My review of the Categories iPhone app…

First, it pissed me off that I’m stuck with AdMob to use this (I even hate the name “AdMob”) but since the ads show only when you’re editing within the app, I can live with it…I guess. Since I had to take it out of hosts, that means I’m stuck with “the mob” system-wide. I’m not thrilled with that. Release a paid version, FFS, so those of us who absolutely hate ads can cough up the cash and be spared. Put it in Cydia’s new store, facrissake–I have PayPal.

Really, really crash-y! I lost count of the times this app crashed (it claimed it was probably due to low memory) when all I wanted to do was choose a fucking icon. Maybe organise them into icon themes so that 654356 PNGs aren’t loading all at once? Either that or get rid of the goddamned ads because the app would crash every time I happened to be scrolling through the images when the ad flipped to change. It would hang for a second as the ad changed, then I’d end up with whatever icon I hadn’t meant to touch, and it would promptly crash. I was getting very frustrated, and at one point had to restart the phone because Springboard wouldn’t come back up.

The selection of sorry-looking icons makes Baby Jesus cry. Three hundred thousand ugly Vista-ish folder-y icons that don’t look anything like they belong on an iPhone, and a handful of others ranging from “meh” to “thirteen-year-old armed with MS Paint”. There are icons for WMP and IE. I rest my case.

Overall, I think the app is a great idea, and although it will take a while before I get used to looking for my stuff in folders, it is a lot neater. No faster–I can page faster than the folders can load–but neater. The icons are ugly, the ads must die (die, DIE!!), and the “loading icons” memory issue needs to be fixed, but I’m going to give this a shot and see whether I like it better than just turning off seldom-used app icons and paging through the rest. Goddamn, those are ugly icons, though, and this comes from someone who has a collection of “explosion at the crayon factory” wallpaper!

At first, I was satisified to have iPhone access without connecting via USB cable. All I had to do was fire up a terminal, type “iphone-mount” and enter the phone’s root password…twice. Unmount…type iphone-umount, enter root’s password, and that’s it. I could have changed it to passwordless when I first set it up, but I wasn’t quite certain what I was doing, so I didn’t want to inadvertently give unauthorised access to the root of my phone, and I left it at the default of entering passwords. After a while, though, I got past the, “Oh, this is cool!” of wireless access in the first place, and wanted wireless access without having to type anything. I’m especially lazy at getting photos off the phone; it always seems like too much trouble to type, then copy, then type some more. Yeah, lazy, but I knew there was a way to enable passwordless access, and it turned out to be much, much simpler than I’d thought!

From the beginning:

Install openSSH, change the password to something more secure than the default “alpine”. No joke–that’s the goddamned default password for root access to any iPhone 1.1 or newer firmware. Better than “dottie”, I suppose. Anyway, after that, install the package ipod-convenience from the repos. It’ll ask for the IP of the phone, and either create the mountpoint /media/ipod, or you can create your own (I made it /media/iphone just in case I ever want to mount my old iPod, since that’s its default mountpoint). That will allow you to use iphone-mount and iphone-umount from a terminal, asking for passwords.

Passwordless access is pretty simple, using a key-based login. With the phone not mounted (but can’t do my usual “forget to temporarily set the auto-lock to ‘never'”)

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/iphone_identity -N “”

That will either create the .ssh directory and place three files in it (iphone_identity, iphone_identity.pub, and known_hosts. The one called iphone_identy is your private keyfile, and iphone_identity.pub is your public one). If the directory already exists, as mine did, it didn’t add known_hosts because I had one already, but did add the other two.

Now, copy the public key to the phone. Mine didn’t ask whether I wanted to accept because my computers and phone already “know” one another (heh), but if it does, you have to accept.

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/iphone_identity.pub root@(IP of the phone)

Now log into the phone, and you shouldn’t be asked for a password. If you are, you’ve got the wrong SSH, but I didn’t; the one from Cydia would appear to be correct.

ssh root@(IP of the phone)

So…yay. L. had sent me a link to a bunch of icons a while ago, and of course I snagged the iPhone ones (hadn’t a use for them then, but one never knows), so I even made it pretty. Right now, I can’t mount or unmount from Nautilus like I can my partitions, but that’s going to be an ownership/permissions issue, which I don’t have time to fuss with ATM, and for now, I’m content. For now… 😀

Hmmm…wait a minute. If I don’t need to enter a password to mount/unmount anymore, that should mean I can access the phone’s music from Rhythmbox without mounting first; I can just tell Rhythmbox to mount it for me. Interesting, but no time now!

Why people are stupid.

From every entomologist and exterminator, and this particular statement officially from the University of Florida IFAS Extension (and being a giant fucking swamp, Florida knows mosquitoes!)

What About Devices That Emit Sound To Repel Mosquitoes?
There is no evidence that wearing devices that emit sound will repel mosquitoes.

“No evidence” doesn’t take a degree in any hard science to understand. I know it’s only 99 cents, but c’mon! I read some of the reviews, just for the hell of it, and lost a little more hope for the future of intelligent life on this planet because some people had actually convinced themselves that it really did work. Even accounting for the dev’s mother, favourite aunt and best friend from grade school to have written positive reviews, that’s still a whole lot of stupid.

USA! USA! USA!

Came across this….somewhere. Don’t remember where. Sadly, I’m not surprised. Well, at least it’s no longer iFart. That must be progress of some sort, I suppose.

Why I need a new tattoo.

I’d die before I’d get a dolphin (or a butterfly, or a heart, or any of the other tattoo clichés), but I found this little doodle of a betta on DA, and I think it’s very funny. Also cute. Cleaned up and coloured, I think it’d make a cool tattoo…probably on my shoulderblade. Maybe hip…dunno. Yeah, I’m too old to get a new tattoo, and I don’t care–if I feel like it, I will! 😀

I came across a site that had images designed to help artists render accurate drawings of various ethnic types. Simply putting narrowed eyes on a Caucasian face doesn’t make it look Asian, so these drawings listed characteristics of different types. I looked at all of them, and of course I was curious as to what it showed for both of mine. I have come to the conclusion that I ended up with the least desirable characteristics of each ethnic type. British Islanders’ height (men’s, no less) with Silvids’…ahem…”robust” build, and wide shoulders and hips. I’d make a good draught animal. I lucked out in missing the Silvid receding forehead; getting a straight, wide British forehead instead, but did end up with the “striking” profile, prominent cheekbones sharp enough to nearly cut through the skin. Long, narrow British face, though, and Grandmère’s narrow jaw. I love, love, love dark eyes–the darker the better–but did I get Injun black eyes? Nope! Interesting that blue is a recessive gene, yet both my brother and I have our dad’s blue eyes, not our mother’s near-black. At least I missed the epicanthal fold, but none of the Injuns in my family (that I’ve ever seen) have it. Did I get striking, eye-framing brows? Not without significant application of makeup, I didn’t! I’d love to have dark gold skin like my cousin’s (he’s a half-breed, too), but what I got instead was British “fair, tends to freckling and to vascularity” (their words), with the dubious bonus of “sallow, tans if I’m out in the sun for more than six minutes, but doesn’t turn that beautiful golden colour like D.’s” (my words). Nope, I tan almost orange, and I don’t even need to spray it on! I was doing guido-orange before anyone even knew what a guido was, and I’ve already got a good start on my infamous summer “T-shirt, shorts and sneakers tan”, which is quite lovely…no wonder I never wear a bathing suit. Did I get that beautifully smooth, dewy, peaches-and-cream complexion for which British women are world-famous? Hell, no–might as well be Joseph Onasakenrat himself. When I was a teenager and into my early 20s, I used to dye my hair blue-black, but its actual colour is medium-dark brown…until I’m in the sun, when it’s West Country red. Most attractive, and complete with wild frizz, too…thanks, Dad! FML. 😛

I normally think that internet memes are either utterly stupid, or somewhat amusing. For reasons I still don’t understand (I think it might be the tolerance of the animal and the “I see what you did there” expression at the end), Keyboard Cat amuses the living hell out of me. He began as “cool cat” on YouTube, actually named Fatso, belonging to Charlie someone and playing two songs, but I cut the video short because this is my favourite.

Apparently, someone saw that and decided to add it to other videos. This is the first one I saw; I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified at the accident, laugh at the cat, or a little of both. Play him off, Keyboard Cat!

Since then, Keyboard Cat has been added to such “dumbass gems” as the infamous Miss Teen South Carolina (also some guy who set his face on fire doing a flaming shot). Had no trouble deciding whether to laugh at this one. Play her off, Keyboard Cat!

I am currently so amused at Keyboard Cat that I set his music as the ringtone when P. calls from his mobile. Been embarrassed too many times in public by the Meow Mix song, and “…cat, I’m a kitty-cat and I dance, dance, dance…” (what was that I just said about internet memes?) 😛

I fucked it up somehow when I was transferring old /home files to new /home (none of them was actually .dmrc), and tried the chmod that had worked way back when that was an Ubuntu issue and not a Lisa-broke-it issue, but to no avail. Renaming it, then later deleting it in an attempt to force it to recreate itself didn’t work, but I did get the message to stop. I don’t know whether it was one, two, three or four of these things, ’cause I got frustrated and did ’em all. 🙂

gedit .dmrc (then save and close)
sudo chmod 755 /home/lisa
sudo chmod 644 .dmrc
sudo chown lisa .dmrc

It didn’t auto-start aMSN on my next login, but that is probably because I hadn’t added aMSN to the start session at the time I fuXX0red .dmrc, so the last session preferences it could save had just conky and my auto-start screenlets. We’ll see on the next login; now that the permissions are correct and I’m not getting the error anymore, it should be able to save changes to the default session. Time will tell, but right now, I’ve got stuff to get done so I can go and watch Mythbusters (better be a new episode, too, and not some fucking re-run).

I learned today how to say “twelve months” in Estonian. It’s spelt “kaksteist kuud”, and sounds like…

Hahaha! My juvenile sense of humour loves the internet!

So far, I don’t actually hate the new notification system as some people do, but if I decide at some point in time that I do….

gconftool -s –type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

Do not try to “fix” a wifi connection when you’re as tired as I was this afternoon. My connection dropped out of the blue (probably just Charter’s remarkable incompetence), and somehow, as I was trying to fix it on 4h of sleep, I made things a whole lot harder by being too tired to remember I’d flipped the physical wifi switch to “off”. Took me over an hour of troubleshooting (all the way to reinstalling network-manager) after I awoke from my nap before I discovered the goddamned switch was set to “off”. I did that once with openSUSE, too. Duh.

J. said that she’d help me with some pronounciation the next time I talk to her. Yay!

There…I can live without the weather on this one for now, so I’m uploading it here lest I ever again forget to save a copy before wiping it out. I’m told you don’t need to start it with a script anymore (in Hardy and Intrepid, it would start and quit if you didn’t delay), but I read that some people are having Compiz draw shadows under it if it’s started right away, and I can’t be arsed to read how to make Compiz not do that, so I’m using a delay; 20 seconds is actually even better, to give aMSN a chance to fully load. It’s just

#!/bin/bash

sleep 20
conky &

I called it “startup-stuff.sh”, just in case I want to add something non-conky to it at some point in time.

To disable Jaunty’s stupid warning dialog when a program started by Terminal is still running:

gconf-editor, apps > gnome-terminal > global > uncheck confirm_window_close

That will also disable the warning if you have multiple tabs, but I don’t give a damn–that warning is very Windows-y and annoying as hell. I already know that closing a terminal will kill the app (most of ’em–not Conky), so STFU.

To re-enable Ctrl-Alt-Bksp, which is disabled by default in Jaunty because people are stupid (how the fuck does anyone short of a mouth-breathing idiot “accidentally” hit a well-known three-key combination??) Install dontzap, then:

dontzap –disable

Okay, so I read the reasoning behind disabling (actually changing) the key combination, and it almost makes sense. It’s because backspace and delete are often side-by-side on laptop keyboards, and many Ubuntu users are coming from Windows, so they might think the three-fingered Windows salute does what it does in Windows (it doesn’t–in Jaunty, it brings up the shutdown dialog, but you can change that), and might accidentally hit Ctrl-Alt-Bksp instead, kicking themselves out of X without saving anything that’s open, and into a scary black screen where they don’t know what to do. I like Ubuntu still, and I know they mean well, but the n00b-friendly stuff is starting to get on my nerves a little. Maybe next time, I’ll try Arch or something.