Don’t forget to touch out.
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I was frantically searching for a long-lost piece of information last night, and I stumbled upon an old notebook. More than ten years ago I wrote this about a colleague, who has now shuffled off this mortal coil of quarter inch magnetic recording tape. I don’t think it’s fair to name him, so instead I’ll pick a name at random from the Adobe Photoshop splash screen.
Chris Cox must ask himself the following questions when any object comes to his attention:
1) Can I drink it?
2) Can I ask it out for dinner?
3) Can I back it each way?
Pay close attention to the Google pages. Thanks to Ashley for this.
The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.
Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:
Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.
BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!
Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.
iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.
Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.
FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.
TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.
I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…
I forgot to put my book in my bag today, and so bought a new copy of Before I Die by Jenny Downham in Waterstones on my way in to work.
Inside it there was a handmade, hand-written Valentines card - four felt red hearts and the inscription “to you, Happy Valentines Day, Don’t Forget To Be Awesome! Lots of love!”. Which was a bit odd. How did it get there? Does every copy of this book have this card in? Which teenage girl am I depriving of her card? And how much trouble could this have caused?
Today I am mostly playing with the BBC iPlayer, Flickr and YouTube on the free Boxee media centre software on my netbook and listening to Gaggle… and yes, thank you very much to the person who said I should stick to Pixie Lott. You know who you are…
Channel 4 used to show stuff like this - Robert Ashley’s ‘opera for televsion’ called Perfect Lives. In 1983 this blew me away. I watched every minute. I think I might have to get the DVD - even on YouTube it looks like the remastering has worked well.
Mind you, they also had Countdown. And now, ironically, New Countdown has become a regular fixture on the office TV.
If you want OS X running on your Lenovo S10 then a retail copy of Snow Leopard and the Snow Leopard Enabler are clearly the way to go. So far pretty much everything seems to work except sleep and ethernet (though I’ve not tried the latter) on my S10-2. Crucially, sound does work. The web cam even works in PhotoBooth if you crank up iChat first and tick the menu option to show video effects first.
I previously had a triple-boot thing with OS X, Windows XP Home Edition and Ubuntu Netbook Remix going on, but I realised there wasn’t much I wanted to do in Linux that I couldn’t do in OS X or Windows - so I decided to simplify it a bit and make the machine a bit more elegant. Instead of a text menu I would have a machine that would boot into OS X without delay unless I told it I wanted to go into Windows - as I will be using OS X almost all the time.
An easy, elegant way to switch between Windows and OS X is to use Apple’s Darwin bootloader - but when I wiped the disk and reinstalled both operating systems I found that the OS X bootloader couldn’t see Windows, only OS X. Configuring the Darwin bootloader seems to be a dark art, and there’s not much info on the web. But I discovered that the order you install them in seems to matter. Here’s how I got it working.
1) Wipe the whole hard drive clean. Do this by booting off your OS X install USB stick, use Disk Utility to partition the disk in 2 parts. I have a 250GB hard drive in my IdeaPad. I made the 1st partition 160GB OS X, HFS+ MacOS Journalled, using Master Boot Record. I left the rest of the disk blank and I did not install OS X at this point.
2) I booted off a WindowsXP Home Edition install CD and made a 15GB NTFS partition in the free space and installed Windows on it. (I found that making FAT32 partitions in Apple Disk Utility seemed to give me disk errors when it came to installing Windows, even if I made it NTFS later, so it’s best to get the Windows installer to make the Windows partition.)
3) I then booted off the OS X install USB stick again and installed OS X on the OS X / Mac-formatted 160GB partition.
4) When you reboot the machine will go into OS X unless you press F8 on startup - just after the Lenovo splash screen and just before the Apple logo.
And you get two logos - cursor left or right to choose the OS you want to boot from.
Next I plan to use some of the spare space to make a FAT32 disk I can use to swap data between OS X and Windows. And maybe leave a sliver free for Linux in the future…
The other day after 2 hours helping to keep a radio show on air, I stepped out for a breath of air and some shopping.
In Tesco’s a man was struggling with the coffee vending machine whilst barking into his mobile phone: “Yeah, right, the thing was Barry, I had a f***ing cluster bomb, right, yeah a CLUSTER BOMB, all ready and you’ll never guess what this c*** did…”
Then I walked along Strutton Ground. This post may seem like a gratuitous attempt to mention Gabby Logan, but it’s not. It’s a gratuitous attempt to mention Strutton Ground. I like saying ‘Strutton Ground’. Try it yourself.
Anyway, I was walking along the street and a gust of wind caught a market stall with lots of glassware hanging up. It fell over. Smash. Smithereens. Shards a plenty. (There’s another word I’m using gratuitously - ’shard’). Then a man in his 60s walked past barking about God and Satan and the other market stall holders (the ones not mourning glassware) parodied his gutteral voice and barked back that he should effing well be quiet.
There’s a street near Strutton Ground with an even better name. More on that soon. Continue reading ‘Random lunchtime oddness’
I have long dreamed of a neat, small computer which I called the MagicSlate and I was interested to read that this was one of the names Apple registered for their slate device. I even wrote a story about its developers. But that’s another, er, story.
But the iPad - it sounds like a sanitary towel for the late 20th Century, by the way - is no MagicSlate. It’s just a big iPhone. Without the phone. And not even a USB port as far as I can tell.
Steve Jobs has also dissed netbook users by saying they are “just cheap laptops”. Almost everyone I know has a netbook or has bought one for someone. And sometimes you need a cheap laptop and Apple laptops are not cheap. Apple could not make a netbook because there’s not enough profit in the hardware at those prices. According to BBC News his Steveness said:
“Netbooks aren’t better at anything - they’re slow and have low quality displays.”
Well my £245 netbook (running OS X, incidentally) has an LED-backlit display. Er, a bit like the iPad. And so much is on the web (and in ‘the cloud’) now that processing power just doesn’t count for that much any more.
One thing seems certain though - if the iPad is running on Apple’s own CPU, it won’t easily get hacked and ported to another make of device any time soon, if ever. But then why would you want to?
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