Please note that Art Of Geek will be unavailable for a good part of Tuesday, March 18 due to an ISP migration. We’re migrating from Bell Sympatico to Teksavvy DSL. Unfortunately, there’s no way to be sure about how long the outage will be, but trust me when I say I’m going to try and make it as short as possible.
See you all when we’re back up and with a static IP address. No more short bouts of downtime because I have to reset my router. Yippee!
Add comment March 17th, 2008
Mention “Lode Runner” to any veteran computer user and chances are they’ll not only be familiar with it, but they’ll have fond memories of playing it. It’s been remade so many times and for so many platforms over the years that many younger gamers are probably familiar with it as well. It was after the topic came up with a friend and fellow computer veteran earlier today that I became determined to find a version of the game I could run on my Mac. While there are one or more Lode Runner-like shareware games for Mac OS X, it became clear to me after a bit of searching that if I wanted the original Lode Runner, I was going to have to run it under emulation.
The world of emulators on the Mac is very diverse. I had a lot of choices available to me of which version of Lode Runner I wanted to run, on which computing platform and using which emulator. I ended up choosing the original Lode Runner game running on the Apple II, and rather than using a traditional emulator, I decided to go with one that came packaged as a Dashboard widget, that way I could quickly jump into a game of Lode Runner no matter what I was in the middle of doing, and just as quickly put it away when I’ve had my fill. Following these step by step instructions, you’ll be able to get your Lode Runner on too.
Here are the controls:
| Action | Key |
|---|---|
| Up, Down, Left, Right | I, K, J, L |
| Dig left, Dig right | U, O |
| Stop moving | Space |
| Switch to keyboard controls | Ctrl-K |
| Switch to joystick controls | Ctrl-J |
| Suicide | Ctrl-A |
| End game | Ctrl-R |
| Pause game | Esc or Stop or Ctrl-M |
| View High Scores | Return |
A more complete list of controls and commands are available here, including editing commands for creating/modifying your own levels.
Hit any key to start a game. Collect all the barrels until the exit ladder appears, then climb up the ladder to move onto the next level, all while avoiding the bad guys chasing you. Remember that bad guys will pick up barrels they walk over, which they will drop sometimes on their own or when they fall into one of the holes you’ve dug.
The only two caveats with playing Lode Runner like this is that there is no sound (the AppleIIGo emulator doesn’t support sound), and the screen can be a bit small. Those shouldn’t really get in the way of some good old school fun though, since the sound isn’t important to gameplay, and the graphics are simple enough that you shouldn’t have a problem seeing all the detail you need. Of course, you can theoretically play any Apple II game using the AppleIIGo Dashboard widget. If you successfully get any other classics running, tell our readers about it in the comments!
Have fun, and let me know what level you manage to reach. So far, I’m up to level 5.
16 comments March 3rd, 2008
Today at work I had to make a DOS boot disk so I could secure erase the hard disk in a really old PC before it got disposed of. I had to call upon knowledge and experience I haven’t used in years and that I’d rather hoped I would never have to again. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say, what should have been a 5 minute operation ended up wasting over an hour and a half of my time between a bad floppy disk, incorrect instructions I was given and stupidly bad source files for the scrubber utility that included a misnamed program file. So after overcoming all the other obstacles, I still had to figure out why I was getting a “bad command or filename” error in the middle of what was supposed to be an automated process.
It was really surreal, and took me back to a dark time in my life when I had to deal with those kinds of problems on a daily basis. A time I never want to have to revisit again. I feel so dirty. I’m going to have to spend an extra amount of time using my Mac to try and cleanse me of this disgusting feeling.
It amazes me that PCs still ship with floppy drives in them to this day. Apple’s first floppy drive-less computer, the original iMac will celebrate it’s 10 year anniversary this year. It’s been over 9 years since Apple dropped the 3.5″ floppy drive from all it’s products. Really punctuates the Windows PC industry’s bizarre obsession with outdated technologies, doesn’t it?
5 comments February 27th, 2008
[Update 1] We Canadians put up with a lot of abuse from our telecom/internet providers. As if high prices and poor customer service weren’t enough to endure, we’ve also put up with data transfer caps on supposedly “unlimited” internet connections and now our supposedly high-speed internet connections are only high speed for some types of data, but not others. To quote an early 90’s infomercial marketing slogan, stop the insanity!
Our government, via the CRTC, have been trying their best to inject some competition into the Canadian telecom market for a few years now, but phone number portability and competition in the DSL and home phone markets will only make a difference if customers actually start switching. It’s understandable that the majority of Canadians are reluctant to switch from one of the major providers to a relative newcomer, but really, what have you got to lose besides maybe a little inconvenience?
Up till now I was content to pay a premium for my Sympatico high-speed DSL internet service from Bell for the peace of mind of knowing I was dealing with a large incumbent that had the resources and experience to give me a reliable connection. I switched to Bell from Rogers when Rogers threatened to cancel my service because I was exceeding their monthly data transfer allowance. Bell’s Sympatico service had no such limits.
But recently, Bell Sympatico implemented traffic shaping to limit the speeds of P2P filesharing transfers during peak hours to a maximum of 30KB/s. I was resigned to live with that, provided it didn’t get any worse.
As someone who hosts their own webserver, I’ve always wanted a static IP address, but because I only run it as a hobby, I couldn’t justify the $100/month it would cost me to get a business internet account, which is usually the only way to get a static IP from Bell or Rogers. To make matters worse, business accounts are usually even more limited on data transfers than consumer accounts. So I’ve been resigned to using dynamic DNS solutions to keep my artofgeek.com domain name properly pointed to my server at home.
Last weekend, I was seeking advice about email server configuration on the ehmac.ca forums and user John Clay was kind enough to respond recommending I switch ISPs to one that doesn’t block mail traffic and offers a static IP. He then mentioned that TekSavvy, a local Ontario DSL ISP offers static IPs for just $4 extra per month.
That sounded too good to be true, but I was definitely intrigued. A quick visit to the TekSavvy Solutions website later, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could get the same speed of DSL service with unlimited bandwidth AND a static IP address for $4 LESS per month than what I was paying Bell. The icing on the cake was that TekSavvy does not shape traffic or block any ports AND, you can use any standard DSL modem to get your connection.
So let me sum up:
That’s $43.95/month. Wow. Game over. I’m sold. So I called Bell today to cancel my service, followed by a call to TekSavvy to subscribe to their DSL High Speed Internet Unlimited residential service.
Now to be fair, you still have to buy a DSL modem, which TekSavvy charges $100 for, plus $10 for shipping. But here’s where TekSavvy’s open modem policy comes in. A 5 minute Google search, and I found speedtouch.ca that sells the exact same modem TekSavvy was going to sell me (the Thomson SpeedTouch 516) for $50 + $12 for shipping. Bell was charging me a perpetual $2/month to lease my modem, and you have no choice but to buy or lease their modem. So as long as my new DSL modem lasts more than 2.5 years, it’ll pay for itself, and I’ll save an additional $2 per month after that.
So that’s it. With just a bit of hesitation, I took the plunge. My service is scheduled to switch over from Sympatico to TekSavvy on March 18, 2008. There will be a bit of downtime during the switch, but hopefully not more than 6-12 hours. Afterwhich the Art Of Geek website should be even more reliable than it’s ever been. The most common cause for the site being inaccessible has been the dynamic IP changing every time my modem or router had to be rebooted. This will no longer be an issue. To top it all off, I will be free to run my own email server if I want to, and I can look forward to getting my bittorrent files downloaded in record time again. Needless to say, I’m really stoked about the switch.
So if you’re curious about how the switch goes, check back here after March 18. I’ll be sure to update the Art Of Geek blog on how it goes.
15 comments February 19th, 2008
Before I owned an iPhone, and a Nokia E61 before that, and a BlackBerry 7290 before THAT, I briefly owned a Danger HipTop on the FIDO network. I returned it and went with a BlackBerry mostly because of the sheer size of the HipTop. I just couldn’t justify carrying that brick around. If only it had been smaller, I might have kept it. I’ve long had a bit of a fascination with the HipTop series of devices from Danger, and they have improved on the size of their device over the years, but I don’t think the size improvements for the most part have kept up with the industry. They’re still fairly bulky.
That being said, they had a pretty decent hardware design concept, a very usable OS (although the interface was a tad childish for my taste) and a promising platform/application distribution strategy. But one thing they have never been is particularly successful in the overall handset market. So I’m a bit confused (and saddened) by this latest news that the Borg has gobbled up Danger, Inc.
“Sure, the folks in Redmond didn’t get their grubby mitts on Yahoo! (yet), but at least they picked up a little something for their mobile division, namely: Danger. According to news just crossing the wires, the monolithic company has picked up the Sidekick-creators for an undisclosed amount, and will subsequently fold the phone-maker into its mobile wing. Is there a Windows Mobile version of the Hiptop in our future? Survey says yes.â€
There’s no doubt this has something to do with RIM and iPhone’s threat to Windows Mobile, as well as the impending Google Android threat, but at first glance, it’s difficult to understand what Danger might have to offer Microsoft.
Danger used to be a hardware designer, so Microsoft may be looking to enter the handset market with this purchase. But if they wanted a cool hardware design, they could have done better than Danger, who aren’t exactly selling HipTops by the truckload. Why not buy Motorola’s mobile business instead? Motorola is officially considering divesting itself of it’s mobile phone unit, after all. I don’t think this has to do with hardware though. For one, Danger has all but given up on the hardware, just one look at Danger’s website makes that imminently clear. Other than in a YouTube video, I can’t find pictures of their HipTop anywhere.
Microsoft also runs the risk of pissing off their existing Windows Mobile license owners. Something they can’t afford to do right now. They did that in the DAP market when they launched the Zune, which has failed to make any serious inroads against the iPod/iTunes juggernaut while at the same time weakening their existing PlaysForSure Certified for Windows Vista licensing effort (what was up with that rebranding move anyway?!?).
I also find it hard to believe that Microsoft sees any real value in Danger’s software, given that Microsoft has their own mobile phone OS. Microsoft has demonstrated long ago that it doesn’t need to pay for a good software idea, they can simply borrow it and make it their own. So what is it then?
I believe the answer to that question lies in these images from Danger’s website. One depicting the “Danger experience” and the other of their new business model:
These images depict a total solutions company. A company that can offer everyone in the ecosystem value, and more importantly provide a source of income from all levels. Microsoft’s current offerings only directly targets the OEM handset makers and the end users and completely leaves out the service providers, where most of the money is. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s two biggest competitors, RIM and Apple, have already figured out how to tap into the service provider revenue stream. RIM by providing the backbone service to it’s mobile email offering, and Apple by giving it’s partners a very compelling phone to lure subscribers with, as well as back-end services like the iTunes WiFi Store as well as email/information services through partnerships with other providers such as Google and Yahoo!.
Danger, once largely a handset OS/hardware company has already done all of the legwork to turn itself into an end-to-end solutions company. So by buying Danger, Microsoft acquires much of the knowledge, technology and relationships it needs to shift from being simply the maker/licensor of the Windows Mobile OS into a complete solutions provider in a bid to better position itself against the offerings of it’s competitors.
Overall, this seems like a smart move, but how easily it can be accomplished has yet to be seen. Danger’s technology has been about open standards and the use of Java. It’s no doubt going to take a lot of work to integrate it with Microsoft’s proprietary OS and APIs, but probably not as much work as trying to develop a similar solution from scratch, especially considering Microsoft is late to the party and was obviously completely unprepared to deal with not one, but two giants suddenly entering the market.
Unfortunately, there’s very little doubt that the current Danger mobile OS’s days are numbered, much to the sorrow of current HipTop/Sidekick fans. Less clear is the fate of the HipTop swivel screen form factor. Microsoft might choose to develop it further and use it to release it’s own handset (a.k.a., the Zune phone), or they might continue to license it out for others to build and brand as their own. What they choose to do really depends on how big the market is for the swivel device. Given that it wasn’t that wildly successful to begin with, Microsoft might just let it die a quiet death.
So HipTop/Sidekick fans, what’s worse? The form factor disappearing altogether, or living on it’s existance running the uninspiring Windows Mobile OS? Sound off in the comments or discuss it in the Art Of Geek forums!
1 comment February 11th, 2008
For those not up on the iPhone hacking lingo, here’s a glossary of important technical terms related to hacking and/or using the iPhone. If you’re fairly tech savvy or have already done some research into hacking the iPhone, you probably won’t benefit from reading on. If you are completely new to the iPhone and hacking however, this may make it easier to understand a lot of the stuff you will read on the internet about unlocking or hacking the iPhone, including some of my own articles, which often assume you already know the basics. I was inspired to write this glossary after I noticed a lot of the same questions being asked in article comments and internet forums.
This really is ‘the basics’ and is designed to be a README FIRST for someone who just started thinking about buying and unlocking an iPhone. This glossary assumes you know what an iPhone is, are pretty familiar with cell phones and their features and are a competent computer user. If you’re the type of person who can’t get anything done on your computer or cell phone without calling someone for help, then this isn’t for you, but if you were that technically challenged, you probably wouldn’t be reading this in the first place. 
So without further ado, on to the glossary!
Apple designed the iPhone to make it difficult to hack for both security reasons, and so they could maintain greater control over how it was used. As such, they have not provided any means for end users to modify the built-in OS X operating system or install additional applications. Jailbreaking refers to the act of circumventing those controls or locks to enable write access the the iPhone’s OS and storage. An iPhone that has had this done to it is considered jailbroken.
Activation is the act of plugging your iPhone into your computer and running iTunes in order to ‘activate’ it’s features, something you need to do when you first take it out of the box or restore it’s firmware using iTunes. Activation in iTunes is usually a one-click process, but only if you have an officially supported carrier SIM card inserted. If it detects your SIM card is not an approved one, it will simply not allow you to activate your iPhone, which makes it pretty much useless except for placing emergency calls (e.g. 911). This is where the activation crack is needed. You need to jailbreak before you can crack it’s activation since it requires you to modify the iPhone’s software. Often the tool you use to jailbreak will also crack the activation.
Most cell phone providers in North America sell mobile phones that have been locked to only work on their own cellular network in order to make it inconvenient for customers to switch to competing cellular providers. The iPhone is no exception. So if you buy an iPhone from the U.S., it’s locked to only work on the AT&T network in the U.S., even though the GSM technology the iPhone was built on was originally designed to make it simple to switch networks simply by swapping out a little chip called a SIM card. Basically, if a non-AT&T SIM card is inserted in an unmodified iPhone, it will be rejected by the phone and you won’t be able to connect to any cell phone network for voice or data. Unlocking is the act of modifying an iPhone to make it function with SIM cards from other GSM providers.
There are several different methods that can be used to unlock an iPhone, including a hardware unlock which requires you to physically open the iPhone and solder some connections, a “TurboSIM” method, which uses a special SIM card which must be purchased and most popularly, software unlocks which simply require you to run an unlock program on a jailbroken and activated iPhone. There are both commercial (e.g. iPhoneSimFree) and free (e.g. AnySIM, iUnlock) software unlock solutions available.
The firmware is simply the iPhone’s operating system and software that makes the iPhone work. Apple periodically releases firmware updates which fix bugs and add new features via iTunes for Mac OS X or Windows. So far, Apple has not forced users to update their iPhone to newer firmware versions, but that doesn’t mean it might not happen in the future. Updating is of course mandatory if you want to take advantage of any new features they contain.
So far, each new iPhone firmware update Apple has released has undone the jailbreak and activation crack, requiring new solutions to be developed. Even restoring your iPhone with the current firmware requires you to re-apply the current jailbreak and activation crack, which sometimes requires you to downgrade your firmware first. The unlock may or may not have to be re-applied however, depending on which solution you use. So far the iPhoneSimFree solution has survived every firmware update Apple has released to date, and this is the one I’ve used on mine and my wife’s iPhones. Newer free unlock programs seem to survive now as well, but don’t have as proven a track record as the commercial iPhoneSimFree solution and even got a bit of negative publicity for rendering iPhones inoperable when firmware version 1.1.1 was first released, although a fix was eventually released weeks later.
Keep in mind that just because an unlock has survived firmware updates in the past, that’s no guarantee that it will survive all future firmware updates, but it does bode well. As always, unless you’re the adventurous type and doesn’t mind being the guinea pig, wait for others to update their firmware and run the new jailbreak/activation cracks and give the all-clear before proceeding with it yourself.
Like most complex gadgets these days, the iPhone is made up of many smaller complex components, each of which may have it’s own little bits of software driving them. One such component is the iPhone’s cellular modem or ‘baseband modem’, which is what allows the iPhone to connect and communicate via voice and data on the GSM network. The baseband modem has it’s own firmware (often referred to simply as baseband, or the baseband) that is periodically updated by the main iPhone firmware updates. You shouldn’t really have to worry about dealing with this at all, unless something has gone horribly wrong and you now either have a corrupt or damaged baseband modem firmware, or a firmware version mismatch, which happens when you downgrade the iPhone’s firmware in iTunes, since iTunes will not downgrade the baseband modem firmware. In either of these cases, symptoms will generally be problems or a complete inability to accept/make incoming or outgoing calls, SMS messages and access EDGE data services.
EDGE is the cellular data network that the iPhone uses to connect to the internet from almost anywhere you can make a cell phone call. Any iPhone data application such as email, Safari, the Stocks and Weather widgets, YouTube and iTunes Store will use the EDGE network, if available, to connect to the internet and send/retrieve information. Note that like all other cellular services, you do have to pay extra for EDGE data usage, and it can be VERY expensive, especially if you don’t have an EDGE data plan, or you go over your plan limit. You can check your EDGE data usage under Settings–>Usage from your iPhone’s main screen. Accessing the EDGE data network normally requires you to have the correct APN settings entered in Settings–>General–>Network–>EDGE. If you want to make sure you never access the EDGE network, to avoid usage charges for instance, simply leave these settings blank.
Wi-Fi is your common wireless computer network that many homes, schools and businesses use to network computers. The iPhone will prompt you to connect to any available Wi-Fi network it detects when it attempts to connect to the internet BEFORE it will use an available EDGE network. This is great, since using Wi-Fi doesn’t incur any airtime charges on your cellular phone bill. The downside is free Wi-Fi networks may be limited where you go, especially outside of urban areas. Some Wi-Fi networks cost money to use, but are easy to spot, since you’ll be prompted by a web page to log in or purchase time when you try to visit any page in Safari. Many hotels, airports, coffee shops, conference centres and even some large urban areas have such paid wireless networks available and they can be really worthwhile if you have some time to kill or really need to get access to some web sites where EDGE would be too expensive. You’ll have to do the math and decide for yourself depending on your carrier’s rates and your data plan, if any.
I’m guessing that if/when my carrier here in Canada (Rogers) officially begins offering the iPhone for sale, that I will no longer have to deal with cracking the activation of my iPhone since iTunes will recognize my Rogers SIM card as an approved one. From that point on, if I have no desire to install my own software hacks, I should be able to upgrade my firmware without having to worry about re-hacking my iPhone. Since Apple has already committed to opening the iPhone to 3rd party software development beginning sometime early next year, my days of hacking my iPhone to install the programs I want on it will hopefully be numbered. I really look forward to the day when updating my iPhone’s firmware is as simple as Apple intended, but in the meantime, I’m thankful to all those hard working individuals who have made it possible for me to own and use this wonderful device in Canada now.
6 comments November 19th, 2007
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