Josh Sunshine's Random Ramblings

Going (Kind-Of)-Pro

Josh — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:40:04 +0000

I’ve just signed the contract which allows me to write for TheAppleBlog! This means that I’ll be posting things up there and getting paid in return! However, since everything I write becomes the property of the blog, I won’t be able to post anything both there and here.
I’ll still try and write some things here, mainly about how I get on with some of the coding I’m going to be doing soon!
Anyway, look out for my first post on theappleblog.com soon!

How-To: Make Your iPad Look Ridiculous

Josh — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:17:00 +0000

Even though thousands of people pre-ordered their iPads on Friday, I’ll bet that nobody has pre-ordered one of these.

Yes, you saw that right. It’s an iPad covered in diamonds. To get one of these tacky things (covered in 11.43 carats of diamonds), you’ll have to go to Mervis Diamond and fork over $19,999. Yep, not only does it look ghastly, but it costs more than a glass stair from the Apple store.

If you are buying one of these, I’d suggest:

Seeing a psychiatrist
Posting a comment below so we can all laugh at you and your lack of dignity

Valve Confirms Steam For Mac

Josh — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:54:31 +0000

It’s been hinted at many times recently, and it’s finally been announced officially; Valve has confirmed that they are bringing Steam, the game distribution service, to the Mac. In their blog post, they also included a list of the games we can expect to see released over the next month.

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.

The news gets better. Before now, to play a PC game on a Mac, you had to either run Windows in some way on your Mac or purchase a separate version of the game. Valve have said that they are allowing use of the same product activation key on both the Mac and PC versions, including previously bought PC versions. This also means that PC and Mac users will be able to play together online (unlike the PS3 and Xbox 360, which use different servers to one another) with no headaches.

Again, it gets even better than that. Valve also said:

We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates.

Portal 2 will be the first game to be released simultaneously on all three platforms.

[Image via Cult Of Mac]

Detangling Your Earbuds

Josh — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:29:22 +0000

Late last year I posted about how to keep iPhone 3GS headphones untangled. Now I have a way for everyone to keep their ‘phones on the straight and narrow. Enter the Wrapster.

Created by design collective Quirky, this piece of bendable rubber is on pre-sale now for $5 (~£3) and is made to keep your headphones untangled. It does this by having you feed each side of the headphones through a hole in the top of it, which keeps them separate and therefore untangled. It also has a flexible clip for attaching the Wrapster to a shirt pocket, and a slot near the bottom for holding the end of the wire when you wrap your headphones around it.

[via Cult of Mac]

Quick Tip: Reading in Bed

Josh — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:45:11 +0000

Reading things on an iPhone when you’re lying down in bed can be a bit difficult; either your arms start to ache from holding it up in front of your face, or you try to lie on your side but the darn thing keeps rotating so you can’t read it properly.

I can’t fix your aching arms, but I do know how you can solve the rotation problem. Lie on your back, then decide which way to roll to be on your side. Then, rotate your iPhone into landscape mode, with the home button facing in the opposite direction. That is, if you’re rolling to the left, you want the home button on the right. The screen will not rotate when you roll because it ends up being upside down, which doesn’t make it rotate. Happy reading!

Re-organisation

Josh — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:47:58 +0000

I listened to what you wanted and I’ve now organised the videos page into sub-pages with 5 episodes on each page. Obviously now there’s yet another new way to access your favourites, which is as follows:

If you wanted Episode 12, you’d go to

http://www.joshsunshine.me.uk/11-15/#12

And if you wanted Episode 22 you’d go to

http:///www.joshsunshine.me.uk/21-25/#22

I hope that makes sense… basically, you use the base URL (www.joshsunshine.me.uk), then the range of 5 the episode is in (XX-YY), then the episode number (#ZZ).

Happy watching!

The $10,000 Stair

Josh — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:33:40 +0000

An eBay auction ended approximately 2:00 this morning from seller heylookitskibbe. His real name is Mark Burstiner, a former Apple employee.

What was he selling? About a year ago, employees from Seele GmbH were replacing a glass stair from the Fifth Avenue, New York Apple Store. Mark asked the employees whether he could have the stair, to which they agreed, and then gave him the coffee-table-sized glass stair. He kept it for a year before auctioning it on eBay. However, Seele GmbH saw the stair and asked for the auction to be taken down, and for the stair to be returned. Burnister unlisted the item, but refused to give back the stair.

On the 28th of February, the stair mysteriously appeared back on eBay, with a starting bid of $700 and a Buy It Now price of $2500. The three-day auction came to an end early this morning, with the winning bid of $9,950 – making this a hugely expensive block of glass (weighing 144kg or 250lbs), which was cracked from having a bottle dropped on it.

[via TUAW]

Birthday Wishes

Josh — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:48:27 +0000

One of our subscribers here on Josh Sunshine’s Random Ramblings has a birthday today, and then another has their birthday on Saturday!

Today, we say ‘Happy Brithday’ to EmmaLeteacee, AKA Emma LeTeace, who is 16.

On Saturday, it’s time to sing to OompaLoompa, AKA Becky Eldrett, who is also 16.

Quick Tip: Pesky Wi-Fi Networks

Josh — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:34:27 +0000

If you’ve been out and about with your iPhone near other people’s houses, you’ve probably noticed many Wi-Fi networks called BT Openzone. Openzone is a service that BT broadband users can sign up to which gives them free access to other BT routers and Openzone hotspots. The problem is, they’re all called BT Openzone, which means that if you log in to one of them on your iPhone, it’ll remember it and try to connect to them every time you’re nearby one. This makes your life difficult because they require a password to be typed into Safari, and this means you can’t use other apps that require the internet to work.

To be able to use your data network even while you’re near an Openzone hotspot, you’re going to have to disconnect from the network. This usually requires turning off Wi-Fi, which is a pain because then you have to turn it back on again later.

There is a way to solve this though. Next time you’re near an Openzone hotspot, load up the Settings app. Choose Wi-Fi, then tap the little blue circle next to the Openzone network. At the top, there is an option labelled ‘Auto Login’. Turn this off and voila! Your iPhone will never again automatically connect to an Openzone network again!

Automation, The Easy Way

Josh — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:16:04 +0000

If you’re like me, then there are some things that you wish your computer would automatically do for you, because they’re tedious or you’re away from your computer. Of course you can do this using scripts, or Automator on the Mac, but when doing that you’re limited to what the script can understand.

Enter Project Sikuli. Sikuli is a Jython application which uses screenshots to work out what you want it to do. By just using simple commands such as click, type and find and giving the app screenshots of what you want it to do, you can get it to do anything which requires use of a GUI.

For example, I could write the following script:

This would switch to Safari, navigate to Facebook, then proceed to login to my account and post an update, all based on screenshots. Obviously this is a more basic script; people with some Python knowledge can add any Python code into the scripts and create something more complicated.

Sikuli is completely free to download and try out, so if you want something done for you, download it and take it for a spin.