How to receive a clearer iPod FM signal in your car
November 25, 2006
If you are like me, then you might be using some version of the Apple iPod, a mini or a nano. You want to listen to your tunes in your car, so you go to the nearest Best Buy or Circuit City to pick up an iTrip or any other FM transmitter. I personally have the iPod Mini and use a Griffin RoadTrip allowing me to play my music through any FM radio in my car, at a party, or wherever the mood strikes me.
The RoadTrip transmitter can then be set to broadcast iPod’s music to any FM frequency from 88.1 to 107.9. Its backlit screen shows which frequency RoadTrip is currently broadcasting -and can easily be adjusted via buttons located directly on the front of the unit.
However, if you live close to a major city like me in LA, the FM transmitter’s signal is not often the strongest. You might find a station that is clear for a while, but seconds later you are listening to some country music station instead of Metallica blasting through your car’s speakers.
Here is a simple tip from MacOsXhints on how to receive a clearer iPod transmitter signal. Remove your car’s antenna. You will now be able to pick any radio station to broadcast the iTrip or Roadtrip through, without a worry of competing signals.
Another tip which is not that well documented is that you can you can get the iTrip to broadcast on 87.7 and 87.9 both of which are technically below US FM frequencies. With the iPod playing and the iTrip is turned on, press and hold the Select button for about 10 seconds. The display should start flashing US. Scroll up or down to change the display to INTL. Select that mode and you should have access to the new frequencies. It works on the iTrip but not all other Griffin models.
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A look back: $9,995 Apple Lisa
November 21, 2006
A lot of people had never seen or even heard of the “Lisa” from Apple Computers but it was about to change things until Jobs beat it with “Marketing” introducing the “Macintosh”…
The Apple Lisa “was first introduced in January 1983 (announced on January 19) at a cost of $9,995 US ($19,000 in 2005 dollars). It was one of the first commercial personal computers to have a GUI and a mouse.”
The Lisa, officially, Apple stated that the name was an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture. Since Steve Jobs’ first daughter (born in 1978) was named Lisa Jobs, it is normally inferred that the name also had a personal association.
It used a Motorola 68000 CPU at a 5 MHz clock rate and had 1 MB RAM. The first Lisa had two custom 5¼ inch floppy disk drives designed with two head assemblies, one per side, which could seek independently. These drives required custom media with two head openings. They were nicknamed “Twiggy” drives. An optional external 5 MB Apple ProFile hard drive (originally designed for the Apple III) was also offered.
The End of LISA
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Funny Steve Jobs Video — Boom Boom and more Boom
November 21, 2006
Steve Jobs is our idol, but check this out….
Also, if you thought that was funny, check out the exclusive video of his presentation of his new iPods which were not presented during his showtime on Sept 22nd.
Ladies and gentlemen, intoducing the new iPod nano, the iPod pico and the iPod invisa
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Microsoft designs the iPod and its casing spoof
November 13, 2006
This is an awesome video made by none other than Microsoft itself. As hard as it is to believe this Microsoft made this internal video mocking itself. Check out the pictures and the video at the end of this article.
Round # 1: Make sure it’s on Brand and has something expressively Human
ex. Microsoft iPod 2006 Human Ear Edition or MS i-Pod Pro 2006 Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription
Round # 2: FOB stands for Full of Bullets
Round # 3: Stars and Stripes
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Hackers looking to bite the Apple in Computer Security
November 8, 2006
The Apple community has, since the beginning of time or well… atleast since its inception, has largely been immunie to attacks that regularly plague the internet community. Remember Nimda, Blaster, Slammer… yup. While you spend your time cursing Microsoft or your not so smart Anti Virus solution so prone to failure from zero day attacks, the Apple fanboys respond — they don’t have to worry about such nonsense. Apple’s general lack of concern towards viruses and malware was based on solid grounds. Their core kernel, based on secure Unix components for its underlying Operating System foundation, in itself makes the mac less vulnerable to malicious code. The other significant factor was that the Apple base wasn’t simply big enough for hackers to devote their attention to. Hackers crave attention … they want headlines also if possible bring in some moolah through their efforts among other things. The Apple community comprised of less that 5% of the overall PC market,so why not spend as much time, maybe even less creating something that will affect the remaining 95%.
However that is all changing. The iPod craze is translating into more customers for Apple. According to Apple’s most recent earning statement, Apple sold a bit north of 830,000 Macs in their last quarter, up 6% from their previous quarter. Apple’s market share is still in the single digits, but I can say for a fact that Apple is back. Thus, the slow but steady growth in the number of Mac users, is starting to make it an attractive target for malicious hackers.
And, we are starting to see this happen. This interest is translating into the discovery of more system vulnerabilities. Security vendor Internet Security Systems found that there were three times as many vulnerabilities found for the Macintosh in May of this year as there. Security supplier McAfee found that the number of vulnerabilities for the Macintosh went up 228 percent, compared to a 78 percent increase for Microsoft Windows, from 2003 to 2005.
In February 2006, the first worm designed for Mac OS X appeared. Named “OSX/Leap.A,” it is an instant messaging worm capable of infecting Mac applications. In addition, a handful of other attacks, focusing on items such as the Apple’s Safari browser and the Mac’s Bluetooth connectivity, have taken place.
In November 06, we see the release of a new worm for Apple named ‘Opener’. As first reported on The Mac Observer October 25, security experts discovered the virus entitled ‘Opener’, or ‘Renepo’ (opener spelled backwards), disguising itself as a shell script.
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!How to extract songs off your iPod using iTunes
October 24, 2006
Question ” How do I extract songs that are on my iPod into my music library on my computer? “
Well, for this problem, we are going to use a software application which you should/would have if using an iPod, the good ol’ iTunes. Below is a simple 4 step process in which we can accomplish our goal.
Step # 1: Convert your iPod to act as a drive on your computer
As soon as you plug in your iPod to your computer, the OS would recongnize the external device and install the drivers needed for it. Now go to ‘My Computer’, and see if your iPod is being recognized as a disk drive. Your iPod should fall inline after any extra hardrives or CDroms and should read ‘Removable Disk’. If your iPod is showing up, great! You have completed step 1.
Step # 2: Enable ‘View hidden files’ on your iPod
This next step requires us to actully see what is on the iPod through windows explorer. Double click on your iPod icon.
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!How to crack a 128 bit WEP key using OS X and KISMAC
October 20, 2006
WEP is one of the ways through which users try to implement encryption on their wireless networks. Most students going into their college dorms for the first time, go the nearest Circuit City or Best Buy, get the latest wireless router and plug it in. Either they leave it open or they go with the default WEP key. Some tech savvy users still go with WEP as their Wireless encryption protocol, just because their laptops might be couple of years old and their wireless adapters might not support better wireless security protocols like WPA or WPA2+TKIP/ WPA+AES.
Even if you use WPA, it doesn’t matter if you have SSID turned on or off, because better cracking programs are coming out every day with better dictionaries. Some help can be obtained through the good folks at GRC where they have a free strong pass phrase generation tool. While MAC address filtering would be an okay complement to your wireless protection, they do not complement your security by much. MAC addresses are actually not encrypted when sent over the air, since they are the only reliable way of identifying a peer. Getting them from network traffic is trivial and only needs a couple of frames. Also, MAC addresses are also trivial to spoof.
To show all you folks why WEP does not provide any security, check out this video from Shawn Hogan. Shawn here cracks two 128 bit WEP keys in around 60 seconds. He uses a publicly available tool called KISMAC available for a Macintosh. After doing some reading, an “ultra-secure” password/MD5 seed would be relatively useless anyway… all it would do is force the attacker to spend 10 minutes on it instead of 10 seconds (see this FAQ and this FAQ), all of which is easily done from the kismac Network menu. It doesn’t even matter if you setup your wireless network to be public or not, because kismac can see it even if the base station isn’t showing the SSID publicly. So here goes hacking with KISMAC on OS X
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