Download Pandora songs with Safari
The safari activity window is something else. I've seen this hack done with youtube videos, and I'm sure it can be used on other sites that download the complete content in the background rather than true streaming. I noticed the other day that if you start playing a song with Pandora and disconnect the network cable or turn off the wifi that the song will continue to play to the end. So I popped open Pandora in Safari, on the Mac of course, and clicked on Window and chose Activity to open the Activity viewer. There will be a lot of noise in the viewer, because it shows everything being downloaded by Safari, the best thing to look for is the biggest file, the songs on Pandora seem to start with http://audio-ash... Once you locate the file, double click it, the file will open and download to your downloads directory. You can click to open the file in finder and click the file and rename it to something.mp4 - Now the file is on your computer and you should be able to double click it and play it. You should be able to play the file in iTunes or quicktime, it's not real high quality but it sounds pretty good..
jailbreakme.com DejaVu, iPad2 jailbroken on 4.3.3
Been following comex on twitter for a while awaiting the news that my iPad2 would finally be "free." Well it's here and you should get it while it's hot, at least before Apple puts out 4.3.4. This was by far the quickest and easiest jailbreak I've ever seen, even simpler than the original jailbreakme.com. Not sure if it's still a requirement, but through his tweets, comex recommended going to 4.3.3 first, then just go on over to jailbreakme.com and click the install button under cydia. It's been a long time, good job comex!!
Angry Birds ringtone on jailbroken iPhone without iTunes
For some reason today, boredom or whatever, I was hell bent on getting the Angry Birds theme song onto my iPhone to replace that stupid Marimba ringtone. First task was to find or make the ringtone, I found one offered up for free here http://www.angrybirdsnest.com/2010/08/angry-birds-theme-song-ringtone/. Not quite sure yet how I was going to manage getting the ringtone on to my phone, I copied the link for the theme song from the web page, http://www.angrybirdsnest.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Angry-Birds-Main-Theme-Song.m4r, and emailed it to myself.
Now that I had the link, through trial and error I figured out the rest. There are a couple of apps you'll need to have in order to download the ringtone and get it to the proper place on your iPhone. The first app you'll need is iDownloader, you can find this app in the appstore for $1.99, or you can go after it the unconventional way using Installous, that all depends on your moral integrity or lack thereof. The second app you'll need is iFile, which can be found in Cydia, yes your phone will need to be jailbroken to accomplish this, iFile cost $4.00 in Cydia - but again depending on how far you'll go for "free" it can be had on certain repositories. I know I'll see comments about how you could do this all with iFile, or use iFile and the Safari downloader from Cydia. Well i couldn't get the webserver on iFile to start and I happened to have these apps on my iPhone already so this is what I used to make it happen, if you already knew how to do this you could write your own blog post about it...
- Start by opening iDownloader and pasting the link into the Address bar, you'll be asked if you want to download the file, let the file download.
- Once the download is finished launch iFile, click the gear on the left of the tab bar to open the Preferences page, turn on Hidden Files and Application Names
- In iFile, navigate to /var/mobile/Applications/iDownloader/Documents/Downloads/, you should find the File you downloaded, Angry-Birds-Main-Theme-Song.m4r. Click Edit, Select the File, click the far right action icon on the Tab bar and select Copy
- Now in iFile navigate to /Library/Ringtones/, click Edit, click the same icon as the previous step and select Paste
- Open the settings app, click on Sounds, Ringtone, you should now see the ringtone in the list, select it and enjoy
Sure you can use this technique for any ringtone file you can find on the internet, but I think the Angry Birds theme song makes an excellent ringtone, enjoy.
Sorry Firefox, but I’m seeing Chrome now
As a developer, when I'm writing/debugging websites, I still love Firefox for it's rich plugins like Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar, but when I'm browsing the web I'm head over heals in love with Chrome. Google is set to push the limits of the web with their latest browser and will be a driving force in browser innovation. Chrome opens impressively fast in Windows 7, and definitely seems faster when browsing sites than the latest versions of other popular browsers, including my now second favorite browser Firefox.
It's a lot of hard work to switch your default browser, since most of us are creatures of habit and have a general fear of the unknown. But let me be the first to tell you, if you're not using Chrome, it could be better and will only continue to get better. Outside of web development I don't use a lot of plugins, but the one's I do use I couldn't live without. Finally with Chrome 4, Google has launched extensions, at least on Windows. The extension community has been very busy, there are almost 3000 extensions available already. A few I would recommend checking out:
- Google Wave notifier, for keeping tabs on your Wave account. Wave's great, but let's be honest, nobody's using it yet.
- Google mail checker plus, nice quick access to your Gmail or even your Google Apps domain email/ It has notification of new emails, the ability to preview, delete, mark as read and plenty of other features.
- Chromelicious, the best delicious bookmark extension on Chrome, pretty close to the functionality you get with the Yahoo plugin for Firefox.
- ChromedBird, a fantastic twitter client for Chrome
- Facebook, a pretty decent Facebook client for Chrome, although I can't seem to find a way to get the Most Recent feed instead of the Top News feed, other than that it supports Chat and Notifications and is best for dipping into Facebook quickly without getting spotted.
- Google Voice, access to your Google Voice account, quick SMS and Calling interface and access to your Inbox. I send SMS messages all day long through this extension.
There are plenty of other great extensions, but these are the one's I use everyday and make the latest version of Chrome that much better.
So the quick list on why I like Chrome better than Firefox, these are purely personal tastes, but maybe you'll find some of these enticing and ditch your Microsoft browser... By the way if you're using a Microsoft browser by choice, you don't know what you're missing.
- Tabs on the top, tabs on the top are awesome, it just looks and feels slick. More of an application feel than a clunky tabbed browser.
- Tab to new window and back to tab, I know Firefox does this too, but nobody does it as seamlessly as Google, it just works and it's so smooth.
- Did I mention it's fast, it starts fast, it works fast and it almost never crashes, it's several times faster than Firefox at just launching.
- It manages memory better than Firefox, I know it's not Firefox's fault. It's all the plugins I have installed, it seems that Google's extensions and process management keep this leaking of memory under control. I know things will get better in Firefox 4, but by then Chrome 5 will be out.
- Latest web standards supported, such as HTML5 and Canvas, other non-Microsoft browsers have implemented HTML 5 features such as Canvas, but Google will continue to adopt and promote new standards, I know Firefox supports some of these standards too, but Google just seems to be quicker at implementing them.
- Sites typically look like they were intended to look, one of the benefits of using a standards compliant browser.
- Extensions can be installed without restarting my browser, I mean come on Firefox, this is obnoxious.
- Updates to new versions are quick and easy.
These are just a few of the things I like, not to mention it's much more secure and stable than other browsers I've used, and as a web developer I use at least the most popular 5 on a regular basis. I see Google trying out new protocols, such as spdy, and new methods of making the web a faster and more secure place for more and more applications that push the limit of what has been possible in the past. With each advancement in Chrome we'll see more and more desktop applications replaced by web applications, so unless you want to get left behind I'd recommend giving Chrome a try, especially if you're using one of those Microsoft browsers.
Getting around Pandora’s 40-hour monthly limit
In the past 6 months or so Pandora has implemented listening restrictions on their free service. It's really quite simple to get around this limitation, you just need more than one Pandora account. You might be thinking, well what about my radio stations?? Pandora allows you to share your stations with your friends, just share your stations with yourself. If you don't already have more than one email address, go out to gmail and register a second address, or even a 3rd or 4th. GMail let's you forward all email to a single account, so as an example, I would just set up webguypandora1@gmail.com, webguypandora2@gmail.com, etc. and forward them each back to webguy@greatwebguy.com. Whenever you hit that 40 hour limit, just simply logout and log back in with a different account. You're other option would be to just pay the $36/year subscription 