Universal Password Recovery
Every now and again, I’ll run into a software or hardware question that requires me to do some Internet research to gather more information. The search results will inevitably take me to some ‘discussion’ forum, which always has the effect of lowering my opinion of the human condition and causes me to forget what I was researching.
Anyway, I’ve noticed that an awful lot of people have trouble remembering the passwords for their information devices, even stuff they’ve just acquired. It turns out that the resolution for this works for any gadget — iPhone, Android phone, iPad, or the other tablets that nobody uses. As a good samaritan, I’m passing on these three easy steps:
- Return the device to the original owner.
- Purchase the device of your choice from a legitimate retailer.
- Set your new password!
Ta-daa!!
… predictions of Apple’s demise are stupid and wrong-headed.
Stop Calling it Curation
Thank you. I couldn’t agree more with Matt Langer’s post.
Note, I’m sharing the link to his blog. I didn’t curate anything.
Unlocked iPhone on T-Mobile US
I have been running a factory-unlocked iPhone 4S on T-Mobile for some time now. It’s something of a compromise that I can live with; I gain call quality (no drops either) and give up some data speed. Actually, in my neighborhood, T-Mobile’s EDGE is faster than AT&T’s 3G (see previous post).
I was surprised when I popped my T-Mobile SIM card into the iPhone 4S and it hopped right on the EDGE network without any configuration. Maybe it’s because I already have a T-Mobile data plan for the MyTouch 3G I’ve had since 2009. I don’t know.
I knew visual voicemail would not work on T-Mobile and that didn’t matter to me. Everything else I tried, including Siri and FaceTime, worked. Except MMS. The weird thing here is that I never use MMS, but I didn’t like knowing that it wasn’t working. I guess I was thinking that one day there was going to be a critical situation that required MMS and I’d regret not having it.
Radio Announcer: “The next listener who sends us a photo by MMS will win $10,000!”
Me: “Crap…”
Even though T-Mobile USA does not sell the iPhone, they do try to support it. I tried the recommended network settings on their site, but had no luck when I tried to send a test photo to my phone. The best I could receive was a message telling me that the media content was not included because of picture resolution or message size restrictions. But even REALLY small pictures would not go through.
I searched the Internet* and found a plethora of settings variations to try, none of which worked for me. The consensus seemed to be that a change was needed in a plist file stored on the phone. In a nutshell, the change spoofs the network into thinking that the iPhone is a Sony Ericsson W800i, which for some reason works on T-Mobile’s system. Normally, you would need to jailbreak your phone to alter a plist file, but there’s a nice tool available, iBackupBot, that will let you open your iPhone’s backup file, make changes, and then restore the file to the phone. Pretty painless.
Comically, most of the tutorials I read involved copying and pasting new text into “com.apple.mms_overide.plist” and then going in and making changes to the MMS settings in your phone, which, of course, happen to be stored in “com.apple.mms_overide.plist”. Just paste the right settings in the first time around and save a step.
Anyway, here’s what you need to do:
- Download iBackupBot from here and install it.
- Plug in your iPhone to your computer.
- Backup up your phone in iTunes. Note that iBackupBot can read, but not change, encrypted backups, so you will have to turn off encryption, if it is enabled. You can turn it back on when you are finished.
- With the iPhone still plugged in, launch iBackupBot and select your iPhone’s backup from the list on the left.
- Look for “”com.apple.mms_overide.plist” in the list on the right and open it by doubleclicking. When the licensing popup window appears, click ‘Cancel’, since you can edit the plist file with the trial version.
- Delete the contents of “”com.apple.mms_overide.plist” and paste in the contents of this file.
- Save the file and close the editing window. Closing the window is a little non-intuitive for some reason — just click the circular icon at the far right of the editor toolbar.
- Choose File -> Restore to load the new backup into your iPhone.
- After your iPhone restarts, go to Setting -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network and make sure that the three APN’s on the screen are set to ‘epc.tmobile.com’. The APN’s are not stored in the plist we just edited. Your screen should look like this:
That’s it.
*Notice that I didn’t “Google” the Internet. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo, a search engine whose name does not convert to a verb very well. “I DuckDuckGo’d the Internet” somehow doesn’t sound right.
T-Mobile and the iPhone
The news that T-Mobile is “spectrum refarming” their 1900MHz band to accommodate HSPA+ is exciting to me. It brings the iPhone on T-Mobile one step closer.
I’ve been a loyal T-Mobile customer for years. I used a first-generation unlocked iPhone on T-Mobile until 2010, when I broke down and grudgingly got an AT&T iPhone 4. I kept my T-Mobile account and a few months ago, I sprang for an unlocked iPhone 4S and started using it on T-Mobile. My thinking was that the superior call quality and lack of dropped calls was compensation for slower data.
The AT&T data performance was always pretty weak in the neighborhood where I live in Washington, DC. But when I used it, I just assumed that, hey, it’s 3G, so it’s got to be better than Edge, right?
Nope. I decided to actually test the speed difference today and I was mildly surprised. Here’s a screenshot with the AT&T SIM card in my phone…
And here’s another with the T-Mobile SIM in my phone…
That’s right — 305kbps for T-Mobile’s Edge network versus 163kbps for AT&T’s 3G. 163kbps is truly lousy. Obviously, I get a better T-Mobile signal where I live, but the difference shouldn’t be that much.
Confronting a Law Of Limits
An interesting, but flawed, New York Times article. The comparison between Cisco and Apple is not valid. Cisco’s market capitalization peak came during a bubble in 2000. Apple’s current price was attained with the world economy still mired in the effects of a recession.
Microsoft Is Forgetting History
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — George Santayana
Let’s talk about the past. Windows 3.0, released in 1990, was the first version of Microsoft’s GUI OS that PC users actually wanted to use. It was the beachhead of the Redmond invasion. But in 1990, Microsoft was an outsider in the office productivity market. WordPerfect and Lotus 123 dominated word processing and spreadsheets in the DOS world.
Unfortunately, both of those companies failed to grasp that a paradigm shift in the way that people interact with computers was underway, a shift pioneered in the marketplace by Apple with the Macintosh. When they finally did release Windows versions of their products, both were poorly received because neither company “got it” when it came to GUIs. This product void was quickly filled by Microsoft’s Word and Excel and the market leadership of WordPerfect and Lotus virtually evaporated overnight.
Today another shift is taking place and Microsoft is the company that doesn’t “get it”. Actually, they haven’t gotten it for awhile, but the popularity of tablet computing, and the iPad in particular, is the tipping point that they are blind to. People are discovering that Office is no longer a “have to have” necessity.
Minimal Mac: Microsoft's Biggest Mess
I misread the tile of this blog post the first time I read it — it’s ‘miss’, not ‘mess’, but my misinterpretation stands. Patrick Rhone perfectly explains something that has been percolating in my mind for awhile now. I’m not a casual user; I use spreadsheets and documents every day in my work. But in a year of using my iPad, I’ve found that the iWork suite meets my needs the majority of the time. Even when I’m not using my iPad, I now find myself firing up iWork or Google Docs more frequently than Office.
Ironically, thanks to Microsoft, I don’t need Microsoft Office. By not offering an iOS version of their productivity suite, Microsoft has inadvertently weaned me off of my addiction.
Source: minimalmac
Is Oracle Doomed?
No, I don’t believe that Oracle is doomed, but I do believe that we are at a technology tipping point in the enterprise software space, as this article on PandoDaily points out. But I’m drawn to this quote from the end of the story regarding Oracle CEO Larry Ellison… Ellison has long shown he viscerally gets where the stock market, the customer and the technology are going. He may be better at this than anyone leading a technology company today. He has pulled off stunning and dramatic turn arounds of Oracle in the past. He can force the company to shift out of sheer force of will, uncowed by the near term pain he may inflict on customers, employees or Wall Street in the process. Agree one hundred percent. I have watched Oracle over the years and I have a lot of respect for Larry Ellison’s leadership. It’s easy to see why he and Steve Jobs were good friends.
Colloquialisms
Colloquialisms can be useful in conversation, putting a colorful wrapper around otherwise drab words. This can be especially useful in my line of work, information technology, but sometimes they do backfire…
I was taking over as project manager on a high-risk engagement and the existing manager was giving me some background information.
“When the project started, we kept the software features simple and things went well,” the manager explained. “But then the scope creep started. They wanted the whole ball of wax and that’s when things went down the toilet.”
With the image of a ball of wax going down the toilet now immovably burned into my head, the rest of the project orientation, uhh… went down the toilet.
