Goodbye Steve

iPhone Tracking

There’s been a lot of noise made lately about the information that the iPhone generates and keeps stored in it’s memory, digital information listing the phone’s geo-location (and by implication, you) over the last 10 months. A bit of software is available that extracts this information from your phone and overlays it on an interactive map, and although purposely granular on the time scale, it still shows a fair representation of your movements. But if the information is as accurate as my results show below, I doubt anyone should worry about their privacy, their Twitter feed is probably a lot more precise.

My logs show excursions deep into South Carolina and southern Alabama, even though my phone has not been in either state. Sure I’ve been in Georgia, in the general vicinity of those areas indicated, and it’s probable that my phone latched onto a cell tower somewhere across state lines as I checked my email, but that is hardly close enough to pin me to an exact geographical spot. But what I find odd is that it doesn’t show some places that I have been, like Chattanooga and Savannah. (Savannah isn’t shown because I’ve cropped it to only show the log hits.)

Emptying the Trash

There has been a stone in my shoe for quite some time. Not a literal stone, but a digital one. My desktop computer, a Mac Pro running both Snow Leopard and Windows XP, has been unable to empty the trash completely for something on the order of 2 years now.

As is my habit, one of the last things I always do before shutting off any computer is to empty the trash, but about 2 years ago, this damn thing balked and outright refused. Everything would be deleted except for a single file with gibberish for a name.

I tried deleting again and again, each time with no success. Grr.

Googling and searching, I couldn’t find the solution. I figured I wasn’t using the right search terms and as days went by, I gradually got busy with other things, fell back on sour grapes and decided it wasn’t that important. I tried to ignore it. But it was hard. It was there every time I shut down, silently taunting me and reminding me I wasn’t master of my own hardware.

So I finally got serious this weekend about solving the problem, taking back control of my own computer, and found my answer on Macworld.com.
Apparently, “it was caused by a corrupt file on a FAT32 Boot Camp partition in the C:.Trashes501 folder”. Run Check Disk Utility under Windows…. and done.

I am now once again the Master.
Thanks ‘heymike’ for the tip!

Color Gangster

As a follow up to my last post, here is a look at the color version of the rejected Gangster Apple sketch.

Robot Sketch

Noodling around with the iPad some more, and came up with this for my grandson. Created using fingers and a stylus.

Rotten Apple

I’m an Apple fanboy. I have owned and used Macs for over 20 years now and would never willingly sit and use any other brand of computer. It literally pains me to have to use my wife’s PC when the oddball need arises. But Apple stumbles now and then and the picture above links to the latest blunder. MAD magazine caricature artist Tom Richmond teamed with Ray Griggs to develop an iPhone app that would have allowed the user to find the names and contact information of their senators and congressional representative either via zipcode or by using the iPhone’s GPS location services. But apparently some politically correct (PC) geek at Apple felt that portraying our political representatives as cartoon characters might be construed as “ridicule” and hurt their feelings, so they rejected the app. I don’t want to put a political spin on the rejection, but part of me can’t help but wonder…