Jan 25
JustinUncategorized
Another simple thing I haven’t been able to find tutorials on.
Ah well, if you want something done right, do it yourself.
Fortunately, as with iPhone OS’s desktop counterpart, just about anything is easily changed.
This can probably be done in Winterboard, but if it can’t/the theme you’re using doesn’t do it, here’s how to change the default album artwork on an iPhone or iPod Touch (assuming it would work on the Touch, my sister has my old one now).
This was tested on my iPhone 3GS running iPhone OS 3.1.
Prerequisites:
1. A jailbroken device.
2. iFile.
3. VSFTPd, correctly installed and configured.
4. An FTP client on your desktop computer.
5. The common sense to backup your files first. Seriously. I’m not joking. If you screw something up, I’m not responsible.
6. A 320×320 PNG image.
Now, why would you want to do this?
If you’re like me and have a huge (in my case, well over 20GB and 10000 songs) music collection, almost all of it obtained from various sources around the internet, almost none of it will have album artwork. So instead of staring at the bland music note icon, give yourself something else to stare at (I take no credit for the graphic used in this demonstration; I didn’t make it and I can’t remember who did).
1. Using iFile, navigate to /Applications/MobileMusicPlayer.app/
2. Rename noartplaceholder.png to something else. DO NOT delete it.
3. Rename the 320×320 PNG image on your desktop computer to noartplaceholder.png
4. Using an FTP client, upload the image to /Applications/MobileMusicPlayer.app/ on your device.
5, Reboot or respring your device.
Obviously, to restore the original image, delete the modified one and name the original one that you backed up back to noartplaceholder.png
Before:
After:
In theory, any graphical element of iPhone OS (or the desktop version of OSX) can be replaced by this method. Due to this, this is probably the last tutorial I’ll write on replacing graphics in either. Or perhaps not. If I find something truly notable, I’ll gladly write up a new one.
Jan 23
JustinUncategorized
Things have been quiet around here lately.
Inspired by this topic on GS, I decided to conduct a study of five major browsers on OSX Snow Leopard (10.6.2, on my hackintosh’d Inspiron 1525 
) to determine their RAM usage in comparison to each other.
http://www.geeksmack.net/forums/topic/4006-mozilla-36-and-memory-use/
Before I post the results, some people claim that RAM usage is proportional to the amount of RAM in the PC. My laptop happens to have 3GB RAM (not much, but my desktop has a rather above average 8GB, so it isn’t a big deal).
I had the same three tabs open inside each of them, joejoe.org, geeksmack.net, and twcforums.info.
GS was open to a different page in Safari, since I was using it to post the reply, but besides that, everything was more or less the same.
The images are rather large, so I’m not embedding them. Click the links.
http://justindaigle.com/files/scr/Skitch-20100123-001458.png
Also, notice I had to install IE for Mac to test this.
Why would anyone still be using this? 
http://justindaigle.com/files/scr/GeekSmack_Community-20100123-001847.png
If you look at the first image, memory usage in all five browsers exceeds that of iTunes, which was playing music at the time, and Finder (at first look, Chrome doesn’t, but you have to count it’s helper processes, which are the actual tabs, as well).
By memory usage, the browsers, in order, from most to least:
Safari (226.8MB)
Opera (121.2MB)
Chrome (115.8MB)
Firefox (80.9MB)
Internet Explorer (75.7MB)
My conclusion:
Shame on Apple for making their own Safari the most bloated browser on OSX.
Seems the infamously bloated on Windows Firefox is the least bloated modern browser on OSX.
Yes, IE actually has the least memory usage, but look at the CPU usage. It’s eating up nearly half my processor.
This is because IE is an old PowerPC browser, discontinued ages ago, and emulated by Rosetta.
My suggestion if you’re low on RAM would be to make the switch to Firefox. Since I have 3GB, it’s not so much an issue for me and I’ll stick with Safari or perhaps switch to Chrome.
Also, I find it funny that web browsers, supposedly the lightweight primary application of netbooks, ate up more memory than any other process I had running.
I may do a similar comparison on Windows sometime soon, using the same tabs and the same browsers.
Jan 01
JustinUncategorized
The Water Cooler opened at 12:01AM this morning.
http://twcforums.info
Having received the skin only hours before the scheduled opening date, I was worried that TWC may not make it and would have to have its release delayed.
Anyway, I invite you to join, post, and contribute. 
Now, if only WinHook, which has been sitting around doing nothing for the last four months or so, would get an approximate release date.
My current guess is never.
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