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To get facetime working on your firewall you need to be sure some ports can be used. For most home users this won’t be a problem but it may be different at work. Here is the Apple KB Article on it :

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4245

If the Wi-Fi network router that you are connected to uses a firewall or security software to restrict Internet access, contact the network administrator and reference this technical article. To use FaceTime on a restricted Wi-Fi network, port forwarding must be enabled for ports 443 (TCP), 3478–3497 (UDP), 16384–16386 (UDP), and 16393–16402 (UDP).

Make sure those UDP port ranges have a good priority in your QoS configuration and you should be good to go. It is worth noting that DNS and HTTP must be open to the outside as well, but they are probably used only to establish the call (same for HTTPS/443) so the QoS config should not matter.

Hi everyone,

I know there are 2billion iPhone 4 reviews out there already, but I know some of my friends want to know what my take on it is. I’ve had my 32GB iPhone 4 on Fido for a few days now.

Build Quality

It feels solid in your hands, and feels quite dense. As it is thinner and slimmer than the 3g(s), it really does feel heavier even though it is but by only 2 grams. It doesn’t twist, and looks great. The Micro SIM card is probably the most impressive thing about it. As you eject it, and see the precision work that went into it, you instantly realize that the iPhone has industrial design that is far better than most consumer electronics. However, the ergonomics are not so good. First of all, when it is in your pocket, you have to touch either the volume buttons or the home button in order to know what side is where. It also gets rather slippery if it’s hot and you have moist hands, and considering it won’t survive a drop on concrete, I’m going to watch out..

The buttons also feel pretty good. The home button clicks well, which is a nice change from my old 3g, but I don’t know how it compares how the 3g was when it was brand new.

Screen

Impressive is the only word to describe it. I read a PDF of normal text on a 8.5×11 sheet without zooming in. You’ll need to be wearing your glasses because the text can go so small but it is incredibly clear and easy to read. The pixels are closer to the surface, so it looks like you’re reading on the glass and not through it.  It is so good that I now find my laptop screen completely ridiculous.

Cameras

The main camera is a lot better than the camera in the 3g, that is for sure. Back then, we didn’t even have tap to focus. The video filming is very smooth. It is a bit hard  not to shake while holding it though, so maybe some videos will need to be stabilized after the fact. Pictures look OK, but don’t expect it to outclass a good point and shoot. The flash is lame, but is better than no flash. For me, it is good enough, which means I can ditch the point and shoot for most occasions, and when I need to take real pictures, I can bring the DSLR.

The main camera seems to be pretty good for its main purpose which is facetime. Framerate looks smooth, resolution is good enough for a face !

Reception

Reception is hard to judge for now. I was running 4.0 on my 3g and I have 4.0.1 on the new one, which means bar levels are considerably lower on the new phone. I got a call in an area where I’ve always had major issues speaking on the phone, and the call was clear even though I only had 1 bar. Death gripping it resulted in “skipping”. 3g download speeds also seem impressive, though lately Rogers/Fido has been slower than ever, so I don’t have any numbers to back that up. But I did download some stuff on MxTube once at a very great speed (close to 5mbps) which is something I hadn’t seen on the iPhone 3g before.

OS/Experience

The OS is exactly the same as what I had on my 3g, so no big surprises there. I had enabled multitasking on my old one, and I can say that on the iPhone 4 with 512megs of RAM, application switching is absolutely great. Sbsettings pops up so fast now, and Cydia is actually usable ! Running trapster in the background also seems to work nicely. Browsing sites with Safari is a charm with the great resolution and faster CPU. Make sure you keep it on 4.0.1 so you can jailbreak it !

Battery life

I managed a bit over 4hours of usage (reading in safari, playing Galcon Labs, watching a few videos in mxtube, shooting a few test videos) and a day and a half of standby on my first full charge. The battery should be good enough to avoid having to recharge during the day even if you use it quite a bit.

Facetime

Are you kidding? With the current shortage, I’ve heard that there isn’t a single person in this city that owns an iPhone 4 and knows someone else who does ! Short of giving out my number in a forum, there’s no way I’ll get to try Facetime soon. Anyways, I don’t really care. Why can’t we initiate calls on Facetime? I’d like to be able to call people in Europe over facetime but I don’t want to pay long distance for the first minute or so..

Bottom line

Buy it, unless you hate really high pixel density screens and a fast phone which responds in a very snappy manner. Then, Jailbreak it and install Sbsettings, 3g unrestrictor, lockinfo, etc..

update: After 24hours, I’m pretty sure it helped quite a bit. My phone did not slow down to a crawl today nor did iOS start killing my fast app switching backgrounded apps. Will it last? Will it blend? Of course not, it’s VIRTUAL memory!

With the latest iOS 4 supporting multitasking or with any other version of iOS that has been set free from its jail, I’ve noticed that my old, slow iPhone 3g has been having memory issues.

With iOS 3 and multitasking applications such as backgrounder, I could at least manage what app I wanted to leave open in the background. Sure, it took more CPU but at least I could manage it.

With iOS 4 (multitasking enabled using the latest pwnagetools) – many apps will keep using RAM in the background if they support Fast App Switching. As more and more apps get recompiled with iOS 4 and fast app switching enabled, I noticed I needed to reboot my iPhone from time to time or manually close these apps. And as we know, task managers, blowing it, etc…

Here is how I enabled swapping on my iPhone – sorry for not quoting any definite source, the knowledge I found was spread out through many forums and no clear source could be found. In any case, I’m certainly not the one who thought about this.

iOS is a stripped down version of OS X, which supports swapping, obviously. However, the flash in your iPhone is not made to handle thousands of writes and this is why Apple doesn’t do swapping on it. Be warned, this will probably end up killing it. How fast? Hard to say. Considering my 3g is 2 years old and I’m eligible for an upgrade soon, I just don’t really care. Please inspect the file before you upload it and understand what it means – I’m not responsible for you nuking your phone. Back it up in iTunes first, too, just in case you have to restore using DFU Mode.

1. Jailbreak your iPhone ( I recommend pwnagetools )
2. Install OpenSSH From cydia
3. Connect to your iPhone using an SCP client (Cyberduck, WinSCP, Filezilla..)
4. Download this file and rename it from .txt to .plist com.apple.dynamic_pager
5. Upload this file to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
6. Reboot

You will now notice that even after opening a few apps, available memory reported by SBSettings will remain close to 30-35Mb.

On top of that, if you browse to /var/vm , you will see that it created a swap file.

I don’t expect families to get 3-4 iPads.. so why not make the thing multi-user ?

Applications would have their separate data, and a simple user switching locking screen would do the job..

Then again, Apple probably prefers not to do that as it would be “complex”. And people will buy multiple iPads.

End of useless post

My new Lacie D2 Network drive is Time Machine compatible. That means it’s really easy to setup with Time Machine – no hacks required, it just gets detected.

However, Time Machine is clearly designed for drives that are used ONLY for Time Machine. This is great when you have a drive that is dedicated to backing up a single machine, but this device being a NAS, the point is to use it for multiple computers, and multiple purposes.

The easiest way I’ve found to limit the size that time machine will use is to:

1) Create the share where you want to host your Time Machine files, make sure you make it Time Machine compatible.
2) Enable Time Machine. It will create the file and start ‘Preparing’. As soon as you can confirm the .sparsebundle file has been created in the share, stop time machine, and disable it.
3) Copy the filename of the sparsebundle file. (It should be something similar to your hostname_mac_of_eth_card – but I figured it’s easier to copy it.)
4) Open a terminal and run this command. Replace the comment and the filename by your own of course, as well well as the size of the volume we’re creating. In my case, I created a 40gig volume for my Hackintosh, since I don’t keep much there. You can create the file locally, it won’t really take 40g (or whatever space you specify) as it is only a maximum.


hdiutil create -size 40g -fs HFS+J -volname "Backup of Blah" blah_000000000000.sparsebundle


5) Move that file on the share you created for Time Machine purposes.
6) Turn on Time Machine and point it to that share again. It will discover the file, it should start backing up to it, and should not go over the space you assigned to it. That way you can fully use your NAS to backup many computers while keeping some space for music and videos !

After a first iPhone that did not support third party apps, we were promised an App store, and push notifications for apps, in order to save battery life by not running applications in the background.

Then suddenly, we stopped hearing about it. Apple was acting like it never happened.

Now, with the iPhone OS 3.0 released, it is finally a reality. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in decent instant messaging on the iPhone get BeejiveIM 3.0 . It is about 10$, but worth every penny once you compare the security model with other applications, and push notifications make it so much more useful, it’s great.
With the iPhone locked, it will ring (if you want it to), and display the message you have just received in a small popup window. As you unlock it, it launches the app and takes you to that message.

Try it out !

Doing it the cowboy way – not even bothering to read about it. Wish me luck !

Update: The install went relatively well, but after rebooting, I had no sound, and 800×600.
I installed the driver pack from : http://forums.msiwind.net/osx-drivers/retail-install-driver-pack-final-release-t11311.html which shouldn’t be used with installs that were made with the MSIWindOSX.iso installer, but what the heck.

Had troubles booting, removed the Realtek 1000 Ethernet card kext ( in single user mode )..

It now boots..

Wifi: Still works
Photo Booth: Still works
Sound: Still works
Ethernet: Probably doesn’t work, I don’t feel like finding a cable and an available port to test it (should be easily fixable though)

Sleep: Works and resumes fast, seems to cause issues with Photo Booth if you sleep while the camera was on, though I am not sure this is a “new issue”. Closing and restarting photo booth works.

Anything else I should test?

Pocket Informant is a wonderful tool on Windows Mobile, and an iPhone version was just released. It doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles (yet), and suffers from the heavy restrictions and lack of functionality in the iPhone OS version 2.

Two particularily annoying restrictions are the fact that it can’t sync with the iPhone’s calendar, which would’ve made it easy to sync with your desktop, and it can’t ring alarms if the app isn’t on. And to think that a decade ago, Pilot 1000s could ring even while the device was off…

To be able to sync my iPhone Pocket Informant to my work Calendar (Outlook) and home Calendar (iCal), and to retain alarms, I use this scheme:

Here is what you will need to do, and in what order.

1. Open a Google Calendar account. It should be noted that this is stored on Google’s servers, so this solution may not be the best if you treat your calendar info as super private or if it contains confidential information. It might also be a very bad idea if you schedule crimes using your iPhone. Read the privacy policy.

2. Backup your iCal and Outlook calendars, or really any other application you will sync with Google Calendar. The calendar will get wiped from your iPhone so make sure that the info is already somewhere else.

3. Download and install the Google Calendar Sync tool. The options are very straightforward:

Enter your Google credentials, and set the sync to 2 way. Test the synchronisation, verify that your Google Calendar now reflects what is in your Outlook calendar.

4. Download and install the Google Calaboration Utility to Configure Google Calendar as CalDAV Calendars in iCal . Again, the options are pretty straightforward, though the first sync will get the data from Google to your iCal in a new calendar. You will to create new appointments in the proper calendar. I’m no big iCal user, I barely use it in fact, so you may know a way of merging your calendars. Test creating an appointment, see if it got created on the Google Calendar, and then force a sync in Outlook and see if it made it there.

5. Buy, download and install Pocket Informant on your iPhone. Under Settings / Sync / Google Calendar, set the Sync to Active, enter your credentials, and force a sync. See if everything is now in Pocket Informant.

6. Disable calendar sync in iTunes. 

7. On  your iPhone, follow these instructions that explain how to setup your Google Calendar to sync over the ActiveSync (Exchange) protocol. This will wipe any calendar info from your iphone. Force a Sync, check if your iPhone calendar got updated. This will give you alarms !

8. Bonus option for jailbroken phones: Install Lock Calendar , available in Cydia, to display calendar info on the lock screen.

You now have a decent calendaring solution for your iPhone, hopefully, some of these steps will be redundant with version 3 of the OS and future Pocket Informant release.

Known issues:

There is obviously a pretty long delay until all parts are up to date. I set the sync on my iPhone to 30minutes (I don’t use push), and to my outlook to 30 minutes, so if I’m not lucky it can take quite a while to be everywhere.

Items added from Pocket Informant with “Alerts” don’t seem to sync properly to Google, and therefore doesn’t get synched back into the iPhone calendar properly. So for now, until a workaround is found (there are quite a few different alert types in PI, maybe one of them works), you’re better off creating items that need alerts somewhere else.

Pocket Informant’s sync is not super reliable right now, should be improved soon.

ToDo:

You can use the same process with a ToodleDo account. I myself simply use Toodledo with the Firefox sidebar, and sync my Toodledo account to Pocket Informant and the Toodledo app for iPhone (Great value, by the way).

** Update ** Official word from Symantec

My favorite quote from that paragraph is: “ Releasing a patch unsigned is an extremely rare occurrence that does not pose any security issues to our users”.

Wow, I guess Norton’s too good, they don’t even need to sign patches. Then why do they ever sign them, if they can push unsigned ones?

Why was that patch hidden, and why did they delete true messages concerning PIFTS before the "spam” appeared?

PIFTS.exe is generating quite a buzz as nobody seems to really know what it does, and Symantec seems to be putting more effort at moderating posts than explaining what it does."

SANS page about PIFTS

Blog post by a guy who thinks that Slashdot is a web 2.0 social networking site for techies:

Digg discussion about that page

Anubis report (who knows if that was done using the real file though):

Slashdot Discussion

Washington Post "Voices"

Great screenshot from the Symantec boards, the thread should be gone in a few minutes..

And another one..

Possibly a great 4chan prank? Who knows, you’d think Symantec would release an official statement if that was the case..

A lot of people have been asking me if my MSI Wind’s built in camera works in photobooth.. Well, it does, and no, I didn’t have to do anything special!

I have however read about multiple versions of the BisonCam camera being used in different revisions of the Wind, as well as different firmware versions.

In any case, I am posting my system profiler info about the camera in case it can help someone out there.

  Product ID:    0×0141
  Vendor ID:    0×5986
  Version:    3.06
  Speed:    Up to 480 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer:    BISON Corporation
  Location ID:    0xfd500000
  Current Available (mA):    500
  Current Required (mA):    500
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