tenthofjune

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I’ve been a long time user of Tweetie, first for Mac, then later on the iPhone. A few weeks ago, when Twitter bought Atebits, the developer of Tweetie, there was much concern that this spelt the death knell of the Mac desktop version, especially as this was (and still is) languishing at version 1.2.6 while the iPhone app had moved to version 2 with a couple of updates on top of that.

Yesterday, Twitter rolled out their replacement for the Tweetie iPhone app, called, not surprising, Twitter for iPhone. I will probably update to that but there appear to be some issues with the way it does a retweet, so I haven’t done so yet. I was therefore surprised to see Echofon claiming that I had tweeted from “Twitter from iPhone” when I had done no such thing. I had actually been using Tweetie for Mac (on the desktop):

This, however, was not the fault of Echofon, as the web page was also lying:

A quick search on twitter showed that others were also noticing this. The problem is that both Tweetie for Mac and Tweetie for iPhone use basic authentication and are registered with the same token. (thanks to Matt Roberts) When Twitter changed the tag from “Tweetie” to “Twitter for iPhone”, it meant that both incarnations of Tweetie were being retagged, one of them wrongly.

The conclusion is that either Twitter has overlooked the consequence of changing the tag or more worryingly that they really don’t care about Tweetie for Mac and are happy to have Tweetie for Mac users advertising an iTunes link to the iPhone app.

Tweetie for Mac is however still available on atebits.com.

While it’s great to receive updates for iPhone apps, these are not always welcome as the update can often change the app’s functionality dramatically, such as when Occipital were forced to removed the Amazon results from their otherwise excellent RedLaser app; for many, this was the main attraction for using RedLaser, so did not want to update.

While you are not forced to do so, it means that you cannot use the ‘update-all’ button; you then have to individually install updates, which can be tedious with a large number of updates. It would be better to be able to opt to ‘ignore updates for this app’, but I can’t see Apple adding this functionality.

Although there are several causes for reduced battery life on iPhones, I found that this was my problem with a rapidly flattening iPhone battery.

When I first got my iPhone, I found that, after an overnight charge, the battery wasn’t even lasting until the end of the afternoon. The phone was also getting quite warm. I initially put this down to overuse of a new gadget, but even when I wasn’t using it much during the day it was still needing a top up to avoid it dying on the way home. Additionally, this didn’t happen at the weekend when I used the phone a lot more.

I then noticed that while I was at work, owing to the perfectly reasonable company firewall settings, I couldn’t connect to my .mac* or gmail email accounts nor send any email. In order to do so, I would turn off the WiFi to use the GPRS (I’d be lucky to get 3G on O2 despite being inside the M60). I then found that the battery life improved so that the phone would now last all day until late evening.

Basically, what seemed to be happening was that the iPhone was continually ‘banging its head against the firewall’. Rather than realising that it could not connect to the mail servers, it would continually retry, and in doing so and using the WiFi it was draining the battery.

Obviously, as I stated at the opening line, there are several reasons for reduced battery life, but check that your iPhone is not needlessly wasting power on futile WiFi connections.

* Yes, I know it’s called MobileMe now

Three dates for your diaries in the next two months if you live in Horwich or Blackrod.

Horwich Carnival Races – 20th June

Horwich Carnival Races will be held this year on Sunday 20th June.
Various running and cycling races for different ages and abilities, both serious and fun are held on the streets of Horwich and this year’s provisional timetable is here. A handful of photos from two years ago are here.

Blackrod Scarecrow Festival – 3rd/4th July

This year’s festival promises to be the biggest ever, according to St. Katherine’s Church, the organisers of the festival. At the close of registration 89 scarecrows had been promised. You can pick up a map guide in Blackrod on the day.

Horwich Carnival – 4th July

While the Carnival has in previous years been held on the same weekend as the races, this year it is on the same weekend as the scarecrow festival – 4th July.
According to the Bolton News there will also be a record attempt at the largest number of zombies in a parade.

Back in 1999, I bought a Canon IXUS L-1 APS camera in New York. Unfortunately, it only had eight films through it before I moved on to the Digital IXUS. While I’ve been scanning my old 35mm negs and slides using a Nikon Coolscan IV, I haven’t been able to scan these eight APS films without Nikon’s APS adapter. Even when the adapter was available, it did not make sense to spend £150 for the sake of eight films.

Recently, I was searching eBay for any cheap APS scanners when I came across an advert for Karmaan who were offering to scan APS films for £3.95 each and also post-process them to remove the grain inherent in APS film, so for the sake of £35 (with P&P) I got them all scanned, one of which is shown below.

I would recommend Karmaan’s service to anyone needing their APS films scanning. More of these APS scans are on Flickr.

Bolton Steam Museum will be holding another of their open days on 30th and 31st May, where you can see their collection in full steam. Admission is free, although donations towards the running of the boiler are appreciated.

More details here. More photos of the museum here.

While setting up a brand new Dell laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed, the UAC (User Account Control) dialogue box popped up asking whether I wanted to allow windows\system32\jucheck.exe to run. The publisher was shown as none.

A quick google from another machine threw up some very conflicting information:

jucheck.exe is a Java component which checks for updates but several forums and ‘answers’ sites included posts that said that while a jucheck.exe file in ‘Program Files’ would be valid, any such file with that name in the windows\system32 directory was most certainly a trojan. If this was a trojan, the question remained as to how it could have appeared. The UAC dialogue appeared during the initial start up of Windows; no websites had yet been visited on this brand new machine, no email has yet been set up and the machine was behind a locked down Firebrick firewall. A portscan from shieldsup at grc.com confirmed no ports were open.

Equally, other posts, including this one from Microsoft say that “Java components are installed and present in both Windows folder as well as Program Files”.

A file search showed four copies of jucheck.exe on the machine all with the same date (about two weeks ago, before the machine was even ordered). There were two in the Java Program files directories, one in the 32 bit directory and the other a 64 bit version, different file sizes, a third in windows\system32 (a copy identical to that in the Java 32 bit program files directory) and another in windows\sysWOW64 corresponding to the 64 bit version in the Java 64 bit program files directory. This mirrored precisely the situation in the above Microsoft post.

Additionally, when the Java update in the system tray asked to update, it ran the copy of jucheck.exe in the windows\system32 folder not the one in Program Files, adding weight to this copy being the legitimate one.

I downloaded and installed the Java update manually, and jucheck.exe stopped being run on startup. If this were a trojan then surely it would still be trying to run.

I decided to uninstall Java completely and found that it uninstalled all four files. This poses the question: if the two in the windows directory shouldn’t be there, why would Java’s own un-installer remove them.

I then downloaded and installed the latest version of Java (both 32 bit and 64 bit) and there is now only one copy of jucheck.exe on the machine, interestingly with a date of 18th Feb 2010, older than the four pre-existing versions, suggesting that all four of the others were trojans.

To be honest, I still don’t know whether this was a trojan or not. I’ll wait until Java tries to update itself again and see if any more files appear.

Great high-speed footage of the launch pad during the launch of Apollo 11 (HD transfer from the original 16mm). Watch it full screen!

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

via GeeksAreSexy