There is this free piece of software called the Prey Project. It’s completely open source, runs on Windows, OS X and Linux, and is basically magic. You install it right damn now, and it sits waiting.

So, you install this tiny lightweight piece of software. It hides down inside your computer, where a thief would never think to look. When your laptop gets stolen, you simply flick a switch on the Prey Project website, and then the next time your stolen laptop connects to the internet, BOOM, any number of rather awesome and CSIesque things begin to happen.

Detailed network information will get emailed to you, such as the laptop’s IP address. A complete Trace Route will be run. Both of these might help locate where the computer is at, if you hand them over to the authorities. But this isn’t really much, right? Prey packs quite a punch.

Screenshots are emailed to you. A list of modified files will be sent. The names of running programs and active connections will be thrown in too, for good measure. And here comes the good stuff – If your laptop has an attached webcam, it will begin snapping photos, and emailing them to you. Not only that, but it will attempt to locate the computer using any GPS equipment built into it, or by making use of the afore mentioned IP addresses and Trace Routes. It managed to pinpoint my house exactly. Scary, right? (Note that this software can also run on Android phones, most of which have a GPS built into them.)

Now that you know who the thief is, what he looks like and where he lives, Prey goes on the prowl. You can set an alarm off on your computer, that is immutable. You can alert the thief that you know who he is by sending messages and changing the screensaver. You can completely lock the computer down until a password is entered. And best off all, if you use your computer for a lot of internet banking and the like, you can hide all your emails and delete all your cookies. All remotely.

And the best thing about all this? It all happens at a time frequency that you set. Want photos every five minutes or every forty? Prey can set that up for you.

‘Sure’, you might say. ‘What’s the privacy in this? It’s all running through an external website that I have no control over!’

Well, I say, that’s a very valid concern. However, Prey can eliminate this if you so wish. If you run your own website, you can set up control through that, totally removing the Prey Project site from the equation. Now, is that cool, or is that COOL? I have it set up on my Macbook Pro as well as the desktop Mac.

One thing to note, if you are on a Windows desktop, is that the program won’t run unless you have a user logged in. It might be a good idea to set up a bogus account with no admin rights and no password, to lure the thief in. This, however, is not an issue with Mac or Linux.

Check out the Prey Project at http://www.PreyProject.com. It’s free, and it’s awesome for College students!

Thanks to The Big G, (or the G-spot, as he shall now be known) for pointing out an error in the linkage.

Tags: College, linux, Mac, snoop, thief, windows

Before I get to this blog post, I would like to say that it is sponsored by THIS playlist. That is some epic stuff right there for midnight blogging.

Anyway, let’s get right down to it. If you are a VFTQ listener, you probably already know what I like about my iPhone 4, and have a vague idea of what I don’t like. Well, I decided to get it all down on the blog, for future generations to read and enjoy, as they play with their iPhone 96. In no particular order:

1. Vibration. Yes, I know, it’s a petty thing to be pissed about. But seriously, the vibration on the iPhone 4 sucks. I can’t feel the thing vibrate when it is in my pocket, which totally removes the point of silent mode, IE allowing you know that your phone is ringing, silently. I don’t know why Apple decided to destroy the vibration strength. And it’s not just me! I voiced my concerns on twitter a week or so ago, and in general, people agree with me. The vibration on the iPhone 4 is pathetic!
2. Totally scratchproof harder then glass magic surface THAT TOTALLY SCRATCHES!?! I mean what the hell kids? I am famously anal about keeping all my expensive gadgets pristine. And in the two days that I didn’t have an InvisibleShield  on the thing, I managed to get a scratch on the screen, just next to the earpiece. (Technically not on the screen, but what the hell. Same material.) I kept this phone in a case, in a pocket with NOTHING else. I can’t understand how this (admittedly hairline) scratch got there. I never scratched my 3GS. The back is still perfect, thanks, and now that I have the InvisibleShield in place, I feel a bit dirty putting the phone in the same pocket as my keys.
3. FaceTime, a free feature of the phone, COSTING MONEY! So, remember FaceTime, that thing that was meant to be completely free (unless you phoned whomever you were FaceTime-ing before hand)? Well, turns out if you don’t live in the USA or the UK, you get charged for a background international text message when you first activate FaceTime. Sneaky? Fuck yes.
4. There seems to be a weird delay when it comes to opening any app that uses a camera. When you activate the camera function, the app just hangs for a couple of seconds, until the camera opens up. Why the hell does this happen? It should be instant, goddammit!

And of course, there have been well documented cases of the network that I’m on, Three, being shitholes to their customers. Thankfully that hasn’t really happened to me yet, with everybody I have been talking to at Three, both in their stores and on their customer support lines being quite helpful and able to answer questions.

So, I’m sure you have something you hate about the iPhone 4. Everybody does. What is it?

Tags: Apple, InvisibleShield, iPhone

Oxegen (one of the huge European music festivals) have released a free iPhone app. It’s currently number one in the Irish app charts, and seems to be instilled with the stuff of magic. Stuff that a few years ago, we were only dreaming would be possible.

Starting from the basics, this app provides a checklist of things to bring to the festival. You can tick things off as you pack them, which is a useful feature. moving to the slightly more complex, it incorporates artist twitter feeds and an RSS feed from the festival organizers. It also provides live traffic updates throughout the weekend, for those who aren’t camping. Then things become cool.

There is a fairly standard map built into the app. It can locate you using the phone’s GPS, and shows you where the stages, campsites, places to get your beers cooled and so on can be found, and direct you too them. You can turn your iPhone sideways, and see everything in Virtual Reality mode, for those you are useless at even iPhone assisted directions. You can also, in a blindingly simple yet stunningly obvious move, tag where your tent is, and your iPhone will show you the way, even late at night.

Another “Holy Shit It’s 2010″ feature is the Interactive Event Schedule. You tell it what bands you want to see, and it informs you of any overlapping performances. Sure, that’s ordinary enough. HOWEVER, just before the bands begin their set, it uses push notifications to inform you, and can then show you to the correct stage within the time needed to get there. That’s pretty awesome.

I have, however, saved the best for last.

Since Oxegen is such a huge place, it is very easy to loose your friends. The app can help out with that. Heading into the Settings area (strangely inside the app instead of in the iPhone settings area) you will notice an area to turn on “share my location”. If you do that, once the festival starts, it will show your friends (connected through facebook, at the moment, and you can choose only to show specific ones) exactly where you are on the festival site. Updated in real time. On the map. Now THAT’S magic. The one possible worry I have over this feature is that some smart thief somewhere might be able to work out where iPhone users have pitched their tent, and may have a night time visit. I’m not sure how well they protect the location data.

I will be at Oxegen from this Thursday, so if you are going and want to say hello, feel free to track me down. Send me an email/comment or something.

Anyway, this app got me thinking. What other “The Future Is Now” things can we take for granted right now? Every time I see a 32gb my jaw drops. These things are about the size of your thumbnail, and look at how much data can fit on them! The Microsoft Courier was another of these Future Tech products, but sadly never got past the R&D stage. It would have blown the iPad out of the water.

Can you think of any other pieces of tech that make you feel like we are living in Star Trek?

Tags: app, festival, iPhone, Music festival, Oxegen

EDIT: Thanks to liamk on the O2 Forums, it seems that this trick could work for every single person who has a contract on O2. Check the link for full details.

EDIT 2: It worked! Hurrah! I can confirm that for me, at least, they were happy to let me go, without even trying to dissuade me.

So, let’s pretend that about a week ago, you signed up for an iPhone on O2, on their €100 plan. You are now tied in to 18 months of O2, but managed to get an iPhone for free. That’s a total of €1800 over 18 months, for a service that is miles below par against other European networks (for more on this, check out my other blog post, “The Irish iPhone 3GS ruined my hopes and dreams“).

Well, O2 just made a change to their terms and conditions. This counts as breaking the contract you had set up with them. Naughty, eh? And they were kind enough to notify customers on a totally out of the way page on their site, mentioned nowhere. And, you may notice, they have done this twice before. So no feeling sorry for them for what I am about to suggest.

Basically, since they have broken your contract, you have until July 12 to phone them up (on 1909), and tell them that under regulation 17 of the European Communities regulations 2003, you would like to cancel your contract. So you are off your contract now. Here comes the fun bit.

As part of the same regulation, you have the right to cancel without penalty. It is YOUR RIGHT to cancel your contract, but stay on as a monthly customer, on the exact same plan, just not tied for 18 months. Of course, from reports, it seems that different people are being told different things. Some are being told that they must leave the network (false), some are being told that they are simply not allowed do this (false). Just keep pushing, and you should get it all worked out.

An interesting factor in this is if you are allowed keep any upgrades that you may have in your account. For instance, if I wanted to take this opportunity to get out of my contract, would I then be able to resign a contract in September when my upgrade will come into fruition, and get a cheap iPhone 4? I don’t know. Some people are being told they can and some people are being told they can’t.

So, why would you want to do this? It is almost guaranteed that with Vodafone and 3 having iPhone 4 on their network, there is about to be a lot of competition in the market. This legal loophole allows you get out of your contract, and move to another provider, getting whatever deal they have going on the new iPhone. Or, if O2 steps up to the mark and provides the best option for iPhone 4 contracts (doubtful) you will be let resign and (hopefully) get a cheap ass iPhone. This, of course, all hinges on if they let you keep your upgrades or not.

Has anybody had any experience with this? I’m going to look into it some more and try it out tomorrow, recording the entire conversation. I will only go through with it if I can get spoken confirmation that I can keep my upgrade.

Tags: iPhone, O2

Well, pretty much nothing. At all. However, if you want to catch up on the latest news with me (consists of pretty much nothing, I promise) you can click the play button below to listen to the latest episode of View From The Quad, which has all the latest.

You can subscribe to View From The Quad easily and for free by clicking here if you use iTunes and clicking here if you use any other feed reader.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

As those of you who follow me on twitter are probably aware at this point, I have gone and bought myself a brand new Zoom H4n, a portable recorder which has two high quality condenser microphones built in an X Y pattern, as well as two fully powered XLR inputs and some 1/4′ inputs to boot. So, what do I think of it? (Take a look at the full features list on the Zoom H4n website)

Firstly, I had read a lot on the web about how rugged these things feel. To be totally honest, the case doesn’t feel hugely rugged to me. They advertised a rubberized outer shell, and I was hoping for a harder version of what the Microsoft Zunes used to be encased in, as that would have taken pretty much any drop ever. However, the area that the microphones are mounted is made of rock-solid aluminum, and I suspect that it would take a lot of work to get them off. On first opening the box, I found the device worrying light, as I like a little bit of heft behind my expensive gear. Adding batteries solved that problem!

“So”, you ask, “What about the recording quality?” Well, I recorded a quick episode of View From The Quad on the Zoom H4n, so that you can get an idea for the real-world audio quality this thing can output. It was recorded on the “Stamina” mode which allows it record up to 11 hours on one set of batteries, which works at 44.1 Khz, 16 bit, allowing for just over 25 hours worth of recording space on my 16gb card. Below you can listen to the slightly edited Mp3 mixdown of this recording, or you can download the original wav file by clicking here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

One thing I have noticed, is that the startup time is a bit mad if you are using a large SD card. I did a bit of Googling and it turns out that this is a rather well known issue, but nobody really knows why it happens. So I decided to do some timing.

The 1GB card took about 15 seconds to start from when I flicked the switch, but once I put in the Class 6 (that means fairly fast, but not blazing) 16gb card, it took 45.9 seconds to start, at which point whomever I’m interviewing has probably upped and gone home. I’m going to consider investing in a few 2GB cards, which I think is a good compromise, each of which should hold about 3 hours of recording at the quality you heard in the test recording.

The menu system on the device is rather wonderful and intuitive. Really, it took me maybe five minutes to work my way around the hundreds of different options, effects and the like. It really is pretty simple, and the menu controls are placed very well. Everything you need to navigate the expansive options is right below your thumb when you are holding the device in your hand!

I bought the H4n off an eBayer, who threw in a whole load of stuff, including the very useful remote control. This allows you start recording instantly from afar, removing any chance of handling noise. The remote is wonderfully thought out, with little blinky lights to show you exactly what is happening on the device at any given moment. He also threw in the afore mentioned 16gb card, a big set of headphones that I have not yet tried out, and a sort of cheapy aluminum stand. I have another heavy duty mini stand that I use instead, as it feels less… shaky.

So, the cons.

I dislike the buttons on the device. I was hoping that they would be of the rubber variety, like you found on the really old phones, but no, they are hard “clicky” ones. Which is sort of annoying when you want to change a setting while recording, either with the inbuilt stereo mics or an exterior mic. That was just a poor design choice. I also dislike how they expect you to buy batteries all the time, when they could have just included a removable chargeable battery. I would have been happy to shell out $50 every few years for a high quality removable battery, but instead I need to carry around lots of smaller AA ones. I would have even bought a spare! I suppose that it does allow you to have a lot of cheap power though, which is an upside.

Another thing I find odd is the storage system. When you format the card to the devices liking, it creates a directory system on the card. One folder for each of the three modes (stereo, multitrack and 4 channel) and then 10 folders inside each of these, named Folder 1-10. This is where your files are stored, and while you can easily change which folder a recording gets saved into, and even move the recording around, you can not rename the folders. For instance, I would have liked a “VFTQ” folder, but no. I think this is weird, and I hope they sort it out in a firmware update.

So, that’s my preliminary views on the Zoom H4n! I may discuss it more after my trip to Dragon*Con in the States, where I plan to use it as my only recording device for two weeks.

Tags: gear, podcasting, portable recorders, recording, Zoom H4n

Like many of you, I have noticed that Steam has finally come over to the Mac platform. The beginning for proper Mac gaming? I damn well hope so.

Anyway, I won’t get a chance to actually use it much until this Leaving Cert is over, but I tried opening up the Mac version of Torchlight, after playing it using Crossover Games for much of the Christmas holidays, on the Steam for Windows program. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Steam Cloud wasn’t working! That is to say, my saved game files hadn’t been transferred over to the Mac port of the game. Sad, right?

So, I searched through the internets, and found that Runic Games are aware of this issue, and don’t seem to be in any hurry to fix it, as they say that to do so would require a fairly hefty rewrite. Although they may change their mind.

Anyway, I worked out how to get it working.

What you need to do is navigate to the following folder on your Windows PC (or Crossover Games bottle) – C:\Users\your username\Appdata\Roaming\runic games\torchlight\ (please note that on copies of Windows prior to Windows 7, replace “Appdata” with “Application Support”.

Once you have that folder, you need to copy it into ~\Library\Application Support\runic games\torchlight, and run Torchlight! As if by magic, everything is exactly as you left on the Windows version, including all your settings. So you might want to mess around with those until the game looks good on your Mac.

Hope I helped!

Tags: Gaming, Mac, Steam, Torchlight

So, if you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a large number of tweets in the past few days about a broken iPhone.

Recently, my iPhone has been giving an error at seemingly random times. It reads “This accessory was not made to work with iPhone”. It started off just popping up whenever I plugged it into the Apple Charger (but not EVERY time) and then progressed to just happening in normal every day situations. Once this error message came up, the iPhone shut off audio to headphones and the internal speaker, which made it impossible to take phone calls or use the alarm clock app. As you may imagine, this was rather annoying.

AppleCare Phone Call #1

So, I call the AppleCare people, and end up with a lovely Indian man, down in Cork. He assured me that I would be able to get my iPhone replaced, and that if I put up a deposit of €400, I would be able to get the replacement iPhone before I even gave them my old one! Awesome, right? I thought so. So I asked if I could ring them again later, with a credit card number. He affirms that I can, and says he will email me a number which I can use to jump right back to the replacement process without having to go through all the questions about the water sensors and such. I hang up, happy.

I never get the email.

AppleCare Phone Call #2

This time, I get a women called Ana, (whom it later transpires is convinced that my name is Ken McMan) who, because I don’t have that number I was promised, has to run through all the steps again to make sure that I’m not trying to rip them off. Which took a while. She had a fixation on the fact that I used a set of Logic3 Jivebox speakers with the iPhone (awesome, by the way) and it took me several attempts to pursuad her that they were not the issue. Then, after talking to several supervisors, she agreed to send me a replacement phone. It seemed that the cool get your iPhone in two days deal for a deposit had ended, instead, they wanted me to pay €29 for the service. Feck that! Went with the free service where they send me a box, I place the iPhone in the box which is taken back by the UPS guy, and I wait a few days (the weekend) and get a new one.

So this was going on, and at the same time I was organizing with Zagg to get a replacement InvisibleShield (as part of the warrenty you get a replacement one for free if it scratches or you have to replace the iPhone) which was a much smoother experience. Just went on their website, clicked a button, and posted the old shield.

Anyway, the iPhone arrived on the Monday, and it came in the most fecking awesome box ever. Seriously. Back in the day of the 3rd Generation iPod, you sent it for replacement and you just got it back in a plastic bag. For the iPhone, they bad designed a wonderful high quality box with protective foam and all. Take a look:

If you want to see yet more pictures of the iPhone replacement box, and the box that the box came in, head to My Flickr Account.

Anyway, I got the iPhone, and a few days later got the InvisibleShield. They have changed the application system! Comes with a really weird sponge, but was certainly easier to apply.

Tags: Apple, InvisibleShield, iPhone

So I watched about three live-blogs of the iPhone 4.0 reveal this week, all at once. You can watch it yourself if you so wish. Here are my thoughts on the new features offered by iPhone 4.0.

Multitasking – This isn’t really multitasking, now, is it? The apps themselves aren’t really running in the background, “services” are that the apps can use. This means that before an app can engage in “multitasking”, it has to be rewritten to take advantage of these services. And there are only seven types of things that apps can do in the background. One of which is NOT the ability to take part in Instant Message conversations, which means that I will have to stick to IM+’s push notification system. The seven services are:

1. Background Audio (allows applications play audio in the background and use the iPod controls)
2. VoIP which allows applications like Skype to accept calls in the background (now if only Skype would release their 3G version)
3. Location Services so that apps can use the GPS in the background
4. Fancier push notifications
5. Local notifications
6. Task completion (which allows apps complete tasks in the background, for instance, uploading a whole load of pictures to Flickr)
7. Fast App Switching (which allows applications open and close instantly)

UPDATE: Turns out that while I am technically correct in how this multitasking works, I am wrong about it being hugely limiting to devs, and was put right by the wonderful Steve Troughton-Smith, who knows a lot more about this kind of thing then I do. Basically, this is the same system that Android uses, and other then the IM dealio, offers all the benefits of multitasking except the ability to see two apps at once, which would be silly on an iPhone anyway. I could see that being useful on the iPad though. Think iTunes mini!

App Folders – This is something I called for in an earlier blog post. Basically, it allows you have folders of applications, with 9 apps in each folder. Great to clean up my games screen! The folder icon is made out of the icons for all the apps. I think that this is a feature that the iPhone was sorely lacking, and am glad that you can now keep something like 20,000 apps on an iPhone.

Fancier Mail – Hoohah. Single inbox. This is useful for me because I have about seven email accounts, and to check them all I need to go into each inbox separately. No longer! They have also included threaded messaging, which shall hopefully move over to Mac OS X soon, if they haven’t forgotten about the operating system.

iBooks – iBooks (the application for reading ebooks on the iPad) will make it’s way to the iPhone, and will sync with the iPad’s iBooks apps through iTunes so as you are always on the right page. Nice. If I had an iPad.

Enterprise – You probably don’t really care about this. Basically allows you distribute apps over a huge number of iPhones. Makes the lives of IT people easier.

Game Centre – This has been likened to Xbox Live. It is basically what the Plus+ network has been for a fair long time, just endorsed by Apple. I think this is the start of Apple moving into the social networking business.

So, those are the main features that Apple is toting. Pretty much all of them are things that have been on phones since the start of the smartphone craze, with only Game Centre being particularly innovative. However, there are another few little things that Apple have told us about. For instance, the iPhone now comes with inbuilt spellcheck, users can set their own wallpaper (like the iPad) and there is bluetooth keyboard support. For if you want to write your thesis in Notes, I would imagine.

So. What do you think about iPhone 4.0?

Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 4.0

So, I just came across this cool new webapp for creating awesome looking wordclouds based on a website you input or a document you copypaste into it. It has all sorts of options for personalizing the cloud to your every whim, such as the font, colour, shape and even direction of the text. So I generated one for the frontpage of Scodio.com, and I thought that I would show it to you. Click to blow it up!

Tags: cool, tool