Okay. So I had this song stuck in my head while I was on the bus this morning, and it totally got to me…
Me being the MacFag that I am, with my iPhone 4 and all, jumped on iTunes and downloaded the album, a minute later I had it all right there, playing through my little Sennheiser’s.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, this is the third legitimate music purchase through iTunes… Why? Because they make it so easy!
Curse Apple for putting a music shop in my pocket!
iPhone needs to be jailbroken to do this (tested on my iPhone 4, with iOS 4.0.1 using the www.jailbreakme.com jailbreaker). You don’t need OpenSSH installed, but I prefer it. If you install OpenSSH, connect using root@iphoneipaddress, password ‘alpine’ – I suggest changing this using the `passwd` command while you’re at it. MobileTerminal currently doesn’t work on iOS 4.0.1, atleast on the iPhone 4.
Pull image off iPhone using the following commands.
The first command uses `nc`, aka netcat, and opens a port up and listens using the -l switch. You run this on your destination computer, and pipe the output to the disk image file, i.e. iphone.img (filename unimportant).
On the iPhone itself, you point `nc` to the destination computer after it has been setup to listen. Pipe the output of `dd` reading the iPhone disk to the `nc` command and it will transfer. Note: I found the iPhone would not read the disk without the bs=1M switch.
The process can take a while. It’s taken about 20 minutes for 2.5gb to transfer over the wireless link I’ve setup between my laptop and my iPhone… For a 32gb iPhone, this will obviously take a while!!!
Once complete, analyse iphone.img with Scalpel or whichever forensics software you prefer.
In my last post about MacOSX gaming, I mentioned I like to play Counter Strike / Left 4 Dead, and how I attempted to run it via Parallels virtually etc etc etc. Well, yesterday, Valve announced some AWESOME news for us Mac owners… I can’t wait to try this out
Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.
Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.
I decided my Mac was running a bit slower, something I would usually refer to as the “Windows downhill effect”. Turns out Mac OS X has it too! Albeit slightly less intrusive…
As usual, Google delivered. I tested out a bunch of apps, and heck, even purchased my first piece of shareware, EVER.
Amongst the tools I tested out, were:
iDefrag – disk defragment
Monolingual – removes unused multi-language code
Onyx – runs a bunch of system scripts and generally checks over the system
Xslimmer – removes unused architectures from universal application packages – i.e. in my case, removed PowerPC code from apps that contain Intel code. Read more…
Having bought a Mac, I sort of stopped playing Counter Strike, in the absence of a mouse etc. I managed to have a crack at TOCA Race Driver 3, which is still by far one of my favorite games (second only to Gran Turismo, for those at home playing along on a PlayStation).
I am quite impressed really, that a notebook can handle gaming as well as this. I have the early-2009 MacBook Pro with 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and the Nvidia 9600 GPU, so it’s not really a sluggish platform.
A month or two ago I decided to re-ignite this old flame of mine, World of Warcraft, seeing as it was supported natively on the Mac. About 3GB of downloading later, I had it installed, paid my dues, and jumped on. My initial impression was slow… I had to tweak WoW a little to have it running at a decent 40fps during mob scenes, by pushing the quality to around half way/medium, with the resolution set to the MacBook Pro native of 1440×900. It seems to run pretty well…
Having played CounterStrike and Left4Dead a fair bit just before I bought my Mac, I HAD to try run it virtually on the Mac. I initially tried it out on VMWare Fusion. FAIL. I was quite disappointed to be honest. Mind you, it was running under Windows 7 RC1. But still, frame rate and general loading of the system was down right average… Heaven forbid you enter the hybrid Mac/Windows mode (whatever it’s called)…. Read more…
I was stunned the other day when I was looking through my system info on my Snow Leopard equipped Mac Book Pro to find it was running in 32bit mode…. Turns out you have to manually configure it to run in 64bit every single time you boot up (as seen further below), or by holding down 6 and 4 on the keyboard at startup.
I like to think I’m pretty good with the MacOS now, but let’s face it, there’s still a whole bunch of little things I’m still learning…
Take for example, how to boot up a CDROM or USB drive…
Turns out, a guy named Dan Rodney has compiled a list of frequently used keyboard shortcuts for the Mac, alot of which I seemed to figure out on my own, and then the rest..
Still trying to find a way to send Page Up / Page Down / Home / End using VIM over SSH in Terminal… Instead, fn+Up Arrow (aka page up) scrolls the terminal window, and fn+Left Arrow (or maybe it’s right) mangles stuff up, instead of shooting to Home / End. Maybe Putty or something similar is the answer to this…
