s just a touch slow over a home connection when you have most of your upstream bandwidth doing the Bit-torrent community a favor, but I was able to finally get in (after stopping the torrents through the WebUI), get into the System Preferences, and enable SSH access. Then, still over VNC, go into the router configuration and open up port 22. Once that was enabled, I managed to download a copy of PuTTY (over FTP since the company’s firewall doesn’t care for my downloading old-school .exe files over http), SSH into my machine, and edit the blog theme I’m developing with vi combined with a bit of black magic so that the W3C validator didn’t hate it as much.

Yikes. And to catch the comments about why the hell didn’t I use emacs - I don’t know how to use either one, and wanted to save myself the three extra characters. Unix underpinnings make me very happy, especially when I can blindly dive in and guess my way to XHTML 1.0 Transitional semi-compliance.

</geek>