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Filed under: Rumors, Hacks, Odds and ends, Steve Jobs, Blogs

On the trail of Fake Steve Jobs

Everybody's favorite anonymous Mac commentator might be a little closer to becoming not-so-anonymous. If you checked out Fake Steve Jobs's site yesterday, you might have seen a short post about a marginally funny iPhone Haiku site. I've still got the post in my Google Reader, as you can see in the pic. Seems harmless, right?

That's what FSJ thought. But apparently, the link was sent to him by the guys at Sitening (who also created the Haiku site as a lark), and the link he was sent was a specially created link, made up just for FSJ by the Sitening guys. See where this is going? When he clicked the link, they tracked his IP, and here it is: 68.160.21.224. That IP traces back to a Verizon service, which the Sitening guys say is in Boston, MA.

And then the story gets even stranger. Diego Barros at the Radio Active Code Blog posted a comment on FSJ's post about the tricksey linkses, and then the post itself was removed completely. FSJ usually seems pretty easygoing about this stuff, so the fact that he actually took it down gives credence to Barros' suggestion that FSJ is on the run.

So who does all this point to? So far, this evidence all says Andy Ihnatko, who lives near Boston, has written for both MacWorld and Playboy, and has worked anonymously before-- apparently he wrote parts of Roger Ebert's movie guides. TUAW dropped him a note asking him about the rumors, and we'll let you know if we hear anything back.

Thanks, Diego!

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, iPhone

iPhone Tip: Tap and hold on a link for a description popup



Safari on the iPhone might be slightly limited in some areas (for example: you can't double-tap contacts in Meebo to begin a chat), but we're discovering all sorts of useful goodies that I don't remember Jobs or the Apple videos ever highlighting. In this screenshot of my iPhone (sorry I couldn't snap a better quality pic), I've tapped and held my finger on a link in Safari, which invoked this handy popup with the name of the linked page, as well as the actual URL. This is a very useful way of translating the typical status bar UI in desktop browsers so it is still accessible on the iPhone for the times you need it, and yet it doesn't take up any valuable real estate during most of the times you don't.

Filed under: Features, How-tos, Productivity, Tips and tricks

TextExpander Tip: Using the Clipboard in a Snippet



Along with Quicksilver, TextExpander is one of my must-have Mac utilities. TextExpander is a "snippet" utility that will automatically paste in content based on user defined abbreviations. For instance, I have "bc" set to expand to "because." However, the pasted text can be much longer (e.g. "sig" becomes a several line email signature). Today on the SmileOnMyMac Blog, I ran across a great tip I hadn't previously known about TextExpander (RTFM), viz. that you can use "%clipboard" as a variable in your snippets. When the snippet expands the clipboard content is automatically placed wherever "%clipboard" appears. The original tip involved using this to create Amazon.com links, but it quickly occurred to me that I could use this to easily create hyperlinks when for posting on blog comments (not TUAW) or on forums.

Continue readingTextExpander Tip: Using the Clipboard in a Snippet

Filed under: Software, Productivity, Internet Tools

An Adium Xtra for linking any browser's current page

I know Adium can insert links from some browsers by itself, but I just found a script at the Adium Xtras site which offers much more fine-grained control over inserting a link from any browser, with the page name's descriptive title linked nice and clean, instead of the long ugly URL you get from copy/pasting. As you can see, specific commands are included for all the major browsers (and even some not-so-major ones), as well as a catch-all Default Browser command. The ones I can test seem to work pretty well, though I'll admit I don't have any copies of iCab or Netscape lying around. Enjoy.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Internet

Macgamefiles offers free game hosting

Macgamefiles.com has announced free game hosting for shareware and freeware game developers (but not for things like maps, mods, etc.). The only catch is that the game's developer needs to point their download links to the game's product page hosted at Macgamefiles.com. This, I assume, is so MGF can make up their (probably astronomical) hosting costs with ad hits.

Given some of the bills I've heard of for hosting large files like podcasts and software downloads, I would imagine this is a huge bonus for garage-based game developers. Three cheers for internet advertising business models!

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