Via Flickr
Flickr user Danial Forsythe has taken matters into his own hands and found a way to manually refocus the iPhone’s camera. Long derided as a deficient feature of Apple’s popular handset, the iPhone camera’s default focal length is set to infinity, which makes for less-than-stellar close up shots. Forsythe has posted instructions detailing a way to open up the case, get the screen out of the way, flip the camera up, break the glue, adjust the lens, and plug the screen back in to check the focus.
If that sounds like more getting “under the hood” than you might be comfortable with, third party lenses and filters do exist to help you try and get more out of your iPhone’s camera.
Via Ars Technica
Written by Lonnie Lazar on August 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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In what can only be considered a turn of logic from an alternative “evil twin” universe, Hackintosh maker Psystar answered Apple’s cease and desist lawsuit of July 3th with their own alleging restraint of trade and antitrust violations.
via Computerworld
// Opinion Follows //
It’s been long anticipated that Psystar would play the “Antitrust Card” in defense of its illegal activities. The only thing is, it’s not illegal to have a monopoly. The key predicate to an antitrust suit is that the consumer must in some way be harmed by the monopolistic behavior of the defendant. Rudy Pedraza, Psystar’s president summed up their consumer harm argument by saying: “It’s not that people don’t want to use Mac OS X, but they’re not open spending an exorbitant amount of money for something that’s essentially generic hardware.”
So that’s it, ‘the Apple’s hardware is too expensive’ argument we’ve heard time and time again, and have time and time again refuted. On a direct feature for feature comparison with Sony, HP or IBM, Apple hardware is no more expensive than the competition.
Our industry is FULL of monopolies that no one seems to disagree with, examples follow:
- Tivo has a monopoly on the Tivo OS, in that it too can only be employed on Tivo or licensed 3rd party hardware.
- Sony has a monopoly on the PlayStation, PS2, PS3 and PSP operating systems and regulates very closely the hardware they’re allowed to run on
- IBM has a monopoly on mainframes and the mainframe Z-OS
- even Microsoft has a monopoly on XBox OS and limits the hardware it can run on
While I can understand that free spirited hackers take unbrage at being locked out, there is nothing inherently wrong or illegal with Apple’s strategy of controlling the whole widget. Monopoly “sounds” bad on it’s own, but in Apple’s case they’re not abusing their power.
Written by Leigh McMullen on August 26th, 2008 with no comments.
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Last month, after a couple of eggnogs at the office, <a href=”http://cultofmac.com/?p=1574″>I drenched my keyboard in a cup of coffee</a>. Kind readers suggested running it through the dishwasher. Of course, putting keyboards in dishwashers is the kind of thing you read on the internet all the time, but never believe it actually works.
So, skeptical that it would work, I tried it myself.
I’m happy to report that running a filthy, coffee-stained keyboard through the dishwasher works great. The keyboard is spotless, and it works perfectly.
Feel me: dishwashers make keyboards better than new.
Full procedure after the jump.
(more…)
Written by Leander Kahney on January 9th, 2008 with no comments.
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spinning beach ball of death and loading pcb from
Gijs on
Vimeo.Since Mac OS X replaced the Classic Mac OS, nothing has galled users more than the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, also known as the “I’m thinking, but I’m thinking in rainbow colors!” icon. Ask your Mac for more than it wants to handle at a given moment, watch as your precious pointer becomes a useless spinning beachball.
Dutch artist Gijs Gieske has taken that icon of Mac frustration and turned it into a giant work of art to remind us all how much easier our lives could be, although he claims he made it “for no particular reason.” Just look at it — it’s like staring into hell…
Source: MAKE via GadgetLab via Engadget
Written by Petemortensen on January 8th, 2008 with no comments.
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So cool. Ben Fino-Radin is doing some awesome work with retro-tech. In addition to the Hacked Mac shown here, he has made needlepoint 128k Mac replica. He hasn’t done anything new in several months, but I’d say he’s earned a break.
Via Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder.
Written by Petemortensen on January 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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