Rick Tech

Apple formally announced the iPhone 3Gs today. Combined with the coolness that is version 3 of the software, and it’s possible Apple has blown away the market yet again.

The biggest features are 3D performance, faster web surfing, and long waited for copy and paste feature. It also includes a built in receiver for Nike + Transmitters, Voice Control of address book and iTunes, a new compass feature and an updated (to 3 mega pixels) built in camera.

The new iPhone is $199 for 16GB of storage, $299 for 32GB of storage. Plus the “old” iPhone has some software updates and has been dropped to $99 with 8GB of storage. Unfortunately for many, it’s still tethered to AT&T so jail breaking the phone for other services will be the way to go. Missing from this announcement is any word of updates to the iTouch too, but no doubt there will be some.

Here’s a new one on me. The Domain Name Appraisal Scam. The email is simple, some emails you asking to buy your domain name for 65% of it’s appraised value. They include links to three different “appraisal services,” one of which is a scam site. The scam site is of course the cheapest of them all.

What is not quite clear in this scam is if they’re also stealing credit card info, or just trying to get people to pay for a bogus appraisal.

From: jeffmiller44@gmail.com

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are interested to buy your domain name BBXGAME.COM and offer to buy it from you for 65% of the appraised market value.

As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
flyappraisals.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Yours truly,

Jeff Miller

In this case the fake Domain Name Appraisal company is flyappraisals.com. Others have reported the fake appraisal company being nameorange.com and namepros.com

On a side note and out of curiosity I did a Google Search for Free Domain Name Appraisals and came up with these:
Swiftappraisal.com
LeapFish.com
DNScoop.com

BBXGame.com appraises for $1600-$2400, $25, and $506 in that order. Which goes to show that the art of Domain Name Appraisals is black at best.

Among the many other features that the iPhone version 3.0 software is bringing us, will be the ability for developers to create accessories that use the standard Dock plug on the iPhones and hopefully by extension, the iTouch.

What does this mean for users? How about external keyboards? External hard drives? Connections to GPS units or cameras? Or even the ability to plug the iPhone in to a dock that gives it full abilities to become an all in one computer, with keyboard, mouse and LCD screen all built in?

Such abilities, especially an external keyboard, would push me over the edge in having to have an iPhone for myself.

It’s comforting to know that when Apple screws up, they do it but good.

Not since the days of Tiger has a dot release from Apple done so much damage. On the surface, 10.5.7 is a very important update. A lists of fixes includes the usual round of security fixes, fixes for network performance, updates for Camera RAW support, among several other fixes. But, initially the Software Update version was throwing up errors “digital signature for the package is incorrect.” Apple rapidly fixed this but it underscores the importance of having good backups and a clean file system.

Afterwards, others started reporting BSOD or Blue Screens of Death after the update was done. Having originated on Windows, the BSOD is now available in Leopard, a nice, if unintended bonus from Apple.

Luckily this problem seems to be fairly easy to fix:

The next issue to commonly pop up is messed up display resolutions for non-Apple monitors. People are finding themselves stuck in 1920×1080! Resetting the PRAM (Hold down the Command, Option P and K keys while booting until it chimes three or four times) seems to fix for some.

For some of us REALLY unluckily people, the update gets stuck part way. After letting it sit for an hour at 33% there was no choice but to reboot the computer. Upon booting back up, OS X is not able to fully boot up. In one machine I was able to fix by going into safe mode, then issuing the softwareupdate -l -a command to finish the download and install.

On my Macbook, it was a full reinstall.

I recently updated the theme on one of my other blogs. Annoyingly the Wordpress Stats plugin stopped working.

After extensive troubleshooting I found that footer.php was missing the critical line that tracks stats.

Add

< ?php wp_footer(); ? > just above the < /body > tag in footer.php

Logout out of the blog, clear browser cache, surf the site then login and check stats. All should be good.