Organic Fail

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Seen at Chipotle. The other 75% are sprayed with radioactive pesticides.

Hack for free Starbucks wi-fi on your laptop (if you have an iPhone)

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If you have an iphone, you get complimentary access to any AT&T wi-fi hotspot. These hotspots are in several chains, including Starbucks.

The catch is, you have to browse through your iphone. I personally find this silly. If I have an iphone, and am paying for service, why does AT&T care whether I use my laptop or my iphone?

So I decided to figure out a way to use my laptop. The first idea was to simply fake my browser’s user agent to look like mobile safari. I really thought this would work, but no luck.

It turns out it’s even easier than I thought. You need to change your laptop’s MAC address to the same as your iphone and that’s it. Here’s how to do it (These steps are for OS X (and possibly linux). If you’re on Windows, it should be the same, but you need to find out how to change your MAC address online).

  1. Go to Starbucks or an AT&T wi-fi hotspot

    Open up mobile safari on your iphone and try to go to any webpage. You should be redirected to a page that asks for your phone number.

    Don’t fill that out yet. You need to get your MAC address on your iphone first. AT&T is nice enough to put it in the URL of the page you’re on. Scroll through the URL until you see something like MacAddr=00%3a2A%3a12%3aA5%3aE2%3a12 (Make sure you grab this one, not NduMacAddr)

    Write down that address somewhere, and change the %3a’s to colons. So it should look like: 00:2A:12:A5:E2:12 (6 hex couples)

  2. Go through the AT&T wi-fi activation.

    Now put in your phone number. It’ll then send you a free text message. Click the link in the text message and you should be able to connect to the attwifi from your iphone.

  3. Boot up the lappy

    First, turn off your Airport.

    Now open up Terminal and type:

    ifconfig

    There should be a group of 6 or so lines that are indented from en0:

    If you see this, but it says en1, that’s okay. Just change en0 in the next step to en1.

    Copy down the MAC address of your laptop (It’s on the line that starts with ether).

    Now type:

    sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 00:2A:12:A5:E2:12

    Make sure to change the MAC address to the MAC address of your iphone. You’ll need to authenticate and then verify that your MAC address has changed by typing ifconfig again.

  4. Turn on your Airport

    Turn your airport back on and connect to attwifi. If you don’t see it listed, go to “Join Other Network” and type in attwifi.

That’s it! Try to go to a website now on your laptop.

And hey, if it worked — I accept tips :)

Some notes and disclaimers:

Do these steps at your own risk. AT&T most likely doesn’t endorse this and they may get angry. I’m not sure what their reaction will be (but I’ll probably find out soon).

You can reset your laptop MAC address by either restarting your computer or doing the step above with your laptop’s MAC address. There’s no harm, though, in keeping it set to your iphone’s address.

Chase solved the financial crisis

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Chase has figured out how to recoup their losses, and it’s ingenious. Don’t give out money, but pretend like you did.

Let me explain.

I went to an ATM today and requested forty dollars. I don’t know if I’m the only one, but every time I’m at an ATM I have an irrational fear that it’ll screw up the counting and nobody will believe me when I try to correct the mistake. I always think this, but of course, it has never happened.

Today was worse. It said, “Please take your cash” and did not give me anything to take. I didn’t request a receipt, because they always end up in the trash two seconds later.

A woman saw my confusion and said, “Did it not give you your money? That happened to me. You need to make like 10 calls to your bank, a few calls to the number on the ATM and it’s all super annoying, but you’ll eventually get your money back.”

I went into the Duane Reade that houses the ATM (for those who don’t know, Duane Reade is like a CVS or Walgreens) and told the manager that the machine was broken.

He said, “Sorry, we can’t put a sign on the ATM. Chase doesn’t allow us to.”

I was stunned. Not only do I have to go through this hassle, but every person for the rest of the day will also get screwed.

Now, here’s the best part. The fact that you have to jump through hurdles to get your money back makes it just like mail-in rebates. There’s simply some percentage of people that will not bother or forget about it. At that point, it’s turned into free money for Chase. Woo! Financial crisis over.

I don’t actually believe this was their motive, but it’s quite ridiculous that they won’t allow employees to mark the machine out of order. Then again, are banks sleazy enough to have thought this through?

Cursor humping

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This is one of the funnier things I’ve seen happen with showing people’s cursors on a website. I decided to check the chat logs and noticed that there were about 50 instances of documented cursor humping happening within the firefly community.

Yes, the web has now been reduced to cursors humping each other.

If you’d like to see for yourself, go head over to firef.ly or you can also turn on firefly on this page (the switch to the right or by clicking here).

I’ll post any other funny screenshots people take

Firefly is in public beta

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I opened up the firefly install page today and now anyone can install it on their websites. So far it’s been going smoothly, with a lot of great conversation happening.

If you have a sec, please go to the Alley Insider article here and maybe digg it too :)

If you’re unfamiliar with firefly, you can visit the homepage at firef.ly

Alexa’s usability makes me cry

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I am no usability expert nor do I try to pass myself off as one — but Alexa’s new tweaks have made the site even more unbearable. I have been using Alexa out of habit, but no more.

1. They pre-populate their fields. Why? Do they really think this adds to the user’s experience? People are going there with a list of sites on their mind and don’t care what Alexa thinks are interesting comparisons.

2. I was marginally able to handle their pre-populated list because they gave a “clear” button that removed them. That pesky convenience has been removed. Now I have to manually remove each field before continuing with my graph.

3. Check your major browsers! Their site displays a broken layout in firefox 3. I’m guilty of not checking every browser when I create something, but I at least have the common sense to check firefox 2/3, IE, and Safari. Both on Mac and PC. It usually ends up with me writing a ton of CSS and javascript that is special cased.

How all this stuff passed through the levels of Q/A, testing, and developers boggles my mind.