Photo Credit: Slickwraps

Obviously, the Slickwraps Vivid Purple Glow Wrap for iPhone 5 isn’t a case. It’s basically just a series of stickers you apply to your iPhone to make it look different. Any protection the stickers might offer is coincidental.

It looks pretty neat, right?

Application is fairly straightforward, everything you need is provided including a screen protector. The only other thing you need is some fairly steady hands.

And it does look good, when your surroundings are dark enough.

When the lights are on it looks a little like a storm-trooper on my Black iPhone with the white stickers.

However, within a few days or a week it’ll start to fall apart.

Here’s what mine looks like after less than a month:

Photo Credit: TimeDoctor Dot Org

After less than a week the top piece fell off.

After two weeks the discoloration had gotten pretty bad around the earpiece.

Photo Credit: TimeDoctor Dot Org

Finally, the bottom piece has started to disengage from the lower-left hand side of the phone. Once this happens, it gets pocket fuzz covering up the adhesive and is pretty much unfixable.

Photo Credit: TimeDoctor Dot Org

Do you want your phone to look like this? The glow effect still pretty nifty looking in the dark, but it’s rarely dark enough to trigger the effect unless you’re sleeping. In which case, who cares?

The best part of doing this review was when I took the Slickwrap off my iPhone 5 and it still looked great despite having had stickers all over it for the better part of a month. They’re not using low-quality stuff here, as is evident in the adhesive leaving no residue on the device. The problem instead is that this is the best level of quality you can get until material science makes some kind of ridiculous breakthrough that allows us to stick devices into a cheap home 3D printer and then they come out glowing in the daylight.

I’m throwing this Slickwrap in the trash, because that is what you do with a sticker once you remove it.

0 out of 5 Oil Slicks

Keep watching, there are some great insider tips towards the end.

It’s almost unsettling how many choices you have when deciding what kind of iPhone case you’d like to buy.

Do you get one that charges your phone, or looks cool?

Is it a wallet?

Or a steering wheel?

The BookBook fits into the wallet category.

It’s small enough to fit in your pocket, though of course it adds a bit of bulk to encompass a few cards, some cash, and your iPhone.

Lets talk about the look.

The spine and sides of it are designed to look like a worn, pocket-sized, tome.

You can alternate between being insulted that it is phony, or charmed and amused.

There isn’t any way to get around this, you either like that look or you don’t. It wasn’t until I saw the Book Book in person that I was convinced it was more than a goofy novelty.

There are cutouts for the sensors, speakers, mic, dock, sleep/wake, home button, headphone, and the mute switch, though the volume buttons do not get a cutout.

The BookBook is about as smooth as you’re going to get for removing a case and docking it. Pull a red tab on a strap from behind your phone to enable removal, and push the phone up and out. Simple and not frustrating.

Unfortunately this is also the process for taking pictures or video. Though you don’t have to slide the phone out all the way to do so, if you choose to keep the phone in the case the top edge and speaker cutout will block some of the screen. An unexpected upside is that it gives you something to grip that isn’t the screen when shooting, so I find that to be a little more stable. Of course you’re also now going to be slightly concerned with the phone tipping out when held horizontally in landscape mode.

The friction of the leather’s grain holds your phone in until you’ve tipped it at a fairly extreme angle. If you slide the phone out for picture-taking until the volume-down button is resting inside the cutout for the mute toggle switch it’ll feel fairly secure. Of course, this is on a day-old product, and I can’t say that this will remain the case (rdrr) after several months of use.

There is minimal screen protection when the case is open. Nothing to prevent an object from impacting with the screen, but the leather frame that holds the phone in should be enough for any drop that isn’t face down. I actually like that this case doesn’t include a screen protector, most of the plastic built-ins would lock dust and pocket lint in and make touch controls that much more difficult.

It is actually a little difficult to hold the phone and use it one-handed. You have to flip the front cover back over the rear and the springiness of this configuration changes the way you touch the screen and the distance from thumb to edge. It isn’t an issue for quick taps, or reading, only for swipes and more complicated thumbage. I don’t find it too impractical, but this is actually the limitation that is the most bothersome from day-to-day.

I chose to be amused by the faux-book style, and am surprised at how well this case functions. For about $60, you’re getting what is actually a quite good leather wallet and iPhone 4 case. If you’re bothered by the style initially, the functionality may win you over.

via Hidden warning message found in Samsung’s Galaxy tablet » Technology Blog » Chipworks.

Lots of interesting stuff including Ryan discussing OS/2 at length. This portion is especially compelling:

I find if you’re targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later.

Not to long ago, people would say, “why bother? Everyone runs Windows!”

But then the consoles became important.

And smaller shops might still say, “well, I’m not targeting those anyhow!”

But now they wish they had an iPad port.

You never know what will be important tomorrow!

via Interview: Ryan C. Gordon.

The English version of the interview is unfortunately lacking this great picture so I have provided it for reference.

None of this points to the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran, though. Best I can tell, this rumor was started by Ralph Langner, a security researcher from Germany. He labeled his theory “highly speculative,” and based it primarily on the facts that Iran had an usually high number of infections (the rumor that it had the most infections of any country seems not to be true), that the Bushehr nuclear plant is a juicy target, and that some of the other countries with high infection rates–India, Indonesia, and Pakistan–are countries where the same Russian contractor involved in Bushehr is also involved. This rumor moved into the computer press and then into the mainstream press, where it became the accepted story, without any of the origina caveats.

via Schneier on Security: Stuxnet. Make sure to check out the comments as well.

First of all, my platform is FreeBSD. You can do this on other platforms, but the most important info is here. If you’re on FreeBSD, you can install the requirements like so:

# portmaster -d www/nginx net-mgmt/xymon-server www/fcgiwrap

Throw in xymon-client if you want it to monitor itself and if you’re not running BSD grab the fcgiwrap code from the nginx site here.

The biggest problem about this setup is that fastcgi isn’t implemented into nginx. This means that your aliases cause issues because the fastcgi script tries to go to the path the webserver gave it not knowing you’re using an alias. It won’t be able to find the files unless you make a symlink that matches your alias… in certain situations you could potentially use symlinks and not define aliases. Use whatever works for you.

Here’s the relevant info you need:

/etc/rc.conf — make sure fcgiwrap runs as the www user

fcgiwrap_enable="YES"
fcgiwrap_user="www"

/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf — or drop this in a vhost

server {
    listen            80;
    server_name  xymon.foo.com;

    root    /usr/local/www/xymon/server/www;
    index   index.html;

    #error_page  404              /404.html;

    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    #
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
    }

    location /hobbit/ {
      alias /usr/local/www/xymon/server/www/;
    }

    location /hobbit-cgi/ {
        alias  /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin/;
}

    location /hobbit-seccgi/ {
        alias  /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-secure/;
}

    location ~ ^/.*\.sh$ {
    gzip off; #gzip makes scripts feel slower since they have to complete before getting gzipped
    fastcgi_pass  unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap/fcgiwrap.sock;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  /usr/local/www/xymon/$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING     $query_string;
    fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD   $request_method;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE     $content_type;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH   $content_length;
    fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
    fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
    fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME        $server_name;
         }
}

And now create two symlinks so the fastcgi scripts work.

# ln -sf /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin/hobbit-cgi
# ln -sf /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-secure /usr/local/www/xymon/cgi-bin/hobbit-seccgi

Securing this page is an exercise left up to the reader.

Enjoy your working Xymon setup on a much more lightweight and responsive webserver.

I think I’ll miss those special advertisements, that only ever appear in computer magazines, when they finally die out completely.

You know the ones I mean.

via No spaceship? No sale..