In order to make this blog post more useful, I will disclose first tips for skipping voicemail greetings. According to a couple of websites, one may simply press the appropriate key (varying by carrier) during a voicemail greeting to be instantly forwarded to the beep:

• T-Mobile - #
• Cingular - #
• Sprint - 1
• Verizon - 1

I have yet to try all these out. Additionally, “*” may work if these fail. If I would much appreciate comments if anyone has first hand experience of other numbers working with other carriers in the Chicagoland area, or corrections in order to make this the canonical reference for the midwest.

Hopefully this will save everyone lots of time in life.

But none of the preceding information has anything to do with San Francisco. I very much enjoyed my trip there for WWDC and am anxious to release some of the code I’ve been working on which utilizes Leopard technologies. It’ll have to wait until October. The trip was great for reasons beyond just the conference though, I had fun seeing Helvetica with Chad. I also bought a new Freitag wallet.

Though there were some low points to the trip. I was trying to play Taboo, but upon opening up the box I found the AA batteries had leaked, and I got some acid on my hand, leaving me with an unsightly acid burn. I also chipped my tooth.

Finally, while I was out there I had the opportunity to work on the Justin.tv widget a bit more. Look for a new version, supporting all the new channels soon.

Just a quick pano from my window here at the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco. WWDC has been a lot of fun, part due to the excellent accommodations I was lucky enough to obtain for the conference. If you look carefully, you can see the tall statue in the center of Union Square.

WWDC kinda makes me wish I were writing exciting Cocoa apps 24/7. I can’t tell you why; it is a secret. But in my downtime, I’ve had the opportunity to add a new feature to the justin.tv dashboard widget. Version 1.6 adds support for all of the channels that have recently been added to the site. You can watch any stream by selecting your channel on the back of the widget, a much requested feature. Check it out.

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Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip

This new version of the widget now saves the window size after restarting the Dashboard. Previously, the window would reset to default size after logging in/out, rebooting, or otherwise restarting the Dock. This was a minor annoyance that is now fixed. I have also tested the issue that is preventing the play/pause/volume controls from working in the widget, and it will be resolved in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

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Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip

Yep. It is official; I’ll be there. Who else is going?

UPDATE

Also, i’m going to see Helvetica while in San Francisco at AIGA sf. Yay!

I know it is quick, but version 1.5 brings a commonly requested feature as well as bugfix. The new version allows you to resize the video stream, at the cost of the pretty striped background. I’m working on adding the texture back in, but it is proving tricky. Additionally, the stream is significantly more reliable thanks to some help from Emmett and Kyle at justin.tv.

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Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip

Justin.tv is a website that started broadcasting 24/7 live video from a camera mounted to the head of founder Justin Kan, on March 19, 2007. It is an internet phenomenon attracting a huge number of young viewers from across the internet. Finding it cumbersome to keep a web page open all the time, I’ve created a Dashboard Widget to enable easy viewing on the Mac.

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Download justin.tv Widget:

justinTV.zip

I’ve had a lingering problem with the Delkin CF32A CardBus driver for my flash adapter. Delkin’s 5-in-1 flash reader is pretty cool for people with PowerBooks (not MacBooks), as it is the fastest way to download media off of an SD card, but about 1/8 of the time, my machine kernel panics when ejecting the CardBus adapter. I’ve e-mailed support to no avail. It appears that a Japanese company, Aska, is actually responsible for the software.

Kernel panic as result of ejecting Delkin CardBus 5-in-1 flash reader

I am confident I’m doing everything properly; ejecting the volume, waiting, powering off the card, waiting, and pressing the button to eject.

It is just sorta sad to see a modern Mac running 10.4 panic like that. The problem has persisted for me through all versions of 10.4, so I guess at this point I’ll just wait for a new laptop that doesn’t have a CardBus slot.