Have yourself a merry little Jazzmas

Jazzmas

Christmas and Jazz is a fun combination. If you fancy some jazzy X-mas tunes for your iPhone or iPod Touch, check out my first iPhone application: Jazzmas.

Ten of the most popular Christmas tunes packed in a neat little application for your iPhone (or iPod touch), together with a Christmas Countdown indicator over an original blue-ish X-mas illustration I’ve created just for this app.

The songs are performed by pianist / composer Manolis Gerempakanis in a jazzy, cozy and festive mood and are decorated with original improvisations as well as some bass and drums.

All this for just $0,99 (0,79€).

Get Jazzmas on the iTunes App Store

Jazzmas Website

Tracks included

• Christmas Tree
• Deck the Halls
• Feliz Navidad
• Jingle Bells
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
• Santa Claus is Coming to Town
• Silent Night, Holy Night
• The First Noel
• White Christmas
• We Wish you a Merry Christmas

How to tether your Cosmote iPhone

Update: MMS may not be functional after updating your carrier settings with this profile.

The latest update to the iPhone firmware (namely version 3.0) allows you to tether your iPhone, that is to share your 3G mobile Internet with your computer via USB or Bluetooth. The sad thing is that some carriers won’t allow you to enable tethering, while others allow this functionality but haven’t updated their carrier settings to support it.

Cosmote is one of those carriers in Greece. I called their customer support to get informed that they’re having technical problems in enabling tethering on the iPhone but assured me that they’re working on it and will let me know. Oh well, I’m not a fan of waiting so did a bit of research and found this how-to article for iPhone tethering. Guess what: it worked!

You can go ahead and follow the steps described in that article. Keep in mind that the carrier settings file for Cosmote is named TMobile_gr.ipcc, so that’s the file that you’ll been playing with. Also, note that you’ll have to compress the whole Payload folder into a zip file (not just the bundle). Last, if you can’t select the ipcc file from within iTunes, make sure you renamed it from within the info window (Cmd + i) and not via Finder (hidden file extensions may not allow you to properly change the filename).

Once you update the ipcc file, reboot your iPhone and go to settings. At first, you may see that you can’t enable tethering (it pops up an info note that you need to call Cosmote customer care), but miraculously after a few seconds, it goes on. I’ve tried it out an worked, with an average maximum speed of 1 Mb/s over 3G (in an area with poor signal). Over bluetooth. Nice.

If you don’t want to get into all this hassle, DM me on Twitter and I can send you the carrier settings (ipcc) file.

On Twitter and the Freedom of Speech

Who wouldn’t crave for remote hearing?

Imagine, for a moment, that you can listen to whatever every human being on Earth is saying; that whenever someone opens their mouth to say anything, it reaches your ears. Surely it would be overwhelming since there are so many people talking in the same time, so you’d end up going in a frenzy by this information overload. It wouldn’t be useful at all and you’d wish you were deaf.

Now, imagine the same thing, but this time you’ve got a very cool built-in feature in your brain that’s called “selective hearing“, which is the ability of your brain to selectively tune-in and hear only those people that you wish to do so. This way you could focus on those people whose sayings appear to be important to you in some way, and you could always mute or un-mute people’s voices in your brain at will.

Obviously, the latter would be very useful since it would give you the ability to tune-in to the sayings of different people of varying age, gender, race and culture; some kind of long-distance telepathy that would enable you to connect with dozens, hundreds or even millions of people worldwide who you would never have the chance of meeting up close or getting to listen to what they have to say. And it would be your own choice whether to listen to them, or not.

This is what Twitter is all about

If you can imagine this, then you have successfully grasped the idea of how Twitter works. It’s nothing but a tool that lets you say out loud anything you want. Anything. It’s like some sort of digital “voice” (only in written text) that reaches the farthest corners of Earth (as long as there’s Internet access), and everyone else can selectively tune-in to your digital voice at will. You follow (“tune in to”) the people whose voice is somehow meaningful to you, and let the rest go on talking without their talk reaching your “ears”. It’s dead simple, efficient and powerful.

Now, selective hearing is based on your ability to decide whose digital voice you get to pay attention to, or not; if you don’t think it’s worth listening to whatever some person is saying, you can just un-follow the person and therefore “tune out” of its voice. It’s that simple. No-one said you have to try and pay attention to thousands of people at the same time, it gets incomprehensible and it all breaks down. That’s why you get to choose who to follow and who not to.

But once you do follow somebody, that means that you are acting as a receiver of their “digital voice channel”, and of course you’re not alone; hundreds of even thousands other people may also be receivers to that person’s voice. In the same time you’re acting as a transmitter yourself, since you’re transmitting your own voice to the Twitterverse (Twitter Universe), where other people may opt-in to listen to.

If you don’t like what’s on the radio, just change the channel

When you’re listening to the radio and you don’t like the music its playing, what do you do? Do you call the producer of the show to complain about the bad music and ask them to comply to your taste, or just change the channel? Since Twitter is the equivalent of a medium through which millions of people get to have their own digital “radio” show (only in text, not voice) to express their thoughts and emotions out to the world in general and to no-one in particular, would you ever “call” them to tell them that that they should stop saying what they’re saying because you just happen not to like it?

Of course not. You would just change the channel. Therefore, when you don’t really like what someone is saying out loud to the world, remember that your selective hearing lets you tune out and recover your peace and serenity. Just un-follow them, but never ever tell people what they should say and what they should not, unless freedom of speech is lost and you get to decide what’s worthy of being spelled out and what’s not.

Apple is encouraging extreme out-of-spec use of MacBook Pro’s?

In the same time that mountain climber Gavin Bate is tweeting his way to the world’s highest peak on Mount Everest, I came across another news feed item (this time on the Apple Hot News feed) entitled “Extreme editing with Final Cut Pro at 18,000 feet“. Apparently, there’s another team of hi-tech mountain climbers who are using their MacBook Pro’s in a dome tent at 18,000 ft. to edit footage using Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

MacBook Pro Specs

The next moment, I rushed to the MacBook Pro specs on Apple’s website to check out the maximum altitude for the device. As you can see in the screenshot, the climbers are operating their Macs 8,000 feet higher than the maximum operating altitude as well as 3,000 feet higher than the maximum storage altitude (not to mention that I’m pretty sure the temperature up there is by no means higher than 50° F (10° C). Despite all this hostile environment, they’re successfully using their Macs not for some trivial task (i.e. Twitter) but for video editing (perhaps they’re deliberately doing that to use the Mac’s boiling aluminum unibody frame as some form or heat source in the cold tent?).

The funny thing about this, is that since Apple is featuring the story in their feed, it looks like they’re taking pride of the fact that some people are using their products against the manufacturer’s instructions in a hostile environment. I wonder if their attitude would be the same if an unknown mountain climber supplied their Mac to a local Apple Store for service (after freezing the guts out of it in the highs of Everest) requesting free service / replacement covered by the warranty.

SEO is long gone. Hail, OEO.

You know that kind of uber-science that applies to making your ridiculously designed, badly developed and utterly irrelevant website climb up the gazillion of steps in Google’s stairway to search heaven? Those “white” or “black” hat wizardry that Internet marketing gurus, SEO wizards and other Gandalf-like creatures are willing to perform (for a slight charge) to boost your company into mythical success?

It’s tagged SEO, for Search Engine Optimization. And it’s dead.

Amidst of a post-web 2.0 era struck by a recession and succumbing to the ultimate power sprouting out of the social media heaven, who needs SEO? There’s no search engine in Twitter, so who cares if your website is not listed in the first search results page? All that matters is to have a few hundreds of thousands of followers. Every person, service, website or even electrical appliance is on Twitter now, so who gives a damn about search engines?

Does SEO help you gain more friends in Facebook? No! Does SEO help you gain more followers in Twitter? No! Search engines are R.I.P., done, dead, kaput and in a state of panic. So forget about all the SEO crap, jump on the social media rescue wagon before the rest of the web plummets into cyber oblivion and let your social presence make you really famous!

Where do we go now?

So it’s the end of the Web as we know it, but what now? How can the social media help you get rich and famous? This is where the new wizardry comes in place: introducing the art of Own Ego Optimization, or OEO for short, the next-gen rituals that are guaranteed to boost you into the highest heights of Twitterland and the rest of the social network universes out there.

Now, out of an untold gesture of generosity, I am about to unfold the well hidden mysteries of OEO, so you can take advantage of this new extraordinary phenomenon for your own benefit without having to spend a penny. Pay attention, and you shall achieve social greatness!

So without further ado, here’s the ultimate spellbook of OEO wizardry:

1. Orientation: If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years and you’re not on Twitter already, do it now. This is the most important step of your road to success.
2. No-one really wants to see you or your friend’s ugly bald head popping in their Twitter client next to your tweets. Instead, use the photo of a hot girl with big cleavage. It works wonders.
3. Follow as many people as you can. Someone tweeted about politics? Follow them. Or maybe someone tweeted about sports? Follow them. If someone tweets about new techniques to clean decayed elephant teeth cavities, follow them. The rule of thumb is, if it tweets, follow it.
4. Argue with everyone. Be an a**hole. Let everybody argue with you, debate you, and hate you. Many people have become famous using this spell alone (ha, no I won’t link them here, sorry!). Just remember: there is no bad publicity!
5. Feel free to act like a web celeb, even if you still haven’t become one. This will make you look like one of those uber-cool online celebrities. Actually it’s pretty easy; all you have to do is tweet about your daily activities, i.e. “bored, going to bed” / “out with @someguy, drinking beers” / “lol, you shuldn’t twerereet when yo’re drun k” etc.
6. Get all of your friends on Twitter, then tweet about things you do in common, i.e. “out with @supercooldude and @awesomepal drinking beers and designing our next web 4.0 app“
7. Organize and host conferences, un-conferences and social media seminars. (Caution, this is a really powerful spell!)
8. It’s pretty obvious but still has to be mentioned for the goofballs: constantly tweet about social media, Twitter and OEO
9. Re-tweet every 1 out of 5 of your friend’s tweets. It makes them feel special and they get to love you more. As a rule of thumb, if a tweet is not absolutely and utterly pointless, re-tweet it.
10. Get yourself a Friendfeed account, so you have something to do when the failwhale beast appears on your screen and you spare the suicide.

These are the pretty basic rules. Stick with them, and soon you’ll be a Twitter celebrity! Yes, it’s that easy. Many people have gone this path and so can you! All you have to do is dare to try it.

(If you found this post useful, tweet / digg / stumbleUpon / blog it by any means and go follow me on Twitter!)

iPhone OS 3.0 Beta Finally Supports Greek Keyboard and Menus

Greek iPhone users (and all of you who wouldn’t buy an iPhone because of this… issue) rejoice! The upcoming iPhone upgrade will support writing in greek. Apple held an event last night, showcasing the new iPhone OS 3.0 (and the corresponding SDK), which is available to all users that have enrolled to the iPhone Developer Program.

Since my company has enrolled, I downloaded and install the beta to my iPhone 3G, and am happy to assure you that there is a greek keyboard (in the International Keyboards section in Settings) that you can enable and type in greek. The keyboard looks to be under development, but it works great (for example, the virtual buttons appear as uppercase all the time, but you can type in both uppercase and lowercase).

The keyboard comes with spell checking and correction too, which also corrects unaccented words to their accented form (which means that you don’t have to bother with accents, it does that automatically). I don’t think there’s much work left to do, so it’s pretty certain that when the new OS becomes available to all users, the greek keyboard will be included.

But that’s not all! The new version supports changing the language to greek as well. Once you choose it, the device seems to “soft rebooting”, and after a few seconds the interface is using the greek language (i.e. in the Settings app, E-mail, Messages etc). Not everything seems to have been translated by now, but I guess they’ll have this sorted out in time of public release.

I won’t go into more details or post any screenshots since I respect Apple keeping the beta stuff as “confidential” (after all some photos have been already posted online). Feel free to contact me on Twitter (@Karageorgakis) about any questions.

When dynamic DNS fails, try Gmail

How to Recover Your Stickies Widget Info After MobileMe Loses it

If you’ve got a Mac and you’re a MobileMe user, be cautious to sync your Dashboard Widgets with the service. Well, I did, trying to sync my widgets along my Macs, which resulted into all of my stickies wigdets to appear blank! I use stickies a lot (the widget, not the Stickies app) when in need of taking quick notes, i.e. telephones, passwords, things to do, even my next great idea, so seeing them all empty wasn’t nice at all.

Here’s how you can restore the information, provided that you do have a backup of your computer’s files. Luckily, my recently bought TimeMachine could save the day.

1. Open up a Finder window, click on your username and then go to Library/Preferences/
2. Locate the file named “widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist“
3. Replace this file with the corresponding file from from your back, either by entering TimeMachine or manually
4. If this problem occured by syncing your Dashboard Widgets with MobileMe, enter the MobileMe preference pane in the System Preferences application and deselect the Dashboard Widgets from the Sync pane.
5. Log out of your account, and then log in again. Your stickies should be populated again with all the precious data you’ve stored in them.

Remember to keep a backup copy of this file in case you’re using the Stickies widget to store any information that you can’t afford to lose.

Baptize your Mac to make it work with TimeMachine

Yesterday I got myself a new MacBook, hooked it up with the iMac and used the Migration Assistant Utility to transfer data from my main computer. Then I turned TimeMachine on and chose my TimeCapsule as the destination drive, but I got the message that “Time Machine cannot create the disk image” (not a verbatim copy, may differ slightly).

Hm, first I checked disk space but there’s enough space in the Capsule to hold the image. I rebooted, updated software, reboot but still nothing. Then it occured to me; I checked out the computer’s name in the “Sharing” tab in the Preferences app, and saw that it was blank! After giving it a name and initiating a backup, it worked.

Of course I had given a name to the MacBook, but I guess either the initial configuration or the Migration Assistant did something wrong.

A probably dark future for Facebook Connect

Since the credit crunch and the crisis in economy started to show their ugly heads, pessimistic scenarios of doom and gloom circulated the Internet. VCs signaled their own mayday, advising their customers to save cash, lay low and accept a possible M&A in order to survive. In other words, they’re telling smaller companies that if they want to stay in business, they better sell themselves to the bigger ones if such an opportunity is raised.

But this doesn’t apply only to small companies. The lack of credit in the world makes value not so “valuable” without cash to back it up, and it has been said that even web start-ups that have been uber successful (like Twitter) could be in danger if they don’t find a way to monetize soon. Considering the hard times that are coming, that’s true. When all cash is burnt, the company either goes to the deadpool, or sells itself to someone with loads of cash.

Facebook faces a monetization problem as well. It may be the biggest social network in the world today (at least in terms of users and visits), yet it had failed to find a way to monetize since not so many people care to click on its ads. However, Facebook does have a lot of cash right now, a part of which (a mere $240 million) comes from investments by Microsoft. But why did Microsoft want to invest in Facebook? I think it was because of fear; fear that Google would, eventually, buy Facebook.

Facebook Connect vs. Open Social

The reason Google would want to buy Facebook is simple: to make it support Open Social, instead of Facebook’s own proprietary Connect. Both of these APIs make it possible to share information from one social network to another. For example, you could use your Facebook account (you have one, right?) to connect to another social network with the same credentials, access your friends list and even do stuff there that would inform Facebook to post a story on your wall.

Facebook Connect

This is so powerful, that it could even merge with OpenID. For example, LivePoker, an iPhone app, lets you play poker online through the device by logging into the system using your Facebook account. Then, you can play against other Facebook users or your friends if they’re online. This way, you don’t have to create yet another account for the LivePoker service, and you’re carrying with you all the social information you’ve so deliberately crafted in Facebook to present yourself online. It’s a huge thing, and Google definitely lusts for it.

All data should be open and accessible

Google wants everything to be open. They’re big supporters of openness. Android is an open API, and they managed to get the FCC to support openness in the wireless spectrum. They simply want all data to be accessible, so they can index it and use it. Google wants to have access to all information there is out there in the world; they want to know everything about anything and they have an infrastructure to support this. If Facebook goes against this openness and insists on using their own proprietary API for their own good, Google has no other solution than to acquire them and force them to open up and conform to Open Social.

Considering this, Microsoft did a good thing investing in the popular social network, thus extending its runway and delaying such an acquisition. Otherwise, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the board could quite probably find themselves considering an M&A with Google when the times are dark and the cash has gone, which would happen if they don’t find a way to monetize. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but at least for now they have time to try and find such a solution.

The dreaded Google – Facebook M&A

Future Facebook

Why do I speak of such an M&A as dreadful? Because it will probably be one of the most big-brother-ish things we’ll see in the years to come. When everything will be social and there will hardly be any human in the western civilization without an online presence, when all the major and minor web services will be supporting open APIs to exchange information (that is, our personal data) and our social network account will become the One Universal ID, I’d be afraid of Google claiming this data for their own use. That is simply going to be too much power in one company’s hands.

Think about it this way: they’ll be crawling and index the whole Web as well as bazillions of e-mail messages from millions of users (Gmail & Google Apps), they’ll be running major web services on their infrastructure (Google App Engine), they’ll have mapped the whole globe (Google Maps & Google Earth) and they’ll have created a “cloud” that would pretty much know everything about anything (like I said in another post that’s what Google officially claim as their goal). I wouldn’t want them to “own” my One Universal ID credentials as well.

One account. One ID. One company. Scares the bejesus out of me.