Virgin mobile - Sprint for your laptop, no contract

For $100 it appears you can sign up for Virgin Mobile Broadband Service. From the fine print it looks like they're reselling Sprint, but there's no contract, you pay on demand ...

$10 10 Days 100 MB 5 hrs Web Browsing Or 25 minutes
Video Or 10,000 Emails (without attachment)
$20 30 Days 300 MB 15 hrs Web Browsing Or 1 hour Video
Or 25,000 Emails (without attachment)
$40 30 Days 1 GB 50 hrs Web Browsing Or 4 hours
Video Or 100,000 Emails (without attachment)
$60 30 Days 5 GB* 250 hrs Web Browsing Or 21 hours Video
Or 500,000 Emails (without attachment)

I'm interested. Anyone with any customer experience?
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My slowing 3G iPhone -- and why multitasking will need new hardware

My 3G iPhone feels like it's on its last legs. Rebooting only helps a bit.

Why should it feel so much slower now than the day I bought it?

Perhaps because it's constantly processing two email accounts, two calendars, one file share, and two contacts servers including use of CalDAV, Exchange server, and MobileMe protocols. That's atop whatever else I might be doing with the phone.

My 3G iPhone is doing a lot of multitasking, and it's hurting. It doesn't have the firepower to handle these demands.

Emily's 3GS does a lot better, but if Apple were to enable 3rd party multitasking I suspect it would run out of steam too.

I'm guessing we'll get 3rd party multitasking on the iPhone this year, probably requiring special certification by Apple, but that it will only be enabled on the June 2010 phone. More multitasking will require new hardware.
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Amazon MP3 download in Safari

I bought an MP3 tune from Amazon, but the download wouldn't work.

Safari OS X kept saving a ".amz" file. The instructions said to "open it", but of course Safari refused. The "help" link took me to a Windows specific help page.

The real answer is that you must first Install the Amazon MP3 Downloader. The downloader is supposed to require that, but it didn't in my case. I migrated my account from a machine that had the downloader installed, so that might explain the bug.

I do wonder, however, how many OS X users ever buy from Amazon. I'm guessing it's a very low number.

When themes corrupt: Fixing a possessed PowerPoint

Twenty minutes before show time, my PowerPoint 2007 presentation (Sorry kittens) was possessed. I tried adding a drawing item to an image and nothing happened. I couldn’t get the the image to display in the normal slide view. I couldn’t fix the problems, so I gave up and went with what I had.

Later I tried to figure out what went wrong. As best I can tell the themes/layout control data had been corrupted. This particular presentation started with a corporate theme as PPT 2003 and had round-tripped between 2003 and 2007 a few times.

Evidently, a few times too many.

Setting a theme on a slide didn’t fix it. The fix was

1. To to View – Presentation views – Slide Master
2. In this view, choose Themes and apply a theme
3. Save
4. Go back through presentation and fix everything up

I had to make do with a standard PPT 2007 theme, but I could again edit my presentation.

LiLi: Windows s/w to create a bootable Linux USB key

My sislaw used Linux Live USB Creator to create a Ubuntu USB key to boot her dead netbook. She pulled her drive data off after booting.

So now she doesn't need to use Gillware data recovery -- though she speaks highly of them.

No personal experience, but worth filing away.

Image Capture - Import to Aperture - deadly bug

I don't remember Image Capture having an "Import to Aperture" and "Import to iPhoto" feature:

Is it new in 10.6?

IC has several advantages over native import. With an iPhone, for example, you can browse your images and choose which to import, and which to delete. There's no other way to mass delete iPhone images on OS X.

Now you can do that during a directed import, no need to save first to the desktop.

Update: Sh*t. Don't do this. From my Apple Discussion post of a few moments ago:

Image Capture allows one to specify Aperture as a target.

Nice feature, but Aperture can't handle video.

So what happens when the images you choose to import contain a video, and you've set IC to delete after import?

The videos are deleted, but not imported. If you were to import directly to Aperture they would be saved to the desktop by Aperture, but with this route they are deleted.

Lethal bug.

I experimented with FileJuicer and PhotoRescue recovery apps. FileJuicer didn't find ANY AVI files, and it ignored the preference settings I used. PhotoRescue found several of interest, but there's no thumbnail -- I can't tell if they're intact or not. There's no longer a MBG for PhotoRescue, so it would be a real gamble to try. We might just live without the videos.

Really nasty bug.

Update b: I am geek. Hear me roar. I knew from watching the image capture process that the images had been copied somewhere. So I went looking.

Spotlight couldn't find them, but DevonThink EasyFind is not so limited. I searched on ".AVI" and found the videos in the hidden folder where ImageCapture stores files prior to sending them elsewhere.

/private/tmp/Image Capture_Import.z2G5f9sM

They were all there. Fortunately I thought of this before this cache was emptied.

I love EasyFind.

Google Reader - following vs. reading the feed

Mahendra, who I will now be following, has written a great summary on using Google Reader. It was all familiar to me, but he cleared up a mystery for me ..

How I Live and Breathe Google Reader by @ScepticGeek

... Tip: By adding a person’s shared items to a folder in Reader, you can unfollow the person in Buzz if you wish, while continuing to see their Reader shares....

Aha! That explains it. Some of the people I most like to follow, like John Munro, had vanished from my Google Reader "Follow" section but their shared item feed remained in my GR Subscription section. I bet I accidentally clicked "unfollow" (surprisingly easy to do for me).

I just navigated to John's shared item feed as shown in GR and added him back to my follow section. (Oops! He's showing up as "08915834275668816438". Hope this gets fixed soon.)

Like Mahendra I'm abstaining from Buzz. Google Reader "People you follow" is much closer to what I want than Buzz.
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