Something strange happened this week with Wakemate, a Y-Combinator-funded project that was a tech world high flyer for a while. The product, a wrist strap that sensed your movement during sleep and ostensibly woke you at exactly the right time, was on hold. In 2010 the product apparently burst into flames (literally) and little was heard from the company at all.
Suddenly, however, co-founder… → Read More
According to the Kickstarter API blog, a bug caused 70,000 unlaunched projects to be publicly visible over the weekend, allowing folks to see goals, funding plans, and descriptions on projects that haven’t yet appeared on the site. Of the 70,000, visitors only viewed 48.
The bug exposed no financial information. → Read More
It seems comments are a little borked today as the Disqus plug-in failed during our last update and problems just started showing up today. I’ve reimported all of the comments for the past few days so here’s hoping it fixes itself. → Read More
Remember when some dude said that the Playbook got 2 hours of battery life on a good day? Wrong, says RIM. They released an official message to all the haters. → Read More
Way back in 2008 we started paying attention to a company called Ivyskin. They first offered a solar iPhone case, which was just ugly, and they they offered something called the SmartCase, an iPad case with a battery in it. It’s basically a more angular Mophie Juicepackfor the iPad. Sadly, there have been numerous complaints about Ivyskin and one reader sent in a recent exchange he had with… → Read More
Many browsers are throwing up some warnings due to potential malware being served up. We are not currently serving up junk and our tech man is working on it. UPDATE – All is well. Our ninja Andy has fixed it. → Read More
While I would love to share with you guys the logic bomb I wrote in high school that moved my floppy drive read head into a corner of the drive that caused massive damage to the disk inside (it never worked) or the “virus” I wrote that randomly erased blocks of my hard drive when I ran it on my Packard Bell 386 back in the ’90s, rest assured that CrunchGear does not serve up… → Read More
We’d ask you to comment below about the problem of broken comments, but you can’t. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on as we speak. Until then, please feel free to leave a comment on in a text editor and then paste it here when things are working again. Thank you for your patience. Update: They seem to be back. Flame on! → Read More
For some odd reason we’re having lots of problems updating the site this week. We’re going to be moving off or Rackspace soon – we’ll be hosted by WordPress just like Big Daddy, TechCrunch, so hopefully things will work better. Until then, please bear with us. → Read More
We have an update on the AIM push problem we wrote about this morning. The problem only affects jailbroken iPhones 2 and 3G running the homebrew app Pushfix. If you are in this sad number please restore to the original firmware or risk seeing your IMs spread far and wide.
Pushfix is a homebrew app that “repairs” push functionality on Jailbroken apps. The iPhone Dev Team, the same folks who… → Read More
Till Schadde, founder of development house Equinux has discovered an exploit – a broadcast error, really – that sends your AIM messages to random recipients without your knowledge or consent. The problem seems to happen in unlocked/jailbroken iPhones and results in a alert appearing on a recipients home screen bearing your message.
Till tested the service by sending an AIM from the OS X desktop… → Read More
There’s a long thread at Apple’s discussion board about sporadic Wi-Fi failures under iPhone 3.0. It seems that the Wi-Fi eventually poops out, resulting in no Wi-Fi connectivity even inches from the router. The only fix seems to be turning off push email.
Essentially, WiFi works fine after the phone has been freshly booted (i.e. right after a restart) – however, once it has put itself into… → Read More
BGR is reporting that some parts of AT&T’s network were failing just as the phones bought at Wal-Mart stores this weekend were getting online. → Read More
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/MacBook_Trackpads_Suck_and_Doesn_t_Register_60_of_Clicks’; A tip came in this weekend from someone with a fleet of new MacBooks. His complaint? Every 50 or so clicks and the trackpad freezes for 5 to 10 clicks and then wakes back up. The tipster writes: So we’ve bought about 10 of them, all of them have awful problems recognizing clicks. The… → Read More
We’re getting reports that our CSS is borked. Anyone else seeing it? → Read More
Reader Mark sent us this chat he had with Sprint’s customer relations bot informing him that his broken Rumor was his problem and none of their own. The phone has been regularly borking for people for the past eight months and it seems people are trying – and failing – to get help from Sprint. 1:55:38 PM System Connected to Sprint Web Chat Server 1:55:38 PM System Session ID… → Read More
Dear Person With Privacy Issues, Please email me a screenshot of your experience so I can recreate it on our servers and throw out some of the junk that higher powers have accreted onto CG over the past year. Just to remind you, you’re the guy who called us a bunch of “assh*les.” My email is john@crunchgear.com. → Read More
We’re trying to fix the RSS feed problem. It seems our installation isn’t sending files through to Feedburner and, as a result, we are all crying. This feed seems to work if you must get your fix but things should be working later today. → Read More
Ladies and gentlemen, I present my iPhone 3G crack. This appeared after a day of fairly heavy usage with lots of pulling in and out of the pocket and briefcase. I didn’t sit on it or smash it but I saw this coming when I pulled it out and noticed some other scuffing. It almost looks as if a thin layer of plastic has rubbed off. I haven’t seen it happening on any other part of the… → Read More
Last week’s PS3 firmware update left some angry gamers in its wake as reports of jacked up consoles made their way around the internet shortly after Sony made version 2.40 of its PS3 software available for download last Wednesday. The company quickly pulled the problematic update and has now said that version 2.41 will be available “midweek,” according to CVG. While most PS3 owners were able… → Read More
We’re getting some wonky 500 errors on the site. Please bear with us as we go through this troubling time – together. → Read More
Quick question for all you programmers. I’m dealing with an MS SQL injection problem on a site running Windows 2000 and MS SQL 2003. Has anyone seen/solved this problem yet? → Read More
Apparently folks are having trouble with our Feedburner daily digest. Can someone who got it this morning (4/28/08) send it to john @ crunchgear.com and/or if you had some sort of problem with IE can you show me what happened? → Read More
I had this problem a few months ago when I was putting together my current PC. First I got a loud system beep and the CMOS display would stop somewhere in the 20s. That turned out to be my video card being improperly powered. Then it would boot and crash hard before getting to the OS. Turned out to be a bad stick of RAM. I’m glad I had my laptop around to look up CMOS codes and stuff, but I… → Read More
This has come up a few times in the past couple days with folks trying to install pwned and failing. What happens is that the firmware doesn’t flash correctly and you have an iPhone or Touch caught in a horrible boot cycle that consistently fails. Sometimes it draws junk on the screen, which is basically the kernel trying to start and then failing and retrying. These instructions are very… → Read More
Reader Mike sends in this rant about his experience with PS3′s customer support. Long story short, his PS3 stopped working and he had to send in his old unit before Sony sent him a new unit — usually vendors send a new unit and you ship back the old unit, but not in this case. Sony sent him a replacement unit but not the cables and, being a nice guy, he had already shipped back all of… → Read More
Now THAT is a delicious looking piece of pie. That’s the size of slice I like when everyone else at the table’s on a diet. “Yeah, you know what?,” I’ll say, “Gimme a huge piece, like a real man-piece. You went to all this trouble to bake this delicious pie and I’d love to eat almost 29 percent of it in one sitting if nobody else minds.” Anyway, Ars… → Read More
The CEO of Buzz Broadband just shuttered his WiMAX network and, in a conference in Bangkok, called the technology worthless. He complains that out of line-of-sight with the antenna WiMAX degrades horribly, resulting in network failures. He is now using a number of standards including TD-CDMA to get about 10Mbps and will not be using WiMAX. Gulp! And we just bought a huge transmitter for the whole… → Read More
Click to see full-sized image. Not sure what purpose it serves, but Firefox 3 on OS X changes the names of jpg files to jfif, which is the umbrella filetype for JPEG encoded files. As a blogger and collector of pornography involving goats and fish, I find this very problematic. You can, however, create an Automator task to fix your JFIF files on the fly. I’ve attached it to a downloads… → Read More
Got a tip from some sad-eyed Verizon customers that the service is down completely in Manhattan. We’re trying a few phones here at the office and will try to figure out if this is a tri-state kind of thing or just a local outage. → Read More
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