The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘consumerism’ Category

(The fol­low­ing is not an April Fools spoof post. That sort of child­ish behav­iour is well behind me)

Like hello and what­not. And ting. See, I’m down with the kids, innit.

For a change, I have a legit­i­mate excuse for not post­ing any­thing here, my iMac died, twice.

I’ll spare you the tech bull­shit and briefly sum up; the hard drive died, it went off to be repaired, it came back, the hard drive died again 8 hours later. It went back for a 2nd repair, this time the drive was wiped, but still work­ing. It came back, the restore process was a mess, it took 3 days of fix­ing to get it back work­ing properly.

Deal­ing with Apple and their autho­rised repair cen­tre was straight­for­ward and easy, and here’s a help­ful tip: Always get the Apple Care on your Macs. Always. One seri­ous prob­lem or repair, it will more than pay for itself. With the prob­lems I’ve had, it has saved me a fortune.

My cur­rent iMac is my third in the last 6 years, an 18 month old, 27” quad core LED screened beast and hadn’t given me any trou­ble till now, but when it died, it really died, while I was using it. I watched as icons dropped off my desk­top, ques­tion marks appeared on the appli­ca­tion icons in the dock, and run­ning apps froze. I tried to restart my machine and when I did, the boot up screen showed noth­ing but a file folder icon with a ques­tion mark on it.

This is a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

I hope you never, ever see the dreaded, hor­ri­ble, ques­tion mark-file folder boot screen icon and may god have mercy on your soul if you don’t have Apple Care.

I phoned Apple, who con­firmed what I sus­pected, most likely the inter­nal drive had failed. They asked if I had a back-up. I did, but it was 2 weeks old.

My bad, I only con­nected my Time Machine drive when the reminder came up, every 10 days — I had ignored it a few days before. Very stu­pid and les­son learned, my Time Machine drive is now always on and always connected.

This all hap­pened on a Sat­ur­day and I had to wait until Mon­day for the repair shop to phone to arrange col­lec­tion. They could have done it on the same day, ie the Mon­day, but it wasn’t pos­si­ble on my part.

Long story short, they swapped out the dead drive for a new one, rein­stalled the OS and tested every­thing. It was deliv­ered back to me early the next week.

I was very happy to have it back and set about restor­ing every­thing from my Time Machine drive, which I was able to do, and I then began to fill in the gaps between my last back-up and the day of the crash, ie about a 2 week period of loss.

I was able to retrieve some recently pur­chased music via iTunes Home Share from another Mac of mine and I emailed myself all of the pho­tos I last imported from my iPhone, then reim­ported them into iPhoto. I keep a lot of my cur­rent doc­u­ments on iDisk, so they were eas­ily obtained as well. I didn’t lose any impor­tant data, I was lucky.

I pur­chased two appli­ca­tions from the Mac App Store that I had to rein­stall, though tech­ni­cally one of them was being installed at the time of the first hard drive crash. Can you guess where this is going?

When my hard drive died the first time, I was installing Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. Its a hefty 4.5gb down­load and it was tak­ing ages. The first thing I noticed as my sys­tem came apart at the seams was that the instal­la­tion appeared to stall.

I was only installing it so I could acti­vate the new mul­ti­touch ges­tures on my iPad, which requires Xcode 4 to put the device into devel­oper mode. That’s it, a very lame reason.

I started to rein­stall Xcode 4 on my repaired iMac, only this time, instead of doing the Mac App Store magic, it down­loaded the installer pack­age to my Appli­ca­tions Folder. I ran the installer and watched as it froze at about the same point it did before…and then my fold­ers and icons started van­ish­ing from my desktop.

Every­thing stopped work­ing, I restarted the machine and low and behold, I was star­ing at the ques­tion mark-file folder boot icon again.

Apple arranged to have it col­lected again the fol­low­ing day, as a pri­or­ity repair. Once the engi­neer had an ini­tial look, he phoned me and said he was able to rein­stall the OS and could see that the user data was gone. He said he would test the hard­ware and let me know the results, but on ini­tial inspec­tion, every­thing seemed fine.

Indeed it was, and after full and exten­sive test­ing, the machine was returned to me and this is where the real fun began.

I restored from my backup and this time it wasn’t as smooth. There must have been rem­nants of the pre­vi­ous restora­tion, because my Home Folder and login name changed, with a num­ber ”1” added to them, the sys­tem cre­ated a new iden­tity for me, con­structed from all my old files. I didn’t lose any data, what I lost were per­mis­sions and privileges.

There’s a rel­a­tively easy fix for this, via Disk Util­ity and the Repair Per­mis­sions com­mand, but that can only get you so far if you are booted up from the inter­nal drive. To really fix it, plus run the Repair Disk com­mand, you need to boot from the OS X instal­la­tion DVD. Boot­ing from that DVD is a very basic part of trou­bleshoot­ing and guess what, I couldn’t do it.

I tried every pos­si­ble way to boot from the DVD, I even spent nearly an hour on the phone with Apple try­ing to trou­bleshoot it. I just wasn’t able to get it to work. I could read the DVD, have the sys­tem recog­nise it as a bootable drive, I could even start the soft­ware on it to the point where it needs to restart and then zip, noth­ing, the DVD would spin for a bit, then stop, while I got no fur­ther than the Apple Logo boot screen.

I cloned the install disk to a flash drive, that didn’t work either. With help from Apple, I booted the iMac into tar­get disk mode, con­nected it to my lap­top via FireWire, but Repair Per­mis­sions was greyed out. I was able to run Repair Disk though.

The Apple guy (who was great, patient and very help­ful) said that I had 2 choices, send it off for another repair or he could send me a replace­ment installer DVD. His view was that if my install DVD was cor­rupted, that could be why it kept hang­ing when try­ing to boot and he also spec­u­lated that the same cor­rupt nugget of data was stop­ping the flash drive in the same place in the process. It made sense, was I decided to try the new DVD option, even though it would take a week to receive it in the post. Bet­ter that than box­ing it up again and hav­ing it gone for another week.

I thanked the Apple guy and felt dejected. And then I had another idea, I used SuperDuper to clone my entire inter­nal drive to an exter­nal, bootable, FireWire drive. It took 4 hours to copy over nearly 400gb of data, but in the end I was able to boot up my iMac using the FireWIre drive.

So my iMac is work­ing, my inter­nal drive is not mounted, I dove straight for Disk Util­ity. Repair Per­mis­sions was not greyed out, so I clicked on it and let it do its magic. This time, it ran for lit­er­ally ages and I could see it repair­ing count­less files and fold­ers. At the end of the process, I rebooted back to the inter­nal drive and waited to see if I could access every­thing with admin­is­tra­tor privileges.

I could. It worked. Happy days.

I still don’t know why I couldn’t boot from the DVD, but could read the DVD oth­er­wise and won’t know until the replace­ment DVD appears. If I can’t boot from it, it will have to go off for a 3rd repair, but if I can boot from it, I’m laughing.

But what about the ini­tial prob­lem and the sub­se­quent sec­ond prob­lem, both iden­ti­cal from my point of view?

I think in the first instance, they might have replaced my hard drive for no rea­son, on the basis that the paper­work instructed them to do so, rather than test­ing it to see if it would work again with a rein­stall. I don’t know this for sure, but I think its likely that the drive was only wiped.

The more thor­ough test­ing dur­ing the sec­ond repair revealed the drive was wiped and since the symp­toms of both crashes were the same, I am guess­ing every­thing else was the same too, but again its only a guess.

So what caused both problems?

The only com­mon vari­able in both sce­nar­ios is the instal­la­tion of Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. It can’t be a coin­ci­dence that it was being installed both times the hard drive went ka-blooey.

I men­tioned this to the help­ful Apple guy, who said he’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve searched on Google, I can’t find any­one else who has had a sim­i­lar prob­lem, but some­times things con­flict, soft­ware anom­alies hap­pen and they are not widespread.

Could I repro­duce this a third time? I don’t know and I’m not going to find out by try­ing to install Xcode 4 again. I don’t even want a 3 quid refund from Apple.

I just want my com­puter back…and I think I have it back now, but I’m not con­vinced just yet.

My iMac is the cen­tre of my life. That may seem like an over­state­ment, but actu­ally its not.

To say I have been a bit depressed by all this, now that would be an under­state­ment. I’ve lost sleep, hon­est to god, lost sleep from the stress of all of this.

If you don’t relate to tech and a dig­i­tal lifestyle, I’ll try to put it in a per­spec­tive you might appreciate:

The most expen­sive thing I own is my house.

The sec­ond most expen­sive thing I own is my car.

The third most expen­sive thing I own is my iMac.

The third most expen­sive thing I own died.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was put in a box and taken away by a stranger, twice.

The third most expen­sive thing I own spent the bet­ter part of 2 and 1/2 weeks, away from me.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was my only access to a life time’s worth of pho­tos, all irreplaceable.

You get the idea.

My iMac is my work­sta­tion, my pow­er­house for dig­i­tal heavy lift­ing, the cen­tre­piece of all my high tech kit and it was out of the pic­ture for nearly 3 weeks.

No joke, I had the same sick in the pit of my stom­ach feel­ing I’ve had when some­one close to me has died.

Now that I have solved the major issues with my iMac, I’m try­ing to con­vince myself its back for good. Its a trust issue thing and clearly my toys and I enjoy an unnat­u­rally close relationship.

And I said I wasn’t get too tech­ni­cal. Oooops

Update: Found THIS THREAD on the Apple Sup­port Dis­cus­sion Board, with many peo­ple who had exactly the same prob­lems with Xcode 4 instal­la­tion wip­ing their drive.

(If you’ve found this page because you sus­pect you’ve had prob­lems result­ing from try­ing to install Xcode 4 via the Mac App Store, I really want to hear from you. Please email me, my address is northlondonhippy@gmail.com)

Like hello and whatnot.

Another year has flown by and I’m already cel­e­brat­ing my anniver­sary of being the northlon­don­hippy, again.

And by cel­e­brat­ing, of course I mean writ­ing this.

Whoopeeee…

Seven years ago today I started my orig­i­nal web­site on Blog­ger. Its still there, though I moved every­thing to this, my own hosted web­site a few years ago.

Go me!

Back at the begin­ning, I posted quite fre­quently, mainly because I had noth­ing bet­ter to do.

Blog­ging sprouted from a rel­a­tively brief period of unem­ploy­ment , it gave me some­thing to do with my time, when I wasn’t get­ting high or gob­bling magic mush­rooms, which were legal at the time.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this with­out a men­tion of shrooms, did you? Shrooms played an impor­tant part in the early days and I was a reg­u­lar con­sumer of them. Since the gov­ern­ment tight­ened up the reg­u­la­tions, I’ve been with­out them. I miss them, a lot. Shroom ref­er­ence ends.

Flash for­ward to seven years into the future, to this very day and you’ll see that I hardly post any­thing, any more. There’s prob­a­bly more posts about my lack of posts, than any other subject.

I don’t even attempt to make excuses any more, I’ve just accepted that my par­tic­i­pa­tion here is spo­radic and ran­dom. I pop up when­ever I feel like it, I just don’t feel like it very often.

That’s not strictly true, as I seem to con­tinue to main­tain a run­ning list of top­ics I want to cover, I just don’t seem to get around to doing it. Then, what­ever the topic might be, becomes less inter­est­ing to me, or less rel­e­vant and I delete it from my list and it just never gets written.

I’m back to mak­ing excuses again. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

It would be eas­ier if I could just beam my thoughts directly to the inter­net, I think that’s com­ing as a fea­ture this sum­mer in the iPhone 5, but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to be start­ing that sort of a rumour.

I know I bang on about Twit­ter a lot, but I do spend a lot more time there than I do on my own web­site. If you did want to bathe in the weird thoughts flow­ing through my head on a daily basis, that remains the best place to do it. Though again, my par­tic­i­pa­tion is ran­dom and spo­radic. I con­sume far more than I con­tribute to Twit­ter, but I do suf­fer from infor­ma­tion glut­tony and tech addiction.

That’s prob­a­bly one of the biggest changes to my life in the last seven years, the amount of tech­nol­ogy in it. I’ve always liked tech and toys, but here in the future, they are more per­va­sive and use­ful than ever before and I find that I am always con­nected, always con­sum­ing media.

A typ­i­cal day starts with me pick­ing my iPhone up from the bed­side table, switch­ing off air­plane mode and let­ting it check my email. I put it in air­plane mode when I go to bed, so it doesn’t ding or buzz with new mes­sages, but I leave it on because it is also my back up alarm clock.

I come down­stairs and fire up my iMac, which is the hub of my tech­no­log­i­cal exis­tence. The hard drive in it died last week and its being repaired this very sec­ond. Don’t worry, I have a TimeMa­chine back up, so I don’t think I’ve lost very much at all, but I am miss­ing my 27” beast very much.

I’ve been using my lifeboat com­puter in the mean­time, an orig­i­nal black Mac­Book that I think is nearly 5 years old. While I’m thank­ful that I’ve got it to use now, its painfully slow, its got about 25% of the screen space of my iMac and the view­ing angle of the LCD screen is not very good. Five years is a very long time in tech termss and my Mac­Book is def­i­nitely show­ing its age. Its bet­ter than noth­ing, loads better!

Any­way, my nor­mal rou­tine with the iMac is to switch it on as soon as I wake up, read the papers online, along with a few other web­sites, check my RSS feed reader, keep an eye on Twit­ter, do some work on some other web­sites I work on, deal with pro­fes­sional and per­sonal emails, sync and charge my iPhone and con­trol my Mac Mini.

My Mac Mini is around 4 and a 1/2 years old and is also show­ing its age. I use it as my media hub, its con­nected to my flatscreen tv and my A/V amp. I use it to play music (streamed around my house to two Air­Port Express units, one in the kitchen, one in my bed­room), I also stream online radio sta­tions the same way. I use the BBC’s iPlayer ser­vice, I down­load and play­back videos from Bit Tor­rent, I use it to screen XVID films friends give me, or even just to play­back videos I’ve shot myself. It gets used a lot. I mostly con­trol the Mac Mini with a remote con­trol, or I use OS X Screen Shar­ing to remotely use con­trol it from the iMac.

My iMac is a pow­er­ful com­puter, I use it to edit video and I mainly use iMovie. I also record my own music, using Logic Pro and a host of exter­nal toys and musi­cal instru­ments that con­nect to my iMac with ease

Once I’ve done every­thing I have to do on the iMac, I might move over to the sofa with my iPad. I surf, use Twit­ter, keep up with my RSS feed, all in a relaxed, com­fort­able way, but that’s not all I’ve done with it. I’ve also used it to edit video, write blog posts and record music. Some of the music pro­duc­tion apps I have are truly amaz­ing, espe­cially Apple’s new Garage­Band app. Its easy to lose hours of your day just play­ing around with it. I’m also a secret Angry Birds HD addict, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

My iPhone is always with me and I use it for so many things, its really a Swiss Army Knife of a gad­get. Its my cal­en­dar, my con­tact book, my mobile Twit­ter machine, RSS reader, inter­net browser, still cam­era, video cam­era, music player, film and video player, nav­i­ga­tion device, com­pass, photo edi­tor, video edi­tor, news por­tal, note taker, audio recorder, gam­ing device, clock, weather cen­tre, torch, hand­held track­pad for my Macs, email client, ref­er­ence library, text mes­sage device, oh and its a tele­phone and video­phone too! It does even more than that, I’m just run­ning out of steam think­ing of it all.

My point to all this tech his­tory is that none of this was pos­si­ble 7 years ago, 2 of the devices I just men­tioned couldn’t have even been imag­ined then.

In 2005, I had a run­ning joke here about my brand new all dig­i­tal lifestyle, right around the time I bought my first iMac. Its no joke today, my life truly is all dig­i­tal. So’s yours. So is everyone’s.

They like to describe all this as “dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy” and that’s a pretty accu­rate term, as long as you don’t see dis­rup­tion as a nec­es­sar­ily bad thing. I don’t buy CDs any more, I don’t go to record stores any more, because that indus­try has been dis­rupted by the ease and avail­abil­ity of music down­loads. If you own a chain of music stores, you’re not going to like this sort of dis­rup­tion, but if you are a keen media con­sumer, you’re prob­a­bly pretty happy about it.

Tech­nol­ogy isn’t the only thing that’s dis­rupted my life in the last seven years, there’s also been some ill­ness and some death. When it comes to dis­rup­tion, noth­ing else comes close.

Both of my par­ents passed away since I started this web­site. My father was already ill when I started it, and his can­cer fea­tured fre­quently back in the day. Some­where, in the archive, is a post called “Dad’s piss­ing blood again” and I’m sur­prised it didn’t win any awards. He died before this blog was a year old.

My mother crossed over to the great beyond at Christ­mas, two years ago. Noth­ing fills you with the hol­i­day spirit like a bereave­ment on Xmas eve, and that applies to the future too, Xmas will now and for­ever be a reminder of her death.

While my mother had health prob­lems for years, her sud­den death was unex­pected. My father died slowly over the course of a year and we pretty much knew when his death was com­ing to the day. I last spoke to him two days before he died and I got to say good­bye. I didn’t have that chance with my mother.

I’ve become old in the last seven years, at least in my head I have. In my head I’m not 48, I’m “push­ing 50”. One of those posts I haven’t writ­ten is enti­tled “My unhealthy obses­sion with death” and I will get around to writ­ing it, mainly because I’m hop­ing that spit­ting out a life time of death obses­sion might help me move past it. Or not. Who knows.

Blog­ging is like ther­apy for me some­times, its a good way to try to work shit out.

I don’t really think I will ever work out my weird obses­sion with death, specif­i­cally my own. I’ve imag­ined my moment of death so many times, in so many ways, yet I know that none of it has prob­a­bly come close to what­ever hor­ri­ble fate awaits me, as it awaits us all.

Keep an eye out for my death post, it will be a cheery lit­tle num­ber, guar­an­teed to lift your spir­its and make you want to do a happy dance down the street.

The truth is that I feel expend­able, dis­pos­able and irrel­e­vant because I am get­ting old. Maybe that’s nor­mal. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal.

I can feel my body break­ing down, I dis­cover some new ache or pain on a daily basis. My joints creak, my mus­cles throb, my bones ache and I’ve been diag­nosed with a long term health prob­lem that requires daily med­ica­tion for the rest of my life.

Mid­dle age is a joy.

Mid­dle age is stu­pidly named. Either you are young or you’re old. I’m old. Phys­i­cally I am, but in my head I’m still 18 years old and full of all the hopes, ideas and dreams I had at that age. Sad, eh?

I’m the same per­son I was back then, I might move a bit slower and have loads more knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, but I’m still me.

And I still smoke weed.

That was one of my goals when I started blog­ging, to fur­ther the cannabis cause. I’ve been smok­ing weed every day, for a cou­ple of months shy of 30 years. I would qual­ify my use as a com­bi­na­tion of recre­ational and med­i­c­i­nal, though its cer­tainly more med­i­c­i­nal these days.

Weed should be legal and the fact that its not shows just how mixed up our cur­rent drug pol­icy has become. Cannabis can be so ben­e­fi­cial in so many ways.

Right now, in these dif­fi­cult and depress­ing eco­nomic times, cannabis is a cash crop our lead­ers should not be ignor­ing. A licensed, reg­u­lated and more impor­tantly taxed cannabis mar­ket would be a much needed boon to the econ­omy. Instead they would rather close schools, hos­pi­tals and libraries and let crim­i­nals con­trol the mar­ket. Its as fool­ish and short­sighted as it sounds.

I’m not going to bang on about it too much now, my posi­tion is clear.

I may not be as pro­lific as I once was, but there’s a giant archive of nearly 750 posts to explore. You might learn to love me, you might come to hate me, but I’m sure you can waste plenty of time here, if you desire.

So that’s it, my weird and ram­bling reflec­tion of the last seven years of liv­ing my life online, just for you. I’m always here, just a few mouse clicks away. Come hang out with me, any time.

If the first seven years are any­thing to go by, the next seven ought to be a real gas, man! Groovy!

Its true, I really do love take­aways. I have them quite often.

With my weird and uncon­ven­tional lifestyle and hours, there’s noth­ing eas­ier and more con­ve­nient than hav­ing a stranger bring freshly cooked food to my front door. With­out fail, I must have them at least 3 times a week.

For the last cou­ple of years, I’ve been using Hun­gry House to order my take­aways online. I’ve tried all the major take­away web­sites and Hun­gry House is my favourite.

Their web­site is easy to use, they offer a wide selec­tion of restau­rants that deliver to me, but most of all, I like their service.

Using Hun­gry House is a breeze, you just pro­vide your post­code and it returns a list of restau­rants that deliver to you. You can browse the menus to your heart’s con­tent, then when you choose one, you can put your order together quickly and easily.

You check out like you would on any shop­ping web­site, pro­vid­ing your deliv­ery details and con­firm­ing your order, but unlike other shop­ping web­sites, you can pay by credit card, or cash and reg­is­tra­tion isn’t required — though it does sim­plify the process if you’re going to order again.

Once you place your order, you receive the first of two emails, con­firm­ing the details of your order, but what really sep­a­rates Hun­gry House from other take­away web­sites is the sec­ond email you receive. That sec­ond email is sent when the restau­rant acknowl­edges and accepts your order, so you know that your food is being pre­pared. Hun­gry House mon­i­tor every order, so you never have to wait very long for con­fir­ma­tion that its all cool.

Hun­gry House offers user pro­vided reviews of the restau­rants as well, and they share the good with the bad. Their cus­tomer ser­vice is also very good, if you do have a prob­lem with an order, they are there to help and will make sure things are resolved to your satisfaction.

I really do use Hun­gry House all the time, I have it set up with both my home and work addresses. I can’t remem­ber the last time I tele­phoned an order through to a restau­rant. It would just seem old fash­ioned now.

You might have noticed, I’ve added an advert for Hun­gry House to the right side­bar of my site. I wouldn’t have put it there if I wasn’t 100% sat­is­fied with them.

I hope you try out Hun­gry House, I think you will be glad you did.

If you would like to check out their site, please CLICK HERE.

I just want to share a few obser­va­tions about the iPad, now that I’ve had a cou­ple of days to fon­dle mine. Believe the hype.

I’m not going to give you a full review of it, there’s already been count­less detailed run-throughs of the iPad from peo­ple who’ve had them for ages. I got mine on Fri­day, UK launch day, so I know I’m late to the iPad party.

The first thing I really noticed was how ridicu­lously thin it is, its easy to hold but a lit­tle heav­ier than you might expect. Its also easy to sit in a com­fort­able nor­mal posi­tion on the sofa with it propped in your lap, bal­anced with a light one handed grip.

What I fore­see is a mar­ket for lap-pillow like stands, that keep it at a com­fort­able view­ing angle, while let­ting it rest securely with­out using your hands. For watch­ing films and videos, some­thing sim­ple like that would be ideal.

The screen is bright and extra­or­di­nar­ily sharp, hi-res colour pho­tographs look unbe­liev­ably crisp and clear with vivid, deep colours. Video also looks good, though its all been in stan­dard def for me so far.

Web­sites fill the screen smoothly, there’s no need to pinch and zoom to see or read any­thing. Like the iPhone, the inter­face is respon­sive and smooth.

It is a fin­ger­print mag­net, more so than my iPhone 3GS, which shares the same oleo­pho­bic coat­ing, but doesn’t seem to be as notice­able because of its smaller size. Keep a microfi­bre cloth nearby, or a lens cloth from any cam­era shop.

Apple’s case (or some­thing sim­i­lar) is absolutely an essen­tial acces­sory. The Apple Case for iPad is very well designed, its sim­ple to secure the iPad inside it. It is very thin and doesn’t add much addi­tional weight, but pro­vides extra pro­tec­tion and flex­i­bil­ity, allow­ing you to posi­tion the iPad for upright, wide screen view­ing, or angling it on a desk for more com­fort­able typ­ing. Its folio-style, with a flap that cov­ers the screen while dou­bling as a sort of reen­forced kick-stand. Its very good.

There are already a lot of iPad opti­mised apps out there, I’ll men­tion a few quickly that have grabbed my attention:

- Wun­der Radio — an inter­net radio sta­tion aggre­ga­tor that seems to offer just about every inter­net sta­tion in the world. It also uses GPS to gen­er­ate a list of local sta­tions and it did very well find­ing them around me. The audio streams are high qual­ity, there’s iTunes tag­ging for sta­tions that sup­port it and the inter­face is clean and easy to use.

- Air Video — I know this one is on the top of many people’s lists and for good rea­son, it works very well. Air Video let’s you stream just about any video file from a Mac on the same net­work, con­vert­ing the video on the fly as you watch. I’ve streamed .avi’s, MP4’s and hi-def MKV’s from my Mac Mini to the iPad already with­out any lag or drop out. You do need to install a small piece of soft­ware on the host Mac to act as server and point it to your video direc­tory in the Finder, but once you do that the iPad finds the server auto­mat­i­cally. From there you nav­i­gate to your film or tv show, and after a very quick buffer time of 5–10 sec­onds, the video is deliv­ered to your iPad. I already had this one for the iPhone and a recent update made it iPad friendly too.

- News­Rack — has been my RSS reader of choice for a while on my iPhone, with its sim­ple inter­face and abil­ity to sync with my Google Feed Reader account, it works very well. Now opti­mised for the iPad, the same app is serv­ing dou­ble duty for me, at no extra cost. News­Rack uses the extra screen real estate to good effect, giv­ing you a left col­umn for your feeds and a large read­ing win­dow on the right side. You can also open links within the app.

- Pin­BallHD — bought this one yes­ter­day on the strength of the reviews and sales in the iTunes app store, glad I did. The graph­ics and game­play blew me away and am find­ing it very addic­tive. Haven’t really played or bought many games for my iPhone, but I can see how much bet­ter the iPad is for play­ing any­thing because of its larger size.

The iPad is prob­a­bly more dis­rup­tive than any­one has realised yet, its an entirely new class of device. Other man­u­fac­tures will be try­ing to catch up, this form of com­put­ing is going to explode in pop­u­lar­ity. It can replace so many dif­fer­ent devices, not just lap­tops or net­books, but portable radios, portable TVs and DVD play­ers, MP3 play­ers, portable game con­soles, e-readers and prob­a­bly a mil­lion other things I haven’t even thought of yet. It is so thin, so light, so easy to carry along with you, the temp­ta­tion to never put it down is immense.

Is it an essen­tial? No, not if you already have some sort of com­puter, but as lux­u­ries go, it pretty damn use­ful. If you’re think­ing about tak­ing the plunge, all you need to do is spend 5 min­utes using one and you will be ready to dive in deep.

YouTube user “grow­glass” has posted four videos of my beloved RooR NLH Deluxe bong being used in action. Check it out!

Remem­ber the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld?

“No soup for you!”, he would exclaim when he deter­mined some­one was unwor­thy of his tasty broth.

Ever won­der what hap­pened to the Soup Nazi since the TV show went off the air?

He works for Apple, reject­ing iPhone app sub­mis­sions. “No app for you!”, he exclaimed as he con­sid­ered an app from your favourite inde­pen­dent blog­ger and inter­net god.

I mean me.

I don’t get to have my very own iPhone app, the App Nazi says so.

Apple’s recent pol­icy change ban­ning inde­pen­dent blog­gers from sub­mit­ting apps to for pub­li­ca­tion on iTunes is still piss­ing me off.

And here’s the thing, it would still piss me off even if I wasn’t directly effected by their deci­sion. Its wrong to silence any voice, how­ever big or small. We all have a right to express our­selves, on any plat­form we choose, on any sub­ject we choose.

I chose to put an app together to bring my con­tent to the iPhone plat­form. Apple, as the provider of the plat­form, have locked me out.

I should have tried to pub­lish a fart app. Appar­ently, you can’t have too many of them.

It could be argued that my con­tent is already avail­able on the iPhone plat­form, via Safari, the iPhone’s browser. You’d win that argu­ment, its true.

All my app did was present this web­site, along with some other enter­tain­ing con­tent pro­vided and owned by me in a very iPhone friendly for­mat, via a cus­tom designed app. One tap on the northlon­don­hippy icon on your Home Screen and you’d be here, hang­ing out vir­tu­ally with me. No book­marks or URLs, just a clean, easy to read inter­face, with groovy NLH graphics.

It would have cost Apple pen­nies to host my free app. Its not like they’re strapped for cash, they’ve got bil­lions just lying around, doing nothing.

They could shut me up with a cou­ple of mil­lion. Or a free iPad.

But they don’t need to shut me up. Nobody seems to give a shit. I emailed a few tech web­sites and news­pa­pers with my sad tale of Apple app woe. Nobody bit.

Links to my pre­vi­ous entry did get tweeted around Twit­ter and buzzed across Google Buzz, or what­ever the kids are doing these days but I am still wait­ing for a groundswell of pop­u­lar sup­port which would push Apple to recon­sider this very fool­ish, point­less and spite­ful decision.

Apple began in Steve Wozniak’s garage, with Woz and Steve Jobs knock­ing together the first Apple com­puter. Blog­ging is not much dif­fer­ent than that, we’re all out here just knock­ing stuff together. Some make it into the main­stream, some toil in rel­a­tive obscu­rity, but most just seem to give up. Many blogs lie dor­mant after a brief, unsat­is­fy­ing flurry of activ­ity, but not this one.

I know I’m not the most pro­lific blog­ger, but I’m still here and have been for 6 fun filled years. Ok, they haven’t been that much fun, but I am still here.

I’ve been toy­ing with the idea of hang­ing up my hippy hat. This isn’t meant to be a threat or some drama queen strop. I’ve con­sid­ered giv­ing up before, but I’ve always man­aged to find rea­sons to keep going and ended up rein­vig­o­rated at the end of it.

Right now, I just feel tired.

The iPhone app was meant to re-inspire me and it would have, if only briefly. But isn’t that the way this works? You are con­stantly search­ing for new inspi­ra­tion to keep you going.

The weird thing is, for a niche blog that doesn’t get updated very often, I do some good busi­ness. When I look at a graph of my vis­i­tor lev­els, its always an upward incline. I make a bit of dosh too, with my lim­ited adver­tis­ing and solo affil­i­ate scheme.

I’ve recently been spec­u­lat­ing that would still be the case, even if I didn’t post any­thing new. There’s a lot of con­tent on my web­site, six years of spew­ing dri­vel will do that. I could prob­a­bly just let this web­site sit here, do noth­ing and still main­tain my reach.

Yes, I’ve been giv­ing seri­ous thought to giv­ing up and quite stu­pidly, mainly because Apple refused to pub­lish my app. Maybe there is no place for inde­pen­dent blog­gers in the world any more and Apple is just ahead of the curve. If your web­site doesn’t have a staff of 30, then no one takes it seri­ously and you might as well not exist.

What’s a self obsessed weed­head and middle-aged fail­ure at life to do?

If I knew the answer to that one, fuck­ers, I wouldn’t be sit­ting here typ­ing out this shit, would I?

My iPhone app was rejected, again. That’s twice in the last month.

I heard back yes­ter­day. This time, the app has been rejected on the basis that Apple have changed their sub­mis­sion pol­icy and no longer allow apps that “…are solely intended for an indi­vid­ual blog­ger with a small audience…”.

Isn’t that most inde­pen­dent bloggers?

I’ve been blog­ging for 6 years, my anniver­sary is next week. My web­site was never going to be main­stream, but that’s kind of the point of its exis­tence and the exis­tence of most blogs. We cater to niche audi­ence, but an audi­ence none the less.

Are my read­ers less impor­tant than the read­ers of the New York Times web­site? Every reader counts, whether its one thou­sand or one million.

Why does Apple hate me? Why does Apple hate my audience?

Why does Apple hate inde­pen­dent bloggers?

Let’s put this into a bit of per­spec­tive. I invested time and money into cre­at­ing an app that I thought would be of inter­est to my read­ers. The app is quite sim­ple, but well designed, effec­tively cre­at­ing an iPhone-optimised inter­face linked to all my online northlon­don­hippy related content.

There’s noth­ing wrong with my app, it all works smoothly, the design is clean and sim­ple, and the graph­ics are slick and pro­fes­sional. The price, there was none, I wanted to offer it via the iTunes store for free, I wanted to give it away to any­one who wanted it.

So why do Apple hate me?

They shouldn’t, I am an unashamed Apple fan boy.

Cur­rently, in the room I’m sit­ting in, there’s a 27” Quad Core iMac, a Core Duo Mac Mini, A Core Duo black Mac­Book, an iPhone 3GS, an iPod Touch, an Air­port Extreme, sev­eral Air­port Expresses, I use Final Cut Express and Logic Stu­dio and iWork, I buy apps, music and films.…

You get the idea, I own a lot of Apple kit and just because they hate me, doesn’t mean I won’t con­tinue to pur­chase their toys. iPad, you are next on my list.

And I don’t just buy a lot of Apple stuff, I rec­om­mend it to my friends and am respon­si­ble for count­less sales to many recent converts.

Apple should love me, like I love them, they’re like that girl who gave you a drunken pity hand­job once, but now looks at you with dis­gust when­ever you run into her sober and you keep hop­ing you’ll catch her a bit pissed again, but you never do. The desire is all one way and it only ever ends in bit­ter disappointment.

I praise Apple on my web­site and won’t stop just because they hate me. I can han­dle rejec­tion, I’m used to it.

In short, there’s noth­ing wrong with my con­tent, includ­ing all my weed related entries. Apple don’t have a prob­lem with cannabis and there are sev­eral mar­i­juana related apps avail­able on iTunes, includ­ing one that will direct you to the near­est med­ical dis­pen­sary. Mine’s appar­ently in Ams­ter­dam, last time I checked.

So why do Apple hate me?

Why does Apple hate all inde­pe­dent bloggers?

I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of nov­els, and was watch­ing with great inter­est to see if Apple would have a route for inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers to get books on to their upcom­ing iBook Store for the iPad, but now I am not so sure.

If Apple are cen­sor­ing iPhone apps to the point where they won’t con­sider sub­mis­sions from inde­pen­dent blog­gers, is there any point to me invest­ing more time and money devel­op­ing my eBooks for the iPad, only to have Apple change their poli­cies suddenly.

Maybe you think a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app is a bit point­less, maybe I do too, but that’s not what’s impor­tant. What’s impor­tant is free­dom of speech and expres­sion and if I wish to bring my mes­sage as an inde­pen­dent blog­ger to an estab­lished, pop­u­lar mobile plat­form, I should be able to do so, with­out any imped­i­ment from the cor­po­ra­tion who sup­plies the plat­form. What’s wrong with giv­ing the lit­tle guy a chance?

It would be like Sony ban­ning you from watch­ing home­made videos on your tele­vi­sion, only Sony Pic­tures DVDs would dis­play on the screen, but not your hol­i­day or wed­ding videos.

Maybe no one would have down­loaded my app, maybe mil­lions of peo­ple would have, but I’ll never know. Apple have killed it, dead in its tracks for no good rea­son other than on a whim they have decided to lock all inde­pen­dent blog­gers out of the app store.

Will Apple recon­sider? If peo­ple make enough noise they might. It wouldn’t be unprece­dented, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

All I wanted to do was expand my online reach, just a lit­tle. I invested time, I invested money, but more impor­tantly I invested my hopes and dreams on a lit­tle iPhone app that I could call my own. I would never have guessed that this lit­tle dream would become a night­mare of cen­sor­ship and unchecked cor­po­rate power.

Does Steve Jobs know about this? If he finds out, he’s going to be mighty pissed off.

I bet hav­ing a recipe as my top post con­fused a lot of my new vis­i­tors and that was the case until I posted this par­tic­u­larly unplanned foray into shar­ing my thoughts.

This is not a food blog. A recipe is some­thing out of the ordi­nary. Nor­mal ser­vice has now resumed.

As I sit here, typ­ing away, we are around 9 hours from the expected Apple Tablet announce­ment. Its pretty big news so I expect you’ve already heard all about it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about it too much.

I’ve got 2 pre­dic­tions, one is an easy one that’s prob­a­bly true, the other is a long shot.

Pre­dic­tion one: It will be a pre­mium prod­uct with a pre­mium price for early adopters. Yes, I mean it will be very expen­sive, but will be cheaper in a year.

Pre­dic­tion two: It will be called ‘iBook”, which used to be the name of one of their best sell­ing lap­tops. They already own it, so it would be an easy yet inven­tive choice. I am far less cer­tain of this one and will be pleas­antly sur­prised if I am right. I’ll also brag a lot about it too.

I’ve wanted some­thing like what’s expected today for years. Yes, I will buy one as soon as they are avail­able though I am guess­ing it will be like the orig­i­nal iPhone, sold is the USA exclu­sively for 6 months, then launched in the UK. That will be frustrating!

Today isn’t just tablet day. Had my mother still been alive, today would have been her 80th birth­day, but she missed it by around 13 months. I miss her, a lot.

At least Apple were nice enough to sched­ule their announce­ment on the same date as my mother’s birth­day, its a wel­come distraction.

So roll on 18:00gmt, when the big show starts in Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll be online, fol­low­ing the announce­ment live as best I can and I’ll be tweet­ing my impres­sions as well. That is, assum­ing the entire inter­net doesn’t come crash­ing down to a screech­ing halt under the weight of all that Apple Tablet hype.

Oh yes, that’s my last pre­dic­tion, Twit­ter is going to crash like Oceanic Air 815 as soon as Steve Jobs takes the stage. Maybe I should just plan on tweet­ing again tomorrow.

First of all, to avoid any con­fu­sion, there is no such thing as a “hippy crab”. If you go to your local fish­mon­ger demand­ing one, he will look at you like you are crazy.

You’re not crazy, are you?

I don’t nor­mally post recipes, but in the real world, I’m actu­ally a pretty damn good cook. I’ve been cook­ing for decades, hav­ing honed my skills by watch­ing TV chefs over the years and mix­ing and match­ing the tech­niques I’ve picked up along with com­bin­ing inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents. Its like art with food, only hand-eye coor­di­na­tion doesn’t play as big a part.

I’ve seen crab risotto on restau­rant menus, but I’ve never tried it. That doesn’t mean I can’t make a good one. And if I have noth­ing to com­pare it to, then it must be per­fect already.

What fol­lows is my made-up recipe for crab risotto, with help­ful hints along the way. I have cooked risotto many times in the past, so I am not a total beginner.

You’ll need:
– one medium yel­low onion, chopped
– 2 fresh cloves of gar­lic, chopped
– but­ter and olive oil
– 500g Arbo­rio Rice (its meant for risotto)
– 1.5 litres of stock (chicken or veg­etable)
– 20cl white wine (appx one glass)

For fin­ish­ing:
– 100g white crab meat (some­times called lump meat, its already cooked)
– 10g chopped chives
– 10g chopped tar­ragon
– juice of one fresh lemon
– cream or creme fraiche
– 50g freshly grated parme­san cheese
– 50g frozen peas
– 10cl sherry (not cook­ing sherry, the real stuff)

Here’s a photo of the main ingredients:

(Miss­ing: Yel­low onion, frozen peas, sherry, but­ter, olive oil)

You need a large sauce pan (or pot if you pre­fer) and you will only need the lid at the very end, so put it to one side.

Put the saucepan on the hob over a low heat and let it warm up a bit. Cover the bot­tom of the pot with a bit of olive oil and a bit of but­ter, basi­cally enough so when you add the onion and gar­lic, its cov­ered and coated with it. You don’t need to use extra vir­gin olive oil, cheaper oil is fine. Extra vir­gin is cold pressed, so its a bit point­less to use when you are going to heat it up. Save it to dress your salad!

Sweat the onions and gar­lic until they are soft, ten­der and a bit translucent.

While the onions and gar­lic are cook­ing, mix up your 1.5 litres of stock. I use Swiss Bouil­lon Veg­etable Stock, but you can use any­thing one that you like. You can do this in a sec­ond saucepan, but my method is to mix 500mls at a time in a pyrex mea­sur­ing jug and an elec­tric kettle.

You can’t just use any rice for risotto, Arbo­rio is the best. The rea­son is the high starch con­tent, which is what makes it thicken.

Once the onions and gar­lic are soft, turn the heat up high and add the 500g of Arbo­rio Rice to the pot, stir­ring con­tin­u­ously, so it doesn’t burn, for around 2 min­utes. You want the rice to be infused with the flavours and oil.

After 2 min­utes, lower the heat and then can begin to add your hot stock. The nor­mal advice is to ladle it in grad­u­ally from a sec­ond pot, and as the rice absorbs it, add a bit more, but I don’t do it that way. Instead I add the stock a 1/3 at a time, in 500ml incre­ments. The heat should be on lower, so the stock simmers.

Whether you add the stock in a lit­tle at a time, or in stages, its impor­tant you keep on stir­ring. Also add the 20cl of white wine. From here, it will take about 20 min­utes for the rice to cook and for the tex­ture to become creamy and sauce-like.

Once the rice is cooked, give it a lit­tle taste to see if it has the cor­rect con­sis­tency. If it is still too firm, cook it longer, but the rice should not become too mushy either. Al dente is what I am look­ing for, it should have a lit­tle bite, but not be too hard or soft. You’ll know it when you taste it. That’s the basis for all risotto recipes, from here you can mix in what you like.

Now, time to add the addi­tional ingre­di­ents to fin­ish the dish. Add the crab meat and stir it in, fol­lowed by the lemon juice. The fresh white crab meat is the one lux­ury ingre­di­ent and I’ve used Cor­nish because I know it is sweet and very tasty. You could eas­ily used tinned, or a mix of brown and white meat.

Once its all mixed through, add the frozen peas, they will quickly defrost and heat up. Then add the juice of one fresh lemon and the sherry and mix them in.

Time for the fresh herbs, toss the tar­ragon and chives into the pot and stir them in too. You can chop the tar­ragon with a sharp knife, but its rec­om­mended you use a pair of kitchen scis­sors to cut the chives.

Finally, add a large spoon­ful of the creme fraiche and a the grated parme­san cheese and stir some more. Put the lid on the pot, switch off the heat and let it sit for a few min­utes, so every­thing is at a nice even tem­per­a­ture. Give it a final taste, to check the sea­son­ing. I’d add freshly ground black pep­per at this stage, and salt only if I thought it really needed it. With the cheese, crab and stock, the salt will prob­a­bly be OK, I don’t use much salt when I cook, so its up to you.

The dish is now fin­ished and ready to serve, you can hold back some chives and grated cheese to gar­nish the top once its on the plate.

Serve it with a fresh green salad and warm crusty bread. Yummm.

And that my friends and hip­py­fans is Hippy Crab Risotto. If you cook it up your­self, email me and let me know how you make out! Enjoy!

I’ve had my geek on for the last week. I suc­cess­fully updated all three of my Macs to Snow Leop­ard and I swapped my iPhone 3G for the new 3GS.

Snow Leop­ard
——————–
The upgrades were very smooth and sim­ple, though I did have some hard­ware trou­ble with my three year old Mac Mini. The Snow Leop­ard instal­la­tion DVD would not mount in the Super­Drive, instead it would try to read it, then spit it out. A healthy dose of canned, pres­surised air sprayed into the DVD slot cured it and I was able to com­plete the installation.

The changes with Snow Leop­ard are sub­tle, but wel­come. Expose and Stacks are notice­ably improved and more use­ful, the Finder tweaks are also quite cool, espe­cially the icon siz­ing and pre­view func­tions. Mainly, every­thing is a lot faster, start-ups, shut­downs and espe­cially sleep­ing and wak­ing. When I wake up my iMac now, it recon­nects to my net­work almost instantly.

The best thing is the amount of hard drive space I got back on each com­puter, around 10-12gb. Stream­lin­ing is a good thing!

I bought the fam­ily pack ver­sion of Snow Leop­ard, which cost £39, so that’s thir­teen quid per com­puter. A bargain!

I haven’t had any seri­ous issues so far, all of my reg­u­lar soft­ware is work­ing fine. Safari seems espe­cially fast and launches like a rocket. Oh and maybe I’m crazy, but the screen seems sharper, like they’ve improved the graph­ics card dri­vers, or the way it ren­ders images, I don’t really know.

iPhone 3GS
—————–
I’ve had it in the back of my head that if I didn’t get a new iPhone by the end of the sum­mer, I would leave it until next July. I’ve tried to buy one a cou­ple of times, but they haven’t been in stock. They are appar­ently still in great demand.

I decided that if I was going to do this, I would buy the iPhone out­right, get­ting it on Pay As You Go, rather than get­ting it as a con­tract upgrade. By doing it this way, I will then be eli­gi­ble for a sub­sidised upgrade next Sum­mer, when the next model comes out.

What finally pushed me towards act­ing is a friend of mine lost his iPhone 3G and needed to replace it. O2 wanted silly amount of money from him for a new one and he offered to buy mine. I agreed, if I could find a black, 32gb 3GS on PAYG.

O2 didn’t have any, the Car Phone Ware­house didn’t have any, but the online Apple Store said they were ship­ping them on 5 days delay. I went ahead and ordered it last Tuesday.

It shipped on the Thurs­day and arrived in my hot lit­tle hands on the Fri­day. Wow, that was fast!

Swap­ping phones was an absolute breeze. I popped my con­tract SIM out of the old 3G iPhone, then popped it into the new 3GS. I con­nected the 3GS to my iMac and it instantly appeared in iTunes. It was acti­vated in sec­onds, then offer­ing to restore it from my most recent back-up, done an hour before. It restored and synced my media quickly. It was set up just like my old iPhone, even my apps were in the same places.

I did have to re-enter a few pass­words for email accounts and tweak a few set­tings, but I would say 98% of it hap­pened automatically.

Wip­ing the old phone took longer than set­ting up the new one. The old iPhone switched on and worked with­out a SIM card and I was able to reset all set­tings with a cou­ple of clicks. Be warned, it takes around 2 hours to wipe a 16gb iPhone.

So what do I think of my new iPhone 3GS?

I’ll say this right now, it is not an essen­tial must-have upgrade. I’ve gained a few use­ful and wel­come fea­tures and a lot of speed, but that alone is not worth the money.

The increase in speed is obvi­ous, the entire phone is faster and more respon­sive. Apps launch almost instantly, there’s no lag at all.

The video cam­era is good, not great, but bet­ter than no video func­tions at all. The tap-to-focus fea­ture is very cool and really works. The com­pass is also a nice thing to have, espe­cially if you use the Map app to get around on foot, it really helps to ori­ent your­self in new surroundings.

And who wouldn’t want extra storage?

I’m sure I will sell my 3GS next sum­mer when the next iPhone upgrade comes, it will still have con­sid­er­able value then. If the 3GS is con­sid­ered an evo­lu­tion­ary upgrade, then next sum­mer hope­fully we will see a rev­o­lu­tion­ary jump in iPhone tech­nol­ogy. At least, that’s what I’m gambling!