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Jailbreakme 3.0 is released!

riccardo — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 06:45:55 +0000

Breaking news – Comex has finally released the new version of Jailbreakme, the online tool capable to jailbreak 4.3.3 iOS devices, including the iPad 2. First reaction and positive reports are appearing on Twitter. Happy jailbreaking!

JailbreakMe 3.0

14 years of Apple in 14 screenshots

riccardo — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:59:09 +0000

Everyone is talking about Apple. One of the best way to visualize the history of a tech company is through its website, and how it has changed in the years. Here we present you a series of screenshot of the home page of Apple.com: one for each year, since 1997 to 2010. Have a nice trip!

TIP: We didn’t add any “special effect” to the screenshot links, so you can open them in full screen. If you want to open them in a new window (and you’re reading this web page from a computer) just click on thumbnails with your mouse wheel to open the full size image in a new tab.

July 15, 1997
4 days earlier, president Gil Amelio resigned from Apple. Steve Jobs has just came back as advisor. At 1997 Macworld Expo, Jobs announce a partnership with Microsoft, to release a new version of Office for Macintosh.
May 8, 1998
The new iMac will sell about 800,000 units in five months. Its designer leader, Jonathan Ive, will prepare some years later the design of iPod and iPhone.
October 5, 1999
The Power Mac G4 is classified by US and Chinese governments as a weapon because of its speed of 1 Gigaflop (a billion floating-point operations per second).
October 17, 2000
2000 is the year of the iBook, launched on July, 21th. Apple is still “stuck” as a personal computers firm.
September 17, 2001
Like many websites around the globe, Apple dedicates a tribute to 9/11 victims.
May 29, 2002
Apple tries to debut in the server market with the Xserve 1U rack mounted server. It was a dual-G4 machine, running on two ATA Drives instead of SCSI. The price of Xserver 1U was relatively cheaper than other machines of same class. A new iMac, with a… strange spheric design, was launched in the early 2002. It will be discontinued in 2004.
November 29, 2003
Introducing iTunes for Windows, too. Macs are still on G4 and G5 processors, and the operating system of the year is Mac OS X Panther.

July 14, 2004
While 100 millions songs were bought from iTunes, design of Apple products (look ad monitors in the left-bottom side) are already similar to today.
October 1, 2005
The iPod Nano hurricane. It will be a insane success, that hasn’t stopped yet. Side by side with a real hurricane: Katrina was the biggest natural disaster in the US history.
June 14, 2006
“I’m a PC, I’m a Mac”. The new advertising campaign of Apple is a very hit, with hundreds of ironic parodies on the web. It seems that Apple marketing choices are now pointed to accentuate the war of its fanboys against MS people.
January 10, 2007
2007 is the year when “Apple Computers, Inc.” becomes “Apple Inc.”, and it’s not a coincidence. With iPods, Apple TVs, and finally with the iPhone, Apple is not a simple computer productor anymore.
February 15, 2008
Mobile computing is now a core business for Apple. It seems that users are interested to mobile computers, to use with their new mobile devices. So it’s the time to launch a laptop that is really mobile: the Macbook Air is the thinnest and lighter laptop on the market.
July 15, 2009
Even lighter, with a music player that looks like… a lighter. The iPod shuffle doesn’t have a display, but it reads titles of songs directly to the listener.
7 May, 2010
At begin, iPad is derided. But in less than a year, it will revolutionize a part of computing world: many persons will buy it INSTEAD a real computer, because it “is sufficient” to browse the web and use emails. Oh, and to use Facebook. Also the commercial world is hit by iPad: business men can now show their products on a little and speedy tablet without open, connect and wait for load of a traditional laptop.
Like the iPhone, it lacks of Adobe Flash. But at last nobody cares.

SugarSync synchronizes your documents for free, brings them to your smartphone

riccardo — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:34:45 +0000

I was looking for a complete solution to keep the office PC with my laptop in sync: SugarSync does more: it offers a free 2.5Gb storage space to synchronize an unlimited number of folders between two computers; in addiction, they gives you a mobile application – available for Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry – to access your file also in mobility.

You’ve only to select the directories you want to keep in sync (tipically the “documents” folder, and maybe your music or pictures archive), the SugarSync client will run in background, automatically monitoring every change. If the other computer is switched off, it will be synchronized the next time you will power it up.

It is a direct competitor of the famous (and good) Dropbox (2Gb for free), but it offers several addictional features: Dropbox syncronizes a single folder and it gives a mobile app only for iPhone, even if the free accounts are elegible to be linked to an unlimited number of computers, while SugarSync free supports only two (plus a phone). SugarSync is available for Windows and Mac OS X (Dropbox has also a Linux client).

You can expand the space limitations of your free account referring your friends: SugarSync offers you 250Mb of addictional space for every new user you refer (and your friend will get the same, starting with 2.75 Gb of free storage space!); if someone you referred will upgrade to a paid plan – starting from $4.99 per month for 30Gb – you’ll get an addictional 5Gb for free.

Go to SugarSync website

How to reset the Mac keyboard

riccardo — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:57:48 +0000

Macs, known for their elegant design, often require knowing different ways to do such things as changing your browser, learning where your folders are, or even changing your inkjet cartridges. Here is the easiest way to reset your keyboard. The screenshot you see here on the left shows a Mac OS X (Leopard) window that pops up when a new usb keyboard is connected. It asks user to press the key on the right of (left) shift, to detect the correct international map. Yesterday I had a problem with the keyboard of a Mac Mini I have in my office network: “<>” and “\” keys were swapped.

In the italian keyboard, “<>” is the key on the right of left-shift, and “\” (the backslash) is above the TAB key.

Apparently without any valid reason, these keys reversed their position, like (I think) they are on official Apple keyboards (I use instead a normal Toshiba PC keyboard). I tried to disconnect and reconnect the USB plug, but the selection window didn’t appear – I think because the system “remembers” that keyboard, so it doesn’t think it’s necessary to ask user to press keys to detect it again.

After a lot of Googling, I found that it’s necessary to delete a file to make Mac OS completely forget keyboard settings:
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

So, after the deletion of this file, I reconnected the keyboard and I completed the dection wizard. Keys are now fixed