I am an owner (a proud and rather happy one) of the BOSE Mobile on-ear headphones. For those of you who don’t know, all the mobileness of these headphones (and thus - a difference from significantly less expensive BOSE on-ear headphones) is that you get an audio lead with a microphone, which may be connected to your mobile telephone (iPhone’s naturally included) so you can use it as a headset. Frustratingly, it has no remote control for iPhone and once someone calls you, you still need to take your iPhone out and slide the green arrow).

To make a long story short - this cable has died. It has died and the right headphone started to disappear (while still working should you plug-in headphones to the audio source directly using the tiny 1” wire on the left headphone). I called up BOSE guys and was given a generous offer - I send them my headphones, pay £50 and get a new BOSE mobile headphones. Practically a bargain. After I gracefully refused it, they’ve suggested to go and buy a cable only - this time for ridiculous £39.95.

No, this not gonna work, I said to myself. Indeed, paying forty quid for just a few wires - that’s not a good deal. So I thought a little - if I can connect headphones to my iPhone directly, this means … oh hold on - isn’t this a standard 3.5 headphones jack on the left speaker of my headphones?

So I went to eBay and bought Griffin SmartTalk for £13.50 delivery included; now waiting for it and thinking, that sometimes being greedy just doesn’t work nicely even for customers who can afford buying £150 headphones.

So what - Google OS is finally on the horizon and what does it mean for us? Let’s try to think about it from multiple perspectives.

1. As a user, I can’t really say, whether I will benefit of yet another operating system. So far I’ve been quite happy with my Mac OS X and not planning to leave it anytime soon, quite the contrary, I hope that it’ll develop further on. On the other hand, millions and millions of Microsoft Windows users don’t really care about any other operating system different from what they have installed on their desktops, laptops and netbooks.
2. As a developer and geek in nature, I’m quite inspired with a new system which may see the light of day; something new is not always something good, though chaps from Google had shown that they have a good taste in innovations - so it may be something very cool and intriguing. Though, it may be not - but we will see.
3. As a person who is deeply involved into IT business, my opinion is quite self-contradictive. On the one hand, more competition is always good, it makes other players more responsive to what their customers are asking; in spite of this fact even MacBook Nano (Mini?) can see the light of the day. On the other hand, Google has a great potential for becoming a second Microsoft in a far worse incarnation - he will not only have our data and very private information, but our hardware as well – they have very good chances to lock their users up in the Google loop - not by using any restrictive measures like, say, Apple, but just because users won’t need anything else; that’s what Microsoft was trying to do for such a long time - and Google can really succeed with it. It is worrying at least.

So is it good or bad? By the end of the day, only market will give a final answer; we can even see a scenario when Google spends an immense amount of money developing their Chrome OS, and when they realise the bet is too high and it’s too late to make any adjustments,  Google may well become a colossus with a feet of clay.

Therefore, an only thing I’m sure so far is that something interesting will happen - as official Google Blog says, we shall see something in the fall (that’s how those chaps that side of the pond name the autumn) - let’s really enjoy our summer until then.

So chaps - cheapvps.co.uk is still down, and from the sound of their emails I feel like their data is completely lost - I have no bloody idea, how did it happen, but it did - which means, inlondon.org, sigizmund.com and even tiny sigizmund.info are all lost. To say it’s frustrating is to say nothing. Nothing, really!

On the bright side, there’s still sigizmund.livejournal.com, which contains lots of geeky crap, though every post from inlondon.org was crossposted - and given the fact, that most of records contains back-link to the original blog, it is being possible to filter only records which I need and upload it to brand new soon-to-be inlondon.org. Feels like I will do it soon, very soon - unless these idiots (beam of hate and death to all of them!) won’t find their backups.

This week was especially long and nasty; so many things happened or keep happening, that somehow that’d be enough for a good month, not overwhelmed with events - both pleasant and not. But anyway, glad this week is over, phew…. 

Sometimes the fact, that Mozilla apps are not integrated into OS X well enough is a good thing: I am using SSH tunnel to my work corporate proxy server rather than buggy and slow Cisco VPN. After I get tunnel up, I fire up Firefox as my browser and Postbox as my mail client - both use localhost:8888 as a SOCKS proxy. Works brilliantly, and in the meantime system is still connected to the internet directly, so I can see my home network without any issues and experience no delay related to sending data through the VPN. 

By the way, did I ever say - Postbox works really really well, and can be compared only with Apple’s native client? Well, it doesn’t use OS X’s system-wide proxy - but, as I just said, it’s not always that bad!

“Recent applications” in your Dock:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add \

	'{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

Then simply restart your dock with

killall Dock

and see the icon next to Bin. Works nicely for me!

Some m/…./r constantly attacks my home NAS, trying all possible usernames and passwords – from Chinese IP address. Reminds me of a joke, when Chinese hackers tried to break into the Pentagon’s servers – each on of them tried password ‘Mao Tse-tung’, on a billionth attempt the server agreed that its passwords is indeed ‘Mao Tse-tung’. Weird, but this idiot keeps trying. Should I change my SSH port? Or what?

Just curious, will it work if I embed a flash to Tumblr, claiming it as video – which it isn’t? According preview window, it should work - so let it be so!