Wesley's Tool-Box

I've reported about the server losing connection after a bit of idling time yesterday, and the culprit was the power management settings. Surprisingly, my Mac mini was set to go into power saving mode just ten minutes after idling. I'm not sure what kept it up before, but it certainly isn't kept awake now. So I set the setting to never go fall asleep. Now the connection doesn't drop.

I thought this was the end of troubles, but it turns out that the server now takes a long time to respond after several minutes of idling. Once it responds, subsequent pages load just fine. I haven't found out why this was the case, but I know it's not a DNS lookup issue because there's no delay while there is network activity on the Mac.

So I devised a way to work around this issue by automatically causing a small network activity every minute. After opening Terminal:

crontab -e

[Press "i"]

00-59 * * * * /sbin/ping -c 1 -n google.com > /dev/null/

[Press "Esc" button]
[Press "!wq"]

And that's it. Once this is done, the system starts doing a ping once every minute silently. So far, it's working nicely and the website loads fine regardless of idling time.

It's now been nearly two months since iPhone 5S and 5C debuted. They have been available to Koreans for nearly a month as well. So now it's not so hard to find them and take a look if you wanted to. Even half of the people in my team who had old iPhones already switched over to 5S.

If you remember, I gave up the much-sought but hard-to-get gold coloured iPhone 5S for the widely available space gray version because that would've been the only way I could get my hands on a 5S as soon as possible.

Looking back, I think I made the right choice. I was able to test it out earlier than most of the people. And I was going to put a skin on it as a basic protection anyway. This brushed metal style dark blue skin I put on really suits the phone well. When I finally got to see the gold version in person as you can see here, I still felt that my skinned iPhone looked better.


As for iPhone 5C, it did indeed look like someone put a coloured plastic case on a black iPhone 5. Nothing too impressive, really. I would have preferred the look of a 5th generation iPod Touch. I can definitely see how people would rather pay $100 more and get a 5S instead. This is perhaps why there are so many iPhone 5C ads in the city as well as commercials on TV.

There hasn't been much of wind-up toys in the house that my kids could get their hands on. I wanted to fill this hole a bit, but past experiences told me that kids don't play with one toy too long, so I should save money and go for some variety. For this, this little assembly kit series called "InoQ" from David Toy seemed to be a good idea.

I bought a Tyrannosaurus model from a local discount warehouse, which cost about US$3. It was on the low-end of assembly kits as far as price goes, but it said it would move, so it looked better than the stuff that you build and doesn't do anything else after. It also didn't look very sturdy, but considering the price, I thought it should be good enough for several minutes of enjoyment.

And boy, did it give us enjoyment.

By default, iOS devices like iPhones and iPads use 4-digit passcodes for the lockscreen. You could also use alphanumeric passcodes that are more secure, but they bring up a keyboard on the lockscreen. This is rather cumbersome compared to a keypad.

What's often overlooked is that there is in fact a nice compromise between the two. You could use a long numeric passcode, and it'll give you a keypad just like when you use a 4-digit passcode, as you can see here. You do need to press a button after entering the digits, but that's because it won't let someone guess how long it is.

I think this is even more useful when coupled with the Touch ID in iPhone 5S. You can still use the fingerprint to conveniently unlock most of the time, and you'll feel more safe in that there is less of a chance someone else could bypass that and unlock using a passcode instead. And the "autofill" of the passcode when you press your finger to unlock doesn't reflect how long the passcode is, either. It just shows nine dots all the time. A perpetrator won't be able to guess the length of the passcode by glancing at your screen.

If you buy a phone with camera function in Korea, you'll notice that taking a photo will produce a shutter sound even if you set the phone to vibrate or silent mode. This is because of a government recommendation set in 2004 to have phones always make a sound louder than 65dB when a photo is taken, to curb spy shots and boost privacy.

iPhones are no exception, and if you buy one in Korea, the silent mode switch does nothing to, uh, silence the shutter sound. This is interesting because iPhones are generally not differentiated except for slight variation in CDMA or LTE support.

(ADDENDUM: The situation seems to be the same for the iPhones bought in Japan or the Philippines.)

The question, then, would be if this shutter sound is controlled on a carrier / region basis or device basis. If it's controlled by detecting what carrier or region it's being used, then taking the phone outside Korea would silence the shutter sound. If it's preconfigured on the device, whether or not the sound will persist would depend on where you originally bought it from. So which is it?