Month: October 2011

WTF: Batangas Sign On Taal

It seems the provincial government of Batangas has approved putting up a huge sign a la Hollywood on Taal. Apparently they’re unhappy the scenic volcano being mistaken as part of Tagaytay (which is in the province of Cavite) since that’s where people usually go to view it. While at it they should tattoo “Batangas” on their foreheads so nobody will mistake them to be from anywhere else!

Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich

Watched the YouTube live stream of the launching of the Samsung/Google Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The Galaxy Nexus has nice specs (1280×720 display!) though I’m not too hot on the form factor. I’ve never liked banana-shaped phones (Nokia 7110/8110 anyone?) nor humongous screens (which unfortunately is the trend). But Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) stole the limelight. Slick new UI, powerful new features (Face Unlock, Beam, folders, screenshots, etc.). Both the phone and ICS seem to have patent-issue avoidance in mind, e.g. the phone cannot be mistaken for any iDevice, the new folders don’t have the content-view of iOS.

Haircut

My hair was getting rather long and people are starting to wonder if I’m going for a Justin Bieber look (NO!). Today, I finally had the opportunity to get a haircut. And I had it cut the way I like my hair (short). After I was done, Jeanne saw me, she started crying! But she got used to it after a while and afterwards we walked around the mall and visited the toy store.

Speck ToughShell

I mentioned before that putting the gorgeous iPhone 4 inside a case generally fuglifies it. So I prefer the iPhone naked or wearing a Sena Ultraslim Pouch. And for the times when I do need a measure protection I use a Speck PixelSkin.

But if the going gets tougher, the only answer, at least previously, is a heavy-duty case like the Otterbox Defender. Unfortunately, it costs a lot, P2,500 the last time I checked, and it has an ugly circular cutout to show off the Apple logo (why?!?). So I searched and found the Speck ToughShell.

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iOS 5 Is Out!

iOS 5 has finally been officially released. I actually already had iOS 5 on the iPhone for a few weeks since I’m a “developer”. But I haven’t gotten around to updating the iPad. So I updated using iTunes. Couldn’t connect to the server. Looked like the servers are swamped so I waited till the evening before trying again. Still couldn’t connect to the server. Looked like they’re still swamped. Not a good indicator for iCloud and its infrastructure. I got a direct link and downloaded from there. It was pretty fast and in about an hour or two I already had the ipsw file. It seems bandwidth is not the issue. And indeed, when I tried “restoring” using the ipsw and everything went well until iTunes tried to verify the ipsw with the server and failed with an error 1654. Luckily, it went through on my second try and I was on iOS 5 on the iPad. Relatively easy compared to the experience of quite a few users. It’s good to be a techie.