iPod Touch and Case Magnets Do Not Mix!

I recently got an iPod Touch 16GB 2G/G2. It is a fantastic device. You can do so much from the palm of your hand. Unfortunately, the first time I took it out on the road it shut itself off 30 seconds into playing music. I could reset it (DFU mode I think it's called?) but it kept happening. I tried restoring, removing all apps, switching off WIFI, and everything else I could think of, but nothing fixed the seemingly random shut-off behaviour.

Finally I went to the Apple Store Genius Bar and explained it to them. They couldn't reproduce the issue but they kindly provided me with a brand new iPod. [Clue: they tested it OUT of the case.] Kudos to Apple. So I got home, charged it for 3 hours as recommended, put it BACK in the case and started to listen to music. It shut off right on cue! OK, I thought, it's just a coincidence. I reset it and started playing music again. This time it worked all the way to work on the bus and then shut down when I put it in my pocket to walk up to work. I had had a suspicion that something to do with shutting the (magnetic) case lid was to blame but had never properly tested it. So I removed the iPod Touch from the case and put it in my pocket just like that. The music kept playing all the way on the rest of my walk to work. Now we're getting somewhere!

Very frustrating! I googled for the problem (why didn't I think of this before? Who knows!) and found somone on MacRumors who had the exact same problem! And furthermore, they had a case with a magnet for keeping the lid shut. I got one of these Cygnett cases when I bought the device and had it in there the whole time. This morning I have been testing the device with the case FAR, far away and no problems at all. I will keep testing when I walk home tonight, but I feel that it is solved. It's a shame as the case is quite nice, although now that I think about it, the fit is not great and typing on the keyboard at the edge of the screen is irritating.

Next step: buy a nice NON-MAGNETIC ipod touch case and screen protector from Amazon. Or maybe i'll get one of these leather folio ipod cases with a clip instead of a magnet.

Moral of the Story: do not buy an iPod Touch case containing a magnet!

How to install Google Chrome version 2.0

1. Download Google Chrome if you don't have it - http://www.google.com/chrome/ and install it.

2. Download the Google Chrome Channel Changer - http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel from the Chromium Dev site.

3. Run the Channel Changed and select Dev.

4. Open Chrome, click on the little spanner icon and choose About Google Chrome. You will see a button in the bottom left saying Update. Click it.

5. Restart Chrome - now you have the latest Dev version - 2.0!

6. To check that it's working - hit F11 - you will have a frameless browser window!

How to get a list of directory sizes in Linux

In Windows, when I need a list of directories, showing their size, I use Total Commander. In the shell on Linux how do we do this?

Say you need a list of all the home directories and the total size of each.
Do the following:

cd /home
du -sck * | sort +0nr

du is the utility for showing file sizes
-s means summarise - so don't show the subdirectories - just show the total size of each directory
-c means give a grand total
-k means show the numbers as counts of kilobytes, so for example, a 186MB directory, will show up as 186000
* means show everything

We then pipe to the sort utility, which sorts the directory list by size.
Remove r to list in ascending order.

If you want to see the sizes in MB, the command is:

du -sc --block-size=M * | sort +0nr

Finally, if you don't want to see some directories, you can exclude them by name or pattern:

Exclude directory called 'dir1': du -sck --exclude=dir1 * | sort +0nr

Exclude directories with names that start with 'abc': du -sck --exclude=abc* * | sort +0nr

My escape key doesn't work in Vista!

Do you have Photoshop CSx open?
Yes?
Close it!

When Gmail insists on switching to the low bandwidth version

Today, for some reason, gmail all of a sudden insisted on using the low bandwidth version of the app because it said my browser (Firefox 3) was not supported. This was happening on Google Apps Mail and regular Gmail.

I found that changing the language setting to English US did not help.

What did help is using this URL:

Regular Gmail

https://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser#inbox

Google Apps

https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/?nocheckbrowser#inbox

How to delete files in Windows Vista

Sometimes it can seem impossible to delete a file/directory in Vista.
This is because of the way security is implemented.

The easiest way to get around this is to first make your account the owner of the file/directory in question. It will help if you have an Administrator account.

You can do this in the Windows file/folder properties but this is quite confusing, so try it in the command line.

Click on the start menu, and type cmd in the Search Box, then hit Enter.

In the command prompt type:

takeown /f [path to file/directory]

The /f switch means that we're taking ownership the specified file in the path.

Now you should see a message like:

SUCCESS: The file (or folder): "[path]" now owned by user "[computer name]\[user name]".

The next step is to give yourself permission to delete the file. This is achieved with:

cacls [path] /G [your user name]:F

/G means we are granting permissions to a user.
And the F means Full Control

Now you should be allowed to delete it. So just do so with:

del [path]

That's it!

Using wget to accomplish great downloading feats!

Instead of using DownThemAll and then ftping, sometimes you need to leech directly to your web host.

The perfect tool for this is wget.

Here's how to use wget to download all the zip files linked to from a given web page:

wget -A.zip -e robots=off -E -H -p -Dexample.com --random-wait -r -l inf http://www.example.com/great-files.php

The command above looks for all the links to .zip files found on the page http://www.example.com/great-files.php.

You can ignore most of the options apart from -A (file type).
-D is used to tell wget not to download files from external links, so it will only download .zip files with a path on example.com

Useful tools for today's modern webmaster!

Fixing Issues With The Wordpress Super Cache Plugin

In theory WP Super Cache is an awesome plugin, and used to work great. Since about version 0.84 I started to have problems on all of my sites. Basically it got 'stuck' and stopped caching and deleting expired cache files. This caused a bunch of cached files to remain cached indefinitely! Not great when showing live auction results.

Today I found a solution which seems to work from Quick Online Tips. It involves manually deleting the cache contents and the plugin, and then deactivating and reactivating it. Only takes a minute per blog, and seems to have fixed my issues so far!