While the Mac whore zealot was clearly awestruck by Apple's new MacBook Air, what with its svelte profile and light weight, not to mention complete lack of upgradability, less power and higher price than standard MacBooks... I was more interested in the latest iPhone firmware update that was also announced at yesterday's MacWorld Expo Stevenote.
First, those of us who aren't terribly interested in participating in the jailbreak arms race with Apple can now customize the home screen of the phone without installing new software and generally dicking around with things for very little benefit. So I can now banish the mostly useless Notepad and iTunes store to a second screen.
Furthermore, you can now save a web page as a widget directly on the home screen, which dovetails with Apple's philosophy of making iPhone development web-based rather than client based. I've got links to my Google calendar, Facebook, Newsgator and JiveTalk right up front.
iphone map
The other cool feature is Google's new mapping application, which while sucking less than it did previously, now catches up to Google's version for the BlackBerry and other handsets, with the inclusion of the Location button. By clicking on the little crosshair icon, the Gmap app will use cell tower triangulation to try and find your location. It's nowhere near as accurate as GPS, to be sure, but it's a handy feature, and seems pretty accurate
In the pic, we're only off by 50 yds or so. Not bad for those "where the f--- am I?" moments.
My loyal readers reader may want to tune this one out. I'm going to take a brief respite from my usual fare sophomoric humor and crude language to delve into the geekery necessitated by the recent shortage of space on my precious, yet abused, MacBook, caused saving far too many pr0n files important spreadsheets.
Anyway, the 80 GB drive I thought I'd never use up was filled to the brim, so I purchased a 250 GB, 5400 RPM Samsung HM250JI drive from NewEgg.
It took about 2 minutes to remove the old drive and slot in the new one. I'm not going to be redundant here, so you can just go download the PDF instructions from Apple instead.
Then the fun part. I attempted to use the Apple Disk Utility.app to partition and format the drive, and it failed. Over and over again. Sometimes the volumes would show up, sometimes they wouldn't.
I googled and googled some more.
I finally hit upon the correct keyword incantation that told me that you need to go to Samsung's support page for the HM250JI drive and download a firmware utility.
Download the M5S80_iso.zip file. Burn the ISO file to a CD. Boot from said CD. Let the firmware updater do its thing.
Shazaam. Now Disk Utility will play nice with the drive, and you'll have plenty of room for your midget-bondage-foot-fetish-golden-shower pr0n powerpoint presentations.
