Category: Articles

I got an iphone yesterday.

Although currently it’s not activated, for that I have to wait a few days. So I thought I’d see what I can do with it in spite of that.

So far it turns out I can’t do anything.

Upon loading up the iphone I’m greeted with a picture telling me to plug the phone into iTunes. On the bottom it says slide here for emergency, which I suppose allows one to make emergency calls despite the fact it isn’t activated.

I really didn’t want to install iTunes. I wanted a more agnostic approach to controling my iphone so I hit the net. My first idea was to try to get my iphone synced with foobar2k. I quickly found a plugin called foo_pod but then was disapointed to learn it isn’t available for the latest version of foobar. But that led me to an alternate plugin called foo_dop.

However the requirements for foo_dop stated I needed to install iTunes in order for it to work. I was back at square one. Googling again I found this comparison of ipod managers on wikipedia. First on the list stated Amarok has iphone support. Maybe I could get this to work on my linux box. But after searching I found not only did it not support my phone. But also amarok 2 doesn’t seem to support any phones at all.

I looked through the list. Trying to find something. I came across floola. But it doesn’t support iphones. I tried mediachest, but it requires java.

I then tried gtkpod. Which in order to use you need to mount the iphone first. So I installed ifuse. It seemed like it worked, although when I plugged in my iphone I got three camera icons instead of one in addtion to the mounted drive. I could see many directories on my iphone. Maybe I was in buisness.

But alas, no matter what I tried and how many tutorials I read I could not get gtkpod to recognize my phone.

And at that I ran out of options as far as I can tell. So I’m off to download iTunes in all it’s glory.

Came across an interest bookmarklet to invoke Firefox’s built in spell checker everywhere on a website. It’s quite easy to install. Just drag this SpellCheck bookmarlet to your bookmarks toolbar and presto. With one click the entire page gets spell checked. You can even right click on highlighted words to get suggestions.

There are some limitations. Once you click the bookmarklet links will cease to work. Although a quick reload of the page will bring it back to normal. Also spell check suggestions don’t seem to show up in certain areas of your page which utilize popup content. I haven’t yet figured out how to trigger the popup and then click the bookmarklet because as soon as I leave the popup area to head towards my bookmarklet the popup disappears. Still this simple bookmarklet has already fixed countless errors on my pages simply and effectively.