Five years ago today, I made an account on some site called “Audioscrobbler”. It was a new fangled site that’d keep track of the music you listened to and create trends, history, etc. No one had really ever heard of it and I only did because I knew one of the developers who was also helping out with Audio-Tracker (a “Now Playing” image site).

Five years later, Audioscrobbler has merged with Last.fm and become the awesomeness that it is today. Oh how the times have changed.

Just finished upgrading to a jailbroken copy of 1.1.3 via the official app in Installer.app. It worked like a charm with no hitches whatsoever! Woot! It kept all my songs, videos, settings, etc., but I did have to redownload all of my custom applications. Sadly, Summerboard doesn’t let itself install under 1.1.3, but I may be able to hack around it if I can just get SFTP working…

It is really nice to finally see the Webclip for FinalGear in person though:

UPDATE: I was trying to login as “mobile” (the new user that everything runs under in 1.1.3) rather than “root”. SFTP is working fine now and thanks to a hack I found, Summerboard is installed and running! It doesn’t work perfectly with 1.1.3 though as it can’t skin the wallpaper (still black) or the dock, but hey. :)

Rather than making a couple short posts I’ve been meaning to make, here there are crammed into one post.

• Web Developers: When backing up your computer before formatting, don’t forget to backup your MySQL tables too. Don’t be an idiot like me and loose a lot of your work. Thankfully I remembered to backup all my PHP code and I don’t think there was too much of utter importance in my database, but still, what a flippin’ pain in the ass.
• My New Computer: is awesome. It can play any current game on max settings, including Crysis. I love it and you can see the specs right here.
• Happy New Year: Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, etc. Yeah, I’m lazy and put this off. heh

I officially hate iTunes and that I am forced to use it to manage my iPod Touch. Okay, so I can tick the manual box and just drag and drop any songs I want to be on it, but the fact that it refuses to fetch album artwork for all my CDs drives me nuts. A huge part of the thing is displaying the album artwork (you can fly through it, it displays while playing, etc.). Worst of all, even if Winamp has already snagged the album artwork and saved it as a JPEG in the album’s folder, iTunes won’t notice it and I’d have to manually add it to my bazillion albums. Why oh why…

Back in the day, I used to just use the same password (well, a couple really, but still) on all sites I had to register on. This made it easy to remember, but the problem is that if one of my accounts was compromised, that password could be used to get into all of my other accounts.

So, for a while, I used a random password generator extension for Firefox, but it was slow and relied on Firefox remembering all my passwords (what happens if my hard drive died?).

Enter the ingenious SuperGenPass. It combines the two solutions I used previously. From the FAQ:

A bookmarklet is a chunk of JavaScript code stored in your Web browser as a bookmark or favorite. There’s no software to install, so you can use SuperGenPass across all platforms and in any modern Web browser. It also makes it easy to use on public computers where access rights may be restricted.

How it works

SuperGenPass uses your master password and the domain name of the Web site you are visiting as the “seed” for a one-way hash algorithm. The output of this algorithm is your generated password. If either your master password or the domain name of the Web site changes, even by one character, the generated password will be drastically different.

For example, let’s say that your master password is “cornflakes”. If you use SuperGenPass at yahoo.com, your generated password will be “r9AQeOhBgU”. If you use SuperGenPass at amazon.com, your generated password will be “zcbEm1t32B”. SuperGenPass doesn’t need to remember this or store it anywhere, because it’s just a (very complex) math problem: the result is the same every time. And because SuperGenPass uses a one-way hash function, no one will be able to reverse-engineer your master password from your generated passwords.

Simply put, you come up with one password and SuperGenPass will generate a unique, re-creatable password for any domain name you visit. It even fills in the password fields for you. I’ve dragged it up onto my top toolbar in Firefox, so I just click it and bam, I’m done.

No more having to remember more than one password or worry about your password being stolen and used on multiple sites.

Been busy, hence the lack of posts lately and this post being a day late. ;)

Firefox v2.0 Final was released yesterday. All you FF users, go upgrade! And to you IE users out there (even IE7 ones), please oh please try out Firefox or at least Opera. Anything but that insecure piece of shit IE.

IE7 is outta beta and available for all users. So, if you just have to use IE, upgrade, but otherwise I really suggest you switch to Firefox or Opera. Both are significantly better than any version of IE.

Google has a cool new beta feature for their Google Maps called Google Transit. It allows you to plan a trip just like you would on Google Maps except that it uses the public transportation system rather than your car.

It’s only available in 6 cities so far (mine included of course — we are the leading city in public transportation in the US after all), but more will be added soon apparently. :)

Winamp v5.3 has been released (what’s new). If you use Winamp, go update! :)

Firefox 2.0 Release Candidate 1 is out and it features an even spiffier looking theme than the one that was in the previous build, Firefox 2.0 Beta 2:

You can go read the release notes or download it now.