Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

The US Courts have declared that "jailbreaking" your iPhone is a perfectly legal activity. Apple has been waving its corporate arms and screaming that jailbreaking is illegal -- citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- and making apocalyptic predictions of "potentially catastrophic" cyberattacks by hordes of iPhone-wielding cyber terrorists. The courts said, "Uh, no." While Apple is free to declare that jailbreaking voids warranties, it's not against the law. I guess all those Android-toting desperados are now free to switch carriers once their contracts run out, since the iPhone is obviously a much better platform for their nefarious deeds. You can thank the Electronic Frontier Foundation for this latest bit of sanity in the world of corporate nonsense.

Perhaps you've read Apple's explanation about the recent  "problem" with the iPhone 4's antenna. After user reports that the signal strength bottomed out (causing dropped calls) when the device was held a certain way, Apple issued a statement that the problem was not with the antenna but instead with the software used to report signal strength. Oh, and there's a patch for that in the works. Not so fast , says Consumer Reports , who declines to recommend Apple's latest wonder because of the problem. Seems their tests reveal it is a problem with the antenna after all. A design flaw, for crissake. Consumer Reports goes on to say problems with dropped calls maybe be more the fault of the iPhone than of much-maligned carrier AT&T. The comments from Apple owners on the story are typically shrill: "Is this an attempt by CR to increase circulation at Apple's expense? It sure looks like it," and "I am so tired of people putting down my ip...

The youngest son had malfunctioning Free Agent external hard drive that had been acting flaky (I will never buy another Seagate drive). Did he pull it without "safely ejecting?" Hell, I don't know. All I do know is the problems started when he started using it with his Windows Vista laptop. Finally it got to the point where his machine and my Windows XP box refused to acknowledge it. Plugging it in would, 3 out of 4 times, cause my machine to freeze.  It had, in fact, become useless. So I offered to try and fix it, and recover the files if possible. The worst that  could happen would be the drive would be unusable. Like it already was. I plugged it into my Linux box (Kubuntu 9.04) and fired up gparted .  Using this I was able to identify the correct device -- /dev/sdb1. Inserting it automatically created a mount point in /media, although it did not automount it. I mounted the drive on /media/FreeAgent using the command: sudo mount -t /dev/sdb1 /media/FreeAgent N...