Did you upgrade to v10 of Flash Player and now your browser runs really slow especially when trying to play any sort of flash video?

If so then maybe you should downgrade to v9. I run an older G4 Powerbook and was running into this issue until a friend of mine emailed me a few files to downgrade my flash player to v9. Now my browser runs much nicer.

Here are the files:
Flash Player Uninstaller OSX

Flash Player v9 Files OSX

Run the uninstaller, then copy the two files in the flashplayer9r159 disk image to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/

That’s all. I hope this helps!

I like most other users LOVE Google Voice and have found some useful apps that I would like to share with other Google Voice users.

1) Firefox Google Voice Add on
This is a nice little app that makes it possible to make phone calls, and text messages from your Google Voice account with out having another open window.

2)Send one message to multiple contacts with ContacTexter

This is a neat little app that was written using Java so it’s cross platform. The interface isn’t too pretty, but it works, and it’s FREE!

3) Get the BEST number on Google Voice Script
This guy figured out how to access google voice number search via a script, and run queries to grab the JSON file. This is definitely worth taken a look at if you are a developer/programmer of any kind. Unfortunately it is a script that was built for OSX 10.5 but is possible to modify and run in 10.4.

4) Scott’s SMS via Python for Google Voice Script (Everyday Scripting)
This is a neat little script to send text messages using Python.

4b) Scott’s NEW AND IMPROVED Python Script for Google Voice (Everyday Scripting)
This script allows you to send mass sms or mass call in an iterative fashion. Keep up the good work Scott!

5) How to write a Google Voice App
Well not exactly, but does give some insight in how Google Voice works since there is no API as of yet.

6) How to use Google Voice as your voice mail instead of your cell provider
This is basically instructions on how to forward your voicemail to google voice. This should help users with the Google Voice Transition.

7) How to enable Google Voice push notifications on iPhone 3GS

8 )One click International Calling with Google Voice

9) Another Google Voice Python Script
pygooglevoice brings the power of the Google Voice API to the Python language in a simple, easy-to-use manner.

10) Using Google Voice with Fluid (OSX Only)

11) Google Voice Grease Monkey Growl Script

12) Place Google Voice Calls directly from contacts on iPhone (Apple Script)

The script works by adding numbers to contacts in Address Book that dial your contact via Google Voice. The new number is prefixed with your Google Voice number, your pin, and the number two. It dials into your Google Voice number and places the call to your contact.

13) Google Voice Bookmarklet Generator (iPhone or iPod Touch)
Those of you who follow tech news know that there’s been quite a dust-up recently over Google Voice apps on the iPhone. First they were allowed, but now they’re banned. So until they work things out, or Google comes up with a more elegant web-based solution, placing a call using Google Voice on the iPhone is a long and drawn-out process. So Ironic Sans came up with this solution.

14) Google Voice Mobile Web Version
This is the mobile web version of Google Voice. I figured it would be good to note on here.

15) Import Facebook Contacts into your Google Voice Contacts (Script)
Facebook’s API + FBConnect is great but it has some severe limitations. Notably, it doesn’t expose all the functionality available on the Facebook site. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to copy a dump of my friends’ names and phone numbers off the site to load into a fresh cell phone. Unfortunately, looking at the API this isn’t possible. Never fear – Greasemonkey provides enough of a hook into Firefox that it would be possible to write a UserScript to accomplish this.

16) Turn Google Voice into a OSX Friendly Application
Google Voice’s web site is nice, but keeping it open in a browser tab can be cumbersome. Mac users, however, can get Growl notifications, complete with transcript previews, and app badge updates with the handy Fluid app. Unfortunately the Fluid App is only available for 10.5 and greater. This was enough reason for me to update, so maybe you should too.

17) Google Voice Dashboard Widget for OSX
Are you looking for an easy way to call or send SMS messages to your contacts using your Google Voice number right from your fingertips? GV Connect is your answer: a Google Voice widget which allows you make calls and send SMS messages from your GV number to your Address Book and Google contacts right from the Dashboard

18) Google Voice Notifier Windows and OSX
A simple system tray notifier for Google Voice. Lets you know when you have unread text or voice messages. The project is written in java and uses Google Voice’s REST service calls. This notifier will work on any platform that supports the java system tray icon.

When my wife and I decided that we were going to be living over seas for a year or more, I knew I had to find a way to call home for almost nothing. I also wanted a way for them to call us without having to use a calling card. This led me to researching something known as VOIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol. This is simply described as using the internet to make your phone calls instead of using traditional phone lines. Also I didn’t want to buy another piece of hardware to lug around known as a VOIP phone, I wanted to use our laptops and a piece of software instead.

1) Download X-Lite
After some trial and error using different pieces of VOIP software I ended up deciding on X-lite as my program of choice.
X-Lite is stable, free, and available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. So I would highly recommend it. But there are other software choices available, but I won’t list them here.

2) Choose a VOIP provider like voipcheap.com
I don’t have a whole lot of nice things to say about voipcheap other than they offer inexpensive VOIP service with free incoming calls. Also their international call rates are the cheapest I have seen. One thing to note is to make sure when you go to their website to sign up click on the MAC & LINUX USERS CLICK HERE link so that you aren’t forced to download their crappy VOIP software. The way voipcheap works is you Pay 10 Euros and you have a maximum of 300 free outgoing minutes during any given 7 day period for 3 months. Voipcheap calls this “Free Days” and the free outgoing only applies to some countries like the U.S. Please look over their calling rates for “Free Days” if you want to call somewhere other than the US. Once your 3 months of “FREE DAYS” is up then you are charged .01 Euro a minute to call to the U.S. But….you get free incoming calls, which brings us to the next part.

3) Sign up with IPKall for a FREE Incoming voip phone number (Washington State)
This is an awesome service, and the only one that is free as far as I know. The only drawback is that you can lose your number if you don’t receive an incoming phone call for 30 days. IPKall get’s a small amount of money for every phone call to an IPKall number, which is why they can offer this service for free. As of writing this IPKall offers free phone numbers in the following area codes: 253, 206, 360, and 425. It takes about 7 days to receive your phone number.

4) Sign up with Voxalot for FREE voicemail
Not much to say here, except Voxalot is a great free service.

All of this is kind of a pain in the butt to set up at first, and can be confusing for new VOIP users. I hope this helps some people make the transition from land line telephone to VOIP Telephony.

On doing a tune up on our Chevrolet S10, I found that the #3 Sparkplug was going to be a pain in the ass to get to due to the steering shaft. I was a little hesitant at first but this is how I did it after doing some research.

Don’t be afraid of the steering shaft. In fact, it was designed the way it is so that it can be removed for the purpose of changing the driver side spark plugs. It is very accessible when you remove the air cleaner box.

1. First change all of your passenger spark plugs. These are the easy ones!

2. Next, remove your air cleaner top completely, by unscrewing the four wing bolts, and loosen the pipe strap just before the mass air sensor, and set the air cleaner top aside.

3. Now remove the bottom air box (its strait forward.)

4. Now comes the shaft. Unscrew the bolt at the base of the steering shaft just before the steering box. Remove it completely, and set aside. Note: You may have to turn your steering wheel to display the bolt.

5. Now just simply slide the shaft towards the firewall. If it doesn’t come easily, I like to use a wrench and small hammer to lightly tap it off. Sometime a large flat head screw driver or pry bar will work.

6. Once you have the shaft off of the steering box, pull it completely out, and set it aside. This will give you plenty of space to work with. It is also surprisingly quick to do all of this also.

7. Now have at it with the spark plugs.

8. To install, just simply do the opposite of removal.

I hope this will help some of you out. It may sound like a lot, but it really isn’t. Don’t be afraid of your problem. Tackle it with confidence.

Apple has offered developers a way to beta test iPhone applications with up to 100 iPhones. Some developers have already started using this to their advantage by giving their software out as free public betas. But, you must supply a developer with your iPhone’s UDID (unique device identifier) in order to install these “Ad-hoc” applications on your iPhone.

To find your iPhone’s UDID, just plug it into your computer and wait until iTunes recognizes it. Please note that a Firewire iPod cable will not work, since the iPhone does not have the proper hardware to support firewire connections. Select your phone from the Devices list in iTunes and click the “Summary” tab. To see your UDID, click on the word “serial number” beside the picture of the iPhone. You should see the word “identifer” and an alphanumeric string – this is your UDID.

Alternative: You can also download an app from the Apple Store called Ad Hoc Helper which is a free download. Here is the itunes store URL http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=285691333&mt=8

To copy it, just press command + C on your Mac’s keyboard (or control + C in Windows). Now comes the hard part: getting on a developer’s beta testing list.

This weekend I took a trip to Maumee bay with my family. We got a cabin which offered it’s own WiFi access point, but it’s $10 for a 24 hour period. Well we suckered up and got it billed to our Cabin number, and they gave us an access code. The problem is that the access code is for 1 computer only! After some sifting around on the source code of the login page where we entered in the access code, I figured out that they were using our MAC addresses for verification. Well, I changed my MAC address on my jailbroken iPod touch using an application called SpoofMAC using the MAC address of the computer we used the access code on. My iPod touch was connected to the web, but I wanted my PowerBook G4 on the web too! I used these two commands to try and change the mac address on my Airport Extreme Card.

sudo ifconfig en1 ether aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
sudo ifconfig en1 lladdr aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

But nothing seemed to work, so I downloaded MacDaddyX to try and change it. Still didn’t work! What Gives?! I could change my ethernet port mac address all I wanted, but not the wifi card mac address. After doing some digging I learned that the mac address for my airport Extreme card is loaded from within my Airport Card driver. Here is how to change your mac address from within your Airport Card Driver:

Because of the few problems with the dynamic method of MAC address spoofing I “invented” a static method. It makes MAC changing more complicated, because you have to hardcode the MAC you want into the driver and then reload it, everytime you want to change your MAC. But atleast no other real problems were discovered with this method.

Setting up…

I strongly suggest not to experiment with the original drivers in /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext atleast until you made sure that everything works as you want. Therefore you should first create a copy of the driver into a test environment and also don’t forget to make an additional backup.

base:/Users/spoofer root# cp -pR /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext .
base:/Users/spoofer root# cp -pR /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext.backup .

Patching the binary driver

For now there is no automatic installation tool and therefore you have to patch the driver binary in AppleAirPort2.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleAirPort2 with a hex editor of your choice. The following values are maybe different in your driver but atleast 3 driver versions have the same bytes.

For pre Tiger driver versions search for:

88 FF 15 30 | 89 5F 15 31 | 89 1F 15 32 | 7C E0 50 38
89 7F 15 33 | 7D 00 00 38 | 89 3F 15 34 | 7D 60 00 38
88 5F 15 35 | 7D 20 00 38 | 7C 40 00 38 | 2F 80 00 FF
41 9E 01 98

and change into

3C E0 Xx XX | 90 FF 15 30 | 3C E0 Yy YY | 60 E7 Zz ZZ
90 FF 15 32 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00
60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00
60 00 00 00

For post Tiger driver versions search for:

88 FF 19 90 | 89 7F 19 91 | 89 5F 19 92 | 89 1F 19 93
7C E0 58 38 | 89 3F 19 94 | 7D 40 00 38 | 88 5F 19 95
7D 00 00 38 | 7D 20 00 38 | 7C 40 00 38 | 2F 80 00 FF
41 9E 01 CC

and change into

3C E0 Xx XX | 90 FF 19 90 | 3C E0 Yy YY | 60 E7 Zz ZZ
90 FF 19 92 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00
60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00 | 60 00 00 00
60 00 00 00

Of course you have to replace Xx:XX:Yy:YY:Zz:ZZ with the MAC you want. It should be mentioned, that putting any value other than 0×00 into Xx resulted in not working connections. I don’t know if it is my accesspoint that refuses such MACs or the Apple kernel.

Testing

After having patched the binary you can now test if everything works by

base:/Users/spoofer root# kextunload AppleAirPort2.kext
kextunload: unload kext AppleAirPort2.kext succeeded
…
base:/Users/spoofer root# kextload AppleAirPort2.kext
kextload: AppleAirPort2.kext loaded successfully
…
…
base:/Users/spoofer root# ifconfig en1
en1: flags=8863 mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::211:22ff:fe33:4455 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0×5
inet 192.168.1.100 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
ether: 00:11:22:33:44:55
media: autoselect status: active
supported media: autoselect

Known Problems/Limitations

• Changing the MAC is more complicated than using ifconfig until someone releases an autopatcher
• WPA/WEP connections maybe need that you reenter the key after changing the MAC

Permanent install

I suggest that you perform this step only if you are sure that everything is okay, because otherwise your kernel maybe crashs during startup. Copy your modified AppleAirPort2 file to /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleAirPort2 and clear the kext caches.

base:/Users/spoofer root# cp AppleAirPort2.kext /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleAirPort2
base:/Users/spoofer root# rm -r /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kernelcaches/
base:/Users/spoofer root# rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
base:/Users/spoofer root# rm /System/Library/Extensions.mkext

The above instructions was found at http://generation-php.net/airport-static.html