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Wallpapers: iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S

The following wallpapers are 640x960 pixels in size, and designed for use on the iPhone 4/4S. Home screen images feature a slightly darkened navigation bar (where the paging dots appear), along with a fade-to-darker gradient in the Dock area below the navigation bar.

Note that the images shown in the image sliders below (hover and click to cycle) are low-quality 256×256 JPEG representations of the actual photos; to get the high-quality images, download the entire bundle [6MB] and install only those you wish to use.

Home Screens (9)Lock Screens (32)

License: All photographs in these wallpapers are © Rob Griffiths, and are freely provided for personal use only. You may not include these wallpapers on other sites, nor in any commercial product, without my prior permission. (I hate having to put this here, but prior experience has shown it to be necessary.)



A Rube Goldberg-inspired garage parking assistant

We recently started parking our truck in the shorter of our garage bays—it's short due to shelves at the front that can't be moved any further forward (as they'd then block access to another portion of the garage).

The amount of wiggle room available is quite small—about two inches of leeway, at the most. So parking in the same spot every time is quite important. (The frontmost item on the truck is the bracket that holds the license plate, so that's the part that needs to be watched.)

While there are many ways to solve this issue, here's how I chose to do it:

Sure, I could have hung a tennis ball from the ceiling (I did that first, actually), or put a block on the ground in front of the tire. But I had issues with both of those methods, and I like semi-geeky do-it-yourself solutions. Read on, if you wish, for the details on the project…

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Troubleshooting a Mac CD tray that won’t stay closed

Recently, I placed my Mac Pro up for sale, both on the net in general and on eBay. The eBay auction closed with a successful bidder, so yesterday, I went to prep the machine for shipping. After wiping the drives and reinstalling OS X, I had but one thing to do: solve a small but annoying problem with one of the two installed disc burning SuperDrives (name used for simplification; one was an actual SuperDrive from Apple; the other a multi-format burning drive from Sony).

The stock drive, which I had mounted in the lower slot, worked fine. So did the after-market upper drive, as long as there was a disc in the slot. If I ejected the disc and then closed the tray, the drive would grind for a few seconds, then eject. It would then stay ejected for a few minutes, until (I believe) OS X noticed it was open. It would then close, and the grind-eject cycle would repeat.

I'm posting the sordid details of my experience in case anyone else is looking for help with a CD/DVD tray that won't stay closed on their own OS X machine; perhaps it'll show up in a Google Mac-specific search at some point in the future. Read on for the details…
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How to not upgrade to iOS5

If you follow me on Twitter, you're probably familiar with my iOS5 installation difficulties. Two days into the process, and I've still not been able to update either my iPad (first generation) or iPhone 4. This is—by far—the most frustrated I've been with any Apple upgrade, ever…and that covers a lot of history!

Simply as a means of venting, and perhaps to save someone else from going through what I've gone through (though note that I haven't yet solved the problem), here's what I've gone through to try to upgrade my iPhone and iPad.

Update: On my 48th attempt, my iPhone 4 successfully updated to iOS5. Now, on to the iPad…

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11.6″ MacBook Air: Who needs a netbook?

As I'm really enjoying my new 11.6" MacBook Air, I thought it might be interesting to compare it with some other portables I currently own. Specifically, I wanted to compare the Air to my previous fave ultra-portable Mac (the 12" PowerBook G4), a Dell Mini 10 running Mac OS X, and my current fave Mac laptop, the high-res anti-glare 15" MacBook Pro.

What follows isn't a comprehensive set of benchmarks done under controlled conditions. It's more of a quick look at performance (and measurements and specifications) across a series of machines, three of which can be considered "ultra portables."

Read on for the table...

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My new favorite (for now) laptop Mac

A while back, I tweeted that my new MacBook Pro was my fave-ever portable Mac—this despite having only used the machine for under two weeks at that point. A few people asked me "why your fave-ever?," so I thought I'd use those queries as an excuse to post here on my near-silent blog.

The specific machine in question is a 2010 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.66GHz Core i7 processor, 4GB of RAM, and (when new) a 5400rpm 500GB hard drive...and, oh yes, the single most important spec: the anti-glare 1680x1050 high resolution screen.

This machine replaced a 2008 MacBook Pro (last of the non-unibody laptops) with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a 7200rpm 200GB hard drive (and the only screen at the time, the standard 1440x900).

Comparing the two, the only area where I gave up anything at all was in the hard drive's speed. I took care of that problem by installing a new Seagate Momentus hybrid hard drive, the 500GB version, to be exact. (A hybrid drive is one that combines a small solid state drive—4GB in this case—with a traditional drive, and then uses its firmware to optimize performance on the fly. For more on the Seagate hybrid drive, see this excellent article at Anandtech.)
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A non-review of Avatar

It's not very often that I see a movie that moves me enough to write something about it. Sure, a couple years back, I put together a list of some of my favorite comedies, but those were capsule summaries written about movies that were, in general, quite a few years old.

Yesterday, however, I saw Avatar, and was, for the first time since the 1977 release of Star Wars (I refuse to call it 'Episode IV'), absolutely amazed by a film. As such, I felt moved to write a little bit about Avatar.

This is not a review, and it (hopefully) doesn't contain any spoilers. Instead, I've focused on my reactions to Avatar, some comparisons to that original Star Wars movie, and what I think it means for movie making going forward.

First off, after sleeping on it, I definitely stand by the three-word (five, counting the parenthetical) review that I tweeted yesterday:

Go see it (in 3D)

Go see it because it's entertaining. Go see it because it represents the state-of-the-art in movie visual effects. Go see it if you're a fan of cinema in general, and want to see where filmmaking may be headed in the future. But really, just go see it—Avatar is well worth the cost of admission, regardless of the reasons.

Does that mean it's a perfect movie? No, in fact far from it—the story, in particular, is too predictable and has been seen many times before. Then again, Star Wars wasn't necessarily a completely original story, either. Another recent favorite of mine, Star Trek, was itself very similar to Star Wars (this funny video demonstrates just how similar). In short, I don't necessarily mind a predictable story if it's presented well and the rest of the movie works with the story.
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One way to password protect a WordPress site

I was helping a friend set up a site for their family, and they wanted it to be password protected. I protect our family site using Apache's basic access protection (httpauth), and it works well enough, so that's how I set up his site as well.

However, we then had nothing but trouble with the Flash-based image uploader in WordPress, which is a tool I don't personally use. After some digging, I discovered that the Flash-based image uploader simply won't work with httpauth.

Because the objective was to keep out unwanted visitors, I found a workaround -- it's not perfect security, but it seems to do the job well, and allows the Flash-based image uploader to work. I disabled the httpauth access restriction, then installed two plug-ins:

  • Restricted Site Access: This plug-in prevents anyone from seeing the site without first logging in. We then created one generic username/password for my friend to give out to all his relatives (which is what we would have done using httpauth, too).
  • Peter's Login Redirect: This sends users to the home page of the site after login, instead of to their control panel. I'm not sure why, but after logging in, our generic user was going to their control panel. This plug-in solved that problem.

The end result is a site that's protected from casual visitors, as well as robots (though we've also got a robots.txt file set up, just in case). It'd be nicer if WordPress would just fix the httpauth issues, but it seems they're not interested in doing that.



GPS, daylight savings time, and cars

With this morning's semi-annual changing of the clock for Daylight Savings Time (DST), I'm once again left to ponder...why, in this era of GPS-equipped automobiles, do I have to manually set the clock in my car? We had, until very recently (we sold one), three cars with factory GPS units. Of those three, only one uses the GPS signal to set the car's clock. In the other two vehicles, we have to manually adjust the clock, even though an extremely accurate time and date signal is one of the features of the GPS satellites.

So my car knows the date, and it knows the correct time...so why can't it figure out that DST has started or ended?

Things have definitely improved over the last 30 years, though--today, we had only a handful of clocks to change. In addition to one of the cars, there were a couple of televisions (another device that seems to me should be capable of changing its own clock), our microwave, and a few assorted clock radios and wall clocks. But most of the clocks we own synchronize automatically with a time signal, so they were correct when I woke up this morning. The computers, of course, handle the change seamlessly. (The fact that I stopped wearing a wrist watch a few years ago also helps; I have ten or so sitting in a drawer somewhere, but I no longer bother to set them.)

I'm not sure I'll live long enough to see a DST start/stop day where I don't need to manually set a clock...but I'm hoping I do!



Indoor flying fun

For quite a while, I've wanted an electric radio controlled (R/C) helicopter--one of the small ones you can fly around inside the house. Over the last couple years, I've tried cheap versions (complete waste of money; they fly like crud), and the expensive versions seemed too, well, expensive for what would be nothing more than a silly time waster.

Then, just before Christmas, E-Flite released the new Blade mCX, a smaller, lighter, and easier-to-fly version of their Blade CX2. The CX2 was one of the expensive models I'd passed on earlier. The mCX, however, comes in $50 cheaper than the CX2, and came close enough to my self-imposed $100 limit that I bought myself one for Christmas :). (Click the image at left [and any image in this writeup] for a larger view.)

After only a few minutes with the mCX, I was hooked. This machine is unlike any other R/C helicopter I've ever tried to fly. Within a couple minutes of my first power-up, I had it hovering in place, and could maneuver it relatively well. Even for me, a complete novice to R/C flying, this machine is incredibly easy to fly. R/C purists probably dislike it, though--relying on dual counter-rotating rotor blades and a gyro, the mCX isn't a "real" R/C helicopter in any sense. But for my desires, it's (nearly) perfect.

The mCX weighs one ounce (with battery), and has a rotor span of just 7.5 inches. Everything about this machine is tiny, including the motors (the round items in the image at left) and the battery (visible at the bottom of the image; it's got a red dot on it). The front of the machine is the brains, though--a circuit board there holds the gyro, motor control units, fully proportional servos, and radio receiver. Amazing that it all weighs but an ounce.

Combine that with very sensitive flight controls, and you can fly the mCX almost anywhere--I've flown it above the garage's workbench, for instance. The throttle is amazingly precise, making it easy to fly at whatever altitude you desire. As a brief example, here's a video of me flying around in the den, trying to keep the mCX within view of the fixed video camera:

Read on for more about this amazing little machine...
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