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Showing posts from July, 2008

802.1x in your pocket

A comment by Jeff reminded me I never went and confirmed how the iPhone 2.0 software does with 802.1x. I hope Jeff does come back and tell about his experiences, but here's what I’ve seen so far: Basically, it just works. As in, it works even better than on a Mac. After the iPhone/iPod Touch sees the network, it asks if you want to join and figures out all the encryption details for itself. Unfortunately, on the Mac (Leopard at least) you need to tell it if you want LEAP, PEAP, etc. So basically, I hope this stuff percolates back to Mac OS X from the OS X on the iPhone. Technorati Tags: iPhone , iPod

COTA riders get help from Google in planning trips

There was great new yesterday in the Columbus Dispatch : Riders can go to the COTA Web site, www.cota.com , and punch in the starting and ending points of their trip, along with the date and time the trip will be made. Google Transit processes the information and tells riders where and when to meet the bus that will take them where they want to go. Actually, I’m not sure why it was necessary to identify one of the people they interview as homeless, but that’s a totally different topic. I will say that I tried it out, and was generally impressed. It gave me the general route I sometimes take. The one thing I would say is that it appears COTA has given Google only the major pick up spots for each bus. So while there’s one just a minute away from where I live, Google would have me walk to a stop seven minutes away. Similary, Google tries to guess the route the bus will take, by using those major stops. That means it didn’t even show the circuitous route of the bus I take that means it’s

AT&T iPhone 3G plans: $70-$130 single, $130-$360 family | iLounge News

One last post before I go and do some actual work: AT&T has finally announced the plans for the iPhone 3G , most particularly for the family plans: AT&T has announced its AT&T Nation and AT&T FamilyTalk plans for iPhone 3G. Its AT&T Nation plans, meant for individual users, range in price from $69.99 to $129.99 a month, and include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling.…AT&T’s FamilyTalk iPhone plans cover two lines and include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling, and unlimited nights & weekends… (Via iLounge .) Technorati Tags: Apple , iPhone , repost

macosxhints.com - Prevent creation of the Mail To Do folder on IMAP servers

A post today on Mac OS X Hints handles something that has annoyed me with using Gmail IMAP with Leopard’s Mail.app. Specifically, there was an issue with To Dos : For a while I’ve been annoyed at Mail.app’s creation of the Apple Mail To Do folder on my IMAP server (I use Dreamhost). No matter what I did, it just wouldn’t stay gone. There’s this hint, and there are some thoughts in the comments, but no real fixes. I returned to my problem today, and found that by going into Mail » Preferences » Composing, I was able to solve the problem. In the ‘Create Notes & To Do’s in:’ drop-down menu, select On My Mac. Close the preferences, then delete the Apple Mail To Do folder on the server. That’s it! No more ‘Apple Mail To Do’ folder on the server; just locally. I added a comment to this for someone who was having trouble with this on Gmail, that after doing this, I: followed the steps above, quit Mail.app, opened Gmail in the browser, went to “Settings”, then “Labels”, and f

Blank Mac screensaver

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Thanks to FeedBurner , I can see how people (all two of them!) come upon my site. Frankly, the search terms are fascinating. One that has come up frequently enough is “blank mac screensaver”, and things like it. I thought this was odd, since I was certain that a blank screensaver came with Mac OS X. Well, I just looked, and not so. Since this is an easy one to help people with, I’ll demonstrate two ways to do it. The first is the easiest: go to the Versiontracker page for Blank Screen Saver . I haven’t tried it, but it looks like others like it and it does the seem to do what people want. But you can also make one yourself, using Quartz Composer ! To start, you want to make sure you have Apple ’s Developer Tools , which now come on an installation DVD with every Mac (I believe), or you can download from the developer site (after registering for free). Once you have the Developer Tools, open Quarts Composer, which is in /Developer/Applications . Now: Choose the “Blank Composition” tem

How to make a Mac screen saver that shows your uptime in Leopard

About nine months ago, I wrote about how to make a Mac screen saver to show your uptime , using Quartz Composer , a package from Fink , and Quartz Composer patch called Shell Command Patch . Not long after , Apple released Leopard , which seems to have changed Quartz Composer enough to break Shell Command. I was getting all geared up on writing a post about doing this using another method (completely redoing it and everything), but looking in to this further just showed me I’m an idiot. It turns out the difficulty I was having is that Quartz Composer patches are saved in different locations. To be clearer: In Tiger (10.4), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Patches/ . In Leopard (10.5), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/ or ~/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/ . That’s it. Seriously. Incidentally, I found this information at Kineme.net’s page on the topic . The new version of the Developer Tools does in fact come with an example patch that can run