All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Okay, folks. There are guys out there already selling iPhone headphone “adapters” that let you plug “regular” headphones into the iPhone’s super-recessed headphone jack.

Don’t waste your money. You can use regular headphones with the iPhone, easy. All you need is a sharp knife.

Take that sharp knife, take a pair of headphones, and right around the headphone jack, trim off about an 1/8th of an inch of the rubber around the jack. Then plug your headphones into the iPhone. Click, they can now fit in the super-recessed iPhone jack.

I’m using a medium-priced pair of “normal” headphones that I just altered this way right now, and the music is coming through perfectly.

And yes, you’ll still be able to use the modified jack on everything else.

I’ve just noticed that a lot of people are trying to reach a paper I wrote over ten years ago at Berkeley on The Third Man. It’s one of my personal favorites, out of all the junk I wrote in college (I actually cared about this one when I wrote it).

Anyway, I was flattered to have it linked from www.noircinema.info — recognition of any kind is always great, and I suggest visiting the aforementioned site for more insight on The Third Man and other noir classics.

You can even get the old Harry Lime radio shows done by Welles from there.

Anyway, it’s back up, it’s at http://www.kiplange.com/papers/thirdman.html.

And a word of warning — do not plagiarize. I am a professional writer, and plagiarism is a serious sin. If you use any of my work in your own paper for college or whatever, I expect you to cite it properly. If I find out this has been plagiarized, which I could easily do these days, I will contact your professor and inform him of what you’ve done (you better frickin’ believe it, buddy, I take writing very seriously).

Okay, enough beating you over the head with that. I hope you enjoy it a little, or that it proves useful to you.

I can see some of you, sitting there, saying to yourselves, “Hey, Kip, what the hell do you do for fun, besides fiddling with gadgets?”

I’ll tell you what I do. First I strip down to my underwear. Then I take a searching inventory of monkeys. Next, I bow down to a giant poster that looks like this:

I then rush to my computer, type
http://www.vastrightwingconspiracy.org/condiishot/
After this, I go to a nearby mirror, and repeat, “Nancy Pelosi wears a thong!” eight times, while holding back the urge to vomit (as many of you may know, Nancy Pelosi has caused me to projectile vomit several times; this is indeed a great problem and has led to me blocking C-SPAN on my TV).

Then I concentrate very hard, turn around, look over my left shoulder in the mirror, and wait very carefully for the face of Rudy Giuliani to materialize.

So there.

Right. Let me try to be brief about this. First, the iPhone doesn’t seem to want to ever connect to YouTube when you’re using a wireless network. Safari, the web browser, works just fine, but not YouTube. As does everything else, as far as I know. So if you can’t get at YouTube, trying going through the regular (and slow) AT&T “EDGE” service.

Now, if it’s not even working through that, you can try two things. First, give the iPhone a hard boot by holding the power button on top down until you get the red “Power Off” slide on the front. Power off, and start it up again (you’ll see the Apple logo if you did it right).

The other option is to “restore” the phone in iTunes. It’s not as scary as it sounds. Everything will re-sync. Make sure you don’t restore to a backup; restore it from scratch. That oughtta work.

In the meantime, hopefully we’ll get an update that will let wireless networks work better with the iPhone YouTube option. Or perhaps some which is actually useful, like a Flash player for all that video you can’t see everywhere except YouTube. Thppthh.

…I’m feeling so upset, although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette — and curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid git…

Pardon the lyrics. But I am tired. I bet a lot of you who remember the ol’ Kip from back in my college days wonders, “Why has Kip stopped writing interesting things? Why is he writing all this bland crap about cleaning lasers and stuff?”

The answer is simple. I don’t want to post a divisive opinion or get into detail about any hijinks I’ve gotten into, because all a prospective employer would have to do is type “Kip Lange” or “Kip Lang” or whatever into a browser and *pop* up comes my blog, and suddenly I don’t get hired because they read about that time with the monkeys, the water-slide, and the KY Jelly, you know?

But dammit, I am going to do some more interesting writing. Possibly under a pen-name under a freely-hosted blog. I’ll let anyone interested know if I do it, so you can follow the rants that once defined my writing…

Right, so the iPhone has been working great, especially plugged into my wireless network. But for some reason it was being cludgy with me, timing out on weather forecasts, stupid things like that. So I figured I’d give it a restore.

So, just let me say for the record, Apple is frigging awesome. The restore took probably less than ten minutes, and then I was easily able to sync the phone back to my custom settings.

It works. Don’t be afraid to restore your iPhone if you want to make sure it’s running right. Just make sure you’ve synched it through iTunes before you do it, so you can get everything back the way you want it.

Well, it’s been about six months now that I’ve had the Playstation 3 in hand, and the same-old same-old problem crops up; because I’m a smoker, the lens has become dirtied and all of a sudden it stopped picking up discs (except after, say the 20th try).

Unlike the PS2, it’s not very easy to get to the laser in the PS3, so you’re going to have to go with the standard methods of cleaning. In other words, get a laser lens cleaner CD. I recommend the Scotch-3M model; it worked the best for me.

Now, I ran that CD through the PS3 a few times and it began to pick up the discs a bit more quickly — but still not on the first try. However, I was eventually able to get the PS3 to recognize Blu-ray discs (those are the first to go in terms of the machine picking up the disc) by adding one extra step. Here it is.

The CD will have, if you turn it over, a few very small brushes poking up. What I recommend is taking a paper towel or cloth of some sort, and soaking it with rubbing alcohol. Then take the cloth and dab as much rubbing alcohol on the brush area as you can. Then put the disc in and run the cleaning track.

This got the PS3 back to (for the time being) recognizing discs on the first try. I also recommend just returning the PS3 if your warranty is still good; chances are the newer models have more sturdy lasers.

Anyway, I hope this helps a few people…

Now, I know it’s a misspelling of my name, but I seem to have to constantly write articles dropping the name “Kip Lang“ so people can get to me (there are more search strings coming in for “Kip Lang” than there are for “Kip Lange“) And no, it’s not pronounced “Lanj”. It’s pronounced like it sounds, with the e silent, so yes, while it sounds like “Lang“, it’s actually “Lange“.

Clear anything up for you folks?

Users of the new iPhone will notice one glaring omission: there is no Flash player available for the iPhone — yet.

However, according to sources, including Mr. Mossberg himself, a firmware update for the iPhone that includes an iPhone Flash player is in the works and will possibly arrive very quickly, perhaps only a month or two away.

Follow the above link to read more about it.

I am pleased to note that I have gotten back into contact with my old friend Dave Rempis (see the sidebar and the link to www.daverempis.com — also, just Google him or click here to see various links to his music).

Dave is a fairly heavy hitter on the Chicago jazz scene right now. I urge you all to listen to his music. He’s sure as hell the best sax players I’ve ever heard.

Anyway, it’s damn good to be in touch with him again. His website hasn’t been really put up yet; there’s just a placeholder there right now, but expect more soon.

In the meantime, check him out online.

And there are only perhaps three people on the face of this planet who are allowed to call him “Pointy” so don’t you dare call him Pointy. It’s Mr. Rempis to you and you’ll damn well like it.