I posted a few days ago about finding the Hawai‘i region in the iPod Touch, and apparently the system-level support is even better than I thought. I set up a few locations using the Weather application, and found that it displayed the days of the week in Hawaiian as well. Too cool. What would be cooler would be to have the Hawaiian keyboard, too. I did find that I could not post this screenshot to this blog using WordPress for iPhone application – I kept getting: “Communication Error. Operation could not be completed (NSXMLParserErrorDomain error 5.” Hmmm.
No iPhone For Keola
While it seemed half of the civilized words was standing in line in order to purchase a new iPhone yesterday, we opted for a much less expensive albeit less technologically advanced option. Kenneth uses and highly recommended MobiPCS. I investigated their plans and for less money than one iPhone all-you-can-eat voice and text plan, we now have three lines – one for my wife, my daughter and myself. We have unlimited local and national calls and unlimited texts within the US. We got the Motorola E815’s for myself and my wife (at left), and a Motorola Razr for M?lia. The…
iTunes 8008 Download Errors
A few weeks after we moved into our flat in Dunedin, I began to experience some very strange errors when downloading TV programs and movies from iTunes Music Store (iTMS). After beginning the download, I would see the “time remaining” indicator jump from a few hours remaining to just a few minutes. The number would then climb a bit, and then I’d get an 8008 error, along with an indication that the file was corrupted. After a number of attempts I noticed that the file always stopped on a multiple of 10Meg, plus .1 megabyte (70.1, 80.1, 120.1). It would…
Paddy Tax
Pat Phelan has been on the warpath since O2 announced its pricing scheme for the iPhone deployment in Ireland on March 14. Alexia and Conor find a few more Paddy Taxes that O2 hoists upon its customers. If you look deep enough it is in much of the telecom industry, though there are a few exceptions like Pat’s own ventures and (for a particular kind of user) MobiPCS back in Hawai‘i. But by and large the major players all treat customers like potential prey instead of valued customers – it’s death by a thousand razors, or Paddy Taxes. My wife…
Rent-To-Own Movies in iTMS?
Here is an idea for you guys at Apple who make decisions regarding iTMS, and I know you all read this blog. It would be great if customers were given the ability, after renting a movie, to be able to buy it and just pay the difference. After I watched “Once” I wished I had bought it, but I’m not going to spend $10 more (or whatever the purchase price is) after spending $4 to rent it. The movies expire and auto-delete 24 hours after you watch. Apple should give renters the opportunity to pay the difference within that time…
“Everywhere” = “USA Only” In AppleSpeak
Apparently “everywhere” in Apple parlance means “anywhere in the USA.” I tried accessing the new iTunes movie rentals here in New Zealand, and iTunes only shows movies available for purchase. While it doesn’t explain this fact on Apple’s website, it was mentioned on another site that the rentals are available in the US only, and that your credit card music have a US mailing address. Apparently you can’t rent movies overseas even if you have a US credit card and a US iTunes account. DVD purchases and rentals are expensive here, and this would have been a perfect option for…
Keyboard Switching Problem Fixed in Leopard
I finally got around to installing Leopard on my MacBookPro about a week ago, and am certainly glad I have done so. I really like the “Spaces” (multiple virtual desktops) feature which help reduce monitor clutter when I’m running 20 different applications. I have not come across any progam compatibility issues and speed of launching and running applications seems about the same. I don’t know if the new features justify calling this an “upgrade” and charging for it – it feels more like an incremental update worthy of a 10.4.12 designation. I also have Leopard server, and that does have…
Static Routes On OS X Server
I spent three days at the UH-M?noa campus setting up a new fallback server for Ulukau – a brand new Intel XServe running OS X 10.4 which is identical to the current server. One problem we encountered back when we set up the current Ulukau server back in August was configuring static routes which are required to tie into the Veritas backup system used at the campus’ data center. Mahalo to our friends at Apple for pointing to this post which discusses how to set up static routes on OS X server. The instructions we followed were in a post…
SquirrelMail/Open Directory Intergration on Leopard
I’ve had a few comments on my earlier post with the request that I finish documenting the steps to get the SquirrelMail address book to show LDAP users from OpenDirectory in Leopard server. Here it is: First, I uncommented the LDAP section as provided in the SquirrelMail configuration at /etc/squirrelmail/config/config.php, but it was missing one parameter, for the protocol. Actually you don’t need to have that with 10.4 if you use the “V2 compatible” option in OpenDirectory. On 10.5 you no longer have that option and need to specify LDAP V3 in the SquirrelMail config file: $ldap_server[0] = Array( ‘host’…
Leopard Server, Day 1
I spent most of the day installing Leopard Server on an old PPC Mac Mini. Not the best machine to deploy on by any stretch but certainly adequate for our technology team to take it for a test drive. As this is the fifth (or so) OS X Server I’ve set up I wasn’t expecting too much trouble, though I’ve never set one up before that was going to offer as wide a range of services as this particular system will need to. The others were mostly for either serving web pages or lab management/file serving grunts. After botching the…