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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

I absolutely love GlimmerBlocker. GlimmerBlocker is a free ad filter proxy, primarily targeted at Safari users. It filters those annoying ads on ad polluted websites very effectively. But wait, GlimmerBlocker is more! Read more »

Here are the kernel extensions I’m using on my ASUS P6T (non SE, non Deluxe) mainboard to run Mac OS X 10.6. I’m not planning to write a guide for a vanilla installation but I already summed up some important points when installing OS X on the P6T in this post from a retail Mac OS DVD. Read more »

I’d like to make my blog posts more share-friendly by adding buttons at the end of every post for the most popular bookmarking/sharing web sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and so on. There’s a wide range of social bookmark plugins available for WordPress. A plugin that immediately caught my eye is SexyBookmarks. It looks great and you can choose between several catch phrases like Sharing is caring or Sharing is sexy.

Read more »

When I compiled the how-to about using Duply to backup a Linux server to a FTP account I mentioned the possibility to backup all data to an IMAP account. So, all we need for our encrypted backup is a reliable IMAP account provider with a few GB of email space. In this post I’m using Gmail which provides up to 7 GB for emails for free, but instead of saving emails Duply will store encrypted backup files on that Gmail account. Read more »

I recently changed my website’s WordPress URL from its www-version to the non www-version: www.trick77.com changed to just trick77.com. As this may will confuse search engines and thus lower your visibility in organic searches, it’s recommended to configure a 301 (permanently moved) redirect from the old domain name to the new one. There’s lots of SEO information about redirecting domain names using mod_rewrite and .htaccess to be found on the web.

Now, some SEO experts claim that it’s important to change the internal links on a web site as well. As I’m occasionally linking to my own WordPress posts within my web site, all those links still point to the old www version of the domain name. So, is there an easy way to change all internal links from one domain name to another on a WordPress site at once? Read more »

My Linux root server’s hosting price plan includes a 50 GB backup storage option. The backup server can only be reached using FTP, unsecured. Even though the backup server is only visible from within my server provider’s local network, I still don’t want to expose all my server settings, accounts and databases in clear text to a man in the middle. Or, I don’t want an untrustworthy subject with access to the backup server’s file system to be able to read my backup. Also, I don’t want to send my entire site to the backup storage every day as this would eat up my 50 GB within days.

This is where Duply (formerly known as FTPlicity) comes in handy. Duply claims to make your incremental encrypted backups on non-trusted spaces a child’s play. It manages backup job settings in profiles and allows to batch execute commands. It supports symmetric and asymmetric encryption using GPG.

Duply is not limited to FTP, you can also send your backups to a IMAP, WebDAV or ssh destination (and even more!). I haven’t tried the IMAP method but in theory you could send your encrypted backup to a free Google mail account as long as you don’t exceed the 7 GB provided by Gmail. However, in this sample, I’m using a FTP scenario with asymmetric encryption.

Read more »