Apple | everyday linux how2s

Apple’s Siri Makes The Command-Line Cool

On December 16, 2011 / Apple, iPhone, Opinion / 2 Comments

As a Linux user, I’ve listened to my fair share of derision from users of other desktop operating systems, about the need to use the command-line on Linux. When confronted with such silliness, I’ve never been a Linux user who insists that you no longer need to use the command-line to use a Linux desktop. I’ve always been a user and supporter of the command-line. To me, the command-line interface has a solid home on the desktop. For many tasks it is far more efficient than the gui. To me, the command-line embodies the very purpose of computers – it allows you to do repetitive tasks very efficiently. The command-line excels at these and a GUI generally sucks at doing them. This view may be a product of the time at which I adopted Linux. In the late 90′s there were a lot of things that could only be done in Linux on the command-line. I agree that things have changed and many functions that were command-line only, are now happily served by a GUI interface. However, I’ve never subscribed to the view that no matter what, the GUI > the command-line. A common criticism of the command-line is that

editing HD video: linux vs imovie

On June 18, 2011 / Apple, Linux, Opinion / 17 Comments

Tags: avchd, file import, imovie, kdenlive

Yesterday, my kids were making a home movie to send to my mother in law. They’d made up some songs, which I’d recorded and were shooting the video to go with them. I suggested that they should edit the video in iMovie on my macbook pro. I figured that they should be able to cope fine with it – they’ve used macs at school to edit video and together with the “legendary” ease of use and “just works” approach of Apple software, it should be no problem. Sadly, they never got to try. The camera I use is a Canon HG20. It has an inbuilt hard drive and records video in the AVCHD format. This is an HD video format for consumer grade cameras and is used widely in mainstream cameras by the main camera makers. I have the latest version of iMovie ’11, which claims to have support for the AVCHD format. However, apparently, this support is limited and selective. Unfortunately, I have a camera that produces unsupported files. After trying to import the files into iMovie, iMovie simply says there has been an error importing the files, and would I like to make an archive of the files

7 Jailbreak Tweaks That Apple Should Add As Standard to iOS

On October 16, 2010 / Apple, iPhone, JailBreak, Uncategorized / 5 Comments

Tags: Apple, iOS, iPhone, Jailbreak, Tweaks

With iOS 4.2 in its late beta stages, I’m sure there will be a slew of articles predicting what’s in it, and the latest new this or that. One of the “leaks” currently doing the rounds is new SMS tones and wallpapers. “Groundbreaking” as this is, it would be nice if Apple stood back, and took a look at what’s in the Cydia repos, they might find some inspiration there. Happily for those who have jailbroken there iPhones, there are a number of tools and tweaks on Cydia that have now become what I would consider essential to my happy phone usage. These are all things that I would now consider should come with the standard iOS. You will read on the internet a number of articles which set out what their authors consider to be the best Cydia apps. This article looks a bit deeper and looks at what I use to tweak my phone, so that I have at my fingertips some of the basic features I would expect from a quality smartphone. Auto-3G Auto-3G is a fantastic little app that helps to save your battery life. As I am constantly battling with a short battery life on

5 Things I Miss From Linux When Using OSX

On September 10, 2010 / Apple, KDE, Linux, Opinion / 51 Comments

I have been a Linux user for over 10 years. I have used it exclusively on my home systems since that time and although it was a struggle at the beginning, I haven’t had any desire to use any other operating system … until now. Recently I purchased a MacBook Pro. Principally because I like the hardware, and can put Linux on it. However, it has also given me the opportunity to use OSX. In fact I’ve been using OSX quite a lot – given I’ve paid for it, I want to really see how it works. However, in the course of using it, I’ve come across a number of features of Linux and the KDE desktop that I greatly miss. If you think I’m wrong on any of the items below, please let me know – I’d love to be able to fill in some of the gaps I’ve found. This is my list: 1. A Package Manager Package management is a central feature of most Linux distributions. Whether it be apt, rpm, emerge, packman or the myriad of other package managers, the basic premise is the same – the ability to update every piece of software on your

iOS4 and Linux

On June 22, 2010 / Apple, Linux / 5 Comments

Tags: iOS4, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Linux

Why iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Owners Should Use Linux

On April 10, 2010 / Apple / 5 Comments

Tags: iPhone, iPod Touch, Linux

For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. In fact, Apple had made it so hard to access the iPhone over USB, that it took the virtualbox and VMware developers months to work out how to access the iPhone via USB on a Windows guest. So this left Linux iPhone users with the option of either jailbreaking their phone and using a kludgy wifi connection, or running iTunes via windows in a VM. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”. libimobiledevice libimobilevice is a project that’s been around since 2007. It has now reached its 1.0.0 release. From the libimobiledevice website: libimobiledevice is a software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone®, iPod Touch® and iPad® devices on Linux. Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking. It allows other software