An audience of two

Tuesday December 11, 2007

VOIP on iPod touch
A report on the Unofficial Apple Weblog claims to have a working VOIP implementation on the iPod Touch. That's pretty awesome - being able to make phone calls from an MP3 player!

Presumably this means that a version for the iPhone isn't far away. Which could be very useful. Now I don't have too much of a problem paying what amounts to a pretty hefty sum (compared to what I was paying on my old contract at least) to AT&T every month, but these days I'm conscious of the fact that if I go over my "minutes" I could get royally screwed. This happened a few months ago - we had some pretty long calls and I was using my old cellphone simply because it had a way better headset and offered better mobility than the landline, and I'd never gone over my limit in the years that I'd had the phone. When the bill arrived it was a bit of a shocker. So the option to use something like Skype occasionally to avoid burning through my minutes would certainly be interesting. In fact I might go so far as to ditch the landline entirely; it annoys me that calls to Menlo Park cost 10c a minute, whereas calls to the UK using OneSuite.com only cost me 2c a minute.

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Tuesday November 13, 2007

Bionic Woman
I was watching the new Bionic Woman on TiVo last night and had to laugh. The bad guy was supposedly holding a conversation on an iPhone - while holding it upside down for the entire scene. Guess he had bionic hearing too.

So far the show is okay, nothing spectacular. The plots have been paper thin and they don't seem to have worked out how to show the "bionic running effect" properly. The 70s shows used slow-mo and that metallic sound effect, but in this series she just seems to be running at normal speed and then pulls off one of those riduculous 50 foot wire-assisted jumps.

Frankly if it wasn't for the smoking hot sister Becca (played by Lucy Hale) and the lack of new Daily Shows and Colbert Reports due to the writer's strike I'm not sure if I'd bother watching.

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Tags: bionic goof hale lucy woman

Saturday November 10, 2007

Just because it's winter doesn't mean I can't dress slutty
Finally using the iPhone's camera for the purpose for which it was intended - taking candid photos of girls in their underwear. I bet this gets my blog up the rankings pretty quickly :)

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Tags: candid photo thong

Wednesday October 31, 2007

Jailbreak!
Okay, I finally did it. I hacked my iPhone. Which makes it sound like I did something clever, but really it was nothing at all. There's a new web site, jailbreakme.com, that exploits a bug in the TIFF handling code to install the jailbreak hack. It takes two minutes, and there appears to be almost no risk of damage to the phone or voiding my warranty. All I did was visit a web site with Apple's buggy browser - if Apple have a problem with that, they are really going to get into a whole lot of trouble.

Two things convinced me to do it, though. The second thing was the fact that the jailbreak hack exploits and then fixes a security hole in the phone. With all the virus writers and bitter students around I figured that it wouldn't be long before a malicious hacker found a way to screw with my new toy, and that's the last thing I want. I won't touch Internet Explorer or LookOut since they are just hack magnets, and now it seems that Safari is no better. Bring on Firefox for the iPhone. Maybe now it's hacked I can install it?

If you want to hack your iPhone, just visit jailbreakme.com, scroll to the bottom and select "Install AppSnapp". After a few seconds Safari will quit and return you to the home screen. Maybe a minute later you'll see the "busy" disc in the centre of the screen, then it'll go back to the Unlock screen. Slide the slider and you're in. You'll see that iTunes is now on the left and there's a new icon.

Two tips: 1) Don't try to do this over EDGE. Make sure you're connected to a WiFi network. 2) If it doesn't work, reboot your phone and try again. Hold down the "home" button on the front and the "lock" button at the top until the phone reboots and you see the Apple logo.

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Wednesday October 10, 2007

Bitching about my iPhone again.
The iPhone includes a 2 megapixel camera. It doesn't take bad pictures (for a phone) even though its low-light handling is poor and it has no zoom or flash. It'll never replace my Canon Powershot, but it's great that I have been able to carry around one device and email the photos directly to Flickr.

Unfortunately, there are some huge issues with it, both concerning moving the photos to a computer. When you view them on the phone the pictures are in chronological order. But when I use the Microsoft Camera Wizard to transfer them to my laptop they get completely shuffled naming wise and it doesn't maintain the orientation correctly. The other problem is that it keeps locking up; the laptop says that it can't transfer the file and I have to reboot the phone.

The other thing that really bugs me is that there's no scrollbar on the web browser or email client. There is no quick way to skip to the end of a 250Kb message, which is insanely frustrating.

The inability to select a block of text to cut and paste is frustrating too.

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Monday October 01, 2007

Best. Video. Ever.
You said it, Apple. Permalink | | | | Comments [0]
Tags: apple different iphone think

Sunday September 30, 2007

Smart phone, Dumb users
I had to laugh when I read that someone is suing Apple for $1,000,000 over the $200 price cut. It reminded me of the infamous Pressdram V Arkell exchange:

Letter from the legal firm of Goodman Derrick & Co.
We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter. Mr Arkell's first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.

Response from the lawyers for Pressdram, publishers of Private Eye
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

There was no further response. It would be nice if that was the outcome in this case too, but sadly I doubt that's going to happen. Granted that I have no sympathy for Apple either; the way they have locked down the phone against third-party extensions is unreasonable. Not that this should come as a surprise; Apple wants to be a monopoly and wherever possible behaves like one. Their beautifully designed systems - iMac, cube etc. - are intended to be unexpandable appliances on proprietary platforms. It must have really irked Jobs to finally have to switch to Unix on x86.

So it should have come as no shock to anyone when all those hacked iPhones suddenly stopped working thanks to the 1.1.1 upgrade. The only surprise for me was that it took so long. Apple is fighting a losing battle there - the hacker community doesn't play by their rules - but they will keep on fighting, and that's why I'm holding off on modifying my phone for now. I'm no longer a fanboy hacker; I'm old and have kids, I need my phone to Just Work Damn It. That means accepting every bug fix release from Apple, even if the iTunes feature doesn't seem to work for me. Not that I'd use it - 99c is still 4X what's reasonable for a compressed downloadable music, but I seem to be in the minority there too.

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