Arrival and packing

The case arrived very fast – in one week, right to my doors through UPS delivery services. It was packed in a quite big box, but it was because of the case packing. Anyway it was enforced by air which offered gorgeous protection for the product. The very case packing included manual for installing the case (with coloured images) and the case itself.

Appearance and construction

The case is available in 2 colour combinations – black and yellow. I received the yellow one, which I disliked at first sight as it reminded me more an digital multimeter rather than in iPhone. But I got accustomed to it very fast and then I realized that I like it much more then the black one. :)

The case itself icompound of 3+1 pieces:

• strong plastic case, which protects iPhone from front and back sides (it consist of 2 pieces which are then vertically joined together)
• silicone skin
• belt clip

As I said in the beginning the case has 3 layers of protection:

• a clear Polycarbonate sheet with high performance hard coating that offers chemical and abrasion protection
• a hi-impact Polycarbonate skeleton
• a Silicone skin to absorb bump and shock

Usage

After compounding all pieces iPhone gets some grams in addition. Also it gets some milimeters from each side. Personally I think that the phone can be holded much better in hands with case than without it. It offers access to all control buttons except the silent switch. I realized this fact as a very big problem, but after rethinking I came to opinion that when I don't want to be disturbed I turn off the phone, or turn on the Flight mode in the settings. I like that the phone is fully protected from each side, including display or camera. Camera is protected by polycarbonate sheet which is in addition countersinked deeper, so when we put the phone on the table the objects glass doesn't gets dirty.

Air bubbles

One of the biggest problem I had with this case were air bubbles between display and plastic sheet. It is really undesirable effect, which could be fortunately solved. To avoid those bubbles we need to put a third layer between those 2. We can use a protecting sheet which are available for few dollars or we can use our hands. Just go through the display with your hand or thumb and then put the phone to the case. It sounds strangely, but it works like a charm.

Conclusion

I own iPhone just for a few weeks, but with iPhone Defender I like my iPhone much better :) It gathered me by its robust plastic construction and with great protection it offers. Beyond this it comes with a belt clip which is also made from the same strong plastic. I would categorize this case as an outdoor, but there are no problems using it in interior conditions as well.

Pros

• very good protection
• massive polycarbonate plastic
• slippy sillicone – it can be easily put out of pocket
• it can be charged through USB cable, but not through dock

Cons

• silent switch is not accessible
• air bubbles – it can be solved as I said above
• the plastic sheet does not fit equally on the display, which decreases its sensitivity, you need to use more force in such cases

Price & Where to buy

The price of this case is $49.95 and it can be "bought through OtterBox web pages.

With the new MacBook Air comes also the MacBook Air ad with the song by Yael Naim. What is really exciting, this ad is so popular that there are many of fanatics who are making spoof and parody ads based on the original one. Just imagine how people are squeezing their old big black notebook's in an envelope. It's kinda funny!

It's better to see it once then hear hundred times about it, so let's go right to MacBook Air Ad website to see a decent collection of those parodies.

Then don't forget to get back here to post a comment about your feelings about this new product from Apple.

The good thing about Songza is that it can find almost any music files you type in the search box and it plays the song right in your browser, so you even don’t need any music player to hear your favourite songs.

Some of the Songza’s features are:

• top songza songs
• online playlists
• send to a friend link
• link to song
• watch on YouTube
• and more

The page also offer to search for an artists discography or for an artist (to buy its CD) on Google.

I wondered how this service works and after a while I found out that the source for the songs is YouTube where as we know there are a plenty of music video clips.

1. Ctrl+T [open a new tab]
2. Ctrl+W [close current tab]
3. Alt+D [go to address bar]
4. Ctrl+K [go to search bar]
5. Ctrl+Shift+T [reopen the latest closed tab]
6. Ctrl+F [search the page]
7. Ctrl++ or Ctrl+- [increase/decrease text size]
8. F5 [refresh (reload) page]
9. Alt+Home [go to homepage]
10. Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab (or Ctrl+PageUp and Ctrl+PageDown) [go to the next/previous tab]

The order of shortcuts is random as I’m using them also randomly, but those are my most used keyboard shortcuts in Firefox.

What cool (productive|killer|hidden|whatever) shortcuts do you use? Share them with us in the comments!

The applications name is anySIM and it’s released by iPhone Dev Team. You can freely download it right from our servers:

Download anySIM.zip from GeekHacks.com

Mirrors:
http://www.weputit.com/files/iphone/anySIM.zip
http://iphone.doggunn.com/anySIM.zip

Installation

Just copy the app to your iPhone and run it. You can find more detailed installation instructions on iPhoneAlley.com: anySIM Released: Free GUI iPhone Unlock

Attention: I don’t guarantee you that this must work!

1. The first step we need to take is turn off Nautilus which draws the current desktop and icons in Gnome:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

2. Next we need to turn up xscreensaver and its ‘glmatrix’ screensaver (nice Matrix movie like screensaver) in the root window (in the desktop):

/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root

3. Congratulations! That’s all

4. Optional: If you would like to start the animation whenever you log in, then create a file “~/.config/autostart/glmatrix.desktop” with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=No name
Name[en_IN]=Desktop matrix
Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

After you would like to get back to your previous desktop, just insert the following on the command line (ElecBoy thanks for that):

gconftool-2 –type bool –set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop true && nautilus

When all steps are successfully done we should expect something like this:

Via

Last week I found a great Web 2.0 application called BuiltWith which can find out what technologies were used to built a specific page. Using BuiltWith is as easy as putting the URL to the form and hitting Enter (or clicking on Lookup button) After that we get a list of technologies which powers the current website.

For example if you are curious what technologies are used here on Geek Hacks you can easily put geekhacks.com to the lookup form and follow up the list. You can see there that I’m using Google Analytics to track my visitors. Interesting thing there are the other popular websites which are also using Google Analytics and the overall percentage share of tested sites that are using it.

How BuiltWith works?

Okay, this is great tool, but what if I would like to know of what BuiltWith.com is built with? The easiest way to find out is to type in its URL to the lookup form Another answer is hidden in their FAQ’s:

When you lookup a page on BuiltWith, a robot goes off deep into cyberspace and looks at the page in question. It them compares that page with the technology list at BuiltWith.com and if it finds any matches, reports the information to you.

or:

BuiltWith.com detects technology by matching substrings of the technology name. If a page contains a matching substring it will report the page as featuring that technology.

Pretty easy, nah?

Last thing to note is that BuiltWith is a fresh new tool which means that it may not know all currently existing technologies, in this case there is a Suggest Technology page where you can suggest new technologies which should be added in the future.

Great resource for such stuff is a Free Software Sticker Book which is a PDF e-book holding all the great free software stickers like Firefox, Gimp, Blender, amaroK, Audacity and also stickers of many of popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, Fedora etc. There are a plenty of icons which are ready to print and use because almost every page of the book contains 8×8 stickers which is 64 stickers per page.

Book is licensed under MIT License which gives you the following permissions:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this
book and associated files, to deal in the book without restriction, including without
limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of the book, and to permit persons to whom the book is furnished
to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or different versions of the book and inside images.

Also if you are a graphic designer and would like to add more free stickers you could participate in that project and send your stickers to stickers@pikao.org.

I think this book is a great project and also very easy way to print out your own stickers of your favourite software.

• Download Free Software Sticker Book

Anyway, today I found a great website which looks like a Linux console. The God is sitting before it and typing commands. He is creating the world. Interested? Click at “If God was programmer“.

However, if you thought that JavaScript can be used only by web developers I must defeat you. Below this paragraph you will find 2 snippets of JavaScript code that you can just copy and paste to your browser address bar and you will see the power of Math and JavaScript.

But before I show you the snippets do the following:

1. Open some web page with images e.g. http://images.google.com
2. Search for whatever you like e.g. hacks
3. Copy and paste one of the following snippets:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.mkssddddddddddd=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

or

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

As you can see there can be much of fun with this 1 line of code. You can also freely modify the it and discover some other cool image motions. Please share them with us!