What the hell is Snow Leopard? I keep hearing that it’s just a service pack or not worth the $29 dollars and more recently I have been hearing that Microsoft is laughing at it’s imperfections. Hey Microsoft take a quick look at Windows 7 because it is far from perfect.

However this does not answer the question. Is Snow Leopard a big deal for all the Mac fanboys and fangirls or is it just some elaborate scheme to exploit money from the population to gain revenue and profit. Let’s admit Apple has been down some bumpy roads lately. Just look at the app store’s developer relations and you can see just a few potholes at 1 infinite loop.

I see no reason why Snow Leopard could not have been a free upgrade. Some even say the feature enhancements could have been delivered via software updates and the processes simplified by spanning it over a few months. I am sure that some would argue and say “Well the core architecture has changed and thus well worth the twenty-nine dollar upgrade.

Lets get serious! We are still far from perfecting the 64-bit model and even further from utilizing it’s full potential. When would a consumer ever need to allocate 2 exabytes of memory. As I see it this is the only real upgrade to Snow Leopard as most other upgrades were already offered via hacking or cracking Leopard or using 3rd party software.

Overall I see this as a pathetic attempt to either 1) Represent that they are still ahead of Microsoft by releasing an incremental upgrade before the launch of Windows 7. 2) Add long wanted features to a seemingly identical Operating System to gain a fair amount of profit (Five Million Copies * $29.99 = $66 million in revenue). Regardless I am highly disappointed in Snow Leopard and expected more from Apple.

If you are still debating on getting the upgrade. I would hold off until the 3rd party developers make better use of the 64-bit model and unleash the full power of Grand Central Dispatch.

Agree? Disagree? Leave your comments.

Today Google made a rather large, and ambitious, announcement. They announced a little thing called Google Chrome OS . All uncreative name choices aside, this seems to be the fabled Google OS. According to everything we know right now, Chrome OS will be targeted at the Netbook audience, an ever popular trend in the Personal Computer arena.

Here are a few facts you might want to know from the post.

• A lightweight OS targeted at Netbooks.
• Slated for product release in the second half of 2010.
• Designed to work on x86 and ARM processors.
• Built on a Linux Kernal. (Quoted from the blog, “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.”)
• Open Source.

One thing I noticed is it did say Open Source, so I’m assuming it’ll be free. I mean most, if not all, of what Google does is free, however considering this is an entire operating system, you never know how it’ll go. Also, although they did say it was targeted to Netbooks, they did in fact mention full blown desktop setups and such. So, with that said, we have to wonder how capable this system is meant to be. Will it just be watered down for Netbooks, or will it be lightweight but capable for everything?

This also brings up the question of Microsoft’s, and to a lesser extent Apple’s, response to the whole situation. Linux was pretty much killed as an OS for the Netbooks when Microsoft announced it would extend the life of Windows XP. And with Windows 7 just around the corner, I’m sure Microsoft thought it had the Netbook market wrapped up. Of course they’ll probably just pull the “We have a very capable, well built, Operating System with loads of software already made for it.” but that may not be enough. Of course, Apple has denounced Netbook’s in general, so it’ll be no surprise if they don’t care in the least. If anything they may support it, as it would certainly hurt their competitor.

Of course, details are few and far between on this new OS, considering it was just announced hours ago. However as time progresses we should start seeing what the folks at Google have to offer in an operating system.

Thanks,
Oliver (lockerhaxor)

Today when logging into my Apple Developer account I noticed a nice little surprise. A new iPhone OS beta was available for download via Apple Developer connection. I have yet to download the beta considering many people are having issues with the network connectivity and such however I did want to point out some interesting modifications in the new firmware.

After reading the Developer Forums it seems as if apple has re-enabled the MMS feature but currently MMS is not working. I still believe AT&T needs to enable the MMS feature on their end but it does seem that MMS will be enabled when the iPhone OS 3.1 is publicly released.

For all you iPhone 3GS users it seems you get a great new feature to go along with the your excellent video recorder (Can you tell I have not upgraded yet?) Apple has added the ability to copy video clips in the editor. I am still unsure where we can paste the clips but I think it will be used mainly to allow us to “splice” two video clips together.

Smaller changes include:

• Modem firmware upgrade bringing the carrier software version from 4.0 to 4.2.
• Adding feature to when the phone is put into “move mode” (when you can move apps) the device vibrates.
• Fixed issue with Voice Command and Bluetooth.
• Phone Keypad now allows you to copy and paste.

Most issues with the beta seem to be with the network connectivity and the iPod app. Some users are stating that the iPod app will not even open. As of now I am going to stay away from the 3.1 beta OS until said issues are resolved and I strongly suggest anyone considering updating to the beta do the same. I will keep you posted when I get more news.

Got questions or your own comments? Leave them below!

The Podium Revolution! The only desktop stand for your iPhone/iPod Touch you will ever need. Alright, sorry for the infomercial type intro but the Podium Revolution is one of the best iPhone/iPod Touch stand on the market. The stand itself comes in both white and silver both built with perfection in mind. A great finish for a great iPhone/iPod Touch Stand.

The Podium Revolution is great for just about anything you can do on your iPhone. Everything from turning your iPhone into a digital alarm clock while you are in bed. To helping you become more organized at your desk. I have noticed myself using the stand to help me keep track of daily tasks and events. Using to turn my iPhone into a digital calendar that updates automatically. If money were no object I would buy an iPod Touch and this stand just for iCal but that is a story for another day.

I highly recommend anyone interested in a great iPhone stand to click the animated image above. Overall the Podium Revolution is a great stand and great choice for anyone looking for an iPhone stand.

Updated way to enable tethering:

Simple! Just go to this website on your phone.  http://help.benm.at/help.php

1. Click on mobileconfigs.
2. Select your Country.
3. Select your carrier.
4. It will ask you if you want to install.
5. Click install.
6. Enjoy your tethering via Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering

Old way to enable tethering:

iPhone 3.0 is live! So I am going to repost the tethering tutorial. Now there is no need to download anything (aside from the carrier file). Seems you can just run a little command in terminal (Make sure you are on OS 3.0 on a 3G iPhone and iTunes 8.2):

So open up terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

After that, the steps become a lot more simple.

1. Download this file (for AT&T) and mount the disk image (thanks Gizmodo) for other carriers, try here.

2. Option-click on “restore” in your iTunes with your iPhone attached. Browse to the opened disk image file and hit OK. It will update phone settings for a few seconds.

3. You have tethering. Now go into your iPhone/settings/general/network/Internet Tethering and turn it on.

Boom – 3 steps to tethering…

As a side note is highly recommended that you not use this as your primary internet service. Please if anything try to stay under 5GB’s of transfer per month to avoid service termination.

Hi there.  I thought I might give you a little background on myself before I wrote this blog entry.  My name is Cody “Belthesar” Wilson, and I’m one of the lesser known members of the Geekologist team.  Typically, I sit in the background and am here to give guidance and direction on the way this site moves forward, either technical or otherwise.  You probably won’t see a lot of blog posts from me, but when you do, it’s because, well, I just gotta share something with everyone.

I was raised for the most part in the Windows world (unless you count when I was mucking around in DOS 5 and 6, and my Apple II years, but we won’t bother with those for now.)  4 years ago, I decided I wanted to give Apple a shot and bought a friends Powerbook G4.  I was hooked from there, and became a Mac zealot of sorts.  I did my fair share of Microsoft bashing while as a Windows user, but it certainly increased when I saw “the light”.  So when I tell you that Windows 7, even in its release candidate stage, is the first Microsoft OS I feel not only comfortable, but welcome and enjoy using since I made the switch to OS X, I want you to know exactly what I mean.

Being the Apple fan I am, not only in OS but in hardware, I decided that I would bite the bullet and nuke my XP Boot Camp partition in favor of installing the Windows 7 release candidate (RC).  Given that I have a new Unibody Macbook Pro, I thought I’d give the x64 release aside, as I was tired of not being able to address all of the RAM when I was in the Windows side of things.  The install process worked without a hitch.  After installing the Boot Camp 2.1 drivers for x64 Vista (which also work without any fuss) I had a fully functional Boot Camp compliant Windows 7 install.  This meant it was time to play.

My first impression was the new Taskbar system, which now very much so replicates and expands upon OS X’s Dock.  You can pin applications to the Taskbar and launch them from there, as well as access any running application from it.  Instead of having a text description, the Taskbar now only has the application icon.  It’s important to note that since they have done this, they have removed the “Quick Launch” toolbar for the Taskbar.  Not a problem as this would have been redundant anyway, and the new system works great.  The Taskbar groups windows by application, and hovering over the application’s icon allows you to select which window you want from a labeled preview icon.  All in all, a very comfortable and familiar experience, especially coming from being an OS X user.  The Taskbar has two other really nice features, one of which is the movement and expansion on the “Show Desktop” button.  Formerly located in the Quick Launch toolbar, the “Show Desktop” button now resides on the far right of the Taskbar.  Clicking it has the same functionality as before, but hovering over it fades each visible window into an Aero transparent window pane, allowing you to see your desktop as well as the outline of each open window.  I found it interesting to find that at one point there was a dialog box that had gotten buried in my persistent clicking about and was able to address it in this manner.  Lastly on the Taskbar, the new System Tray is fantastic.  You can now not only choose what icons appear in the tray, but how their notification behavior works.  Also, instead of expanding the System Tray, it brings up another small window like when hovering over application icons on the Taskbar which allows you to select the other hidden System Tray icons.  All in all, easy to use, easy to manage.  Many welcome changes from not only Vista, but from XP, and given that many users are still staunchly avoiding Vista like the plague, I have a feeling this new interface will be different, but welcome to the users that have avoided the switch to Microsoft’s current desktop OS.

Secondly, the modifications to the Vista-introduced “User Account Control” system have made a very annoying and ridiculed feature much less of an annoyance while maintaining the security benefit of user-granted process elevation.  UAC now has a slider that controls just how in depth it’s requests for attention are.  Its default setting seems to be very sufficient by being present, but not unobtrusive.  UAC offers a hyper-paranoid setting for users questioning if they have viruses, or just really like knowing whenever any system change is trying to be made, a little more relaxed setting which still brings up a dialog window whenever a system change is being made but does not lock out or dim the screen (also an added feature for older systems and I’m sure netbooks, who have trouble with the DirectX transparency overlay taking a long time to load), and finally an option to disable UAC completely.  Not being unfamiliar with having to elevate to perform certain tasks since my experience with UAC, I have left it at its default setting.  UAC also learns what tasks you seem to perform on an elevated level and will learn to automatically elevate certain tasks.  These tasks still have the “elevated shield badge” on them in the Taskbar, but have a opposing pattern blue and gold shield coloring versus the Windows patterned shield for elevated processes.

The last feature I’m going to talk about in this article is the Theme system.  Present since Windows 95’s PLUS! Pack, Windows Themes allow you to style your computer’s interface to your liking.  Sorta.  They can change your desktop icons, your border colors, your wallpaper, and your sound set.  And they still do now.  But making and changing themes to suit your style is easier, more intuitive, and more powerful than ever.  Desktop backgrounds no longer require a third-party application to be rotated.  I use the same folder I do in OS X for my backgrounds in Windows 7.  A nicer set of default sound sets are included, so if for some reason Vista’s sounds make you cringe, then there are several other themes you can choose from.  The Aero and Taskbar colors can also be modified.  All things that you could do before, but now have a way of doing them simpler and easier.

All in all, the Windows 7 experience is something I’m truly excited about.  I finally feel that Microsoft has a true contender in the OS market again, and it’s now Apple’s turn to start looking at what Microsoft is doing and learning on how to improve upon it.  While I’m not about to say that Windows 7 is fantastic and I’m a switcher, I now have no problem booting into Windows and feeling like I’m using an alien or antiquated operating system.  For basic users, it’s newly simplified and streamlined interface will be a breath of fresh air.  For power users, those advanced features and organization systems are easily within your grasp.

So alright, Apple.  Microsoft has finally stepped up their game, and they have an OS to rival yours.  Time to step up the Apple experience once again and keep this rivalry going.  Because there’s finally some competition in the desktop OS market again and it’s time to see where innovation takes us next.

First please watch the video above as it will help you better understand the tools required to get this job done correctly.

I have always had the issue of Mac OS X not having the best IRC clients. So I decided to start using mIRC within a VM (Virtual Machine) Running windows XP. However the problem I ran into was not getting the fancy growl notifications when I received a PM or Highlight. To solve this issue we at Geekologist have found a way to get mIRC to send notifications to Growl via SSH.

Requirements :

• plink.exe – It can be download from putty’s download page. (Just google Putty)
• growlnotify – This is included in the software bundle when you download Growl
• mIRC (Obvious)
• SSH enabled on the Mac – (Follow the instructions in the video to do this)
• Growl installed and running on the mac

mIRC Scripts you will need :

For Highlights :

On $*:Text:*:#: {
if ($highlight($1-)) {
if (($0 == 1) && ($1 isnum)) return
else echo $color(highlight) -ts -Highlight- $nick highlighted you in $chan $+ . ( $+ $replace($1-,$ifmatch, $+ $ifmatch $+ ) $+ )
/run -hide plink.exe -ssh MACIP -l YOURUSERNAME -pw YOURPASSWORD /Users/YOURUSERNAME/growlnotify –image ‘/users/YOURUSERNAME/images.png’ -t ‘ Highlight from $nick ‘ -m ‘ $chan $+ : $replace($1-,$ifmatch, $+ $ifmatch $+ ) $+ ‘ -n ‘ mIRC ‘
}

For PM’s :
On $*:Text:*:?: {
if ($nick == $active) { return }
/run -hide plink.exe -ssh MACIP -l YOURUSERNAME -pw YOURPASSWORD /Users/YOURUSERNAME/growlnotify –image ‘/Users/YOURUSERNAME/images.png’ -t ‘PM from $nick ‘ -m ‘ $1- ‘
}

Please replace YOURUSERNAME with your mac username, YOURPASSWORD with your mac password and MACIP with the IP address of the mac running growl.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.

Hosts:
David Ford
Keaton Taylor

Topics:

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One thing that will never change in any tech community is the never-ending operating system (OS) wars. I’ve seen a good number of them and a lot of them just don’t have the facts to back up their claims. However, on a constant basis, it is usually the prime two operating systems: Windows and the Mac OS, otherwise known as Mac vs PC.

I don’t normally like to get involved in those arguments or any other computer-related war, the main reason being that both parties are simply not satisfied with what the other product has to offer. It boils down to each party acquiring their favorite OS and dismissing another all together in a stubborn and ignorant manner. However, in this particular post, I’m taking the opportunity to display my observations, clear up a lot of the flaws presented in the arguments, and lay down a few technicalities on this on-going issue.

The word “Mac” is a term that Apple laid down to set themselves apart from the “PC” platform. While this is a creative marketing theme, we need to look at the whole picture here. A Mac, believe it or not, is a PC, taking note that PC stands for Personal Computer. That term also goes for any other brand of system outside the Apple spectrum: HP, Compaq, Dell, Toshiba; they are all PCs.

Those who have fallen prey to this little piece of propaganda tend to develop a nice superiority complex because of it. That is not a good thing, by the way. Due to this common complex, it also stems others to start OS wars. A lot of the common things that are said sound most likely similar to “Oh, Mac Sucks” or “Vista Sucks” or “I hate Ubuntu”. However, a good majority of the time, this is how a typical conversation within the OS war would be like:

“Mac is really better? Have you tried other operating systems?”
“Yeah, Vista sucks.”
…
“Okay, what about Linux?”
“Linux blows. I could never learn that.”
“Have you taken the time to learn Linux?”
(No response)

I’ll be honest with you. You can’t assess whether one operating system is better than another without actually trying them for yourself. It really isn’t that hard to go to your nearest Apple store or another electronic store and try out OS X. Testing it out also applies to Linux as well. Linux and its hundreds and hundreds of distributions are, for the most part, free. Ubuntu is a nice stepping stone for those that want to learn Linux and the Unix command line. Download Ubuntu Linux and run the Live CD to see if you like it. Don’t automatically dismiss an OS because of what you heard about it. While sometimes that can be reliable, for the majority of the time, however, it’s better if you experience it for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not hate Apple. I have used OS X before. If Apple’s EULA allows OS X to be installed on other computers, I would probably purchase just the OS and nothing else. Why? Apple’s computers are top notch machines but the price leaves it out of reach for a lot of people, like myself for instance. If they drop the Mac Pro to under $800, I would buy it in a heartbeat. But I really don’t see that happening for a while.

All I ask is that you try out a Mac, a Linux operating system, or any other operating system before you start completely dismissing it all together. Being better informed is better than being ignorant. The knowledge that you gain from experiencing it yourself will be more worthwhile.

Hey guys, it’s The App Guru here and  here’s an awesome game that is extremely addicting and hard to put down. This game consists of you controlling a very colorful block as you venture across the map through all the corners and traps. You have to reach the end of the level where  your block will suddenly turn into a colorful batch of liquid soaring into the air. You control your block by simply moving your finger in the direction you want to the block to go. This is a very simple game that almost anyone can pick up. It also has tons of challenging levels to keep you entertained. Overall I highly recommend this app and you can purchase it in the App Store for $5.99.