Kevin J Edwards

These are just quick shots with my iPhone. The official photos will be coming.

1) Read information to me.
I’d love to hop in my car and tell Siri to read the top news headlines of the moment. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to go to a configuration panel and select the types of headlines I’m interested in (News, Politics, Sports, Tech, Etc…)

2) Allow 3rd party plug-ins.
Let apps like Shazaam plug into Siri, so I can just ask, “Who plays this song?” or “What song is this?” and have Siri tell me and provide me the option of buying it and putting it in the playlist I want. Many other apps could have plugs-ins around a specific subject area. If you have more than one app in a given subject area, your could prioritize one as the default, but then prefix the question with the name of the app for the second.

3) Allow the changing of settings.
I’m dying over hear with my unjailbroken iPhone 4S and its lack of SBSettings. It would help if Siri could “Turn off WiFi” or “Reduce brightness”

4) Read my email.
It’s strange that Siri will read/write text messages, but while Siri can write an email message, it can’t read one. It should be able to search emails and read specific ones.

5) Allow for corrections.
When taking dictation, it may interpret a word incorrectly. When that happens, it should allow me to say, “Edit, replace tomato with tomorrow”.

What would you like to see in Siri?

iPhoto 9.2 was crashing like crazy for me. It’s always been very reliable, but then when I enabled Photostream, all hell broke loose.

It turns out that the problem was with 3ivxVideoCodec.component.

Worse, it turns out that this little bugger had been causing problems with various apps for years as I’ve seen a history of people claiming problems with iPhoto, iTunes, Aperture, iMovie, QuickTime, and possibly other apps.

The Stupid Little Blog, shows how you can search for the file 3ivxVideoCodec.component and remove it, but some people have left comments saying that they aren’t finding it.

Apple made finding files much harder in some ways under Lion.

One annoying thing they did was to hide certain folders. However, MikeSel.info has a page showing how you can unhide the hidden folders/files in 10.7 Lion.

The short answer is to use the following terminal command to show hidden folders/files:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

And the following to undo this (hide folders/files that Apple thinks should be hidden:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO

Restart, or re-login for the changes to take effect. Alternatively you could Option-Right-Click on the Finder icon in your Dock and select Relaunch.

If you have the FTP application Transmit, you can use that to both browser hidden folders/files, and delete them. Other applications may allow browsing/deletion of hidden folders/files as well.

Once you’ve revealed your hidden folders/files, you can go to:
/Library/QuickTime
(That’s the top level of your system hard drive -> Library -> QuickTime)

From that directory, delete 3ivxVideoCodec.component (if present).

Restart your Mac.

You may be able to relaunch iPhoto with everything working ok, but I’d recommend holding down the Option-Command keys while launching iPhoto and then let iPhoto repair/rebuild your library and thumbnails.

Alternatively, or if the repair/rebuild fails, you can restore your iPhoto library from Time Machine. You do archive with Time Machine on a regular basis don’t you?