Alligator Belly

iPhone 4 Black vs White?

Alligator — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:26:04 +0000

With the new iPhone 4 on the horizon I am debating on which iPhone I should put my money on? The Sleek Black or The Hip White?

iPhone Black Cons

Fingerprint Smudges show easily
Everybody has it !!!!

iPhone White Cons

Sensor Grill on front looks odd
Might collect dirt over time and turn black?

What do you say?

Installation Failed 1625: The installation is forbidden…

Alligator — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:49:41 +0000

Trying to install Google Chrome on Vista today and after downloading it through Firefox and running Alligator kept getting the dreaded Installation Failed 1625 error. Tried making the account an administrator on the machine but that didn’t help either. Turns out the Google Chrome installer needs to be Run As Administrator manually. While installing other applications Windows Vista automatically elevates to Administrator mode but it does not do so with the Google Chrome installer. So download the installer and browse to the folder where the installer was saved and right click on the file and click Run As Administrator. That should let the installer do its job!!!

iPhone 2.0: Usage Time = Standby Time !!!

Alligator — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:49:03 +0000

With the 2.0 release of the iPhone firmware and the launch of the App Store a day earlier, Alligator could not wait to upgrade his phone. As soon as the firmware was out on Friday, July 11th, Alligator plugged his iPhone into the computer and was able to the get the new firmware after a lot of clicking on the update button. Finally after crawling through the “Could not access iTunes Store” error message, the iPhone was back up and running with the 2.0 firmware.

Alligator had to hit the road soon so he downloaded a couple of free apps/games while on the road. In the evening, about 8 hours later that day, the iPhone was running out of battery which was pretty unusual as the iPhone had never before run out of battery unless of course it had not been charged overnight. Alligator thought since he was messing around with his iPhone and the new apps the whole day, that might have caused to iPhone to drain the battery. The next day after a full charge overnight the iPhone’s battery level was dropping rapidly again and looking into the usage menu in the iPhone the standby time was equal to the usage time. So Alligator turned off the phone and rebooted it. After the reboot Alligator kept a close watch on the usage time and it seemed back to normal. Soon after Alligator knew who was the culprit. It had to be one of the free apps that Alligator loaded into the iPhone. The app might not be closing correctly and eating up CPU cycles on the iPhone even when it should be asleep.

Alligator puts on his detective hat and tries to launch all the 10+ apps one by one and kept a watch on the usage. Unfortunately the usage times seem to normal. Thinking the iPhone just needed a reboot Alligator goes back to using his iPhone as usual and uses the iPod to listen to some music while surfing the web in Safari. Just to be sure the iPhone is acting normal Alligator checks the usage after some inactivity and the usage times are speeding up again. Frustrated Alligator tries to search on the web and finds nothing. Then he goes through Safari and finds that it has 3 pages open. One of the pages happens to http://www.wunderground.com. Suddenly the light bulb goes on and Alligator closes the wunderground.com page since it has a auto refresh script on it. Voila the usage times are back to normal after the wunderground page had been closed.

Now for the million dollar question: Is Safari remaining active even though the phone is asleep a feature or a bug? Please post your valuable comments below.

Can Time Capsule share files?

Alligator — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:35:51 +0000

One thing thats been bothering us is will Time Capsule be able to share files like a NAS or is it strictly a Time Machine backup device only?

MacBook Air Announced Today

Alligator — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:14:05 +0000

Looks like the rumors were more than true. Jobs has announced the Macbook Air weighing in at just 3 pounds and as thick as a Hershey’s candy bar. Other announcements included new firmware for the iPhone and the iPod touch and the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule is just a external hard drive with wireless networking and LAN switch built in for use with Time Machine. One thing out of line was that Apple requires 10$ for the iPod Touch upgrade. Seems a little weird isn’t it?

Google Mobile Maps GPS without GPS?

Alligator — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:03:47 +0000

Google has once again broker all barriers and introduced the My Location feature in Google Maps. The My Location feature approximates the current location using cell phone towers instead of a GPS device. So chances are if you have a newer cell phone without a GPS that you could Google Maps and it could tell you your approximate location between 25 meters to 2500 meters. That means no more finding out where you are at, just open Google Maps on your cell phone and let it find itself on the map. Although the technology is proprietary there have been rumors that the cell phone using the My Location feature sends some information about your location to the Google servers. So if privacy is a concern then you could have the My Location feature disabled. We tried it on a Nokia E61 Symbian S60 3rd edition phone and it works great and even though it’s still in Beta it’s more than 90% accurate. You can find more information about the technology here.

Is the iPhone good?

Alligator — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:15:04 +0000

Now that we are in the post-iPhone era, did the iPhone stand up to it’s hype? Here are some things that we didn’t like about the iPhone.

Although the phone is fancy is slim but there is not much to the software. The software is simple but nothing fancy to it. The only thing fancy about the software that comes to my mind is the scrolling. Other than that it’s basic.

The Google Maps is good but a GPS would have made it much better.
The camera application just has one button for the shutter and nothing else. Picture brightness and contrast controls would have been helpful and a software zoom wouldn’t hurt either.
Safari rendering is great but it is very slow. Surfing on the EDGE is slow and even on the WLAN it is slow.
No corporate email. That’s a big market share that Apple loses out on, although there are rumors that there is a software update coming in a few weeks to support corporate email. But thats anyones guess if it will support Good or Blackberry clients.
The pinching action for zoom in and zoom out requires both the hands to be used. That is perfectly fine unless you try to zoom in on maps while driving which is a big No-No.

But since it was a first generation phone we couldn’t expect everything to be perfect. So hopefully the second generation iPhone will have a lot more features.

Cannot see text in Safari on a Windows XP PC

Alligator — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:39:16 +0000

Just installed the brand new Apple’s Safari browser on a Windows XP machine and no text shows up (See Image). There are no menu bars, no bookmarks and no text on the web page that is displayed. The images seem to load up fine and that is the only thing that seems to work. The address bar is clickable but can’t seem to type anything in it. Same thing with the search box. Tried rebooting and uninstalling and reinstalling but doesn’t seem to help. Has anyone run into the same issue?

UPDATE (6/22/07): A new Safari beta 3.0.2 has been released by Apple which seems to have fixed this issue. You can either uninstall and download the new version from Apple’s website or use the Apple software updater to get the new beta.

Apple iPhone

Alligator — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:34:03 +0000

AT&T has announced the release date for the Apple iPhone to be June 29. The 4GB will cost approx. 499$ and the 8GB will cost approx. $599 with a 2 year contract. There are also rumors that the iPhone SDK will be released at the WWDC which commences on June 11th. Time to break your piggy bank and get an iPhone.

Pink Hurricane follows Google Street View car in Las Vegas!!!

Alligator — Thu, 31 May 2007 23:01:11 +0000

Aliens and not just humans were also amazed by the Google Street View car. The aliens liked it so much that they followed it for a good 2 miles all the way from Flamingo & Swenson to Flamingo & McLeod in Las Vegas, NV. But on further analysis it looks like one of the cameras or a part of camera went bad and produced the pinkish overlay. Now it’s for you to decide whether it’s a pink hurricane, aliens or a just a minor malfunction of the camera. Or is it another clue to prove that Area 51 does indeed exist.