Alligator Belly           Gadgets and Technology

Apple maps on iOS 6 and iPhone 5 have been under fire ever since launch but there is another issue that hasn’t gotten much public attention. The battery life.
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Alligator tried to get his hands on OS X Lion as soon as it was released yesterday but ran into a roadblock while installing OS X Lion on his MBP. After waiting an hour for the download to finish from the app store the installation finally started. After a couple of minutes the computer restarted and Alligator saw a progress bar saying 35 minutes remaining and was really excited to be in OS X Lion heaven soon.
But Alligator was in for a surprise when after a couple of a minutes there was a big yellow exclamation mark saying “Install Failed”. The detailed error message stated

Max OS X can’t be installed on the disk iMac, because a recovery system can’t be created. Visit www.apple.com/support/no-recovery to learn more.

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With the new iPhone 4 on the horizon I am debating on which iPhone I should put my money on? The Sleek Black or The Hip White?

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Trying to install Google Chrome on Vista today and after downloading it through Firefox and running Alligator kept getting the dreaded Installation Failed 1625 error. Tried making the account an administrator on the machine but that didn’t help either. Turns out the Google Chrome installer needs to be Run As Administrator manually. While installing other applications Windows Vista automatically elevates to Administrator mode but it does not do so with the Google Chrome installer. So download the installer and browse to the folder where the installer was saved and right click on the file and click Run As Administrator. That should let the installer do its job!!!

With the 2.0 release of the iPhone firmware and the launch of the App Store a day earlier, Alligator could not wait to upgrade his phone. As soon as the firmware was out on Friday, July 11th, Alligator plugged his iPhone into the computer and was able to the get the new firmware after a lot of clicking on the update button. Finally after crawling through the “Could not access iTunes Store” error message, the iPhone was back up and running with the 2.0 firmware.
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One thing thats been bothering us is will Time Capsule be able to share files like a NAS or is it strictly a Time Machine backup device only?

Looks like the rumors were more than true. Jobs has announced the Macbook Air weighing in at just 3 pounds and as thick as a Hershey’s candy bar. Other announcements included new firmware for the iPhone and the iPod touch and the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule is just a external hard drive with wireless networking and LAN switch built in for use with Time Machine. One thing out of line was that Apple requires 10$ for the iPod Touch upgrade. Seems a little weird isn’t it?

Google has once again broker all barriers and introduced the My Location feature in Google Maps. The My Location feature approximates the current location using cell phone towers instead of a GPS device. So chances are if you have a newer cell phone without a GPS that you could Google Maps and it could tell you your approximate location between 25 meters to 2500 meters. That means no more finding out where you are at, just open Google Maps on your cell phone and let it find itself on the map. Although the technology is proprietary there have been rumors that the cell phone using the My Location feature sends some information about your location to the Google servers. So if privacy is a concern then you could have the My Location feature disabled. We tried it on a Nokia E61 Symbian S60 3rd edition phone and it works great and even though it’s still in Beta it’s more than 90% accurate. You can find more information about the technology here.

Now that we are in the post-iPhone era, did the iPhone stand up to it’s hype? Here are some things that we didn’t like about the iPhone.

Although the phone is fancy is slim but there is not much to the software. The software is simple but nothing fancy to it. The only thing fancy about the software that comes to my mind is the scrolling. Other than that it’s basic.
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Just installed the brand new Apple’s Safari browser on a Windows XP machine and no text shows up (See Image). There are no menu bars, no bookmarks and no text on the web page that is displayed. The images seem to load up fine and that is the only thing that seems to work. The address bar is clickable but can’t more info

seem to type anything in it. Same thing with the search box. Tried rebooting and uninstalling and reinstalling but doesn’t seem to help. Has anyone run into the same issue?

UPDATE (6/22/07): A new Safari beta 3.0.2 has been released by Apple which seems to have fixed this issue. You can either uninstall and download the new version from Apple’s website or use the Apple software updater to get the new beta.