Abandoned?

Yes, I know this place looks abandoned, but really, it isn’t!

I have been noting down ideas for blog posts since I last posted and I am formulating some ideas, honest.

Sadly, several things in my personal and professional life have prevented me from having the time and most importantly the energy to write anything longer than 140 characters every now and then over on Twitter.

Actually, even that has proven too much effort some days, but I am far more active over on Twitter than I have been here of late, so please, do have a look at my Twitter stream if you want to know what inane things I am saying. There is even a sample of the recent ones on the right if you are reading this on a non-mobile device, which may, or may not, be a good thing.

In the meantime, please be assured that I am working on some new content for this blog, and I intend to start posting with a bit more frequency again now that things have settled down a bit at home.

Check back soon…

Can Bookmarks be Sexy?

I don’t know about you, but I have seen quite a lot of sites recently using little pop-up icons to represent the different ’social-sharing’ services, allowing people to let others quickly know how much they enjoyed the post they have just read (hopefully).

I have been using the great ShareThis service which I thought was nice looking, iconic and subtle. You do not see anything until you click on the nice green ShareThis icon.  However, this does mean you have to click on the icon, assuming that you know what it might do I suppose.

I did wonder how these other bloggers had got these little icons on their posts that popped up when you hover the mouse over them.  So, on one site, I viewed the source for the page and found a reference to SexyBookmarks.  Checking out the site I found it was another free (or donationware) WordPress plugin, giving you quite a few options for which services to include icons for. Nice!

I don’t think that SexyBookmarks has any tracking like the ShareThis service, but I do like the pop-up design of the icons.

So, which do you prefer?  I have included both below on this post, let me know, in the comments, which one you prefer to see.  And if you know a bit more about either service or use them yourself, please also let me know.   Thank you.

Update: Added twtpoll to make it easier.  Please vote and let me know what you think.

Why I Restored my Jailbroken iPhone (again!)

I bought my first generation iPhone almost a year after the original launch, only when I could afford to because O2 had drastically reduced the price without contract. Selling my old iPod 30Gb and my old mobile meant I could just about afford it.

Now, I have desperate geek-lust towards the iPhone 3GS, but there is no way that I can afford to get one at the moment. So I am resigned to using my old original iPhone for the foreseeable future.

This isn’t such a bad thing really, I love the iPhone as a device, and the OS3 software update went a long way towards making my iPhone more of a pleasure to use.

I regret not having GPS in the old iPhone. This is a pain because I would like to try out some of the apps that would track my route/elevation/speed via GPS when I go Cycling and also for tagging my photos.

Hardware issues aside, the key ’software’ features my 1st Gen iPhone was missing in comparison to the 3GS, and that I could do something about, were MMS (duh, Apple!) and video recording. Both of these, and of course a few other system level things, were easily addressed by Jailbreaking the iPhone.

With all the talk about the enhanced and new features for the 3GS iPhone, I really felt like it was time to redress the balance a little, and the only way I could do that with my 1st Gen was to Jailbreak it once more, and so I did. I have Jailbroken my iPhone twice before, either as Apple updated their iPhone OS, or as I decided it was time to restore it, so it was no great worry for me to Jailbreak it again after the update to OS3.0.

I got MMS working fine with the excellent but paid-for SwirlyMMS and was happily recording video on my original iPhone with the free Cycorder (much better in my opinion than the paid iPhoneVideoRecorder app, and I have paid for it!). Having video on my phone is a real advantage and great thing to have for catching the antics of my nearl2 and 4 year old kids. There is never time to get the video camera out, or charged, when they do something cute, or funny, that we want to remember. And a lot of the time I don’t want to carry the video camera around with me.

But the iPhone is almost always near me, or in my pocket, and so video is the one Jailbreak app I will miss more than anything else. I’ll miss it because I had to restore my iPhone. I just could not put up with the poor performance of my iPhone whilst it was Jailbroken.

The other times I had Jailbroken my iPhone, I didn’t notice any real performance hit, but this time was different. I don’t know if it was because of OS3.0 or something else I had installed, but this time my Jailbroken iPhone was crashing all the time, taking forever to start or re-start, acting slow and unresponsive, not responding to presses of the home button for 10-15 seconds; basically the whole experience felt like I was navigating my way through a sea of porridge in a treacle covered slow-boat.

The crux of the matter, in my opinion, is that OS3.0 is not optimised for my old model of the iPhone. Even after restoring my iPhone back to how it ’should be’ I have a sneaky feeling that Apple didn’t do too much to encourage people to hang on to their old hardware with the new OS.

I think this is why the Jailbreak experience was less enjoyable for me this time, but I am curious, it might just have been me. If you are reading this and you have Jailbroken your iPhone running OS3.0, especially if it is a 1st Gen model, please leave a comment and let me know how it went for you. Did you have a similar experience, or was everything fine for you?

Mac Quicktip: Very fast way to get a more detailed Airport view

I didn’t know about this tip, and as a Trainer I like to pass on the knowledge in the hope it will help someone, somewhere, have a better day.

So, the credit for this quicktip goes to Dave Hamilton from the excellent MacGeekGab in Epsiode 214:

I knew that on Mac OSX, if you click on the Airport icon in the menu bar, you would see the name of the wireless network you had connected to, and any others in range, plus a little padlock to the side to indicate if security was enabled on that base station. This is the standard view as illustrated on the right.

But what I did not know is that if you hold down the Alt (Option) key and click on the Airport icon you get more information, a bit like the screenshot to the right here.

This is useful in a number of ways, but in the MGG episode they were talking about connecting to multiple base stations with the same SSID (or Network Name if you like), and this extended info gives you the MAC address which will, of course, be different for every base station.

By the way, the ‘Alt key trick’ works in a lot of places on the Mac. Just try it and click on any menu, you might get a few nice surprises and quick access to things that are usually hidden away somewhere else.

Anyway, just wanted to pass that on to any other fellow Mac users who want to poke around and get more information on their system very quickly.

This kind of built-in additional functionality with just the press of a key is exactly why I love using the Mac OS more than any other.

Finally, a use for the ‘useless’ port on my MacBook Pro

I am fine with USB sockets, I hook up a 7 port hub and hang disk drives, a printer, scanner, iPod, iPhone and digital camera off of it. I even have a use for the Firewire port on my MacBook Pro (hereafter, mostly, referred to as MBP), that’s where my video camera goes. But there is a little trapdoor on the left side of my Mac that has puzzled me for a while. I knew it replaced the PCMCIA card slot that my old PowerBook had, and I actually used that all the time as a Compact Flash card reader.

But this new little trapdoor on the MBPs apparently opens into what is known as an ExpressCard slot. No, I hadn’t heard of it either! And, it would appear, Apple have given up on it fairly quickly, with the current iteration of the MBP now having a more obviously useful SD card slot.

Actually, the SD card slot is not that useful to me personally. My DSLR (the Canon EOS 400D) uses CompactFlash cards, requiring a separate card reader, which is another thing I hang off that USB hub I mentioned earlier.

However, today I finally got around to listening to Episode 211 of the always informative and really great fun MacGeekGab (MGG). If you like to get at all Geeky about the Mac, and you do not listen to this show, you are missing out big time. Subscribe to it in iTunes NOW! I really, really enjoy listening to this podcast and it has saved my Mac bacon many times, I love it, thanks Dave and John.

Anyway, in this episode of the Mac Geek Gab (and in others), Dave and John discussed the use of the ExpressCard slot with an SSD drive. A listener had contacted them to suggest using the SSD (fast access, no disk spinning up and down) as the boot drive for the Mac OS and all the applications. The listener had a 48GB(!) drive in the ExpressCard slot, and this gave him fast OS and Application start up times, whilst using the MacBook Pro’s internal hard drive for storing files, iTunes library, etc.

My head is spinning at the potential for this. Especially as I am a keen (but struggling) amateur photographer, so my iPhoto and Lightroom libraries are massive and not getting any smaller, and I am constantly fighting to retain the ‘10% free disk space’ holy grail on my 120GB internal drive.

In the MGG episode they mentioned the planned production of a 256GB version of this drive, which is going to be very expensive (I think they said about $900 or about £540), almost the cost of a new 13 inch MBP! I have just checked Crucial’s website and the 256GB 2.5″ version is £405. This isn’t the same as the ExpressCard version as far as I know, so we will have to wait and see on the pricing for those.

All of this is moot though, because I am not financially in a position to put diesel in my car for the rest of the month, let alone consider this kind of purchase, but the potential for this is fantastic for day-to-day use of the MBP. 256GB of fast ‘Flash’ SSD memory, in addition to the internal drive, is exciting this particular Mac Geek.

I am really looking forward to the development of these drives and hopefully the tumbling prices over the next few years while my MBP is still in service. I will be watching their development closely.

By the way, in researching this post (yes, I did do some research) I found a website all about ExpressCard development news. Check it out if you’re interested, here.

That’s all, I just wanted to share this while I was still thinking about it. If you read this far, Wow! and thank you.

How much does Twitter mean to you?

I am sure that hundreds, if not thousands, of other bloggers have gone in to the merit of Twitter, and how it can be used in every day life, work, etc. So what I wanted to say, fairly quickly, is how much it means to me.

What has caused a lot of the twitterers, tweeps, tweeple or whatever we should respectfully call a collection of Twitter users, shudder and evaluate the importance of the service to them, is the Denial of Service (DoS) attack on Twitter and Facebook yesterday, and which they continue to fight at this moment (some API features are still broken apparently).

My first thought “Twitter is down, I must tell people. Oh no, I can’t tweet, Twitter is down! Now what do I do?”. I felt a bit helpless so I Googled it, obviously, then blogged about it yesterday, even though this is a brand new blog, and I am the only one reading it…

About Twitter and Me

I view my Twitter stream a few times a day at the very least. If I am on a break at work, or lunchtime, or sometimes in the car park of the venue I am training in (if I get there early enough), I will check Twitter on my iPhone. That is, if O2’s data network isn’t down again, it has been really flakey over the last few weeks. Does this make me a Twitter addict? I don’t think so, from what I can tell, this makes me an average user of Twitter. There are far more manic minded people than me when it comes to Twitter usage.

On my iPhone I use the fantastic and free Twitterfon. This lets me favourite any tweet I want to go back to, if I want to read a tweet or more often a web page or article it links to, I can save it to read offline on my iPhone/Desktop with the fabulous (and free!) Read It Later account link, and I can Reply, re-tweet, and do a lot of the things I would do back on my Mac (where I use the excellent and resource-friendly DestroyTwitter).

All of this allows me to keep up to date with those people I think are worth following, major events by following news agencies and just general Internet memes or fads, in one place. And I like the place too, that’s what really helps. Twitter is easy to use, understandable and fun. I am going to sound really cheap as well because it is also free, at the moment, and probably will be in some form for the foreseeable future.

In fact, I used to check hundreds of RSS feeds every day, but now I hardly ever open up my feed reader. I just find out if someone is on Twitter, or generally I don’t bother to keep up to date with them. I have a Facebook account but find the whole thing messy, hard to use and unattractive to a great degree.

So there, as if anyone in the world gives a care, that is how I was affected by Twitter’s massive outage yesterday.

Try This
For more fun, have a look at this hashtag (if you don’t use Twitter, a hashtag is like a keyword that you add to your tweets, and then people can search on that hashtag and find all related tweets about that keyword). It makes for some humorous (and frankly, sad) reading: #whentwitterwasdown

Twitter under DoS Attack – right now!

Like a large chunk of the world’s Internet using population, I have been trying to get onto Twitter repeatedly over the last few hours without success, not even seeing a ‘failwhale’ message.  But a quick Google search reveals that apparently, Twitter.com is under a massive Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

No, I’m not sure what that is either, but this article helped to explain it a lot.  It was linked to from the Wired article that reported the Twitter outage this afternoon.  Just in case anyone was wondering why they couldn’t get their fix today!

Test Post

Hi, thanks for visiting, this is a test post as a placeholder for what will hopefully be my blog in future. Sorry it is not any more exciting than that at the moment!

Here is a slideshow of my photos on Flickr for now, please click the play button to get started or, for a better experience, go Fullscreen: