The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category

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!

Here are 3 videos I shot and edited on my iPhone 4, using the cam­era app and iMovie. I also used an app called Cin­ema FXV to adjust lev­els and add video effects.

I was test­ing the kit more than any­thing else. All three were uploaded via the YouTube web­site, so they are all 720p, but to see them at that res­o­lu­tion, you’ll need to go to YouTube. The embed­ded ver­sions here are smaller.

Oh and all the videos are of my cats. They’re all going to need equity mem­ber­ship after this.

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.

Happy New Year fuckers!

I hope you’ve all bought new cal­en­dars and you aren’t still writ­ing 2009 on your cheques.

Do peo­ple still write cheques?

I do, some­times, but that really doesn’t have any­thing to do with any­thing, so I’ll swiftly avoid the diver­sion in that dead end direction.

Instead, I’ve come to share the lat­est news from the land of your favourite north London-based hippy. Its actu­ally kind of big news.

Dig this, I sub­mit­ted “the offi­cial northlon­don­hippy iPhone app” to Apple yes­ter­day, it should be avail­able on the iTunes store very soon for your mobile surf­ing pleasure.

This isn’t one of my lit­tle funny wind-ups, its an hon­est to god, actual app that runs natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How cool is that?

On the hippy’s cool-o-meter, its off the fuck­ing scale of cool­ness into a brand new realm of cool that has yet to be dis­cov­ered by nor­mal folk. Once the app is avail­able, that new realm of cool will be yours for the taking.

The app deliv­ers in an iPhone friendly for­mat, all of my inter­net con­tent. If I pub­lish some­thing, it will mag­i­cally pop up on the app. You will receive my lat­est posts from this web­site, as well as hav­ing easy access to my busy Twit­ter feed. I’ve also included my Twit­Pics and YouTube videos, which are all eas­ily acces­si­ble inside the app.

How much would you pay for a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app?

Really? I kind of expected that, which is why it will be avail­able to down­load for FREE. That’s a price I’m sure you can afford.

My aim is to make this app the num­ber one northlon­don­hippy iPhone app in the world. I don’t think it will be very hard to do, as it will be the only northlon­don­hippy app avail­able, at least offi­cially. I’m sure all the other kids will be cre­at­ing their own ver­sions to com­pete with mine.

Ah-hem.

I don’t want any of you to think I went off and learned how to write code for an iPhone, because I didn’t. I used a web­site called www.appmakr.com which auto­mated the process to such a degree that even a moron like me could do it. If you need an app made for the iPhone from RSS feeds, you could do a lot worse than try this site out.

I will of course, reserve final judge­ment on App­Makr until I see my fin­ished app on my own iPhone, but so far I am very happy with the ser­vice they pro­vide. You will be too once you are rock­ing my app on your mutha­fuckin’ iPhone.

Keep watch­ing for my announce­ment con­firm­ing that my app is live on iTunes. Until then, you can join me on some ten­ter­hooks as I try to patiently wait for Apple’s approval process peo­ple to what­ever voodoo that they do.

While I am quite pleased about my app, I am less excited about my birth­day this month. Is there a law that says you have to have birth­days? Can we get it repealed?

Some years I am not too both­ered about being another year older, but this year is not one of them.

I sup­pose a lot has to do with the awk­ward­ness of my impend­ing age…forty-fucking-seven. Its an odd num­ber in more ways then one. Mainly, it marks my decent into my “late forties”.

I don’t like the word “late”, it makes me think of death. I think about death enough already, I don’t need stu­pid words tacked on to my age to remind me that the mor­tal coil is get­ting dis­tinctly shorter every year.

My bones tell me, my mus­cles tell me, my world weary expres­sion tells me, all pretty much on a daily basis. I am plumb­ing the depths of mid­dle age.

I’ve been con­tem­plat­ing hav­ing my very own mid-life cri­sis, but I can’t seem to set­tle on what form it will take. On the menu are:

- a grown-up gap year to trek through the Andes
– a hair trans­plant
– 3 months of Swiss shin stretch­ing
– a small, red, con­vert­ible sports car
– a sex­u­ally expe­ri­enced 19 year old girl on the side
– a men­tal breakdown

I reckon to make it a proper mid-life cri­sis, I need to chose at least 3 things off that list, then pur­sue them with gusto.

Trekking any­where is out, because it sounds too much like hard work.

A hair trans­plant just sounds messy and expen­sive and for what? To look like Elton John? No thanks.

If I was going to have my shins stretched, I should have done it 20–30 years ago, but it didn’t exist back then. I don’t think I am going to live long enough to make the pain & suf­fer­ing worth it. You only gain a cou­ple of inches in height any­way, so screw it, I’d still be short.

The lit­tle red con­vert­ible sports car is cliche and I don’t really like red as a colour for a car. Unfor­tu­nately, because of my age, red is the only colour a car dealer will sell me, at least for a 2 door rag­top. I’ve checked, its a car dealer bylaw, right their in their charter.

Does it all make sense now? That’s why you only ever see bald, fat middle-aged guys in red Fer­raris (or Corvettes if you are state­side). And all this time, you thought they were choos­ing the colour. Now you know, its the law.

The nine­teen year old girl seems on the sur­face to be an easy option and if I was a mem­ber of the Rolling Stones they would be queu­ing up at my door, but I’m not, so they’re not. Besides, 19 year olds haven’t lived enough to be inter­est­ing, so unless I can cram a 50 year old’s brain into their 19 year old body, I don’t see much point. And if I am hon­est, the only way I am going to get a hot lit­tle 19 year old is to rent one for an hour. I cer­tainly couldn’t afford the care and feed­ing of one full time and I am a hippy on a bud­get, so this is out too.

A men­tal break­down? Don’t I mainly have them on the inter­net or as it is oth­er­wise known, a run­ning blog.

This web­site is my ther­apy, which I guess makes all of you my shrinks. Every time I ask a ques­tion, you just have to say “well, what do you think?” Go on, its easy and I just saved you seven tedious years of uni­ver­sity and med­ical training.

Email me for your cer­tifi­cate or degree from the Uni­ver­sity of North Lon­don (hippy). That and a pound will get you a ride on a bus.

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!

I flirted with Twit­ter for around 6 months before I prop­erly signed up and started tweet­ing. I didn’t really get it at first, which is not unusual, for it has become a vir­tual sub-culture on the inter­net, with its own rules and eti­quette, that must be observed if you wish to play a part.

By rules, I don’t mean any­thing offi­cial, per­haps con­ven­tions or an infor­mal code of prac­tise would be more accu­rate, but for sim­plic­i­ties sake, I’ll stick to “rules”.

As I’ve used Twit­ter, I’ve devel­oped my own set of rules, or rather they’ve evolved as I’ve learned bit by bit what works for me.

And that’s what I believe is the key to Twit­ter, learn­ing what “works for you”. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple use it in dif­fer­ent ways and I’m going to share few things I’ve picked up since I started tweeting.

Fol­low­ing people:

At first, I really didn’t know who to fol­low beyond @wossy and @stephenfry and while they are both enter­tain­ing and pro­lific tweet­ers, it wasn’t enough to make Twit­ter worth my time. And its one thing fol­low­ing celebri­ties, they expect your atten­tion and ado­ra­tion, but how do you find other peo­ple to follow?

I was a bit shy about fol­low­ing peo­ple at first, after all you are choos­ing to learn a great deal about some­one who is a ran­dom stranger on the inter­net, but I’m far less so now.

When I started, I only really fol­lowed peo­ple who fol­lowed me first. Silly, eh? Don’t be afraid to fol­low some­one if you want to, even if their updates are pro­tected with a pad­lock. Mostly, that’s to keep out spam­mers and porn­bots, not gen­uine peo­ple like you. Occa­sion­ally, an account is truly pri­vate, but I’ve yet to per­son­ally encounter one.

Nearly all of us are on Twit­ter because we want to be fol­lowed. And who wouldn’t want some cool rockin’ hippy like me trail­ing them in cyber­space? Now tell me, what colour is your thong today?

Unfol­low­ing:

Occa­sion­ally, I unfol­low some­one and if it is you I unfol­lowed, I don’t mean any dis­re­spect. The biggest rea­son I unfol­low peo­ple is they tweet too often and its mean­ing­less crap — and that’s my job on Twitter!

Recently, I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple because of the con­tent of their tweets. I’m rarely offended, so if you man­aged to offend me, you’ve said some­thing extremely loath­some. And I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple who’ve signed up for adver­tis­ing tweets — I don’t want your stream to be inter­rupted by a word from YOUR spon­sor. It reduces Twitter’s value for everyone.

Fol­low­ers:

Its not a num­bers game. Don’t be suck­ered into think­ing that it is.

At first, I was con­cerned about how many fol­low­ers I had, and what peo­ple would think of me, if I didn’t have many. I soon learned the num­ber of peo­ple fol­low­ing you doesn’t mat­ter as much as the qual­ity of your fol­low­ers. And if the qual­ity of your tweets is high, you will attract fol­low­ers soon enough.

If you have a smaller num­ber of like-minded peo­ple fol­low­ing you, that beats mil­lions of ran­dom fol­low­ers any day.

If I cared about the num­bers, I’d let all the spam­mers and mar­ke­teers con­tinue to fol­low me, but I don’t — I block them. If I did leave them in place, it would prob­a­bly dou­ble my num­ber of followers.

If you fol­low me, I won’t auto­mat­i­cally fol­low you back. I might fol­low you, but only after I’ve had a look at your pro­file to see if your style of tweets would be inter­est­ing to me. If I don’t fol­low you, please don’t be offended. I only take a quick look and then make a snap deci­sion. Some­times I get it wrong.

And if you want me to fol­low you, just send me an @ mes­sage and I will. There are too many “online mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists” who can help me make money on Twit­ter try­ing to fol­low me, or girls who want to show me their sexy pri­vate pic­tures, for it to be sen­si­ble to auto­mat­i­cally fol­low back.

Find­ing people:

I stum­ble upon new peo­ple all the time, in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Some­times, some­one using a hash­tag I’m track­ing will catch my attention.

I often look at who other peo­ple are fol­low­ing or fol­lowed by as well. And on occa­sion, I see some­one I’m fol­low­ing exchang­ing @ mes­sages with some­one and while fol­low­ing the con­ver­sa­tion thread, the new per­son catches my attention.

A lot of peo­ple think #fol­lowfri­day is another good way to find new peo­ple, as its the day to rec­om­mend new peo­ple for you to fol­low. I have to be hon­est, I still don’t really get the eti­quette of the whole thing. To me, every one of the nearly 500 accounts I’m fol­low­ing are worth it, or I wouldn’t be fol­low­ing them. So I choose peo­ple to rec­om­mend, know­ing I’ve prob­a­bly unin­ten­tion­ally left some­one very wor­thy out, or I’ve embar­rassed some­one by rec­om­mend­ing them. Clearly, I’m too neu­rotic to be play­ing in pub­lic with strangers.

My tweets:

I make a lot of jokes, or at least I try to, but some fall flat on their faces. I am occa­sion­ally seri­ous, sin­cere, angry (more than occa­sion­ally), but mostly I am sar­cas­tic with a dash of irony.

I tend to treat Twit­ter like one giant open-mike night and let my inner-comedian run wild. If you worked with me or hung out with me in per­son, it wouldn’t be much dif­fer­ent, only I would type less.

The impor­tant thing is I don’t tweet any­thing that I would be embar­rassed or ashamed of later. I’m polite and friendly to oth­ers, but most impor­tantly I am true to myself.

It helps that I’ve blogged a long time and have learned how much of myself to share with the wider world. Too fuck­ing much!

DM’s and @ messages:

I try to reply to all I receive, as long as you are not offer­ing me a free Mac­Book Air or telling me how to get 16K fol­low­ers in a week, and make money doing it!

If I haven’t replied to your mes­sage, its because I prob­a­bly missed it. And Twitter’s not per­fect, as some mes­sages and tweets get missed out from client to client. I know this because I use a vari­ety of meth­ods to read my tweets and mes­sages and I can see that some­times things aren’t exactly the same from client to client or device to device.

Twit­ter is fast mov­ing plus I keep weird hours most of the time so I do occa­sion­ally miss things.

If its impor­tant, mes­sage me again — I’d rather have your mes­sage twice, then have you think I was ignor­ing you.

I’m happy to hear from any­one, espe­cially if you’re in Nige­ria or a mem­ber of the US mil­i­tary in Iraq and look­ing to trans­fer large sums of cash into my bank account.

Invest time

You need to prop­erly invest time inter­act­ing on Twit­ter. You can’t just send the same tweet over and over, sell­ing your prod­uct or ser­vice. Peo­ple won’t pay atten­tion, they’ll clas­sify you as noise.

Start out slowly, grad­u­ally build­ing your net­work. Give more than you receive on Twit­ter, if you can answer someone’s ques­tion accu­rately, then do it. Don’t be self-centred or self-serving — peo­ple can smell it a mile off and will avoid you.

Know what you want from Twit­ter:

This is the best advice I’ve found on using Twit­ter, so I will pass it along. Think about what you want to get out of Twit­ter and be focused on that.

If you want to extend your social net­work, or use it to pro­mote a prod­uct or ser­vice, go for it, but do it well. There are many guides avail­able on how best to use Twit­ter for your busi­ness. Heed their advice.

I won’t lie, I joined to pro­mote my web­site and “brand”. Are you shocked? Sad­dened? Will you not look upon me with the same ado­ra­tion you had for me yes­ter­day? I’m crushed.

Its worked, I’ve seen a dra­matic upward spike in vis­i­tors to my site since I started tweet­ing regularly.

What I didn’t expect but found any­way, is a com­mu­nity of extremely nice, kind, help­ful, gen­uine people.

I’m quite reclu­sive by nature and more than a bit of a loner, but I find myself exchang­ing @ mes­sages with peo­ple quite fre­quently. Its an unan­tic­i­pated, yet wel­come ben­e­fit of being a mem­ber of the Twit­ter community.

Now, I won­der how many of them would loan me some money? I don’t need a lot, just a few grand to get this shy­lock off my back. You don’t want to see a cer­tain north Lon­don based hippy with shat­tered knee-caps, do you?

I’m angry.

I’m pissed off.

I’m hop­ping, fuck­ing mad.

Apple showed off the new iPhone 3GS a cou­ple of days ago and it is a desir­able piece of kit. While not a huge leap in tech­nol­ogy, the new hardware-based fea­tures of this new model make me want one.

You’d think, in the mid­dle of a deep reces­sion, that spend­ing my hard earned cash would be easy.

Think again.

O2, the mobile net­work here in the UK that has exclu­sive rights to sell iPhones are being quite fool­ish about upgrades to exist­ing cus­tomers like me. They seem to think its sen­si­ble for me to take out a 2nd mort­gage to upgrade to the new model.

Exist­ing sub­scribers are gold dust to com­pa­nies like O2 or at least they should be, but it seems this time that is not the case.

In the cell phone indus­try, net­works refer to it as “churn”, or the loss of cus­tomer to other networks.

There was a lot of “churn” here in the UK last sum­mer, when loads of peo­ple dumped their exist­ing net­works to move to O2, so they could have an iPhone 3G. I was amongst that large group of switch­ers myself.

I love my iPhone, its eas­ily the coolest device I’ve ever owned. I have no regrets about chang­ing net­works to get one.

Early adopters, like myself and many of my friends and work col­leagues, drive tech­nol­ogy sales in that we buy first, pay full whack, then show it off to our mates who end up buy­ing them too.

I can think of half a dozen peo­ple right off the top of my head, who bought an iPhone because I per­son­ally intro­duced them to mine. I’m sure the same is true for many other early adopters; we should all be on com­mis­sion really.

Instead, O2 don’t respect us and are actu­ally going out of their way to penalise peo­ple who bought their iPhone 3G’s last July. Do you think that makes me keen to per­suade oth­ers to get an iPhone from O2 now?

O2 want to sell me a 32gb iPhone for the same cost they’re sell­ing them to new sub­scribers, £269 I believe. I could just about wear that, if I had to, but they also want me to pay the remain­der of my con­tract as a penalty.

A penalty?

I want the lat­est hand­set from my cur­rent net­work provider and they want to charge me a penalty? Why not just smack me in the face and get it over with?

I have 6 months left on my cur­rent con­tract and I am on the £45 a month tariff.

£45 x 6 = £270 (it dou­bles the cost of the phone).

Its stu­pid beyond belief.

They want me to pay £539.00 to upgrade my hand­set, when some­one off the street just sign­ing up to O2 would get it for half that.

Its mad­ness!

I’m an exist­ing cus­tomer, I should be treated bet­ter than a new cus­tomer. Show me a lit­tle love and I’ll show you some back, but try to screw me over and I’ll cost you money.

How?

I’m still work­ing on that, but I have a cou­ple ideas.

Every­one who wants to upgrade their iPhone should each spend at least one hour on the tele­phone with O2 cus­tomer services.

You’re not going to get any joy, but you are going to waste their time and in busi­ness, time is money.

For every minute you keep one of their sales reps occu­pied, that’s another minute they are not sell­ing a brand new phone.

Be polite and just keep repeat­ing your­self, its what the O2 rep is going to do, so you might as well do the same.

Esca­late too, they hate that. Ask to speak to a super­vi­sor, then the supervisor’s super­vi­sor, then the depart­ment man­ager. The key is to keep them on the phone as long as you can. And call them from your iPhone, because the call is free to you, but it does cost O2 in net­work bandwidth.

Say any­thing, use some of my argu­ments, sing them a song, tell bad jokes, what­ever will keep them talking.

Then use the word “churn”, that will scare them.

Keep telling them exist­ing cus­tomers are get­ting a raw deal.

O2’s line is that the iPhone 3G was sub­sidised, which is why they want to force peo­ple to see out their con­tracts before get­ting a new hand­set. Its bull­shit, but that’s the tack their taking.

Like I give a shit about their profit!

If they did a bad deal with us last year, tough. Don’t try to fix it by screw­ing us over a year later. That’s not smart.

I don’t want the new iPhone in 6 months, because it will be a six month old phone then.

And I know 6 months after that, a bet­ter iPhone will be released. And here’s the thing, the dif­fer­ences between the iPhone 3G and the 3GS aren’t that huge, but that might not be true with next year’s model. Who knows? And who wants to gam­ble on it?

The really smart thing to do is buy the new iPhone 3GS pri­vately once an unlock is avail­able, then switch net­works. O2 are being so myopic about this, I am very tempted to fol­low this path and show oth­ers how to do it too!

O2 are going for short term profit, when suc­cess in cus­tomer rela­tions only comes by play­ing a long game.

Peo­ple are seething over this, check out mobile phone forums or Twit­ter. Every news­pa­per has had a story on this mas­sive O2 cock-up too.

I’m def­i­nitely not the only one who wants to push back hard at O2.

I can’t do this alone, we need every other iPhone owner look­ing to upgrade to take action.

“Brand man­age­ment” is a mar­ket­ing buzz­word these days and O2 have done some real dam­age to them­selves. They might be able to put a ridicu­lously high price on upgrad­ing, but hav­ing a well-respected brand is priceless.

Can you hear that, O2? Its the sound of your stock price drop­ping fast. I don’t see a net to catch it, do you?

O2 can either work out a bet­ter plan for us to upgrade, or they will start to haem­or­rhage sub­scribers. If O2 don’t make us all happy and soon, its going to cost them plenty.

( #O2fail — search for it on Twitter! )

This is a lit­tle warn­ing from your friendly, neigh­bour hippy.

Do you tweet from your iPhone? Are you broad­cast­ing your loca­tion with every tweet when you are at home? Do you know what I am talk­ing about?

If you answered “yes” to any of those ques­tions, espe­cially that last one, you really need to pay atten­tion to this.

Your iPhone is location-aware, so to an extent is your iPod touch. You prob­a­bly know this already. It means it can work out your loca­tion using GPS, wi-fi and/or cell phone tower infor­ma­tion to a rea­son­ably accu­rate degree. That fea­ture is built right into the core archi­tec­ture of your iPhone.

Hav­ing that infor­ma­tion at the core, means appli­ca­tions like many iPhone Twit­ter clients, can mag­i­cally grab your exact loca­tion (expressed in lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude) and attach it to your tweets and Twit­ter account.

If you look at people’s Twit­ter pro­files, occa­sion­ally you will see two sets of num­bers where their city would nor­mally be…if you cut and paste those num­bers into Google Maps, it shows you their exact location.

Per­haps there are times when you want to broad­cast your loca­tion, for exam­ple, you are vis­it­ing a famous land­mark and want your tweets to reflect that. Or maybe you are out on a Sat­ur­day night and you want your friends to eas­ily be able to find you, because its your round. That’s all cool.

But what if you are at home, mer­rily tweet­ing away about your two-week hol­i­day abroad that starts tomor­row and you’re not aware you’re send­ing out your home address with every mes­sage? Sup­pose you have a photo of your­self on your account, or hun­dreds of them on your linked Face­book page.

What would it take for some enter­pris­ing crim­i­nal to park up on your street and watch for you to leave, know­ing your flat will be empty for a fortnight?

Very lit­tle.

Think I’m being para­noid? Think again, because some­thing like this hap­pened recently in Ari­zona. Here, check out this local report.

So what can you do to avoid this hap­pen­ing to you?

Sim­ple, become more aware of loca­tion awareness.

If you tweet from your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any other loca­tion aware device, if one exists), go into the set­tings of your pre­ferred Twit­ter client and turn off loca­tion ser­vices. The set­ting is some­place dif­fer­ent in every app, and if you can’t find it in the app, look on the main set­tings sec­tion from your home screen.

When the app asks you to turn them on again, like it did the first time you used the app, say “no”, unless you want to broad­cast your loca­tion. And if you are home, or where you work, this should prob­a­bly always be “no”.

You can re-enable this fea­ture if you do want to use it, when you are out and about, but I really rec­om­mend keep­ing it switched off as your default setting.

Also, check your own Twit­ter pro­file, to see what you have listed as your loca­tion. You might dis­cover a lit­tle surprise.

If you wish to change it, log into your account from the web and go to Set­tings, then find the lit­tle box for loca­tion and type some­thing suit­ably vague. Mine says: “north Lon­don, UK, Earth”, in case any­one con­fuses it with the Venu­sian version.

There’s one more sim­ple thing you can do to pro­tect your­self, when you send tweets, don’t give out too many spe­cific track-able, real-world details about yourself.

I realise if you are tweet­ing under your own name, and can be found by direc­tory enquiries or (gasp) in the white pages, it may already be too late, but if you are at all pri­vacy minded, nei­ther of those things will be true of you. They are cer­tainly not true of me, but I am extremely pro­tec­tive of my pri­vacy online and off.

If you’re some­one who didn’t realise you’ve been prac­ti­cally attach­ing your home address to every tweet sent from your iPhone, this advice is espe­cially for you. Just send me what you saved in the increase to your home con­tents insur­ance post-burglary and we’ll call it even.

With the mas­sive suc­cess of the iPhone app store, app devel­op­ment is on the upswing. I’m see­ing report after report about peo­ple who’ve never writ­ten a line of code in their lives, sud­denly try­ing to learn how to cre­ate apps for the iPhone.

Its sen­si­ble, as the rel­a­tive ease with which you can sell your app com­bined with the poten­tial prof­its make this a very appeal­ing propo­si­tion to many.

Per­son­ally, I haven’t writ­ten any soft­ware in nearly 30 years, when I used to have a very rudi­men­tary under­stand­ing of BASIC. Here’s a sam­ple of what I mean:

10 Print “Fuck You”
20 Goto 10

Yes, that’s about how sophis­ti­cated I got. And wow, did that lit­tle pro­gramme make peo­ple laugh. Things have changed a lot since then.

The prob­lem with devel­op­ing apps for the iPhone is the amount you need to learn to do it. It’s the steep learn­ing curve that is prob­a­bly putting some peo­ple off trying.

What if you didn’t have to learn anything?

What if you could piece an app together the same way you’d design a web­site or automa­tor action?

Enter iApp, the lat­est soft­ware to join the other pro­grams in iLife.

Well, tech­ni­cally it hasn’t yet, but I am tak­ing a wild guess that it will in the future.

iPhone apps are just chunks of code and APIs strung together, so why can’t Apple build an iLife style appli­ca­tion that would allow dum­mies like me to design appli­ca­tions for the iPhone with a sim­ple, clean and easy to use interface.

Just imag­ine assem­bling a list of sim­ple instruc­tions, the same way you would put together an automa­tor script, which are then com­piled and trans­ferred to your iPhone via iTunes.

Apple have already done this for music, video, DVD author­ing, ring-tone cre­at­ing and web­site design, so why can’t they do it for iPhone applications?

The short answer is that they can and if I was to ven­ture a guess, they are prob­a­bly work­ing on just such a prod­uct right now.

Think about it: they could com­pletely democ­ra­tise pro­gram­ming apps for the iPhone, allow­ing any­one with a good idea and some free time the chance to design their very own appli­ca­tion with a very gen­tle learn­ing curve. And if you think your app is good enough and would be of inter­est to oth­ers, you can reg­is­ter to sell it on iTunes and watch the dosh roll in.

Do I think this is com­ing soon? Who knows?

I do think some form of sim­ple iPhone app cre­ation will come. And its going to be a major game-changer when it does.