How good can it be, if it isn’t HD?

As expected, I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard and my Sprint Novatel u727 EVDO modem wouldn’t work. Basically the problem is you don’t need the SmartView software, but it fails to uninstall. So here is how you manually uninstall it.

Disconnect the u727 and open terminal and run these three commands then reboot — always be careful with sudo and especially rm -rf, they can destroy your data if you aren’t careful.

sudo mount -uw /
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/NovatelWireless3G.kext/
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/NovatelWirelessFilter.kext/ 

Now after you reboot, plug in the u727. At first it’ll pop up like a USB drive, eject it and eventually a Network dialog box will pop up, so hit preferences — not sure if there is a way to always prevent it from mounting. Now you should see it listed with the other network devices other system preferences. Hit “Apply” at the bottom right, and now hit connect.

The best part is now you don’t need SmartView and whenever you plug the modem in, the WWAN icon will show up on the menu bar which is much better and something that never worked with SmartView installed.

I’m pretty upset today because I finally decided to give up on my beloved MacBook Air. It’s been a love hate relationship almost since the very beginning, but the frustration I experienced while trying to record the podcast recently has thrown me over the edge. Those that listen to the show live on Tuesdays know that I have to put an ice pack under the Air while I record or it’ll over heat and ruin the recording. This is just so absurd but believe me I’ve researched it plenty and came to the conclusion that the Air simply isn’t designed properly and thus the CPU can’t even come close to running 80% for any extended period of time without overheating (kernel_task uses up all the cycles).

So I finally broke down today and bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Ultimately it came down to be being less superficial than I usually am when it comes to computers and swallowing my pride. You see I just hate the idea of buying another laptop with a useless optical drive. So while I’ll almost never use the DVD drive I’m now faced with carrying around, at least I’ll have the following perks. No overheating, no loud fan running all the time, two USB ports, a Firewire 800 port to capture HDV with, an SD slot (which in effect frees up another USB port), about 30% more battery life, another 80GB of disc space, and some much appreciated performance. And for this I gave up about $100, a 20-inch Apple Cinema display, and about 1.5lbs to carry around when I travel. Seems like a good trade, but I miss my Air already; dammit Apple.

Any good network person will tell you, turn off UPnP on your router! But in many cases it comes on by default, which means that people don’t know that it is on. But what’s worse is that, for most, UPnP is really useful because it will allow applications like Skype and the Xbox Live to open up ports on your home network’s router/firewall without having to understand ports and IP addresses.

Not sure why I’m such a gluten for punishment, but I turned on UPnP recently on my FiOS issued ActionTEC router and noticed all kinds of ports being opened. At first reaction, I disabled it and deleted all the port forwarding rules, but then I started to wonder where they were all coming from. My first thought was that I let someone use my WiFi and their machine opened ‘em, but I wanted to be sure so after cleaning up all these weird rules, named things like iC5900, I used this post to figure out how setup WallWatcher on my WHS so the next time it’d happened I’d be collecting Syslog data from my ActionTEC router. My thought was I wanted to make sure I had a log since I had no idea when the ports would be opened, but to my surprise when I preceded to enable UPnP, all the ports were opened almost immediately and the destination was my MacBook Air!

At this point I figured I must have a trojan or something, but then I noticed it was port forwarding to known services I had running on my Mac like VNC, Skype, and SSH. So the next thing I tried was to set firewall on the Air to essential services only — usually only enable it when I take it off my LAN — delete the UPnP created rules, and wait. This time they didn’t come back.

Now the problem is that Bonjour requests that the WAN router open up all the ports that are open on the Mac’s local firewall, which is kinda cool, but not what I want. You see while I want to be able to connect via SSH to my Mac while on my LAN, I don’t want to over the internet — otherwise I could control this by configuring the Mac’s firewall. The easy solution is to just disable UPnP on the router, but I have to say that probably won’t work for many people because they don’t understand how to manually configure their firewall. The other option is to disable Bonjour completely, but then the LAN services won’t work either.

For now I’m just going to go back to manually configureing my router’s port forwarding and turn my Mac firewall on when I take my Mac about.

There is one cool OSX command I learned along the way, like how to tell which applications are communicating on port 22.
sudo lsof -i -P | grep 22

This lsof command is basically a more useful version of netstat on the Mac, which evidently will also tell you which files are open.

I went cableless just over a month ago, so as you’d expect, I’m looking for new ways to get content. Now we all know there’s no way I’m going to watch SD, so besides OTA HD and Blu-ray Discs via Netflix, I’m looking to fill some gaps.

One of those gaps is a few shows on HD cable that I actually enjoy like Battlestar Galactica and Burn Notice. So like any Apple TV owner I figured I might as well check out the HD show selection. But man, what a rip! I mean $2.99 a show or like over $40 a season. That is a total ripoff. It’s not like I’m going to watch them more than once. No way I’m paying that much, even for one show. Seriously, how backwards is it that you can only rent HD movies and buy HD shows?

The unbelievable part to me is that not only do some actually buy ‘em, but some of the same shows are available for free — and in better quality — via OTA HD. I just don’t get it.

You’ll have to excuse me now while I go load up my favorite torrent program. I figure it’s either that, or wait another 6 months until I can rent the Blu-ray versions on Netflix.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the new iPhone 2.0 software, but the games are terrible. Sure they are fun after you wait 30 seconds for them to load — when they don’t crash — but the entire point of a game on your mobile device is to fill in the gapes in life. To make things worse when you get a call, or for whatever reason need to do something else on your iPhone, you have to wait for them to load all over again, this makes them almost completely useless.

The other really annoying thing is the music. Do these companies really think I want to listen to their generic game music instead of my own? How can there not be a setting that lets me choose to listen to my own music — or an Podcast in my case?

I’m sure some people don’t care about this, but I’m not a big gamer, I just want to enjoy the occasional game of Tetris or solitaire while I wait for the elevator to arrive, sheesh.

I understand why Apple changed the activation process with the 3G iPhone, and if given the choice to wait in line with other Apple Geeks for 4.5 hours or pay $600 for a 16G 3G iPhone, I’d most definitely choose the wait; but man it’s amazing how much faster the line went last time. The good news is I made some great new friends while waiting and without much fuss was out of the Apple store in about 30 minutes.

Anyhoo, although I love the new iPhone, the real killer new feature is the applications, but with only 25% of them free and no trial period, it’s too easy to burn through all your iTunes credits on crap. So here is my list of iPhone applications, highs and lows — Thanks for the idea Richard.

Highs

1. WeatherBug – Free and easy access to radar maps and weather cameras, but no animated loop. Wouldn’t mind paying for a weather app if it featured animated loops.
2. eBay – Free, but not super fancy, but still faster than using the web browser.
3. Remote – Who doesn’t like this?
4. Tetris – $15, much better than the free Jailbroken version, but takes a long time to load and has crashed on me during games a few times. But very impressive implementation using the touch screen. Definitely worth the money, but I’ll be looking for an update to make it more stable.
5. SportsTab – Free, very quick access to sports scores, seems easier than espn.go.com, but we’ll really see when football season starts.
6. vSnax – Free, like YouTube but more useful, because there is actually recent news and other corporate content.
7. Talking Spanish Phrases – Free, this is a great little phrase utility that includes the pronunciation of spanish phrases as well as to speak them out audibly.

Bad

1. iLoveControl – Free, even at free, this thing is completly useless and even if I did have a Crestron HA system, it doesn’t look like it’d be that cool of a way to control it.
2. Super Monkey Ball -  $10, this game is impossible and you have to look down at the iPhone to even play it. Not much fun at all.
3. Texas Hold ‘em – $5, not a bad deal for $5, but the game is like 150MB and the game play is too slow.
4. NetNewsWire – Free, I’m a long time NetNewsWire fan, but I have to say that Google’s Web reader for the iPhone is better, much better.

The rest of the apps I tried that were just all right were, Cro-Mag Rally, which isn’t as much fun as Crash’s race game. Blip Solitaire which isn’t bad, but takes too long to load and isn’t as good as the free version I was using on my jailborken iPhone.

Overall I’m happy, but I wish Apple had an RSS feed that would make it easy to keep up with new apps and udpates.

I’m a sucker for no interest deals, so bad that sometimes I’m tempted to buy things I don’t even want just so I can shaft some bank out of its money. There’s nothing better than not paying the item off until the very last moment knowing that the bank’s plan has failed, and I enjoyed something on a big corporate bank’s dime for some period of time — so far I’ve yet to pay a cent of interest *knocks on plastic*. So when I bought my MBA I decided to take advantage of the 90 days no interest deal offered to new Juniper Visa Card with iTunes rewards customers. So today when I opened my mailbox I had three card sized envelopes from Juniper and each contained a $25 iTunes gift card. So not only have I not paid for the laptop I’m typing on right now yet, but I have $75 to spend at iTunes. The problem of course is that I generally don’t spend money at the iTunes store and the last time someone gave me a iTunes gift card for $50 (Thanks Stuart) it took me about a year to actually spend it. But I hear you can sell or trade these things nowadays.

Ever since I bought my first Mac, I’ve shared my love and I’m not sure if it’s me or those around me, but I’ve only been able to get a few people to switch, but the biggest failure hit me today. I’ve worked on getting my wife to use a Mac for almost four years now, and I just can’t break her. I even try to strong arm her — yes, I feel guilty about it — but it didn’t work either. I thought it was OS X — cause like many Windows users, no matter how much better something is, if it’s different it’s a barrier — so I even offered to install Windows XP on it. So today I gave up, and against my better judgement I helped her pick out a pink Sony Vaio. I know Jeremy, I know.

The reason is the funny part — although she loves pink gadgets, I’m sure I could’ve convinced her to send it off to Colorware. No, the problem was one that can’t be fixed, and honestly I completely understand. The problem is there’s no right click button on MacBooks. Yeah, she knows you can can control click, or tap with two fingers or rest two fingers while clicking, she doesn’t care. She likes to click on the buttons and she there’s no way to add it.

So how ’bout it Steve? You lost this one and you know it, why else would you’ve include the right click on the Mighty Mouse and all the MacBook shortcuts, so give in already and add the button? Like we all need a three inch click button or something.

If you follow me on Twitter, then you probably saw that I’m not happy with the Apple TV 2. While I couldn’t wait to get the Apple TV, I wait with baited breath for every update to see if I will actually get the main feature that I bought the stupid thing for. No it’s not the video, the quality just can’t compare to Blu-ray so I’m not interested, the thing I really wanted, was a way to enjoyable look at my photos on my 60-inch plasma. Sure my TV has a memory card slot, as does my Blu-ray player, but I said enjoyably. This hasn’t been the case for the Apple TV in the past and it’s not the case with that latest update. To sum up my issue with the Apple TV’s photo experience, I’d like to share a little IM chat I had with my friend Tyler from Format War Central.

Tyler: so the apple tv still sucks?
me: I’m just bitter that they didn’t fix my biggest grip about the photos
Tyler: what do you mean?
me: go to photos on your iphone and select an album, you see thumbnails of all your photos right?
Tyler: yeah
me: If you hit play you can watch a slide show right?
me: how often do you watch the slide show and how often do you just thumb through your pics?
Tyler: never watch a slide show
me: well on the ATV, you can only watch a slide show
Tyler: thats retarded
me: so even though you can browse all your movies and tv shows with thumbnails filling the screen, you can’t look at your pictures with that UI
which makes it useless

So how about it Apple? Can we please browse our own photos like we’ve been able to in iPhoto, the original iPod Photo and the iPhone? And just like we can browse movies and TV shows on the Apple tV? Is that really too much to ask?

I’ve always loved small laptops and as silly as some think it is, the thinner the better. The MacBook Air is my third ultra-portable laptop and so far my favorite for a few reasons that MBA haters will find funny. The battery lasts longer, it is thinner and it runs OS X! The third is the most important of course. The other great thing about the MBA when compared to my older laptops is the keyboard and the screen. Not only does it feature full sized versions of both, but the keys feel good compared to my old um32w and about the same as my m300, but not as cramped. The MBA costs about the same price as my other two as well, but lets hope it lasts longer than my um32w which died after 14 months, with a sporadic power off issue.

The only thing I’m quickly learning to dislike about my MBA is the solo USB port, I’ve already purchased two hubs which will help out, but it would’ve been really nice to have two. So far my favorite thing is the way the MBA looks much thinner than it really is. The thickest part is .76-inches thick, which doesn’t seem much thinner than my um32w which was .8, but when you put them next to each other the MBA sure does look smaller.

In the end I recognize the MBA isn’t for everyone, but it’s for me. I just wish Apple would make a 13-inch MacBook Pro, ’cause I think this would help cut down on the MBA hate, who had their hopes up for a replacement to the 12-inch PowerBook.

Check out all the pictures comparing my um32w to my MacBook Air.