This is gonna be a quick and short post about a tool I use on my Mac called "Caffeine". This tool essentially allows me, at the click of a button, to disable the display's dim and eventual turn off function. It's useful when you're reading something and you won't be touching the keyboard or the mouse, but you'd still like the screen to be on. It's useful also when I'm playing along a guitar tab and I can't afford to stop playing just to get the screen back on.

Anyway, this tool places an icon on the status bar. The only problem is that this icon is in color and it just stands out in my status bar like a sore thumb. SO! I created a new icon set. You can get it by clicking here. Scroll down to have a look at the icons before you download it.

All you have to do is copy them to /Applications/Caffeine.app/Contents/Resources/ et voilà! I've included two more icons (not shown here) for the right click behavior.

Icons:

This is what it looks like in action:

and

]]> http://www.tiagoespinha.net/2011/09/black-and-white-icons-for-caffeine/feed/ 0 http://www.tiagoespinha.net/2010/10/adobe-starts-including-spyware-with-acrobat-reader/ http://www.tiagoespinha.net/2010/10/adobe-starts-including-spyware-with-acrobat-reader/#comments Sat, 23 Oct 2010 17:57:52 +0000 tiago http://www.tiagoespinha.net/?p=434

We all know the folks at Adobe are some really nice people and that Steve Jobs was just being a bastard by not allowing Flash on the iPhone. But as it turns out, whilst Apple is too restrictive as to what it allows on their AppStore and their iDevices, Adobe on the other hand is too permissive and they might have just crossed a line.

Now, I understand that companies are all just trying to make money but if you attempt to install the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader and you're using Firefox, you'll be asked to install a Firefox extension to manage the download. While I typically try to avoid these downloaders (mostly because they're unnecessary and due to the fact that I don't feel comfortable with a company that thinks they're too important to give me a direct HTTP link), I was in a rush and I couldn't find a direct link on the page I was taken to. Considering this, I just thought "how bad can it be?" and went ahead.

What was not my surprise when I saw the following, without ANY user input at all:

Yep, what you see there is Adobe's downloader which has just installed McAfee Security Scan Plus. Without prompting me about it AT ALL. I was pretty annoyed with this situation because if this isn't the definition of ad/spyware, then I don't know what is. I just thought I'd write this as I'm not usually very happy with companies who think it's OK to install software on my computer without my consent. It's not OK. Adobe, you're the one McAfee should be protecting me from.

If you need a way to store your files in a manner that they are always accessible everywhere, then Dropbox is for you. In case you haven't yet heard about this service, then know that Dropbox offers you 2Gb for free to store whichever files you like. The guys at Dropbox also have a software that integrates nicely with Windows and Mac OS and you can even access the files from your iPhone or Android powered phone.

You might think that 2Gb are rather meager and you are right, that's nothing these days. This is why Dropbox has an awesome referral program that will allow you to go up to 10Gb just by referring friends! That's right, 10Gb for free just by referring Dropbox to a few friends.

Read on to find out more!

If you are up for it, Dropbox also offers paid plans where you can pay $9.99 a month for 50Gb of storage or you can go the extra mile and pay $19.99 for the 100Gb service. Still, if this is a little too extreme for you, register an account (with my referral, obviously ) and start spamming referring friends with your link!

Anyone who owns an iPhone or who has a friend who owns an iPhone will probably know about Angry Birds. Angry Birds is this awesome game where you hurl all kinds of different birds with different abilities at some nasty pigs. The goal of each level is kill all of the pigs and keep progressing through the different levels, with different obstacles and new birds.

Sounds like a game you'd like to play on your Android phone? Well read on then!

The good people at Roxio finally had mercy on us, Android users, and decided to release a version of this game on the Android platform. You can find it in the Android Market as a Lite Beta version. I've had the chance to try it on my Samsung Galaxy S and let me tell you: it's orders of magnitude faster than the same game on my iPad. Absolutely stunning and fluid. Give it a go!

(Don't know what this is? Download an app called "Barcode Scanner" and scan this code to download "Angry Birds" right away!)

True to the proverbial "feather in the cap", I have been promoted to committer with the project I have been participating on during the last few months, Apache Derby. There's not much to say except that it feels really good to have your hard work recognized

Apache Derby is a great project with a really nice community of helpful people and it was through Derby that I have participated and successfully completed the Google Summer of Code challenge for two years in a row! It's always a great challenge even to the sharpest mind and most advanced skills because this is an extensive project that has already been around for more than a decade. Over this period different developers have participated on it which adds to the challenge of reengineering and simple engineering of new features when the need arises. I can't say this is a disadvantage though as it is an excellent way of being exposed to actual production code from an IT giant (Apache Derby once was IBM Cloudscape). It's also exciting because the changes that you make will actually have an impact on the thousands of people that use Apache Derby and for this reason all changes have to be done with most care to keep Derby's performance up to the challenge as well as to ensure that all standards are kept.

With this said, I'll just leave here the link to the "historical" vote in the ASF list

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/db-derby-dev/201008.mbox/<4C6F038C.7080708@sbcglobal.net>

Yeah, it is serious I have 10 Google Wave invites to distribute to the first ten visitors to leave me a comment on this post. This is NOT a contest, I will be giving the invites to the ten first lucky people who leave a comment on this post requesting an invite. Please be sure to leave the comment with a working e-mail address, or the invite won't go through and you will lose your chance.

Comment away!

[UPDATE]: 8 invites left!

Well, for some weird reason, Apple refuses to give in and have Adobe port Flash over to the iPhone. It would be a massive advantage if we could see an iPhone with a full blown version of Flash, as opposed to Flash Lite. But... Apple won't bend. So what does Apple do? The best it can do right now: get people angry at Apple.

Below is the image that people will see when they try to download Flash on their iPhones (courtesy of Engadget):

Well, truth to be told this had to happen at some point. According to the good folks at Engadget, T-Mobile has most probably lost the data of their customers' Sidekick phones. The T-Mobile Sidekick is a device that relies heavily on cloud-computing and simple things such as looking up contacts or reading old text messages are done through servers in the cloud (that is to say, in the Internet). So if these servers fail for some reason, or more extremely (like it happened) lose all the data they contain, then the end user is pretty much screwed.

I hope for the sake of the costumers that the data isn't just lost; I would have also hoped that T-Mobile had off-site, offline backups of all this stuff but that clearly does not seem to be the case. It is also up to our imagination whom to blame for this. Of course that for all the people affected by this problem, T-Mobile will be the one to blame, but whose fault was it in the end? Is it a bug in the servers? Will it happen again? Has it been patched?

Doesn't really matter now but here's the morale of the story: ALWAYS keep backups of your data.

Having recently tried Mac OS X and all of it Exposé and Spaces goodness, I couldn't help but to notice that Aero Peek feels like a complete rip off of the Exposé feature. Don't take me wrong though, it is not a critic. I am of the opinion that progress can only be made if we pick the best bits and pieces out of everything that is out there and put it all into one package. So while Windows still has a long way to go on user experience matters, I see this as a move forward.

Still, Aero Peek came with an annoyance for me: it takes too damn long! Basically, when you activate Exposé on a Mac (either by having a shortcut or by hovering over a hot corner) you instantly get to your desktop and can see what's underneath - with Aero Peek this takes at least one or two seconds which isn't ideal for me by any stretch.

With that in mind, and since there does not seem to be that much documentation about this yet, Microsoft allows you to adjust that delay time with some registry hacking. To adjust the delay, do the following:

1. Open regedit (Start -> regedit -> press enter)
2. Go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced
3. Once here, create a new DWORD (32 bit) entry with the name DesktopLivePreviewHoverTime and set it to whatever time you'd like in milliseconds. I found that 100 works best for me but I will leave that at your own discretion.

Now I'm back to testing Windows 7 RTM - have a good one!

Soooo... apparently Mac's can't catch viruses but the iPhone certainly can. There is a flaw in the iPhone's software that allows any attacker to gain complete control over your phone. Flaw which Apple is aware of but still hasn't patched. The details are simple and as such I will cut to the chase: if you receive an SMS with a single square in it, by the love of God - TURN OFF YOUR PHONE.

You have been warned, be safe, buy a Palm Pré.

[via Engadget]

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