The All Knowing "Blog Nerd"

My Top 10 Favorite JAILBROKEN Apps in Cydia. (2009 Edition)

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:42:20 +0000

Some apps are only in certain repos in cydia.
iClarified: http://cydia.iclarified.com/
Touch-Mania : http://cydia.touch-mania.com/
SOSiPhone : http://cy.sosiphone.com/

New Sony PS3 Slim Review (120 GB)

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:36:37 +0000

Cnet’s first look of the new Sony PlayStation 3 Slim ps3 slim review ps3 slim ps3 slim sony playstation 3 slim sony playstation 3 slim review review for the new Sony PS3 Slim. PS3 Slim PS3 Slim PS…

Upgrade to Snow Leopard

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:23:47 +0000

Apple’s latest operating system, OS X 10.6, aka “Snow Leopard” is something of a departure for Apple. It’s less about new features and more about incremental upgrades, refinements and speed boosts. And priced at $30 for an upgrade, Snow Leopard is also considerably cheaper than past OS X versions.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the things you should do before you make the leap to Snow Leopard, and how to go about the actual installation, including how to install it even if you aren’t using its predecessor, OS X 10.5 Leopard.

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1 Before You Upgrade 2 Installation 3 MacBook Air 4 Conclusion 5 External links

Before You Upgrade

Before you join the legions of Apple faithful in your upgrades, there are a few things you should know about Snow Leopard.

Requirements

Snow Leopard requires an Intel-based Mac, at least 1 GB of RAM and a DVD drive. Check out the Apple website for the full list of Snow Leopard requirements.

Technically, Apple also says that the Snow Leopard upgrade will only work for those using OS X 10.5 Leopard, but it looks like anyone running a Mac with 10.4 that also meets the new OS’ hardware requirements can upgrade to 10.6. (More on this below)

Clean house

Whether you decide to do a clean install of Snow Leopard or simply update your existing system, now is the perfect time to clean up your hard drive. This means getting rid of unused applications, cleaning out your start up items folder or even just getting rid of that desktop file clutter. As for deleting bloated logs and other background files, we like OnyX which can handle those tasks and quite a bit more. Other options include Cocktail.

See our How To Speed Up Your Mac guide for more details.

Back up!

The next thing to do before you upgrade to Snow Leopard is to back up your current OS X installation. Than means using Time Machine or one of the many third party solutions available.

Have a look at our Guide to Backing Up Your Mac for suggestions and backup strategies.

Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:13:34 +0000

Vanish Finding Evan Ratliff

Track down author Evan Ratliff and win $5,000. Contest explained here.

Spy Son Rats Out Mole Father

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:09:14 +0000

The son of a disgraced CIA agent convicted of funneling classified information to the Russians has pleaded guilty to charges of helping his imprisoned father collect overdue bills for his dad’s nefarious activities.

The 25-year-old son, Nathaniel James Nicholson of Eugene, Oregon, traveled throughout the world using coded e-mail messages to plot meeting locations with the Russians, and received tens of thousands of dollars on behalf of his convicted spy father, Harold James Nicholson, according to a January indictment. (.pdf)

The younger Nicholson faces up to 25 years in prison. But in exchange for leniency up to a sentence of probation, the son has greed to testify against his father if there is a trial. The younger Nicholson pleaded guilty late Thursday to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign nation and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

“Nathaniel Nicholson acknowledged his role in the ongoing conspiracy with his father to collect money from the Russian Federation for his father’s past espionage activity,” acting U.S. Attorney Kent S. Robinson said in a statement.

The father, nicknamed “Batman,” is already serving 23 years after pleading guilty more than a decade ago to furnishing the Russians “documents, photographic negatives and information relating to the national defense of the United States, with the intent and reason to believe that the same would be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of the Russian Federation,” according to an FBI affidavit (.pdf). As part of the agent’s plea deal, he admitted that, during his 16-year tenure, he received $300,000 from the Russian Federation for supplying the identity of CIA operatives in Moscow, including their code names.

At the time of his 1997 conviction, he was the highest-ranking CIA officer convicted of spying. He faces life in prison under the latest charges.

Outside Lands Best Bets: Wired’s Guide to Kick-Ass Bands at This Weekend’s Music Fest

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:05:56 +0000

Deciding which bands to see at multiple-stage festivals with more than 60 acts to choose from can be overwhelming to the unprepared. Good thing Wired’s got your back. We’ve done the prep work and selected the 10 must-see up-and-coming artists at this year’s Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco.

The three-day event, which takes place in the wooded environs of Golden Gate Park, starts Friday afternoon and runs through Sunday night.

At big festivals, bands often start late and run past their scheduled slots, and all the artists you want to see are rarely on the same stage. So, we’ve included some other killer acts performing before and after each of our picks on the same stage or nearby. As one show winds down, you’ll have enough time and know-how to refresh yourself, grab some food and a frosty brew before charging to the next musical encounter. The Outside Lands online schedule lets you create your own festival itinerary.

Now, to our picks!

Friday

Akron/Family: Friday 1:45-2:30 (Lindley Meadow)

The psychedelic folk of Akron/Family translates well to live performances. Known to invite fans to join them in chanting parades off-stage, so who knows where you’ll end up? (Read our Akron/Family spotlight.)

Before: West Indian Girl (Speeway Meadow 1:00-1:45)
After: Zee Avi (Speedway Meadow 3:20-4:00)

Akron/Family, “River”

Zee Avi: Friday 3:20-4:00 (Speedway Meadow)

A key strategy in music festivals is finding the perfect mellow act to serve as a buffer between heavy, head-bangin’ bands. Zee Avi provides a great interlude to all the rockin’ with her dulcet guitar and folky, soulful ballads. Standing a skosh over 60 inches, it’s a spectacle just to watch so much soul come from such a tiny being. (Read our Zee Avi spotlight.)

Before: Akron Family (Lindley Meadow 1:45-2:30)
After: Blind Pilot (Lindley Meadow 4:10-4:55)

Zee Avi, “Monte”

NASA’s Most Awesomely Weird Mission Patches

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:54:24 +0000

Perhaps the best thing about NASA’s military provenance is that the agency picked up the armed services’ habit of making patches.

We’ve long loved the Most Awesomely Bad Military Patches series that our sister blog, Danger Room, runs. Then, earlier this week, space collectors bid up the accidentally limited edition Stephen Colbert treadmill patch to more than $175 on eBay.

And with the Augustine Commission report on the future of human space exploration due next week — and bad news likely — we thought we’d do some old-fashioned space boosterism and assemble this gallery of Awesomely Awesome NASA Patches.

The patches above were drawn and worn by the wives of the astronauts on those respective missions. They are nearly identical to the actual patches, but the central figure is a woman instead of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Virtruvian Man.

The Stephen Colbert patch commemorating the treadmill that sort of bears his name on the International Space Station combines the new photorealistic style with the line drawings of older patches.

Older mission patches tend to be more iconographic than their contemporary counterparts. The sailing ship of the Apollo 12 mission patch played on the golden age of exploration on Earth.

NASA hasn’t shied away from using well-known figures on its patches in recent years. In 2003, Daffy Duck and Marvin Martian made appearances on two patches for Mars Exploration Rover missions. (Many thanks to CollectSPACE for these images.)

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were featured on a patch for the Multi-Purpose Logistics Model of the International Space Station. Why? Three of the four modules of the MPLM shared their names with the famous “heroes in a half shell.” (Turtle Power!)

Eyeless, Fanged Crustacean Found in ‘Tunnel to Atlantis’

The Blog Nerd — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:49:59 +0000

A species of crustacean with no eyes and venom-injecting fangs has been discovered in an underwater volcanic cave in the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa.

Researchers discovered the new animal during a diving expedition through the world’s longest submarine lava tube, called the Tunnel de la Atlantida, or “tunnel to Atlantis.” The divers were searching for specimens of a closely related crustacean species that they’d discovered 25 years ago in the same cave. But after capturing several of the sea creatures, the researchers noticed something peculiar.

“Some animals were much more active in swimming around than others in the small sample bottles,” said marine biologist Tom Iliffe of Texas A&M University at Galveston, who was part of the team that discovered the new species. “On closer examination, and subsequently with DNA testing, we confirmed that they were actually two different species.”

Their findings appear this month in a special edition of Marine Biodiversity. The new crustacean has been named Speleonectes atlantida, which means “cave swimmer of Atlantis.” It’s a very apt name, Iliffe said, because the creature is a very active swimmer, gliding through the water an undulating fashion.

Because the crustacean lives in near-total blackness of the cave, its body is almost transparent. Through its clear skin, 20 to 24 nearly identical body segments can be seen.

Google Voice App Rejection: AT&T Blames, Apple Denies, Google Hides

The Blog Nerd — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:00:38 +0000

Federal regulators wanted to know why Apple rejected Google’s innovative Voice app from its iPhone app store and what role AT&T played in the rejection. The rejection drew sharp criticism from around the net that Apple and AT&T were using their dominant position in the smartphone market to stifle innovation.

On Friday, AT&T told the FCC that it had no part in the decision, while Apple claims it never happened. Instead, the company is still just “studying” Google’s application, which is taking a long time since the Voice service might be too confusing for iPhone users, Apple vice president Catherine Novelli wrote in a seven-page letter.

As for Google’s side of the story? We still don’t know.

The search giant that likes to pride itself on openness and transparency and doing no evil told its side to the FCC in a confidential filing, but blacked it out in the accompanying public one. Google was the only one of the three companies to use this option.

more at www.blognerd.com

Review: Nightmare Nazi Dominates Tarantino’s Glorious Basterds

The Blog Nerd — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:00:06 +0000

Quentin Tarantino can always be counted on to write killer dialogue. In Inglourious Basterds, his bold and bloody homage to World War II action movies, the writer-director has produced his most wordy epic yet.

Dispensing with the innovative cut-and-paste timelines featured in Pulp Fiction and his taut debut Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino now orchestrates a talky G.I. Jew fantasy propelled by the director’s favorite dramatic motif: revenge.from World War II action pics like The Dirty Dozen, Devil’s Brigade and 1978’s original Inglorious Bastards (yes, both words were spelled correctly in that version), Tarantino has fashioned a relatively straightforward storyline in which a special unit of Jewish Americans land in occupied France and start scalping Nazis. They later cross paths with a theater owner with her own scheme.