I eventually managed to figure out where the space was going by making use of the following tools:

• Macroplant Phone Disk
• GrandPerspective

Pretty simple: Macroplant Phone Disk uses MacFUSE to present the iPhone filesystem natively. GrandPerspective constructs a treemap of any directory. So, mount the phone as a disk with Phone Disk, point GrandPerspective at the disk, hit go. It definitely takes a while – on the order of 20 minutes for my 32GB phone.

Once the treemap was built it was pretty obvious that the space was being consumed by some stray movie files that somehow ended up getting synced to my iPhone. I don’t remember when or how I put them there, and I forget exactly where they were now, but I believe the folder name was related to some jailbroken media sync app that I had installed at some point.

Note that GrandPerspective is freeware but Phone Disk is a trial with 100MB transfer limit. Fortunately the total amount of metadata GrandPerspective needed to pull down to reconstruct the treemap of the filesystem was only 98MB. Also, prior to GrandPerspective I tried using Disk Inventory X (also freeware) but it crashed when I pointed it at the iPhone file system, presumably because FUSE filesystems smell different and/or don’t support whatever disk IOCTL or other bizarre thing Disk Inventory X wants to do? I was surprised, but not enough to actually try to figure out why it didn’t work.

Turns out it doesn’t, but that’s easily remedied with this Termsrv.dll patcher.

Note that (I think) you have to manually open port 3389 in the firewall, assuming it’s on, for this to work.

I managed to pair the headset but it sounded like crap. Turns out you need to jack up the minimum bitpool setting for audio devices in OS X because the default negotiated with many headsets is wrong or bogus or something:

I tried using the Bluetooth Explorer as detailed here, but I couldn’t get the settings to persist – if I closed and reopened the Special Options window, the settings were back to 0.

With more Googling I found out how to set it using the defaults command in a Terminal:

$ defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent “Apple Bitpool Min (editable)” 50

Both ’40′ and ’50′ work much better than nothing. It seems like ’40′ actually sounds better than ’50′. Not sure why that would be though maybe forcing the minimum value too high causes the audio codec to forcibly clip in order to conserve buffer space on the device or something? Yes I’m waving my hands wildly…

Chicago, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania: “Fuck these smug-ass yuppies.” Choice quote: “What an odd thing to gain a sense of smug superiority for doing…nothing, really.”

New York: “Thumbs up! Fewer strollers means more room on the subway!”

Meanwhile, Smug-ass Mom from the S.F. Bay Area: “Um, like, I don’t know who you people have been hanging out with, but I was totally using a baby carrier since 2002, here’s the brand name, and all of *my* friends have been using them since then too.”

Ok, in fairness another ass hatette from Monroe, NY theorized that with “more skin-to-skin contact, more warmth…Maybe the rates of ADD, ADHD will go down”.

Yeah, maybe it’ll cut down on gluten allergies too.

A Tribe Called Quest – The Chase Part 2 (LP Mix)

The route there took a day and a half, because we were slow getting started – we forgot the permits and had to head over to the tourist bureau to get them re-issued. We were also extremely cautious with our water supply, refilling constantly at Brian’s behest – I was lugging around 25 pounds of water for most of the hike, which you can see in the photos below (those are 4 liter platypus bags strapped to my pack). In his defense, I made him carry 15 pounds of food that I didn’t eat, and I lost the stove (though not before we managed to make one pretty delicious meal the first night).

The hike ends in this unbelievably spectacular beach. It’s indescribable. We camped under a waterfall (no joke), slept on the beach, and headed back very early on the third morning. We hoofed it and managed to complete the return in 8 hours.

Anyway, I’m writing about all of this now because I finally got the pictures that Brian took with his DSLR on the trail. We thought they were lost for good when his Mac laptop hard drive started acting erratic, but he managed to recover them and I snagged them last weekend while I was visiting him in Seattle.

So without further ado, check the bullshit. I apologize in advance for the six million pictures of the same sunset at the end, but I got tired of trying to compare them, I don’t really trust my judgment or taste, and I’m too chickenshit to delete any of them because they’re all dope.

P.S. Gallery2 blows so hard. Why do I still use it? I found Zenphoto and set it up; it looks promising but there’s no automatic import from Gallery so it’ll probably take a solid afternoon to convert over and I don’t know if I care quite enough to do it despite the incredibly painful experience I just went through trying to sort through all these Hawaii pictures.

We’re all crashing with Raj, who lives in the U district. Last night we went out dancing at the Baltic Room (I think?) and capped off the night with some street meat from the crazy cart with the LCD screens. Today we walked over to the Gas Works Park, which is awesome! I can’t believe I never knew about this place – it’s definitely a pretty fun place to hang out and I used to walk around the area back in the day when I was interning at MS. Anyway, Raj lives right near the park so we walked over and killed a couple of hours around sunset, which made for some decent photo opportunities even when you only have an iPhone.

Pictures from Gas Works Park

Irene pointed out that it’s totally steampunk, which is obvious in retrospect though I didn’t pick up on it myself.

http://aclab.ca/users/norman/music/

I’m in Syracuse right now, where I had to transfer off the NYC-bound express to this Syracus-Schenectady-Albany route. So far it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. The first bus I was one was older and not as comfy, but it was good enough for me to sleep pretty much the entire way. I didn’t actually know I needed to transfer until I got to the terminal – they don’t exactly make that clear on the website, probably because they know that pampered princesses like me would take the train or fly instead if they called that out. Anyway on this new bus I’ve got wifi, an A/C power outlet, and the entire two-seat row to myself, so I’m living large.

I had to line up in the freezing cold outside the terminal in Toronto which was also really annoying; if you don’t do that you aren’t actually guaranteed a seat on the bus, though they actually have several waiting and of course people near the back of the line ended up getting on the newer/fancier bus.

The border crossing was painful; we almost made it out of there in about a half hour but then we were delayed twice as long because one girl had to be sent back to Canada (she was Chilean I believe). She was part of a group of girls, all international (Spain, Chile and Korea, wtf?!)  travelling together and apparently it wreaked havoc on all the hotel and travel plans for the entire group. There were many tearful goodbyes exchanged. Some of them are now on this bus with me, but I feel like it’s a bit too rude to ask what happened given the dramatic conclusion.