A day after the iOS 4 was released I upgraded my iPhone 3Gs to benefit from all the new features. I was delighted with the new Cellular Data switch – it allowed my iphone to be a real phone and last for days not merely hours, all due to the GPRS/3G not abusing the battery.

Unfortunately one of the “features” in iOS4 turned out to be an even worse battery abuser – the persistent Wi-Fi. While I was at home or in the office – about 20 hours of my average day – the phone was constantly connected to the Wi-Fi and the battery lasted for 15-16 hours tops, with no more than an hour of actual usage!

So far there is no “Persistent Wi-Fi” switch, so I set on finding out what caused this behavior, and here is what you need to do to get it off:

  1. Disable notifications (yes, no more knowing when someone wrote on your Faceboko wall or mentioned you on twitter)
  2. Disable any Push e-mail, from the list of e-mails (Exchange, GMail, Yahoo, etc.), not just the Push switch in Settings -> Mail -> Fetch New Data!

If you are using Exchange (or Gmail/Google Apps) you’ll also need to disable your calendar and contacts unfortunately. In other words you have to switch to IMAP/POP e-mails.

This feature, unfortunately, makes you chose between having Push e-mail and notifications or manually turning on and off the Wi-Fi every time you need it, just like those nasty Symbian phones, the iPhone claims to be superior to!

UPDATE: after ten days I have to admit – I was wrong. Probably one of those nasty background-running apps was keeping the Wi-Fi connected at all times. Now I close most of my apps after I’m done with them and battery indeed lasts for 2 days and about 3 hours of use! Cheers!

They should’ve removed that image on apple.com:

from the Apps for travelling, apps for losing your iPhone prototype page.

Or else I wouldn’t be able to do this:

If found in a German bar please return to Gray Powell iPhone App

The App, Gray Powell did not have

James Cameron almost had it right – excellent cast and staff, big budget, a distant and unfriendly planet, a high-value substance, greedy corporation, big scary robots, The Marines and Sigourney Weaver. If only he hadn’t forgotten the Aliens…

It turns out that migrating a linux box to a new hardware is not as easy task as it used to be. I’m running a Trixbox system on an old 1 GHz Pentium III machine. The owner of the box got another antique – a Dual 1.4 GHz Pentium III ProLiant DL360 G2 with two SCSI drives. So I was tasked with migrating the trixbox to the new hardware. It took me about 20 hours to get this working, but all the work can be done in 3-4 hours, depending on how much data you have. This guide requires you to have a basic knowledge of the linux architecture and the linux commands, as well as what is in the /dev directory. Due to the fact that trixbox is CentOS-based this guide can easily be applied to migrating a regular CentOS installation .
Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the self-proclaimed Masterchef Georgi’s Cooking Master Class!

In Lesson 1 of 1, I’ll teach you how to make pancakes!

Before you start make sure you have the following ingredients:

  1. 500 gr. Flour
  2. 2 eggs
  3. 300-500 gr. of milk
  4. 300-500 gr. of water
  5. spoon of salt
  6. spoon of sugar
  7. spoon of sunflower oil or more, if you do not have a special no-oil-needed cooking pan
Pancake ingredients

Pancake ingredients

You will also need the following tools of the trade:

  1. A frying pan
  2. A mixing bowl (anything big enough to hold 2 L of liquid will do)
  3. A scoop (you can use a bigger spoon too)
  4. A mixer (if you don’t have one you can replace with muscles and a fork)
Tools of the pancake trade

Utensils needed for making pancakes

Pot

Pot

When you all those ingredients, you are good to go! Break the two eggs and drop them in the pot

Break the eggs in the pot

Break the eggs in the pot

Mix the eggs with the mixer/fork

Mix the eggs with the mixer/fork

Add 200-300 gr. of milk to the eggs and 100 gr. of water

Add 200-300 gr. of milk to the eggs and 100 gr. of water

Mix the eggs and the milk

Mix the eggs and the milk

Add 200-300 gr of flour

Add 200-300 gr of flour

Mix the flour/milk/water/eggs

Mix the flour

Note on the mixture: it is a matter of experimentation to get the right thickness of the mixture, so experiment – add extra flour, milk, water in order to get it right! After the fourth pancake preparation you’ll know what’s the right consistency!

Add the salt, the sugar and a teaspoon of sunflower oil

Add the salt, the sugar and a teaspoon of sunflower oil

Heat the pan and add a few drops of sunflower oil

Heat the pan and add a few drops of sunflower oil

Pour evenly a scoop of the mixture in the heated pan

Pour evenly a scoop of the mixture in the heated pan

Bake the pancake on both sides

Bake the pancake on both sides, don't forget to turn it around!

Bake all of the mixture into incredible pancakes!

Bake all of the mixture into incredible pancakes!

Use your taste and imagination for the filling!

Use your taste and imagination for the filling! I really love some honey, some hip jam and some cheese!

ENJOY!

Expect Lesson 2 of my master classes – turning the pancakes around in mid-air! :)

Valentine Pancake

St. Valentine's pancake

Чухте ли за iPad? Не? Лъжете, няма хора, които да ползват модерни медии и да не са чули за iPad!

А ползвахте ли iPad? Не отговаряйте, освен ако не работите в десетината разработчици поканени от Apple, отговора е НЕ! Факт – всички са виждали iPad само на картинка (или филмче), и взеха да пишат, колко бил слаб iPad. В Българската преса дори се появи статия Десет слаби места, където iPad отстъпва на стандартните нетбуци. Как така разбраха, че това са слаби места? И iPhone има доста от тези недъзи, но това не го прави по-малко продаваем. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me start off by saying this is a subjective review. I’m reviewing how Google Chrome fits into my “way of life”, not how good/bad it is.

I have 4 browsers on my mac – Safari, Firefox, Opera and … Chrome! Since I do some web development once in a while (8 hours a day counts as once in a while!) I have loaded my Firefox with a bunch of handy web-dev extensions – Firebug, Web developer, Tamper Data, HTMLValidator, etc.. All that heavy load makes FireFox unusable for every day surfing – it’s just too slow. Hence, I use Safari as my main browser. I don’t miss any of the FF extensions or anything – it’s a simple browser, and is well “supported” on the websites I frequent – which is all that matters for me! In essence this will be a Safari vs. Chrome review.

To be “objective” I started by setting the official Chrome beta as my default browser. I’m even using it to write this!

I’m a creature of habit, that has probably to do with my excessive age! If it works – don’t touch it! Hell, I haven’t even reinstalled my Mac OS since I got this macbook almost 2 years ago. And a fresh install would be beneficial, I’m sure! At first (and still) the Chrome shortcuts make it uncomfortable – they are completely different from Safari. I expect to hit cmd + 1 and to load my first bookmark from the bookmarks bar, but instead I go to the first tab. And I use that shortcut a lot, because the 5 bookmarks I have make up for 80% of my browsing time! -1 point for Chrome. Moving left and right on the tabs – again different shortcuts. -1 point.

Then, I start browsing.

One of my favorite spy sites – http://live.xbox.com renders almost perfectly, except for the spying part – the text which says when your gaming buddies have been last online overlaps with some other text. I have to select the text in order to see it. -1 point! And that on top of the fact, that Chrome is using WebKit – Safari’s rendering engine. Safari displays http://live.xbox.com perfectly fine?!

Browsing all those flash intensive websites with lots of banners, and YouTube makes no difference. My MacBook’s CPU goes as crazy in Chrome as in Safari. No points added or subtracted!

So far the review is pretty negative, but that’s normal, I’d say. Everyone finds out first what has changed in a negative light. I really hate Safari’s hanging when it has to load a gazillion of flash ads. That doesn’t happen in Chrome. Chrome’s sandbox model allows you to browser some of your other favorite sites, while the heavy one “unhangs”. I love this on Chrome. +1 point.

For some reason Chrome seems to load websites faster than Safari. It doesn’t matter whether this is the fact or not, as perception defines reality, not statistics! +1 point.

I found out that PDF files are downloaded in Chrome, while Safari simply opens them in the browser window, which is very handy and keeps some extra trash piling up in my Downloads folder. Chrome doesn’t have that, so -1 point.

While writing this, I realized Chrome even implemented the html/js debugger available in Safari (apparently as part of WebKit), so Chrome will also be usable for a quick-debug too!

Another features that I love in Chrome, but absent in Safari, is the list of recently closed tabs. I really miss it in Safari. And the last tab I closed, isn’t necessarily just the previous one in my history, it’s usually 20 items back! +1 point.

Last but not least, I love the small memory footprint Chrome has! 60-80 MB even after 2 days staying open and used extensively for browsing. Safari will hit 400-500 MBs in that amount of time, even if there is not even a single page open. This, however, might be caused by a memory leak(s) from a number of plugins that Safari loads, and not be Safari’s fault.

What I’d love to see in Chrome, besides the points above, would be to use the passwords I saved in Safari auto-magically. I don’t remember 300 passwords or so, and I can’t be bothered looking them up. I just enabled the “offer to save passwords” feature, so it might turn out that this is already implemented, which would be great! UPDATE: It actually works out of the box. I just have to remember my username!

The fact is that if I were keeping score, it would have been a draw. But it isn’t, as I don’t keep track of the score, and points should be more weighted than a simple +1/-1 for an extra feature or for a missing feature. I’ll keep on using Chrome for a day or two more, if I get used to it I might replace Safari, but for now I think I’ll stick with Safari, and get rid of some of the countless number of useless plugins I loaded into it!