j. paul arterburn

I’ve been using an add-on for Snow Leopard called BetterTouchTool that I’ve found to greatly improve the use of the already awesome touchpad on the latest Macbooks, including older Macbook Pros. It made my transition to Google Chrome on the Mac a breeze because it allowed for me to use the multi-touch gestures of the touchpad for things like tab management, paging, and, of course, page navigation such as back/forward. In the picture below you can see a few of the gestures that I’ve added to Chrome. I also use it so Picasa can use similar gestures that iPhoto uses (rotating photos, zooming).

Anyway, this doesn’t need to be some wordy review because there’s honestly nothing to sell - the tool is FREE - much thanks to the German developer, @boastr_net.

Grab the latest version here from the official site. If you want to use the gestures I’ve setup for myself, you can download mine and import them into the app if you’d like.

It’s like I passed out for 20 minutes and remembered all these songs…295 songs from Pennywise/NOFX/The Ataris/Sugarcult & more (list in spreadsheet form here). It’s like we’re back in Logan Pribbeno’s 1996 Jeep Cherokee all over again.

Grooveshark playlist:

One of the nice-to-haves with an iPhone 4 I soon realized was being able to use the flash on the back for the camera as a light. It doesn’t take very many steps to click on camera and turn the flash on, so I wasn’t too disappointed when I found out Apple wasn’t allowing flashlight apps that utilized the flash (because they are using “hardware not for its designed purpose”).

I did my research and found a developer, Jason Ting, who let me be a beta tester for his app - LED Light for iPhone 4 - I figure this was my workaround for not being to able to get it off the App Store. But I just got an email from Jason with good news…sounds like Apple is now letting these sort of apps in, so I’m obviously going to plug his.

It’s pretty simple - you load the app and the flash turns on. The bottom button is for dance-club-strobe effect. But seriously, it’s FREE (or $0.99 for the non-iAd version), so quit reading and just install it.

Yes, it’s brighter than just using a bright white screen.

I wasn’t able to find this anywhere, and it was fairly simple. I had a problem with my iPhone recently that forced me to do a complete restore and only the greatest & latest firmware (3.1.3) would actually work during the restore process. Everything I was finding said that jailbreaking & unlocking were not supported if you did this upgrade, but I’ve managed to make it work.

1. Download 3.1.2 firmware from Apple
2. Run RedSn0w (0.9.4) to jailbreak & choose the 3.1.2 firmware file that you just downloaded.
3. Open Cydia, run all initial updates
4. Cydia: install Fuzzyband (4.0-b4) to downgrade baseband & allow for unlock
5. Run Fuzzyband - you should see the following information:
   Bootloader: 05.08 [G2M3S2]
   Baseband: ICE2-05.12.01
   OS 3.1.3
6. Cydia: install Carrier Logo Fix - this will add back the AT&T logo in the status bar
7. Cydia: add source repo666.ultrasn0w.com ; install ultrasn0w to unlock

You might have heard of this guy singing about pizza & booze in “I love college”…this has a little more mellow feel…

Lyrics after the bump…

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Last night I went to the sold-out Jónsi (from sigur rós) in Lawrence. The ambient sound was incredible. All 4 musicians shuffled instruments throughout the set, although the drummer was mostly consistent - this man knew how to beat a drum.

Review from Back to Rockville blog:

The performance culminated with “Grow Till Tall” and the most powerful emotional moment I’ve experienced at a concert.
….
Like a roller coaster car inching its way to the top of a hill, the music kept ratcheting in intensity, building past any release point until it became a dense sheet of white noise, and even then it continued to swell. It seemed the only thing that kept the audience from being engulfed by the sound and the building from being torn apart was the fragile magnificence of Jonsi’s voice that penetrated the noise.

I present to you…Grow Till Tall (best heard at 150 decibels, possibly curled up like an infant on the floor — as Tommy Lee likes it):