What's included (dictaphone)

I keep getting amazed by how much is included in iOS devices (or, I'm sure, many other similar devices). For example I only noticed today that my iPhone 4 includes a dictaphone ("Voice Notes"). It's better quality than the Olympus digital one I paid good money for a few years ago, it's easier to use, has way higher capacity, and it can email voice notes to myself so I have them on my mac too (or to others of course).

I mean, this is seriously useful stuff, but in amongst everything that this little device can do, it's just thrown in as a extra you may not even notice.  Jeepers.

Big wallpaper photos

I found this great page for wallpaper photos, up to 1600 x 2560 (Apple Cinema Display) size.

If you know other sites with good photos or art in such size, please share.

------
I just wish it weren't so common for photos on the web to be over-saturated and over-sharpened. I might even go for some more BW ones...
Like this one, very nice indeed:

Update: KabelYaache said:
Just in case you have ever taken a tripod and a camera out at night to do some shots, you might notice that the saturation of the lighted areas is increased. As well as the contrast.
But, it's easier to sit pretty writing about things, than actually doing them, n'est pas?

Eolake said:
I was not talking about those pics I had selected, but rather about those I hadn't.
And it's not all of them, just some. Like these:

iRetrofone goes steampunk

iRetrofone goes steampunk, post.

The handsets are connected to the iPhone. The lower one is resin, the top one is cast in copper! 

I think I may like the design of the black one better, actually.

Two And A Half Men

I am watching a recent episode of 2 1/2 Men. I learned a few things:

1. The kid is now so big, next season will be called 3.2 Men. 
2. You can say "ass" on TV, but not "whore" or "bastard". That puzzles me a bit. 
3. The real estate agent's fee for a 60M dollar home is 2 million! That puzzles me a lot. 

Why do teen boys (including myself back then) think that hair hanging almost over the eyes is cool?

I'm not sure if the words were bleeped (actually silenced) from the US or the UK.

Why do people not bypass real estate agents? Their fees are usually nuts, and it doesn't seem to me they do a lot to earn them.

Update: Jan said:
I've sold two houses, both times without an agent. It was no fun, but allowed me to avoid the extortionate fees.
If you plan to do it yourself, I suggest you get price estimates from several professionals who know the local market well. You can ask a bit more, but it will help you keep your feet on the ground (my original asking price for the first house was way too high, which made me lose a lot of time and some interesting buyers)
It also helps to take great photos and to fix it up a little bit (some paint can do wonders) to make it look more appealing.

Supergirl

Supergirl as Superman's cousin was killed off in the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" storyline by DC in the eighties. Since then there clearly was hot-young-supergirl shaped hole in the readers' mind, for she appeared in various forms over the years, including an android. But now she's back to being Kryptonian and Superman's cousin. But it does not seem she has the Linda Lee Danvers secret identity of old days. A pity. On the other hand, she's not averse to showing her tight midriff, a definite plus. 

In the well-regarded Justice League Unlimited animated series, her top is white, which I think is a bold idea (breaking with Superman's colors), and looks good on her.

Powergirl and Supergirl.

How computers think, part 112

I wrote a mail which I did not send immediately, because I was still uploading something which was linked to in the mail.

When it came to send the mail, I opened it from Apple Mail's "drafts" folder, and... it just sat there, empty, thinking and thinking and thinking, trying to recreate the content of the mail.

I did something else, giving it time, and it finally succeeded after several minutes! It turned out that I was opening a temporarily created version of the email where I had mistakenly copied/pasted the name of a folder on my computer instead of a web link, and Mail, unlike my old email app, does not interpret this as simple a bit of text, it understands it as me copy/pasting the actual folder into the mail... And in this case it was a 600MB folder with thousands of files, all of which it apparently, bravely, was getting itself reading to email to my poor correspondent!

If I have to send a list of files to somebody, I have to first copy/paste the list into a text editor, which converts it into just text, and then copy/paste this list, otherwise I end up mailing the files instead of the list!

I guess it's useful once you know about it and get used to it. Though I still think simple drag/drop is the easiest way to add an attachment.

The Mactini

[Thanks to Pascal]

Wow, finally a proper manual!



I wonder if it can be used for CAD/CAM?

Cheap classical collections

[Thanks to Andy]

Sadly and typically only available to US customers, here are ultra-cheap MP3 collections of classical music.

For Europe/UK, here's a similar offer. (Still highly economical, and I have just bought several of them. A remarkable and sudden expansion of my collection!)

All the world's a stage

"The American: businesslike, unwilling to be distracted.
      The Canadian: self-absorbed and disconnected from  reality.
              The Italian and the French: ”LOOK AT THAT BUTT”

Big Body, Big Screen

State of the Art - Big Body, Big Screen - Droid X Is This Month’s Superphone, NYT review article.
Interesting to hear of all the upsides, dowsides, and sidesides of the best of Android phones right now.
The first thing I noticed is that the cheapest contract with this phone is $90 a month! When the two years is up, you've paid over two grand to use your smartphone! This is clearly not not meant for weekend users.

How to Make Free iPhone Ringtone with iTunes

How to Make Free iPhone Ringtone with iTunes, article.

It works on my Mac, I haven't tried it with Windows.
(It only works with DRM-free songs.)

I've not been into the whole ringtone thing, particularly not paying two or three bucks for one, as the kiddies seem quite willing to. But now I got an iPhone finally, and I could take a bit of song to make a ringtone, it seemed the time to do so. So I made one from Bowie: Heroes (live), Talking Heads: Wild, Wild Life, and Ugress: Decepticons. (Mail me if you wannem.) 
I admit it does spice up a phone call, like a custom wallpaper spices up a computer screen.
It can't be one with great precision, though,  it seems the export process does not allow for split seconds.

Update: Laurie says:
It's better and very precise if you use Garage Band. Also you can use any track in your collection, not just the DRM free tracks.

iOS oddities

Here's an oddity I've noticed on both the iPad and the iPhone: I plug in the device, iTunes pops up and does its stuff, and then reports that the device is now updated and synced. But a new app I bought has not appeared on the device. So I sync manually via the File menu, and now the app does appear on the device after sync. The last time I did (on the iPhone, two minutes ago), it was quite many items which did not cross over until I did it manually. I think this is quite odd behavior. I'd think a sync is a sync is a sync, but it seems not.

---

Another thing, when texting on the iPhone, how do you get around the flippin auto-word correction!? I can't get the flippin device to accept the word "hmmm", it writes all kinds of things instead.
(I'd be thankful to know 1: how to turn it off altogether and 2: how to override it manually in particular instances.)

Update: Anonymous said:
RTFM, numbskull!!!!!
SHEESH!

eolake said...
It doesn't *come* with an effin' manual, blockhead.

OK, so I'll do my own research, jeezz, just trying to communicate here...

... It turns out that until quite recently, you actually had to jailbreak the phone (voiding the warrenty) to do this. But after a recent update, it can be done under Settings/General/Keyboard.
Although I still haven't found a way to override it in individual circumstances.

KC Aussie said...
When you are typing something and it offers a correction (a little bubble above or below the word you are typing, text is blue), you can press the "x" in the in the bubble to dismiss the bubble and the correction offered.
What I have found is that over time it seems to learn words or abbreviations. For example, in notes to myself I often write the first three letters of the day of the week (Mon, Tue, Wed, etc) and it would always change the "Wed" to We'd" ... what I found is that if I dismissed the offered correction eventually it was no long offered.
I'm not sure how many times you have to dismiss a correction before your preferred spelling becomes added to the dictionary iOS uses.

Thanks, friend.

By the way, why isn't there an effin manual? When I buy a camera, it comes with a manual. At the very least a PDF one. You would think that a company like Apple puts so much care and pride into creating an awesome product like the iPhone, they would want people to be able to figure out all the hundreds of features it has.
And surely the features are documented somewhere, otherwise they couldn't even build the phone. So why don't they hire somebody to convert that document into a public-friendly manual which would make their customers that much more happy? It's not like they can't pay, they have like $20B in the bank.