Google Public DNS - Performance Comparison

Regardless of the obvious privacy issues, such as letting All Knowing Google to access a big chunk of information about my surfing habits, I still wanted to test out the performance of Google’s DNS service.

In this test I used DNS Performance Test tool provided by Silverwolf. It makes a number of DNS queries to a seemingly random list of domains using your OS’ default DNS settings. I ran the software until 1000 successful queries were made for each DNS provider.

DNS providers in this test were my Finnish ISP Sonera, OpenDNS and of course Google Public DNS.

And here are the results:

So Google Public DNS is indeed fast and even surprisingly fast when compared to OpenDNS.

Enable “Emoji” Icons On iPhone (No Cost, No Jailbreak)

Just wanted to share this nice little app I found yesterday from AppStore. App is free and it is called “Spell Number”. Here are the steps to enable emojis after you’ve installed the app:

1. Go to http://bit.ly/freeemoji and from the site grab the secret code which you need to type in the app. Current code (December 20th) is 91929394.59, but as it might change, confirm the code from the developer’s site.
2. Fire up the app. What app basically does is it converts a series of numbers to spelled text. Eg. 211 = two hundred and eleven. The simple interface offers only one input field for typing in the number. You are probably already guessing that this is where you type the secret code.
3. Once you have typed the code exit the app by pressing home button.
4. Go to iPhone Settings and General > International > Keyboards.
5. Select Japanese and toggle “Emoji” on.

After you’ve finished you can now switch to “Emoji” keyboard by pressing the globe icon in the bottom left of the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. This works pretty much in any app that supports typing (SMS, Mail, Safari, IM…).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bestdamntech/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

How to Create ISO Image from CD/DVD Using OS X Terminal

1. Check which device name your DVD/CD drive has (use this name for the rest of the commands):
   • “drutil status”
   • Should be something like “/dev/disk2”
2. Unmount the drive:
   • “diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2”
   • There should be a message similar to: “Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful.”
3. Use dd to create the ISO image:
   • “dd if=/dev/disk2 of=filename.iso bs=2048”
   • Syntax is quite simple; if = input file, of = output file.
4. Building of ISO image might take around 10 minutes, depending of course of your CD/DVD size.

Creative Vado HD and iMovie ‘09

I just recently bought Creative Vado HD, a 720p pocket video camera. It has very impressive video quality in comparison to Kodak and Flip Mino HD but a one big gripe: video files recorded with Vado HD are not compatible with the latest iMovie ‘09.

Video files are AVI type and the most common solution I found from the great internets was to transcode the video for example to MOV. Transcoding is just such a time consuming process and also degrades the video quality so I looked for some other solution.

Bit more googling and I found this instruction which used ffmpeg command line utility: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8976934#8976934. This works great, there is no need to transcode and no degradation in video quality. I just found one issue with the instructions. If I converted the original AVI in to MOV as in the example, video became very choppy and pixelated in iMovie. Instead I used following ffmpeg command to convert the AVI to MP4:

ffmpeg -i VID00106.AVI -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac out.mp4

This worked pretty much flawlessly. A 20min video was converted in couple of minutes and great video quality was maintained.

Some of you might ask, well how do I install ffmpeg? I found only one way to get the necessary codec support to ffmpeg: MacPorts. Here is a quick three-step-guide to get ffmpeg running:

1. Install latest Xcode, it is a free download from Apple: http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html
2. Install MacPorts: http://www.macports.org/install.php
3. Install ffmpeg using MacPorts by running Terminal command:

sudo port install ffmpeg

That is it. Enjoy your camera and iMovie ‘09 :)

Invisible Shield and iPhone 3G

I like the idea of Invisible Shield. Thin layer of protection and no bulky cases. But as you can see from the photo above, the protection film has started to peel off. And as it peels of, it starts to collect dust, yuck… The main problem lies in the way Invisible Shield wraps around the bottom and top corners of the iPhone. It is almost impossible to get it stick perfectly and if there is even tiniest gap, dirt and pocket lint will start to collect, and the shield will start to peel off. 

So today I went ahead and ordered new back skin from Best Skins Ever. Corners are cut bit more open than in Invisible Shield’s version but I assume it is way more easier to apply on the phone.

I’ll post comments when I get one.

Nokia N97 Touch-screen Smartphone

Nokia announced today company’s latest N-series phone N97. This bad boy is loaded with features:

It has 3.5-inch widescreen touch display, 5Mpx camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, 16:9 video recording, LED flash, 3,5mm headphone jack, A-GPS, built-in compass, physical QWERTY keyboard, whopping 32GB of built-in memory and support for up to 16GB microSD cards. For communication N97 boasts HSDPA, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 and stereo Bluetooth. N97 also has the latest S60 5th Edition OS. The sweetest part? Battery life: 37 hours of music and 4.5 hours of video.

I think they nailed it this time.

Source