Jared Mendelewicz » Technology

Interesting Music Videos

jared — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:44:24 +0000

I really like the style of these music videos.

Never Shout Never – What Is Love?

Bright Eyes – Easy / Lucky / Free

Underoath – A Moment Suspended In Time

Disabling that Pesky Trackpad Rotate Feature in Photoshop CS4

jared — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:37:05 +0000

I use photoshop for various things, but, after my most recent Macbook Aluminum purchase and my upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS4, I’ve noticed that stupid compass showing up as I work. At first, I had no idea what it was, couldn’t find anything about it online- but, more importantly, I couldn’t find a way to disable it.

After tinkering for a little longer, I saw I could rotate the canvas using two fingers on the trackpad. Still, I hate this feature and it annoyed the hell out of me.

A few weeks later, I googled around and found an Adobe-issued plugin that disables the feature for trackpad users. Here is a link to the Adobe download page:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4337

Once downloaded, move the plugin to your Adobe Photoshop CS4 install directory plugins folder and restart photoshop. Works like a charm.

Booya. Damn, I hated that feature.

iPhone 3GS Poor Signal, Bad Reception

jared — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:30:18 +0000

I just purchased a 16 GB White iPhone 3GS and am having terrible signal issues. At first, I thought it was only my local tower, maybe even only my phone. After consulting a couple people around the office who recently purchased the iPhone 3GS, I realized that they are all having the same problem.

If anyone else is experiencing this, please comment and let me know if Apple/AT&T can do anything about this. This is becoming extremely frustrating. I am right next to a window and I’ve receive three voicemails from people trying to reach me this morning! This seems to be an intermittent problem.

The Sound of Metal

jared — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:15:30 +0000

My brother, Ben Mendelewicz, created this animation for his senior project.

Macbook Flickering Screen Backlight Warranty Repair

jared — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:22:46 +0000

Throughout the past two years, my 13″ Black Macbook has experienced four repairable issues:

Hard drive failure
Light to medium flickering backlight
Light flickering backlight
Cracked wrist support edge plastic

Each time I brought the computer in for these issues, the Genius (tech support) immediately smiled and admitted my machine for warranty-covered repair. Always renew your Apple Care. If you stumbled upon this blog and have not renewed it, consider it a lesson learned. Just go a few days before your computer’s one year birthday and spend the money to renew. Mine has paid for itself more than three times by now.

Why Facebook Chat Owns Your Face

jared — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:16:51 +0000

Facebook has recently released Facebook Chat. There are a few reasons why this new feature not revolutionizes digital and personal relationships, but completely owns your face- and all of our faces.

I don’t know about anyone else, but Facebook, in and of itself, really helped me get in touch with people from high school, middle school and even elementary school who I never would have spoken to again.

Over the years, Facebook has not only allowed us all to reconnect with these people via messages and wall posts, but they even created a semi-creepy news feed feature for us to spy on our friends!

With the release of Facebook Chat, Facebook has turned our grade school and college acquaintances into real people, online RIGHT NOW. You’re not only looking at news feeds anymore, you’re looking at these people real-time!

Many of my Facebook friends aren’t my friends in real life or on AOL Instant Messenger, so seeing them online and being able to chat with them truly brings my online network to an entirely new level.

How to get photos, music, notes and data off of your iPhone and iPod Touch

jared — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:25:36 +0000

I was recently plagued with a failing hard drive in my Macbook. I wasn’t really concerned because I had a Time Machine back up- unfortunately, it was almost three months since my last Time Machine sync.

Before I get too into this, I’d like to make it clear that my iTunes was configured to sync the last 12 months of iPhoto pictures. Facing almost three months of missing photos, I was determined to find a way to access the missing photos on my iPhone.

I spent a while googling for solutions and it took me a few pages to find my solution:

MegaPhone for iPhone and iPod Touch lets you access photos, music, notes and other data from your iPhone and iPod Touch. You can not only easily drag and drop photos, galleries and notes, but you can recover your music quickly and easily.

For anyone who experiences the following related problems, I hope you can find this software useful if you want to:

Restore photos from your iPhone or iPod Touch
Restore music from your iPhone or iPod Touch
Restore notes from your iPhone or iPod Touch
View or export your call or SMS history from your iPhone
Store files on your iPhone or iPod Touch

Click here to download MegaPhone for iPhone and iPod Touch

iPhone vibrating loud and loose- broken vibrate mechanism!

jared — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:19:20 +0000

My brand new iPhone rang today and it sounded like something was loose, causing the vibration to be extremely loud and sounded like something was rattling. You could imagine my dismay when I touched all around my iPhone while it rang and noticed when I applied pressure towards the top of the iPhone, that the noise stopped and began again when I released. I am now on hold with AppleCare and will post more information as it becomes available.

Update @ 2:30 PM – Taking it for a “Genius” appointment tonight, I’ll also be bringing my Black Macbook with a flickering backlight and/or dimmer- should be fun!

Update @ 9:22 PM – Met with the Geniuses- apparently it’s a common problem with the vibrating mechanism. They ordered me a replacement and will swap my phone out for free. Also, they ordered a new inverter cable and inverter “board” for my Macbook to fix the flickering back light.

Update @ 11:38 PM Wednesday the 12th – iPhone replaced at another Apple store that had an 8GB in stock. It’s nice not to have vibration instead of buzzing.

Update @ 12:32 AM Monday the 17th – So, for all of those people who have stumbled onto this blog because of the weird rattling, vibration plastic iPhone noise, rest assured that Apple representatives know EXACTLY what this is. As soon as I told them my problem, they shook their heads, laughed and held the iPhone to their ear and shook it. It was only moments after that, when they grabbed another iPhone from the back and swapped ‘em out.