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General technology.

iOS 5 Mini Review

I've only been playing around with iOS 5 for a few hours, since the update took forever thanks to the infamous "Error 3200," so this is just some first impressions.

What I Like

Android's Notification Center

Notifications now appear at the top of the phone, and you can swipe down to view them (and various widgets) at any time. So that's nice. And exactly the same way it works in Android.

Heh

I know I'm not the only one this is happening to, but it's still amusing:

Apple's website returning a HTTP 403 Forbidden error

Update: Just to be clear, this happened immediately after the iPhone 4S was announced (October 4th, 2011), but before Steve Jobs's death (October 5th, 2011). Note the time stamp.

The Nook gains a web browser

The Barnes & Noble nook has had a web browser added to it in the 1.3 update (along with sudoku and chess and a bunch of other things).

And the web browser actually works pretty freaking well. The nook’s design of a small touch screen along with an e-ink display means that you get a full-color small view into the website on the bottom and a very nice black-and-white view on the top. You can scroll through the website using both the touch screen and the page back/forward keys, meaning that all-in-all, it works very well for simple surfing.

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iDon't care...

So apparently Verizon has decided it needs to take the iPhone head on, and is running a campaign that makes various points all starting with "iDon't." (Some of them are pretty damned weak, like "iDon't run widgets.")

Then it jumps from clean and Apple-like to noisy and - well, honestly, it reminds me of a traditional horror movie promo. "Coming November, it's DROID. DROID is a trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and it's related companies."

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Apple must have hired the Windows copy dialog developer

It looks like Apple hired the guy who did the Windows copy dialog to do the time estimates for Spotlight:

The dialog says "About 9 hours remaining" and the progress bar indicates it's about half done

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Poorly Documented iPod Touch Button Combos

Probably the most important one to know is the "reboot" combo for when the iPod Touch crashes. Er, I mean if. Most of the rest of these were discovered while trying to reboot my crashed iPod Touch.

There are basically two buttons on the iPod Touch: the Sleep/Wake button on the top, and the Home button on the face. Rather than write "Sleep/Wake" out each time, I'm just going to call it the Sleep button.

So, here are the button combos:

Hold Sleep for 5 seconds: bring up the "turn off iPod" UI, or turn the iPod back on if it's off.

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Fun With Copy/Paste

While looking through some JSPs, I noticed something:

<%@ page language="java"
  contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
  pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
  content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

I've highlighted the important parts. The web server is set to tell the browser that the page is encoded in UTF-8. The page itself, on the other hand, tells the browser it's ISO-8859-1.

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"Comcast Doesn't Interfere With Active Network Connections"

Comcast claims that they don't interfere with active network connections. ORLY?

Either Comcast is, say, lieing, or Steam has some pretty severe reliability issues. The following log takes place over 12 hours:

iTunes Sucks

So iTunes apparently decided to crap out and destroy its own library.

What does it do? It crashes on loading its XML backup, overwrites it preventing me from reimporting it, and then proceeds to wipe my iPod clean.

Leaving me with absolutely no way to restore my playlists.

You'd think they could import the metadata from the iPod, but of course not. It just deletes everything.

Thanks a lot, Apple.

Pidgin's Crappy Formatting Icons

So let's take a quick look at the Pidgin background color and foreground color icons:

Two icons: a blue "A" on a white background and then a white "A" on a blue background

Take a wild guess as to which is which.

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