Ever since upgrading to iOS 4.0 my iPhone 3G performed like a piece of crap. I’ve seen that Apple published an iOS 4.1 beta on its iPhone developer network website and I was willing to give it a try to see if there are any performance improvements. To make it short: yes, there are. While it’s not as good as with v3.x the phone is a lot more responsive than with v4.0 or v4.0.1, without having to turn off Spotlight indexing! Let’s hope these changes make it to the 4.1 GM.

To activate iOS 4.1 beta your iPhone’s UDID needs to be registered with an Apple iPhone SDK account ($99 a year). As every account comes with 100 UDID slots for iDevices you just need to find a developer who adds your iPhone’s UDID to the beta SDK list. Some do it for free, some charge a couple of bucks to do it. I may have one or two UDID slots left in my dev account so you may want to leave a comment if you want to have your iPhone registered (please provide the UDID for the iPhone- but don’t ask me where to look it up). You also have to find the beta firmware on your own (Torrent sites may be a good place to start).

Btw. initally I tried to install iOS 4.1 beta on my iPhone 3G without a registered UDID. I used redsn0w 0.9.5b5-5, iOS 4.0, iOS 4.1 beta and iPhoneExplorer to remove the beta-tag in SystemVersion.plist. While I was able to activate my iPhone 3G that way I lost 3G/WiFi network connectivity. The problem seemed to be related to DNS. Making/taking calls, SMS worked perfectly though. This way of activating a phone most likely requires a new redsn0w version in order to work properly.

Just in case you’re running your ASUS P6T mainboard with a Windows operating system and your iPad always displays “Not Charging” near the battery icon: there’s a software based solution from ASUS, the “Ai Charger”. In addition to recharging your iPad it also claims to recharge any Apple i-device up to 50% faster than conventional USB ports do.

With the exclusive ASUS Ai Charger, all of your motherboards, and desktops become universal chargers for your iPod, iPhone and now, the new iPad. Ai Charger turns any PC into a flexible power-up station for popular Apple devices through a simple USB connector, extending their usability and benefit in every lifestyle. Charging goes up to 50% faster* and smoother while you do your work or have fun – whether at home or on the go.

Head over to the ASUS website to download Ai Charger.

This morning, I successfully updated my Asus P6T Hackintosh from 10.6.3 to 10.6.4 using the OS X online updater. As usual I had to reinstall marionez’ AppleHDA kext to get sound with the Realtek ALC1200 but other than that updating went smoothly as usual. Detailed information about the 10.6.4 release is available here. Read more »

I have an iPod Classic connected to the Audi Music Interface (AMI) in my car to listen to music over the Audi multimedia system MMI 3G. The iPod is able to store a vast collection of music but sometimes I just want to listen to the tracks I recently downloaded in the iTunes music store without having to walk down to the garage, disconnecting the iPod, sync it on my Mac and so on. Read more »

Lately, I always get an error message when I try to sync my iPhone in iTunes. The message simply says “The iPhone cannot by synced. The required file cannot be found.”

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t say exactly what file is missing. While playing with the sync options in iTunes I found out, that the problem is related to Apple Aperture 3 in my case. If you’re using iPhoto instead of Apple Aperture, you may find a solution in this Apple support note. If you’re getting this error message in iTunes and you’re syncing your Aperture 3 library (or parts of it) to your iPhone, I may have a solution for you. Read more »

Did you know that more and more credit card companies let you design your own credit card? Obviously you can’t change the text and general layout of the card but you can use your own background image on it. Depending on the company, they enforce some more or less strict rules about the content of your image. You could always try but don’t expect them to accept that nice Apple logo or your favorite Playmate’s boobs on the credit card you designed. Read more »

Gosh, it ain’t that easy to mount a remote NFS share from a Mac. At least not if the NFS server is a Dreambox DM800 sat/cable tuner. Read more »

StatPress & StatPress Reloaded move over, there’s a new WordPress statistics plugin in town! It’s called kStats Reloaded. Even though it’s still in beta I find it more useful than StatPress (Reloaded) because it’s a lot faster and the charts look better. It even has an option to import all your historical data accumulated by StatPress. Read more »

If you’re an avid geotagger and own a Nikon GP-1 (or compatible) on-camera GPS receiver, you may have found yourself in a situation where you had to take a photo even though your GPS unit wasn’t ready, thus leading to inaccurate or even missing latitude/longitude coordinates in your photo. A GPS receiver usually needs at least 30 to 40 seconds to acquire an accurate position fix in the open once you turn the camera on. Depending on your subject, that can be quite some time. An on-camera GPS unit like the Nikon GP-1 also puts quite a strain on your camera’s battery life.

On the other hand, if you’re using an off-camera geotagger like the Holux M-241 there’s always some sort of more or less complex post-processing workflow involved to store the GPS readings in your photo’s metadata header. I sometimes forget to switch my Holux M-241 on when I’m outside with the camera or even worse: I usually forget to take it with me at all. Doh!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a GPS unit that sits on the camera (so I don’t forget it at home), runs on its own power but still is able to immediately store GPS readings in your photos whenever you take them? Running on it’s own power has the advantage that when you’re outside with your camera, you can simply forget about hot/warm/cold startup times or draining your camera’s battery and just concentrate on the non-GPS-side of photography.
This is where the Easytag GPS module (a.k.a. Easytagger) comes into play. The Easytagger is a hybrid between an off-camera and an on-camera GPS logger. Judging from the product description, this thing seems to be the jack of all trades:

• Stores GPS info directly to a photo’s metadata header (no matter if NEF or JPEG)
• Data logger mode: Ability to log a trail (a series of GPS readings) to a microSD card using the popular NMEA format
• 2-axis magnetic sensor to record heading
• Barometric altimeter
• Built-in rechargeable 500mAh Li-Ion battery, and in case it’s emtpy, draws power from the camera
• Unique design to allow mounting on flash accessory shoe and the built-in flash to be used at the same time
• Multi-model compatibility: simply use the appropriate data cable. 10-pin: Nikon D200, D300, D300s, D700, D3/D3s/D3x, D2/D2x/D2xs/D2Hs. 8-pin: Nikon D90, D5000
• No setup required, just plug and play!

But does the Easytagger really live up to its expectations? I’m going to have a close look at the Easytag GPS module from a Nikon D700 and a Mac user’s perspective. Read more »

I always thought that my 12400 Geekbench score using an overclocked i7 920 CPU on my ASUS P6T Hackintosh was pretty fast. Today, fleebailey left a comment on an ASUS P6T related post on my site. I followed his link and found that he had created a fine tuned DSDT for the ASUS P6T mainboard. Read more »

I just updated my ASUS P6T rig to OS X 10.6.3 with the built-in online Software Update application without any problems. It comes with a new Darwin kernel which has the number 10.3.0.

I also installed a brand new Intel X-25 M G2 solid state disk (SSD) and boy, this setup is starting to fly. Boot time from the grey apple logo to the login window is just 11 seconds! Applications like Mail or Safari start instantly, it’s like clicking an application icon and BOOM the software is on the screen. Even Photoshop CS4 with the default plugins enabled starts in less than 4 seconds. The performance increase is awesome. Forget about buying that slightly faster CPU… pour your hard earned money into a fast SSD. The only downside is that OS X still lacks support for the TRIM command for SSDs. It’s already available in Windows 7 and even in Linux… but unfortunately not OS X. Considering that Apple already ships its own notebooks with (overpriced) optional SSDs for quite some time that’s certainly a bit lame. Read more »

I just bought an external Iomega eGO Portable Mac Edition USB 2.0/FireWire hard drive with the intention to use it on my ASUS P6T Hackintosh (dubbed Hac Pro) for wickedly fast file transfers. The eGO draws its power from the FireWire port so there’s no external power supply needed.

When I tried to plug that FireWire 800 cable into my P6T I found out that the P6T only has a 6-Pin FireWire 400 connector. Doh! Guess I should have read the manual. Fortunately, the Iomega eGO also sports a FireWire 400 connector. Well, according to this Wikipedia article FireWire 400 is still a lot faster than USB 2.0 (almost twice).

Unfortunately, after hot plugging the Iomega eGO using the FireWire 400 cable, no new drive showed up on my OS X desktop. An inspection of the /var/log/system.log revealed a strange error message saying “ICANotifications framework timed out waiting for a FireWire device with GUID ’40718943393659308′”. Read more »

Apple finally introduced support for the RW2 format from the Panasonic LX-3 and the Leica D-Lux 4 compact digital cameras in the Digital Raw Camera Compatibility 3.0 update. You may have been wondering why it has taken so long to add support for these models. The reason is that the LX-3 and the D-Lux 4 use a lens with high (up to 2.9%) lens distortion at short focal lengths. Apparently, this is the price that has to paid in order to have a 24mm (equivalent) wide angle zoom lens in a compact camera. The built-in raw conversion engine in the camera corrects for this distortion and also applies other corrections for de-vignetting, chromatic aberration and sharpness when the photo is saved as a JPEG. To compensate for the distortion, the photo has to be cropped quite a bit. See here for more details. Technically, the shortest focal length is more like 21mm (equivalent). While Adobe Lightroom users were enjoying RW2 raw photos from the LX-3 and D-Lux 4 for quite some time, Apple’s digital camera raw engine didn’t have support for lens distortion correction until version 3, which was released at the 9th of this month. It supports both, Aperture 3 and iPhoto ’09. Unfortunately, you’re SOL if you’re still using Aperture 2. Read more »

Ever since the release of Aperture, Apple only half-heartedly supported metadata in exported photo’s. I don’t know why but Apple decided not to export extremely useful metadata information like lens model and many others as well. Unfortunately, this is still the case with Aperture 3 :( Lens type is still not included in any exported JPEGs or when directly uploading a photo to flickr. When I tried to upload a photo to flickr using the new flickr button in Aperture 3, even location data from “Places” wasn’t included. Commenter Connor had the solution: I needed to check that checkbox in Aperture’s preferences web tab (see screenshot below). Read more »

The new Geotagging features in Aperture 3 are pretty cool – and very simple to use too. Just like in iPhoto, Apple doesn’t use the term Geotagging but calls it “Places” instead. There’s support for the popular NMEA format which I’m able to export from my Holux M-241 GPS logger using BT747. Aperture Places is also able to read the latitude/longitude data embedded in a photo’s metadata and displays the location on map. Places is able to show the track log if you want to see the route as well. It’s so nice to finally have Geotagging support within Aperture. This simplifies the Geotagging workflow when using a GPS logger a lot. It’s even easier if you use an on-camera GPS unit.  Read more »