Health insurance

A lot of people decry the public option in the upcoming health care bill, saying they don't want to subsidize insurance for those who do not have it. And it's a fair argument. Except most people do not realize they already pay for other people's health care through high insurance premiums. Health care in this country is good for one reason — its exorbitant cost. Doctors prescribe expensive medications and really expensive procedures left and right, whether a person needs those or not. Who cares — neither doctor or her hospital nor patient have to pay for it. And because of that premiums keep rising and I have to pay for someone's health care. Public option is no more evil than this current lack of accountability.
Another major issue is care discounts for big providers in a given area. Big insurer gets discounts from a hospital, that cost has to be subsidized by smaller insurers, who obviously pass the cost to you. End result — your premium goes up or in some cases flat out canceled.
So, lots of issues..

When it comes to iPhone — it's either love it or hate it at&t

Spotify for iPhone

Simply rocks. I stopped using iTunes. Plays over 3g network while driving in excellent quality. Not sure what the bit rate is over 3g but it has to be at least 128kbps. (It's 320kbps on desktop with Premium subscription.) Songs start playing almost immediately, thanks to Spotify P2P setup that downloads the beginning of the file first.

You can also store 3,333 song on the iPhone itself in so-called offline mode.

Tethering on iPhone with 3.0

No jailbreak required, just point your iPhone Safari browser to help.benm.at

Works over bluetooth or cable.

Using a VNC port other than 5900

Apple has a VNC server that only allows access to port 5900. There is no way to change it, so the client has to be set up to be routed to that port. I needed 2 ports, since my Mac has two internal ip addresses — one for ethernet and one for wi-fi — and there is no way to forward an outside request to your home router for the the same port to two different ip addresses. A second port is necessary. In order to set that up, you need to download a 3rd party VNC software, that will handle requests on other ports like 5901. Vine Server is one of those.

This way you can pick to remotely connect to your Mac through either your home networks's wi-fi or ethernet.

Same would apply if you need to access more than one computer on your network from outside.

Music: Owning vs Streaming

Streaming and owning will always co-exist. It's silly to say "iTunes will be dead now that there is Spotify" or "It's been proven that people want to own their music".

There are bands and artists and tracks that you will want to own, just like certain movies and books. And then there is music you just want to listen to — today, tomorrow, maybe next week, but not necessarily keep forever in your library, again just like certain movies and maybe tv shows that you Tivo and some books and magazines and newspapers. Really, who needs to own magazines?

Re: "Hands-On With Spotify for iPhone: Is iTunes Dead?"

Spotify for iPhone

Spotify Mobile is out on iTunes today. It needs a premium subscription in order to work, £9.99/month buys you instant access to 6 million tracks over wi-fi, 3g and offline with offline playlist caching.

Spotify in the US

In order to make it work the account needs to be registered through a UK proxy. The account is free and there is no need for an invite. Just point the browser here https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
After setting up the account, download the client here https://www.spotify.com/en/

download/mac/ or here https://www.spotify.com/en/

download/windows/

As I found out yesterday some time into using it, Spotify will stop working because of the location mismatch between where you log in from (US) and the account location (UK). It will say you are not allowed to travel for more than 14 days. In order to fix that you have to put in a UK proxy into Spotify's preferences and let it log in through it. Once it does, you can remove the proxy and it will work without it again. Remains to be seen for how long though... Using a proxy all the time is not a solution since they are slow, overused and go bad often, so you always have to search for new ones.

Safari 4 32bit vs 64bit

Looks like 64bit Safari 4 is a bit quicker than 32bit

Mac OS X 10.5.6, Safari 3.2.1: 3261.8 ms
Mac OS X 10.5.8, Safari 4.0.3 (5531.9): 824.8 ms
Mac OS X 10.6 32-bit, 32-bit Safari 4.0.3 (6531.9): 657.6 ms
Mac OS X 10.6 32-bit, 64-bit Safari 4.0.3 (6531.9): 479.2 ms
Mac OS X 10.6 64-bit, 64-bit Safari 4.0.3 (6531.9): 478.4 ms


Apple promises a much quicker Java with 64bit. Start-up time compared to Firefox 3.5 is about twice faster with Safari 4. Add-ons/Plug-ins like Glims only work in 32bit Safari.

@igorpilot

Why not...

Create IPA from .app folder for the Iphone/Ipod touch to install through itunes.

An .ipa file can be opened by itunes and used to sync your iphone or ipod touch easily. The benifits of adding applications this way is to click once and have the application installed. Unlike making an iphone tunnel and using SCP to transfer the files over to the iphone or ipod touch.

To build an .ipa file from a .app folder you will need to create a folder called Payload and place the .app folder inside of that.
Zip up the Payload folder, then rename the file with a .ipa extension. You can use any name you like so long as the extension is .ipa.

If you want the applications artwork to appear in iTunes (instead of a generic icon), you need to place a file called iTunesArtwork (with no extension) into the zip file on the same level as the Payload folder (not in it). This is actually a jpeg file of a 512×512 image and this will appear in iTunes for the app.

Of course you need a jailbroken iphone or ipod touch for this to work along with having downloaded at least one legit free application from the apple app store.

This is a repost from http://codytaylor.org/?p=12527

Also Ad Hoc apps: http://www.innerfence.com/howto/install-iphone-application-ad-hoc-distribution?zip_file=AppName.app.AdHoc.ipa