Greg Sadetsky

Great news, a simple and elegant SOCKS proxy hack has surfaced, allowing you to bridge the iPhone’s 3G connection and your computer (should work under Windows, as it’s a simple proxy - works great under Mac OS X). See here for instructions - you need a jailbroken iPhone, of course.

In a quick test (which I hope Rogers didn’t consider like an unusual use of the iPhone/their bandwidth and for which they’ll charge 5 cents a kilobyte), I downloaded Safari at 120kb/sec. The 18Mb download would cost 921$ at 5 cents per kilobyte, for those keeping track (e.g. this would be the cost if you were roaming in the U.S.)

Also, found here a way to disable the annoying AutoCorrection. Simply rename the /System/Library/TextInput/TextInput_en.bundle/ directory to anything else (like TextInput_en.bundle-DISABLED for example) and get rid of the spelling suggestions!

Installing this iPhone Dev team tool (Mac OS X only) (released an hour ago, July 19th around 8pm Eastern, mirrored here) gives you access to Cydia, the “Installer 2.0″ (actually an iPhone port of & UI for APT called Telesphoreo).

All in all, it’s the best of both worlds. Apple’s App Store and Linux & community software all on one device.

My first dream, now much closer to reality: tethering my MacBook to the very fast 3G connection.

Oh, and also a better bandwidth counter that resets every month on the billing date, and runs once per week (e.g. cron) to alert me on the amount of data that I’ve transferred. So far so good on Rogers’ 6 Gb monthly limit (I’m only up to 150 Mb after 6 days)…

Tel que noté ici, l’accès sans-fil au réseau de la Grande Bibliothèque nécessite un abonnement à cette même bibliothèque.

L’abonnement à la Grande Bibliothèque est gratuit pour toutes les personnes ayant une adresse de résidence au Québec. Une pièce d’identité est obligatoire.

L’érosion de l’accès libre et anonyme à Internet continue.

Comme on peut imaginer, tous les employés de la Bibliothèque rencontrés sont extrêmement aimables, professionnels et généreux. Il n’y a besoin que d’une seule décision dépressionniste “en haut” pour empoisonner la vie à tout le monde.

Plus d’infos: La Conspiration Dépressionniste.

Expensive and sad. That’s all I can say after seeing taking a look at the official Rogers prices for the (legal) Canadian iPhone.

A petition is organizing… can it change anything? Go here to RuinediPhone.com, sign, donate and wait…

Update: to put things in perspective, the base plan is 90.96$ per month, which gives you 5 calling minutes and 12 Facebook pages worth of download per day. Yay! (…)

By tinkering in Python (with the help of smart friends), some of Google AppEngine’s own code can be found.

Download the found files here. Everything was found under the “/base/python_lib/versions/1/” path.

Of interest, and not present in the public AppEngine SDK:
- the xkcd inspired antigravity module
- references to “Google3“, perhaps a codename or future product name for App Engine?

- references to internal modules: “google.net.rpc.python.rpc_internals”, “google.net.rpc.python.pywraprpc”, etc. See for example, the internal version of /google/appengine/api/mail_service_pb.py

While at Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ), connecting to the Internet via wifi used to mean forking over 10$ to Bell.

Not anymore - by selecting “Boingo Hotspot” and opening any page with the iPhone’s user-agent, you can get 4 * 15 minute sessions of free access after watching one 5 second advertisement per session.

With the iPhone user-agent set, try the following page: https://www.boingo.aero

The simplest way of faking the user-agent is to enable Safari’s debug mode in Terminal:

and then selecting Develop -> User Agent -> Mobile Safari iPhone

For Firefox users, you can install this user agent switcher extension and use the following user-agent string:

Full list of Boingo wifi airports where this should work - ABZ, ATL, AZO, BNA, BWI, DTW, EDI, EWR, GLA, HOU, IAH, JFK, LGA, LGW, LHR, MDW, MEM, MKE, MSP, OAK, OKC, ORD, SDF, SJU, SLC, SMO, SOU, STL, STN, YOW, YYZ.

Un sondage montre que 43% des Québécois seraient en faveur (et 31% contre) du projet de loi C-61, projet qui introduirait des changements dangereux aux droits des consommateurs par rapport au copyright d’oeuvres distribuées de façon numérique.

L’article et la discussion sur le blog de Michael Geist sont intéressants à ce sujet: la plupart des commentateurs s’entendent sur l’absence de couverture médiatique du sujet au Québec.

On peut mettre en cause quelques facteurs: Quebecor en partie (et donc l’inutilité de chercher de l’information à TVA, et le Journal de Montréal et Québec), mais aussi la basse utilisation “active” d’Internet dans la Belle Province (de l’Institut de la statistique du Québec: “Avec les provinces de l’Atlantique, le Québec demeure l’endroit où le taux d’utilisation d’Internet est le plus faible au Canada”; de la Montreal Gazette: “Most Quebecers are distrustful of making purchases online. 53% think using their credit cards online is unsafe.”)

Il est aussi intéressant de s’informer de la position du Bloc sur le sujet.

WOW. Web stats will never be the same.

Google Trends for Websites is fantastic. The “Also visited” and “Also search for” sections are amazingly interesting.

But wait – there’s “humor” in it! All Google properties - Google.com, YouTube.com, GMail.com are blocked off!! Hahaha…. Let’s see how that goes over with critics.

Looking at the Denny’s homepage, you’ll see a “EMPLOYEE LOGIN” form at the upper-right corner. The password is Dennys (yay!)

The employees page links to 2 interesting documents:

- The Employee Handbook (PDF), from which I took the “Never say there is no manager on duty.” quote (page 35)

- The Location and management list, updated May 2008.