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April 13, 2009

Bag Review: Booq Python Pack

I call this: bag reviews,computers,mac — Posted by KP @ 4:13 pm

It all started under the truck. This is me, in St. Louis, being cute and acting like I’m pulling the truck. Oh, so funny! What a great Facebook picture! But this fun Facebook picture did not come without sacrifices. As we had just left the bus, I had my usual computer backpack on my back, and I specifically left it on for this picture, hoping it would sort of look like I had some kind of harness on helping me to pull the truck. Well what ended up happening was that all the grease under the trailer (which I assume is what makes it able to slide onto the tractor so easily) got all over my bag. I mean all over. If you have not crawled around under a truck, I don’t think you can conceive of this much grease. At first I thought my bag might be a total loss, but over the two or three days in St. Louis, I decided to clean it, with a variety of products suggested by my colleagues. I had some success with dishwashing detergent, but the bag was still stained and vaguely slimey. I bought a cute Jansport sling-style bag in the college bookstore to use until my bag either dried out or was given up on, and while I’m glad I have that bag for other uses, it was never big enough to replace my primary computer bag (which was a Victorinox laptop backpack that I can’t even find a picture of anymore.) My bag had these kind of cool rotatable straps that were connected to a flexible plastic plate inside the bag. The plate had started cracking, and I was growing concerned that one day the whole thing might crack off and the bag would become a useless pile of jello. So I was starting to keep my eyes open for a suitable replacement. You may know, I’m a bag whore — I’ll buy a bag for any specific purpose or situation, but my computer bag almost never satisfies me, because it must be able to do everything. So I stick with the same one for a long time, not because I’m being frugal or rational, but because I rarely find one I find acceptable for such an important job.

All this to say, this is not just any bag review of some bag I saw that I thought might be cool to try. This is the decision to replace the bag, the one that in a few cubic inches allows me to bring my stage managementy goodness wherever I go — safely, comfortably, and with the ability to fit and organize every item that I deem must be with my person at all times.

Needless to say, I did a lot of research. One major factor that immediately excluded a lot of bags is that I refuse to buy a bag with a dark or black interior. There is no good reason that the interior fabric of a bag should make it difficult to find things inside. There aren’t that many companies that take this seriously, and Booq stood out as one of the few that had an obvious understanding of the benefit of a brightly-colored interior.

Booq is a small company that seems to aim their products at Mac users without exactly excluding others. I’m guessing the reason for this is that their M.O. seems to be that they make really really expensive bags. Really nice, really thought out, really expensive bags. And the mentality of the average Mac user is probably more in line with that philosophy of “Yeah I spent a whole lot of money on it, but look, it’s awesome!”

They seem to have a lot of cool bags for different purposes. What I wanted most in mine was capacity and organization for lots of small accessories, while not being too huge for my small body. I found the Python Pack most to my liking. It’s designed for photographers, and comes with a matching camera case that has dividers which can be arranged to fit camera, lenses, and other accessories, and then the whole case slips into the bottom of the main compartment. The idea as best I can tell is that you have your laptop, accessories, memory cards, and camera gear, and then a little room for some extra stuff. I wasn’t so interested in the camera bag, but the size of the spacious compartment, and the many pockets and slots for storage appealed to me, so I gave it a try. Because it doesn’t seem to be carried in stores, I had to make something of a leap of faith. Thankfully, I ordered it from ebags.com, who I’ve always had good luck with, and who happen to have a generous return policy, so if I decided that this bag I paid $300 for, sight unseen, was not the perfect bag for all my needs, I could return it.

Due to my laptop dying on me, it’s taken me longer to finish this review than I had intended, which is good because I have had more time to truly live with the bag. I am still completely happy with my purchase, and this is definitely going to be my main bag for a while. Now on to the details.

List of Pockets and Compartments
I’m a little too happy to have Photoshop back, so I made a fancy list. Do you hate me? I hate me a little. Click for full size.


I didn’t get so fancy for this one. There’s just a pocket on each shoulder strap. Because the straps get bent around your body, I wouldn’t really advise putting anything in them that might not like getting bent. I usually keep gum in them. It would be good for an iPod smaller than an iPhone.

The right-side flap has a lot more little pockets than the other side. I keep things like my computer’s remote, a few thumb drives, my camera (not shown unfortunately because I was taking the picture with it), and some assorted cables. There are two pen slots, but neither is big enough for a chunky pen or pencil, and one of the slots is really only appropriate for a standard #2 pencil. As a stage manager and fan of mechanical pencils, this is pretty useless.


Basic exterior view. Henry V luggage tag not included!

PROS:

  • Very nice quality construction. The fabric, zippers, seams and pockets feel sturdy. They’re also kind of sexy. The spandex-like material on some of the pockets, which is also functional for its elastic effect, and the magnetic closure on the flaps inside the main compartment, are just pleasant to use.
  • Rubbery base, which wraps around onto the back. It not only protects the bag from whatever may be on the ground, it provides a little traction on the back to keep the bag from sliding around.
  • Orange interior — easy to find things. Unfortunately the large side pockets have a partially black interior, which sucks a lot, but I suppose due to the construction of the bag it probably couldn’t be avoided.
  • It has waist and sternum straps — and just as important, they are removable. I use the sternum strap a lot. I originally took it out on the road with the waist straps stowed in a pocket. But since I never used them, I now travel without them altogether.
  • Comfortable straps

    • CONS:

  • Overall most of the pockets are too tight. What I mean is there are tons of pockets, but it doesn’t feel like much thought went into what happens when there are contents in them. Suddenly they are very small and many of the little pockets overlap, so when one is filled, the one in front of it becomes almost impossible to get anything into. This is helped a bit by the fact that many of the pockets are made of a spandex-like material, so they expand when things are in them. The ones that are not made of this material have very little give.
  • The two slash pockets on the front are so thin, small, and strangely shaped, I’m not sure what is intended to go in them. Right now I have my business cards, a pack of gum, and my Advil/Tylenol box.
  • The camera case is too big to get in and out of the bag easily.

    • Camera Case
    The camera case is really too big for the bag. Even with all the interior pockets empty, the case has to be forced just to get through the opening of the bag. Also, it’s too tall to have it sitting in the bottom of the bag and still be able to get a binder upright above it (you can kind of fit one diagonally, but it’s awkward.) I try to travel with my script in my bag as little as possible, but to be unable to makes me uneasy. While experimenting with this, I discovered that my printer (Canon i70) does indeed fit sideways in the bag, just barely, which helps justify using the camera case in certain situations. Case, printer, script and laptop is never going to happen, though.

    I’m not a photographer, so I really had no use for the case, but I thought it might be fun to play with the provided partitions and use it to hold other goodies of an electronic nature. It holds most of the gaming peripherals I travel with on the road: mouse, USB hub, and gamepad, as well as my backup hard drive. I brought the case on this leg of the tour, and it was a stupid idea. It takes up way too much space for its usefulness. Keeping it in the bag on a daily basis is not a good use of space, and the important stuff, like my mouse and backup drive, live perfectly well in the pockets within the main compartment of the bag itself — pockets which ironically can’t be filled when the camera case is in the bag.

    At any rate, the case would definitely be useful to bring along in more casual situations where I would not need to carry a binder. For an overnight trip, for instance, there would be just enough room left in the bag for some clothes and other small items.
    Here’s how I set up the dividers for my HD and gaming stuff (that’s mouse on the left, HD top center, USB hub upper right, and gamepad at the bottom.)

    Below is a picture of the bag with the camera case in it, and my printer on top.

    Commuter Report:
    My first commute with the bag went surprisingly well. All I had in it was my laptop and the accessories I permanently carry (which is a lot of stuff). The bag was very well balanced, and as a result felt much lighter than it was. My morning train was pretty packed — I got a seat, but I was crammed in, so it was a good opportunity to check how well the bag can be contained on one’s lap without spilling over into someone else’s personal space. While it is much more rigid than a normal backpack, it can still be squeezed into a smaller footprint if need be. The sturdy handle on the top is also nice. It’s big, padded, and strong enough to really be used to drag the bag around with a lot of heavy stuff in it.

    World Traveler Report:
    The bag has been nice to fly with. Again I was nervous about the fact that it’s kind of rigid, but I have found it fits beneath the seats of every plane I’ve been on, including some tiny puddle jumpers. On a couple it has been really tight, though. It does fit in the overhead compartments well, too, if you can tame the straps from going everywhere. When I fly I tend to take the little tiny electronic crap out of my bag as much as possible so the TSA people don’t freak out and have to look at all of it. On my first flight with this bag, I didn’t really do that, and sure enough it had to be hand searched. But because there are enough pockets for everything to have its proper place, that didn’t take long.

    Work Report:
    I really love the fact that the bag naturally stands upright. It just makes getting into it easier. The rigidity is also nice since you don’t have to dig around, everything is exposed. I keep my laptop charging cable in the inner pocket on the flap, which makes it very heavy. When the bag is largely empty and the charger is still in the pocket, it does have a tendency to fall over, but that probably serves me right for packing it that way. The handle on the top is very sturdy for wrestling with the bag and dragging it under my desk, into the junk bunk on the bus, or anywhere I need it to go.

    In Conclusion:
    I have no regrets about buying this bag. It’s very expensive, but so far it’s been worth it, as I haven’t seen another bag that meets my needs so well.

    And finally, here’s a view of the bag carrying a theoretical load of two large scripts, my printer, and computer (for those who really care about the distinction, that was my 15″ Powerbook standing in for the picture, my Macbook Pro was busy doing something — it’s a little bit longer and thinner than the PB.) You can also see one of the padded inserts that comes with the bag, so that it can fit Macbooks from 13″ (where you would use both pads) to 15″ (with one pad) to 17″ (no pads needed).

    You can see in some of the other pictures that I have an inner sleeve in the laptop slot. That is one I just bought, also made by Booq, although it’s not particularly marketed as an accessory for this bag. It’s their Taipan Skin sleeve, which comes in a couple colors. The black one pretty much matches this bag. It has three little rubbery stripes sewn on it, which give it a little more protection and grip. The zipper wraps around two sides of the bag, so you can take the computer out horizontally or vertically. There are also two zippers. I have the medium model, designed for the 15″ MacbookPro. If you’re curious, Booq makes it clear that it fits both current (unibody) and previous-gen MBPs. Mine is previous-gen, and the fit is very snug, but not too snug. I don’t have a current-gen model to test it with, so I can’t say for sure how it would fit, but I’d guess it wouldn’t be swimming in it. It’s a little tight to just slip the computer in when it’s inside the laptop slot in the bag, but I like traveling with a sleeve because it allows me to carry the laptop around by itself with some protection, when it’s overkill to take my whole bag, such as running into the theatre for a minute from the bus, or going up to the booth during a show.


    April 3, 2009

    On Apple Repair

    I call this: computers,mac — Posted by KP @ 3:29 pm

    I am typing this from my Macbook Pro. If you’ve been following my continuing adventures, you will know that last Friday, a week ago, a day that will live in infamy, I opened my computer at the theatre and found that the graphics had crapped out. This was in Phoenix. Since we were leaving Phoenix Sunday, I decided to wait until we arrived in Tucson on Monday (which also has an Apple Store) before taking my poor electronic friend to the Genius Bar to see just how screwed I was.

    Monday morning at 11AM, I went in, and was saddened to be told the logic board needed to be replaced, and inconveniently, this graphics failure doesn’t happen to be the same Nvidia graphics failure that would have offered me a free out-of-warranty repair, it’s just one that looks exactly like it. Now I’ve heard horror stories of logic board replacements that cost more than a new computer. I was really surprised to be quoted about $350 for said repair. Considering I don’t even like the current version of the MBP (mostly due to the glossy screen) I was far happier to pay a relatively small amount to get my current computer back rather than have to buy a newer one. So I counted myself lucky, and bid farewell to my friend for a while. Because we’re only in Tucson for a week, and the repair was estimated at 4-6 days turnaround, I felt it unwise to have it sent back to Tucson, so reluctantly I gave the Acting Company’s office as the return address. I expected it to arrive today (Friday) or maybe Monday, and then I would pick it up first thing Tuesday morning when I got home on vacation.

    Then yesterday morning I awoke around 9AM, and grabbed my now-incredibly-important iPhone off the nightstand to check my email. I had an email from our office manager in New York, saying my computer had arrived, and did I want it shipped out to me, or would I pick it up? Well I had every intention of keeping it simple and picking it up when I got to New York, but I never imagined it would be there Thursday morning. I counted, “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday…” and made a quick calculation that perhaps the cost of overnighting an object of such value, while excessive if it were anything else in the box, might be worth the benefits of having my computer for four and a half days when I otherwise wouldn’t have it. So I asked for it to be sent to our hotel, and it arrived during our morning matinee. So far everything appears to be fine, although it’s hard to tell because the internet here at the Hotel Arizona is an embarrassment to the entire hospitality industry.

    Anyway, I have never had a computer so utterly crap out on me in my life (well once, in 1993, and it was a Packard Bell, and it sucked). It has always been my absolute nightmare to have such a catastrophic failure while out on the road. And I am so impressed at how smoothly the process went to get it fixed, at every step of the way. Like most things Apple, it just works. Make an online appointment at the Genius Bar, show up, they tested it on site, took some basic information, and sent it off for me. I see now from my receipt that came back with the machine, the repair center in Texas received it the following day, and repaired it that same day. Two days later it was in New York first thing in the morning. For a computer out of warranty to need the replacement of its most essential part, and to be processed so quickly, and have it only cost about $350 including tax, is pretty amazing. I hope never to have to go through it again, and I know there are horror stories out there, but I feel really good about how it all went, and God forbid I should ever have something like this happen again in my computing life, I will at least feel like Apple will make the process go as easily as such a huge inconvenience can be.

    So now I’m back, and can get about the business of catching up on my tour blog, and my big review of my new computer bag.

    Oh, and P.S. — bravo to the iPhone. I can’t believe a person as geeky as myself could survive for a week without a computer and not go completely insane. This was only made possible by the fact that the iPhone provides so much of the essential connectivity that a person such as myself relies on. It can’t do everything, of course. There were things that I had to borrow Nick’s computer for, such as doing the show report, blogging, and other things like paying my credit card bill, that I just felt better about doing on a full computer. But for email, calendar, Facebook, keeping my Flickr photos updated with my traveling adventures, reading emails and documents, podcasts, my phone was sometimes a little more cumbersome, but it allowed me to continue doing most of the things I needed to do. The quality of Safari on the iPhone is also pretty amazing. Although it doesn’t support all the more advanced functions of certain web pages, and can be unwieldy to use with pages of unconventional layouts, I was surprised at how many pages I was able to use that I figured would just not work. It wasn’t always pretty, but when I had no other option, I was glad just to be able to keep running my life at all.


    March 31, 2009

    The Ongoing Adventures of a Geek Without a Computer

    I call this: computers,mac,On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 10:24 am

    Day 5 without computer. The 4″ iPhone screen is feeling extremely claustrophobic. I don’t mind it so much for reading web pages, but for any page that requires input and typing (blogs, forums, etc.) it can be really frustrating to use, and usually doesn’t render properly.

    I’m currently using Nick’s Macbook. It’s load-in day, and we’re basically done after an hour, as usual. So I’m grabbing this opportunity to bogart his computer once again. It’s kind of comical how many copies I have of my “TAC” folder with all the show stuff in it. It’s still on my computer somewhere out there in the bowels of Apple repair world, it’s on my backup drive, on Nick’s computer, and on two thumb drives. The only thing left for me to do would be to hide the two thumb drives in different places — like put one of them in my suitcase. Which is probably a good idea since normally all three of my thumb drives live side-by-side in my computer bag (which I suppose should now be referred to as “bag”).

    We’re loading in in Tucson, where the Arizona Theatre Company has another venue. A lot of the department heads are the same folks we worked with in Phoenix, so it’s been very easy. The theatre is not quite as fancy, but it seems very nice so far. I took some video of our truck driver, Scotty D., backing the trailer at a crazy angle to their loading dock.

    Well I must move on and do all the other things that one does while one has a computer.


    March 29, 2009

    Technical Difficulties

    I call this: computers,mac — Posted by KP @ 11:56 am

    Greetings from Phoenix. My beloved Macbook Pro has had a graphics failure and is pretty much out of commission (I think and hope it might be the known failure of the 8600M which would mean it’s still covered under warranty). This has happened before.  Last time it magically fixed itself on the morning I was to bring it in to the Genius Bar.  We shall see.  I have an appointment at the Apple Store in Tuscon tomorrow.

    The computer is completely functional except that the internal and external displays don’t work.  I’m actually typing this on it now, by screen sharing from Nick’s laptop.  Like an idiot I had turned screen sharing off about a week ago, and had to do some Terminal hackery to enable it through SSH.  I don’t know much about unix, so that made me feel pretty damn cool.

    Anyway, as the only way I can access my computer is by borrowing someone else’s, I’m pretty much restricted to necessary purposes, so I may not be blogging much for a while.  We are home in a week, so whatever happens, I’ll have my PC and my poor Powerbook, which surely can’t withstand another tour.  Or can it?


    February 14, 2009

    My Inner Monologue in Weather Widgets

    I call this: mac,On the Road Again — Posted by KP @ 9:56 am

    Our wardrobe supervisor has nicknamed this tour “The Big Thaw” as we are (theoretically) moving from one of the coldest places national tours go, in the middle of winter, to the warmer climates of the US as we get towards summer. After two months in Minneapolis, we are all a little bit obsessed with the weather. It’s a constant topic of discussion among both cast and crew. What is the weather like tomorrow? Will it rain on load-out day? What’s the forecast in our next city for the day we arrive? What did your mom/brother/spouse/roommate tell you on the phone this morning about the weather in New York?

    I currently keep four weather widgets running on my dashboard at all times, which usually have to be updated every day or two as we travel. Below is an example of a current screenshot, and the purpose that each of them serves. Bear in mind when looking at these that a week ago the crew was in Nashville on our day off, wearing tee shirts and eating outdoors at a restaurant when it was 73 degrees.


    January 25, 2009

    iPhone Apps for Stage Managers, Round 2

    I call this: phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 2:51 pm

    UPDATE: For a current list of apps see the Apps Page

    For my initial review of helpful apps for stage managers, read this.

    I’ve now had the iPhone for about six months, and the App Store has grown exponentially with new and updated apps, so here is another check-in on what I’m finding useful for stage management and life. All links will take you to the App Store page.

    TimeCalc ($1.99) still remains the greatest single contribution of the iPhone to stage management, as far as I’m concerned. I use it every single day. Right now I use it most because the Guthrie requires an 18-minute intermission. Sucking at math as I do, I prefer to input the time the first act ended, and add 18 minutes to it.

    Night Camera ($0.99) is a really cool camera app that has completely replaced the built-in camera for me. The gist is that it uses the accelerometer to tell when you are holding the phone perfectly still and takes the picture at that moment. It is so named because it creates much better pictures in low light (which is great for theatre), but also takes better pictures in any light, in my experience. Below is an example of a picture I took in tech, during a very dark cue. I’m no Joan Marcus, but for a midrange phone camera, you can see what it’s a picture of, and I think that’s the most anyone can ask for. The regular camera app would probably have shown a black screen with a red blob in the middle.

    MobileFotos is more of a fun app — it is a Flickr upload client, which I’m sure you could justify as a work-related app if you used Flickr to upload and share work photos of some sort — which now that I think about it is not a bad idea for things like documenting the proper look of light cues or scenery on stage). I use the app to update my Flickr stream, which is linked in the sidebar, with photos from my tour. It also is a nice way to pass the time by looking at other people’s photos. It’s very full-featured and nicely laid out.

    Night Stand (Free) is used for one thing in my world: it tells the time down to the second. For some reason the iPhone doesn’t seem to have an app or an option somewhere that can show the time in seconds. A minute is a very long time when your director wants to know why the 2nd act got 30 seconds longer today. Personally, I take my running times down to the nearest 5 seconds. I’ve just started using Night Stand, and it’s very good at the one thing it does. Just a few days ago it was updated with some alarm features, but because apps can’t stay active in the background, there’s not much point to using a 3rd-party alarm app, since you can’t do anything else with the phone while waiting for the alarm to go off. I’m also looking at getting LCDClock or Table Clock, which are both $0.99.

    Delivery Status Touch ($1.99) is the iPhone companion to the dashboard widget Delivery Status, which has long been a favorite of mine. It tracks packages from the major delivery services, and when you sign up on the developer’s site, it will sync your deliveries from the desktop widget with your phone (which is invaluable for entering tracking numbers since the phone doesn’t have copy/paste).

    On the jailbroken front, I use PowerTool to restart my springboard when the phone gets a little sluggish. It can also trigger a full reboot or power down.

    The most useful app, whether official or jailbroken, in my mind is PDANet (link goes to website), which has a long history of allowing tethering on Palm devices and others, and is now available for jailbroken iPhones. If you create an ad-hoc wireless network with your computer and join said network with your iPhone, PDANet will allow you to use the phone’s internet connection through your computer. Since AT&T has decided they don’t want our money (yet?) for this service, after a 14-day free trial, you can instead pay PDANet’s one-time registration (I think it’s about $30) for the ability to tether anytime and anywhere. This comes with all the usual warnings about tethering — it’s not allowed under your contract, don’t use enough data that AT&T will wonder where it’s going, etc. If you’re jailbreaking your phone you probably know all about what AT&T doesn’t want you to do already. It’s pretty expensive for an app that violates your data contract and could cease working with a future update, but in my mind there is no price that can be put on this feature.

    I often hear people talk about how tethering is useless (or not useful enough to be bothered with). I think these people must get paid a regular salary, file one or two W-2s per year with the IRS, and spend most of their time at a “desk” or in an “office” or “the same place of business every day” where things like “phones” and “internet” are provided by their employer. For those of us whose jobs are a little less predictable, but still desperately need full desktop internet access HERE and NOW, not in 10 minutes, not at the Starbucks down the street, and who have to provide this level of efficiency but aren’t paid enough to afford a wireless broadband card for the laptop, tethering is the only option. I once distributed a rehearsal schedule while sitting in the trunk of my car in a restaurant parking lot. And I have done plenty of shows which rehearsed or performed for weeks in a room (or a building) with no internet available. For reasons such as this, I refuse to have a phone incapable of tethering, whether legally or illegally. When the 3G iPhone came out, before the tethering apps were available, I had to carry my previous phone, the AT&T Tilt, around in my bag so I could swap the SIM card into it if I needed to tether in an emergency. Obviously it was a huge pain, and I am very glad to see that PDANet has pretty much perfected the art of tethering on the iPhone to make it as reliable and simple as it can be without official support.


    A Sonnet

    I call this: mac,On the Road Again,phones,theatre — Posted by KP @ 11:47 am

    Tonight I write a poem with pen and pad
    Upon this two-show day of Henry V.
    My iPhone rests behind my chair plugged in,
    The cord supplied of insufficient length.
    O what can I with simple paper do
    Of import that would match my Facebook’s state?
    An email might for many minutes sit
    Unknown, unread, devoid of swift reply.
    Tomorrow’s weather stays a mystery,
    No picture sent to Flickr when it’s took.
    I fear a post comes from my favorite blog,
    And yet I’ll know it not upon this hour —
    Perhaps to wait until I reach my home.
    And oh for shame, however will I know
    One of my apps perhaps is obsolete,
    An update waiting in the App Store now
    That was not there to get an hour past.
    The world is changing, yet I can’t be told,
    But sit and call a show five centuries old.


    December 4, 2008

    An Observation on iPhone Battery Life from the Bowels of the Earth

    I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 11:31 pm

    We’re teching The Spy at Baruch college, at the Nagelberg Theatre which is on level B3, so somewhere in the earth’s mantle, which I can only assume is why the A/C is always cranked so high.  Of course cell service is nonexistant, and since the internal walls are made of generous helpings of concrete, even getting wifi from our production office to the house (probably about 60ft, if crows flew underground through concrete) took two days and two routers to pass the signal so we can get it at the tech tables.  I never quite managed to get it to the booth.

    Once I had established our lifeline to the outside world, I kept my iPhone with wifi on and the cell radio off all day (if you don’t know how to do this, put it in airplane mode first, then turn wifi back on.) I was expecting that keeping an active wifi connection all day would kill the battery, so much so that I negotiated an electronics deal with Ian, that I would lend him my Macbook 2-prong power adapter if I could charge my phone from his tech table’s power, since the power strip on mine was being taken up by frivolous things like the light board, sound computer, and LittleLites.  As it turns out I have never needed to charge it in the middle of the day.

    During tech I’ve been underground for 12-15 hours a day, off the charger for 18 hours or more, and only once did I come home with the 20% battery warning.  Some days the battery was hardly drained at all.  On an average day above ground, using only 3G and maybe a little bit of wifi, I almost always am pushing the limits of the battery by the time I get home. Plus, my commute to Baruch is longer, so the phone spends more time per day playing music.

    All of this just to say that I was surprised to find that the wifi radio uses so much less power than the cell radio.


    September 18, 2008

    iPhone Wallpaper

    I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 1:20 pm

    I’ve created a wallpaper for my iPhone that I’m liking so much, I might as well share it.  Here it is.  I have no idea what it is.  I guess it’s some kind of rainbow laser beam, which as far as I know is a physical impossibility.  But it looks kind of cool as a lock screen wallpaper (especially when an alert pops up in front of it).  If you have a jailbroken iPhone and use Winterboard to customize your home screen, it also looks pretty cool as a background behind your icons.  It’s a good fit for me because I like the default look of the home screen, so I don’t want to customize it with something too crazy.  This keeps the basic appearance the same, but just adds a nice extra touch (see below).

    If you like it you can click on the thumbnail above and get it in full size. If you want to post it somewhere feel free, but please link to this site, and don’t sell it or do anything stupid like that, and that’s fine with me.

    UPDATE: 8/31/10

    I now have an iPhone 4, and decided to dig up this file and make a Retina Display-compatible version, in 640×960 resolution. Click below to get it full size.


    September 14, 2008

    Cycorder Tutorial For Mac Users Who Hate Terminal

    I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 11:06 am

    I mentioned in my roundup of useful iPhone apps, the video recording app Cycorder.  It requires your iPhone to be jailbroken (which I’m not going to get into, but this is the blog of the team of hackers who develop the jailbreaking software, which will have the latest software and info).

    I’m going to assume that your iPhone is jailbroken and you’re on a Mac (there are ways to do this on the PC, I just don’t have the experience or interest to do it just for the hell of it).  I am also doing this in Leopard, so the part about the Finder would look a little different in other versions of OS X.

    Cydia is the primary app for downloading unauthorized software onto your jailbroken iPhone.  It will appear in your list of apps once you have jailbroken.  

    The apps you will need to download in Cydia are:
    1. OpenSSH (so you can access your iPhone through Terminal on your Mac)

    2. Cycorder (the app we’re talking about here)

    3. Netatalk (so we don’t have to use terminal anymore)

    You can go ahead and install them all at once.  Only Cycorder will show up as an icon with your apps.  The other two are background apps.

    Cycorder will function as an app on its own, happily shooting videos and playing them back for you on the phone.   If you want to move the videos off the phone, this is where the other stuff comes in.  Netatalk gives your phone support for standard Apple file sharing.  Once it’s installed, if your iPhone is on the same wireless network as your Mac, it will show up in your Finder under “shared.”  (If you don’t have access to a wireless router, just create a network with your Mac using the “Create network” option in the airport menu, and call it whatever you want.  Then have the iPhone join the network.)

    So now you see your phone in the Shared section of your Finder, and when you click on it it will probably say “Connection failed.” Click the button “Connect As” in the upper-right and it will bring up a username/password window.  Make the name “mobile” and the password “alpine” (the default iPhone password) and it will give you access to your files.   The folder you’re looking for is Mobile/Media/Videos, in there you will find the videos you took with Cycorder, in handy .mov Quicktime format.

    Now you have what you want.  You would be done, provided you never find yourself on the same network as someone who knows something about iPhone hacking and wants to take a look at your files.  So it’s a good idea to change the password for the iPhone’s “Mobile” user from “alpine” to, well, anything else.   Now we have to use the Terminal, just for a second.

    1. Make sure your phone is on the same network as your Mac.

    2. On the phone, go to settings, wifi, and then click the little “>” arrow for the network you are on to bring up details.

    3. Look at the IP Address.

    4. On your Mac, open Terminal

    5. Type ssh mobile@[the IP address from the phone] and hit enter.

    6. Terminal will probably think for a minute, then ask if you’re sure you want to connect.  Say yes.

    7. It will then ask for the password.  Type alpine and hit enter.

    8. You will now be at the command prompt.  Time to change the password.

    Type passwd mobile and hit enter.

    9. It will ask for the original password (alpine), and then for the new password, and then for the new password again to confirm.  Make the password whatever you want.

    10. We also need to change the password for the phone’s “root” user, which is also “alpine,” because the same random hacker on your network could also get in there and cause lots of trouble.  The process is the same.  Follow the steps again, except type “root” instead of “mobile” and change the password to whatever you want.

    11. When you’re done, type exit and hit enter, and close Terminal forever.

    From now on when you connect to the iPhone through the Finder you will enter the name “mobile” and the password will be the new one you chose.  You can check “remember this password” and never have to enter it again if you like.  The important thing is that some random person who connects to your network won’t know what the password is.

    Enjoy!


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