The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘home electronics’ Category

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.

Hey fuck­ers! I’m blog­ging from my iPhone again.

I am hav­ing a rather dull and dreary night at work with pre­cious lit­tle to actu­ally do.

Cov­er­ing a war is lively at first and then you set­tle into a rou­tine. Yes I am as cal­lous and jaded as I sound. I have been cov­er­ing wars for around 20 years, they’re all pretty much the same. Peo­ple die, lots of them.

Life is so frag­ile and we are all so break­able. Its a won­der more of us aren’t killed more often.

The thing about cov­er­ing wars from a dis­tance, as I’ve mostly done, is you get to see some of the most har­row­ing scenes of suf­fer­ing. By the time it arrives on the tv in your liv­ing room, its been san­i­tized and cen­sored, to pro­tect you from images you are likely to find distressing.

I strongly dis­agree with that. You have just as much right to see the uncen­sored hor­rors as I do and my media col­leagues should not be deny­ing you from see­ing the truth.

I don’t find strong images offen­sive, but I do think war and the need­less slaugh­ter of civil­ians is extremely offensive.

I guess I picked the wrong job. Or rather the wrong job chose me!

(blogged from my iPhone)

Seven days into the brand spankin’ new year and I am already filled with opti­mism and hope. And by opti­mism and hope, I really mean depres­sion and despair.

All my tv wants to show me is that nasty shit going on in the mideast. Why do they keep mak­ing sequels to that movie? I’ve seen it all before. That said, there’s some­thing more upset­ting about it this time. Its whole­sale slaugh­ter at an indus­trial scale and it sick­ens me.

I just wish I could change the chan­nel but I really wanna see how it all turns out. Maybe some­one could tip me off just before Rambo arrives and illus­trates the point­less­ness rather than glory of war­fare. And by Rambo, of course I mean Gandhi.

I’m bored to the point of dis­gust at see­ing chil­dren mur­dered and maimed. I can’t be the only one who has seen more than enough of this shit. Why don’t they all just stop?

Closer to home, or rather right here at home, north Lon­don has been sub­merged in sub-zero tem­per­a­tures for what seems like a few weeks now, with each suc­ces­sive night pro­vid­ing another record-breaking low. Brrrrrrrrrrrr!

The ther­mome­ter in my car hit a rather chilly –2 yes­ter­day, which was an all time record low for me and it hasn’t gone above +1 in over a week.

We’re not used to this sort of cold here in Lon­don and its bring­ing every­one down, espe­cially with no respite in sight. All we need is some snow to com­plete this win­tery hell and trust me, I’m not wish­ing for it.

And the econ­omy is so far into the toi­let it can taste the salt in the ocean.

Weed is going be returned to Class B from its present posi­tion in the more appro­pri­ate and rec­om­mended by gov’t advi­sors, Class C. That really sucks.

Things are indeed look­ing dis­tinctly bleak as 2009 begins.

Even Apple let me down yes­ter­day, with a Mac­World keynote devoid of any new toys for me to pur­chase. My credit card was revved up and ready, but it had nowhere to go.

Remem­ber, if it weren’t for cool con­sumer elec­tron­ics and soft drugs, I would have no joy in my life.

And its my birth­day in a cou­ple weeks, I could really do with­out that.

Oh moan, moan, moan, moan, moan!

Hey fuck­ers!

Dig this shit! I now have the abil­ity to post to my blog directly from my iPhone.

At least I think I do. We will find out for sure when I attempt to post this bad boy on my site.

If you’re read­ing this shit, then it worked. And you can maybe expect more mobile blog­ging on the future.

There’s only ten days left till xmas and if you haven’t fin­ished your shop­ping yet, I’m here to help.

Its a short list of poten­tial gifts, but ones that will be cer­tain to impress and daz­zle the recip­i­ent. Also, you can order them online and have them ready to dole out on xmas with­out hav­ing to leave the com­fort of your home. That’s the best way to xmas shop!

Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era
Ama­zon UK: £ 89.99

The Kodak Zi6 HD Video­cam­era is an impres­sive lit­tle piece of kit. While pocket sized, this lit­tle mar­vel shoots in glo­ri­ously rich and detailed 720p High-Def, while record­ing onto cheap and read­ily avail­able SD cards.

The Zi6 also shoots in stan­dard, YouTube friendly VGA, has a built in USB con­nec­tor and works like a dream. On my Mac, it just appears as a hard drive on the desk­top, you drag the files onto your desk­top, then into iMovie, which can han­dle them in HD quality.

On a PC, the Zi6 includes built in edit­ing soft­ware, that you can run from the cam­era. Sweet.

It also shoots stills, has a 2x opti­cal zoom and works off stan­dard or rechar­gable AA bat­ter­ies. I am so impressed with this cam­era already.

I bought mine a few weeks ago and paid £119.99, which means at £89.99, its already a major bar­gain! If you’re look­ing for a sim­ple to use pocket video­cam­era that won’t break the bank, this is the cam­era for you.

iPod Touch
Ama­zon UK: £149-£254 depend­ing upon stor­age (8gb, 16gb or 32gb)

I know I go on and on about my iPhone, but what if you are already happy with your cur­rent mobile deal, but still want to play with the coolest hand held gad­get ever? The iPod Touch is for you!

The iPod Touch is basi­cally an iPhone with­out the phone. It does nearly every­thing an iPhone can do except make and receive tele­phone calls, send and receive SMS mes­sages, take pho­tos and have proper GPS. Other than that, it does every­thing else.

You can run most apps on an iPod Touch, you can surf the net, send and receive emails, it does have some loca­tion aware­ness based on wi-fi posi­tion­ing. Oh and it plays music and videos and dis­plays pho­tos too.

I bought one for Mrs. Hippy last xmas and she absolutely loves it. She used it for music until the Apple App Store opened and that’s when she really got hooked. She now uses it for surf­ing, for gam­ing and its rarely not in her hands.

The 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch is even slim­mer than the first and its added a small speaker and the abil­ity to input audio via an exter­nal micro­phone, mak­ing it even more flex­i­ble than the orig­i­nal model.

The only neg­a­tive Mrs. H has come up with on it is it makes her wish she had an iPhone. The lack of con­nec­tiv­ity when there is no wi-fi avail­able is a real stick­ing point. Other than that, its nearly a per­fect device, guar­an­teed to be used daily by who­ever you might give it to.

Vol­cano Vapor­iser
everyonedoesit.com — £279.75 for the stan­dard model

I bought one of these a few months ago, but it is some­thing I’ve cov­eted for ages. Near as I can tell, its the only vape that really works and con­sis­tently deliv­ers good results.

The Vol­cano Vapor­iser does one thing and does it very well, it takes your favourite herb (like weed) and turns the active bits into vapour, while leav­ing the nasty bits alone.

When you smoke weed, you burn every­thing, includ­ing the carbon-based bits which con­tain the known car­cino­gens and other nas­ties. You also burn a good chunk of the THC, before it reaches your lungs.

A vapor­iser only burns the THC. leav­ing the other com­po­nents alone. The weed doesn’t actu­ally burn, but it does get a bit toasted and turns brown.

The Vol­cano works by fill­ing a small cham­ber, which holds your weed between two screens. You place this cham­ber on top of the base unit, where it is heated to the proper tem­per­a­ture. You then engage a small fan, which blows air up through the cham­ber, fill­ing an attached bal­loon with very sweet, pure vapour.

When you inhale it, you can def­i­nitely taste the weed, but your throat and lungs don’t feel any­thing at all. The vapour is at room temp, so its not hot and dry like smoke, and it is very light, though you can see it when you exhale.

The head on vapour is also dif­fer­ent from smok­ing and is hard to describe. It is decep­tively strong, clean, clear and every enjoyable.

By far the most impres­sive thing about using a Vol­cano is how lit­tle weed you actu­ally need to get high. A week’s worth of what I would smoke, would prob­a­bly last 5–6 weeks in the vol­cano. A spliff’s worth in the cham­ber is enough to get 4 peo­ple pleas­antly stoned and then some.

And when you are done vap­ing the weed, don’t throw it away, there’s still some THC left in it, which you can extract by mak­ing cannabut­ter. You could even smoke it if you were des­per­ate, though that would kind of defeat the pur­pose of vaping.

I know the Vol­cano is expen­sive (and I bought the even pricier dig­i­tal ver­sion), but it will more than pay for itself with the money you will save on weed. Add the health ben­e­fits and you’ve got a really use­ful, ben­e­fi­cial device that will change your life.

I bought mine because I am plan­ning on giv­ing up cig­a­rettes in the new year. When I do, I’m going to want to cut down on my spliffs as well and I think this will help loads.

That’s it for this year, just three hi-tech toys which will amaze any­one you might decide to give them to. And if you’re shop­ping for your­self, even bet­ter, you’d love them all too!

I read in the last week or so that there are now over 10,000 apps avail­able for the iPhone and that’s only in the last six months since the App Store opened.

Wow!

That’s a lot of appli­ca­tions for the world’s favourite, ultra-clever smart phone.

Some of them are com­pletely point­less and fun, oth­ers are very use­ful and some are just plain cool. I’ve gone a bit app mad and down­loaded loads of them, so many that I am going to run out space soon.

That’s ok, because at some point, I know I am going to have to cull my apps and lose the ones I hardly, if ever use. For now, though I’m all about the apps.

I’ve already reviewed some of my favourite apps, CLICK HERE to mag­i­cally travel back in time to those heady, crazy days, of August 2008.

Since then, I’ve found some even cooler apps to share with you. Some of them are free, some are paid for, but nearly all of them serve a use­ful pur­pose and most of them are used by yours truly on a daily basis.

Google Search
This app has been around since day one of the App Store, but the recent update added a fea­ture that will not only impress your mates, but actu­ally works.

The lat­est ver­sion of Google’s search app doesn’t require any but­tons, you put the phone to your ear, wait for the tone to cue you and then speak your search and it under­stands you and dis­plays your results light­en­ing quick!

Like if you say “ show me pic­tures of naked women”, it fills your screen with very pretty pic­tures. And if you have the “safe search” option switched off, you’ll get some hands free porn, which if you think about it, could have some appli­ca­tions of its own.

Seri­ously, its very cool and a quick demo will blow most peo­ple away.

Weather Bug
There are a lot of weather apps for your iPhone, but this one is my favourite.
You choose a weather cen­tre near­est to you from a list pro­vided and the app then dis­plays the tem­per­a­ture, wind speed, along with all the usual stuff like humid­ity and barom­e­ter pressure…in real time.

You can watch the wind change direc­tion and speed while the app is run­ning and it also tells you what the wind chill is, a use­ful tool when choos­ing what coat to wear. The app also pro­vides fore­casts for the next few days, but here’s the other killer fea­ture, it shows you the most recent satel­lite weather photo for your region.

This app is a must-have if you dig the weather, or like to know how cold it is out­side. Trust me, baby its chilly.

TV Plus
This one is really only of use to you if you live in the UK and sub­scribe to SKY TV and have a SKY+ box. For those of you who don’t know what I mean (my pals in Amer­ica!), its a com­bi­na­tion TiVO and satel­lite tv receiver and is my dig­i­tal plat­form of choice.

If you have a SKY+ and an iPhone, you will really love this one. TV Plus dis­plays the SKY pro­gramme guide for the next seven days, with descrip­tions for each pro­gramme, on every chan­nel. If you’ve signed up for a MySKY account, you can enter your details into the app, then, and here’s the killer bit, once you’re set up, you can enter record­ings into your SKY+ from any­where you have a con­nec­tion via wi-fi, EDGE or 3G.

I’m not sure if I am explain­ing this well. Say you’re at work and you’ve for­got to put a record­ing in for some tv show, it doesn’t mat­ter what. You can find the pro­gramme on the vir­tual pro­gramme guide on your iPhone and tap the record but­ton and through some magic voodoo jig­gery pok­ery, the record­ing just appears in your SKY+ plan­ner as if you entered it with the remote from the prox­im­ity of your sofa. Amazing.

Set up is slightly com­plex, but the step-by-step instruc­tions were very clear and easy to fol­low — I had it up and run­ning in no time. It prob­a­bly took longer to sign up for the MySKY account (free from SKY.com) than it did to set up the app and my SKY+ box.

Just be aware that the remote record­ings work best when you have more than 30 min­utes before the pro­gramme begins, oth­er­wise there don’t seem to be any lim­i­ta­tions. It’s well worth the price!

iTap
I wasn’t that impressed with iTap ini­tially, but since the most recent update, it really shines. Its a sim­ple app that turns your iPhone into a remote track pad for a Mac and just about any­thing you can do with a mouse, you can do with iTap, includ­ing right click­ing. iTap now also has a key­board, for remote text entry.

I have a Mac Mini con­nected to my tv and I can do most things with my Log­itech Har­mony Remote, includ­ing con­trol Front Row and iTunes, but the one thing I’ve never been able to do is put the Mini to sleep. With the lit­tle white Apple remote, no prob­lem, I press and hold the cen­tre but­ton and voila, my Mini is snor­ing. I can’t seem to come up with a way to repli­cate that com­mand with the Har­mony remote.

With iTap, I don’t have to, I can just start it and in two taps, my Mini is dream­ing of elec­tric sheep.

iTap requires a small piece of receiver soft­ware to be installed on your Mac, but it was very easy, just drag it into your apps folder, run it, then from the menu bar icon, select “open on start-up” to add it to your log in items. Then just for­get about it.

Mocha VNC Lite
iTap is great, if you can see your Mac’s screen, but what if you can’t?

There are many occa­sions where I need to do some­thing with the Mac Mini, while the tv is in use and I don’t want to switch over to the Mini to do some­thing quick and sim­ple. Instead I use Mocha VNC Lite.

VNC stands for vir­tual net­work con­trol and if you’re run­ning Leop­ard, its built into the oper­at­ing sys­tem and called screen shar­ing. Because it is built into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, its very easy to enable, just go into the pref­er­ence pane under shar­ing, click the screen shar­ing box and set a pass­word for remote login. Your Mac is now ready to be remotely controlled.

Mocha VNC Lite allows you to con­nect to your Mac and con­trol it, with the touch­screen act­ing as a track­pad with the remote Mac’s out­put dis­played on the iPhone’s screen.

With Mocha VNC Lite, I can start and stop down­loads, I can run apps, enter text through the inte­grated key­board, all from another room, or even in my back gar­den. I’ve only got it set up to work within my home net­work, but peo­ple who are bet­ter at the real tech stuff can prob­a­bly get it to work over the inter­net, from any­where in the world.

Its a free­bie, though there is a paid ver­sion, which I should buy myself.

iTalk Recorder
Griffin’s iTalk Recorder is another sim­ple, yet well designed and use­ful app that does what it says on the tin. It records sound, but it does it very well.

You can choose the qual­ity, from good enough to be broad­cast on FM radio to very low, but still listen-able and the length of the record­ing is only lim­ited by your avail­able flash memory.

Trans­fer­ring your audio to your Mac is a breeze, there is an appli­ca­tion that you need to install which wire­lessly con­nects your Mac to your iPhone and you just drag over the files you need.

This app is works so well that I bet I could use it to do vox­pops on the street that sounded good enough to be trans­mit­ted on the radio. Of course, I’d look like a dick, walk­ing up to peo­ple and mak­ing them talk into an upside-down iPhone, but you get the idea.

Air­Cam­Live­V­ideo
This app is extremely cool and I have absolutely no pur­pose for it, not even a nefar­i­ous one.

Air­Cam­Live­V­ideo turns your iPhone into a wire­less remote receiver for the built-in isight cam­era in your iMac or Mac­Book and it also works with the old exter­nal isights. It should work with other web­cams as well, though best to check before down­load­ing the app.

Again, you need to install a small piece of soft­ware on your Mac to trans­mit the images (and now audio too) from your Mac to your iPhone. Start the soft­ware on the Mac, run the app on your iPhone and away you go. It self-configures via Bon­jour and you can pass­word pro­tect the live stream to keep pry­ing eyes away.

Like I said, I have no prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion for this one, its just very cool and futur­is­tic. I also think its the most expen­sive app I’ve bought so far. It was a fiver, but now that I’ve reviewed it, bang that’s com­ing off next year’s taxes as a web­site expense.

Now — Geo-networking
This is a weird one and I’ve yet to really work out its usefulness.

This app lets you post a tag on a loca­tion in real time, and they only remain there for a day or so. You can also search for other people’s tags.

Post­ing appears sim­ple, you allow the app to know your loca­tion, put in your line of copy and hit send. Be care­ful what you post and where you post it, though.

The rea­son to be care­ful is that when you do a search, you can see what all the other peo­ple have posted, com­plete with direc­tions to get there. You don’t want to be sit­ting at home post­ing “sex avail­able, no charge”.

Or maybe, you do.

And yes, I have seen labels such as my exam­ple above posted on a map of the world. The app is global and should work wher­ever you are on the planet.

When you do a search, the app hands off some data to the iPhone’s built in map app, and you can watch a col­lec­tion of red pins descend across the global. Tap a pin to read the attached descrip­tion text, zoom in and see where they are or switch to the satel­lite view.

For me, its an easy, fun way to gen­er­ate addresses for play­ing with the new “street view” func­tion added in the iPhone’s soft­ware update to ver­sion 2.2.

The UK hasn’t been blessed with street view just yet, but most of the con­ti­nen­tal US has and guess where most of the posters on this app are from? Although bizarrely, Google did have some street views avail­able for an Ital­ian sub­urb and it does look like Lon­don will be added soon, which means I’ll be able to vir­tu­ally stalk myself.

And speak­ing of stalk­ing, tell me this doesn’t sound fun. Next week, I’m going to be post­ing “www.northlondonhippy.com” via this app, at var­i­ous loca­tions through­out Lon­don. If you’re really quick, and you can get there in time, you might catch a glimpse of me and my iPhone in action.

If you don’t, at least you’ll know that you are stand­ing in the exact spot where I stood when I posted it. If that doesn’t make the lit­tle hairs on the back of your neck stand up, I don’t know what will!

And that my friends and iPhone fans is my lat­est col­lec­tion of super-neat-o-cool iPhone apps, but it by no means com­plete. There are plenty of oth­ers I like and prob­a­bly my absolute favourite is yet to come. Enjoy!

After my recent flurry of posts about my new iPhone 3G, I’ve noticed lots of new vis­i­tors attracted to my site by this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. With the rumours of Apple plan­ning on shift­ing 45 mil­lion more of them next year its likely to remain a pop­u­lar topic for some time.

And with good rea­son as the iPhone is the most pow­er­ful pocket-sized device avail­able so far thanks to the abil­ity to add addi­tional appli­ca­tions that extend the func­tion­al­ity nearly to infin­ity. It truly is a Swiss Army Knife of gadgets.

As a result of my recent health prob­lems, I’ve pretty much had the last month with noth­ing but time on my hands and my iPhone in my hands. I’ve barely put it down, its the first thing I fon­dle when I wake up in the morn­ing and the last thing I stroke before drift­ing off to sleep.

As much as I adore my iPhone, and believe me I do, I’m not going to lie to you about the smooth­ness of the expe­ri­ence. I’ve been suf­fer­ing with some of the issues and prob­lems you may have read about; apps crash­ing on launch, apps and updates not installing prop­erly and the dreaded poor sig­nal on the 3G net­work, but even with these nig­gles, it is still an amaz­ing piece of kit.

I believe the prob­lems I’ve had are address­able and Apple will be able to fix them through soft­ware updates. The last update, to 2.0.2 has already stopped the crashes on the phone itself and since installing it, I haven’t had a spon­ta­neous restart.

I did have to do a full restore though, as I had lost some apps when iTunes tried to install their updated ver­sions. It took a cou­ple of hours and the most recent back-up I had done was around a week old, so I lost some SMS mes­sages and a few other bits of data, but the phone is now work­ing well.

The 3G issues per­sist for me and it could be that the cov­er­age where I live isn’t that great, but I have trou­ble believ­ing that, since I live in Lon­don. I hope it improves and soon.

I’ve installed dozens of apps already, stretch­ing across 5 home screens and I thought I would share a few inter­est­ing ones with you, that you might not have heard of yet.

Sim­plify Media
Sim­plify Media is very cool, it allows you to stream your entire iTunes col­lec­tion (unpro­tected tracks only, noth­ing with iTunes DRM), over wi-fi, Edge and 3G to your iPhone and it really works. In real terms, it means there is no stor­age limit on your iPhone, it will hold as much as your Mac or PC at home. You install a small piece of soft­ware on your net­worked com­puter, install the app on your iPhone, log into both devices with the same account and your entire musi­cal col­lec­tion mag­i­cally pops up on your iPhone and you can play any track! The app is cur­rently free, but after 100,000 down­loads, they will start charg­ing for it. Grab it while you can!

Sol Free Soli­taire
There are many ver­sions of this pop­u­lar solo card game, but I like this one, mainly because it is free. I’m not much of a gamer, but I used to play Soli­taire on Win­dows PCs and its nice to have a ver­sion to play on my iPhone. The inter­face is smooth, you tap the card you want to move, then tap the card you wish to move it to and it away it goes. There are sev­eral vari­a­tions to play, my favourite is Klondike 3,

Dual Level
This is another app that’s free, which makes it prefer­able to the paid ver­sions. Its a sim­ple idea, when you start the app, the screen turns into vir­tual hor­i­zon­tal and a ver­ti­cal spirit lev­els linked to the built in accelerom­e­ters. You can use it to level hang­ing pic­tures or any­thing else you might use a spirit level for — very cool!

iVote
This is a sim­ple app which lists poll ques­tions for you to respond to, rang­ing from pol­i­tics to per­sonal, with the results avail­able for you to break down in var­i­ous ways. It’s more geared towards Amer­i­cas (like almost every­thing online!), but it is a fun app and a real time waster. I like it!

WhosHere
Of all the social net­work­ing apps, this one shows the most promise with its sim­ple, yet focused func­tion. It’s a chat app that uses your loca­tion to show you other iPhone and iPod Touch users and their approx­i­mate prox­im­ity. In other words, its a loca­tion based chat appli­ca­tion which is very clever. You fill out a pro­file with as much, or as lit­tle (or noth­ing) and tap the near but­ton — you are then pre­sented with a list of peo­ple, their pro­files and the approx dis­tance from you. You can set the prox­im­ity of your search from as lit­tle as 5 miles up to 3000 miles. You can also blur your loca­tion, up to 2 miles from where you really are, so you do have options to main­tain some pri­vacy. The app’s user base seems to be grow­ing fast and yes, this one is free too.

Pho­to­Swap
Pho­to­Swap is very new, its only been avail­able for less than a week (at the time of my writ­ing) and I find it strangely addic­tive. The premise is sim­ple, you take a pho­to­graph on your iPhone and the app sends it to a ran­dom stranger, while you receive a photo from the same ran­dom stranger that receives yours — that’s the photo swap. Once you receive a photo, you have the option of reply­ing directly to that per­son with another photo, effec­tively hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with iPhone snaps. I’ve received all sorts of pho­tos; city sky­lines, beach views, people’s homes, pets, all sorts really. And before your sick imag­i­na­tion con­jures visions of body parts, I’ll dis­ap­point you — I have yet to receive any­thing offen­sive and there is a “report” but­ton to tap if you do. The app allows you to chose a user name, plus one line of descrip­tion for a mini-profile (accessed through the main set­tings via the home screen not directly from the app) and you can choose to show your loca­tion on a map. I would sug­gest turn­ing off the loca­tion stuff if you are at home and only use it when you are out in pub­lic. It might sound a bit strange, but try it, I think you will agree that there is some­thing very endear­ing about using it.

This is just a small selec­tion of apps that have caught my atten­tion, there are lit­er­ally over 1000 of them avail­able already, with more being added to the App Store every day. Have a look, I’m sure there are some that will appeal to you too.

And I’m still wait­ing for the two apps I’ll pay for, Tom­Tom nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware for the car and a Sling­Player client. I’d lay you odds I have both before the year is out!

After all the whing­ing and com­plain­ing over the last week about my prob­lems get­ting my new iPhone 3G from O2, I thought I would share some of my ini­tial impres­sions of it.

Yes, that’s right…I’ve got my brand new, shiny, lick­able, 16gb black iPhone 3G. I exclu­sively revealed this excit­ing bit of news on Face­Book last Thurs­day when it was deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair.

And again, yes, you read that right, I posted it on my Face­Book pro­file, as a sta­tus update.

Sta­tus updates on Face­Book are a lot like Twit­ter posts. It’s another rea­son why you should be my Face­Book friend!

Even though it was 6 days later than expected, I was still very pleased to be receiv­ing iPhone 3G and couldn’t wait to unbox it and fire it up.

I didn’t buy the orig­i­nal iPhone, as it was only released offi­cially here in the UK around 8 months ago. My rea­son­ing was sound, or so I thought. As I expected a 2nd gen­er­a­tion of iPhone to come out around now, I didn’t want to be in a posi­tion of want­ing to buy it so soon after get­ting the 1st gen.

How was I to know that O2 were going to be hand­ing out cheap (or free) upgrades to exist­ing cus­tomers? Doh!

I was bit dis­ap­pointed that Apple left out a cou­ple of good­ies that shipped with the orig­i­nal iPhone — the dock and the microfi­bre cloth to wipe the screen. The lack of the microfi­bre cloth is a real silly miss, they can’t cost that much when you’re buy­ing a mil­lion of them.

The touch­screen does pick up a lot of fin­ger­prints, though they are only really notice­able when the the screen is off. When the screen is illu­mi­nated, its very bright and you really don’t see any.

The screen is actu­ally glo­ri­ously bright, extremely crisp and pin sharp. I could eas­ily watch a full length film or tele­vi­sion pro­gramme on it and prob­a­bly will. The multi-touch con­trol of the device is noth­ing short of astound­ing. It’s extremely intu­itive and very accurate.

The iPod func­tions are also impres­sive and it blows away my old 60gb 5th gen iPod with video.

I’ve also set up sev­eral email accounts on my iPhone. If you want to reach me when I am on the go, you can con­tact northlondonhippy@gmail.com or northlondonhippy@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll receive them pretty god­damn quickly! You might even get a mobile reply…

I’ve also got the Face­Book mobile appli­ca­tion, AIM for instant mes­sag­ing and I’ve been play­ing around on Twit­ter with that cool app called Twin­kle. I’m northlon­don­hippy on all of those ser­vices too, though Twit­ter reg­is­tered my user­name as n_londonhippy because they don’t give you enough char­ac­ters for my full online name.

Surf­ing the web on the iPhone is some­thing else I’ve spent a good deal of time doing and its the first hand-held device that gives you any sort of use­ful inter­net expe­ri­ence. I’ve accessed the net from var­i­ous mobile phones and an old Palm Pilot of mine and I’ve always found it sorely lack­ing. Spend ten min­utes doing the same on the iPhone 3G and you will won­der how you lived with­out it. I’ve used both wi-fi and the 3G net­work and pages load very quickly too.

I read that the new iPhone 3G has about as much com­put­ing power as a lap­top made in 2003; sim­i­lar pro­cess­ing power and stor­age is what I took that to mean. Think about it — I’m now car­ry­ing some­thing as pow­er­ful as a five-year-old lap­top in my pocket now. It blows my mind!

There really are only 2 major dif­fer­ences between the new iPhone 3G and the orig­i­nal iPhone (and yes, I know there are plenty of minor changes, just humour me, please). The inclu­sion of 3G net­work access and GPS.

The GPS is noth­ing short of amaz­ing. Even sit­ting here , deep inside my north Lon­don lair, not near any win­dows and it still knows where I am with fright­en­ing accu­racy. The map soft­ware lets you know how cer­tain it is of your loca­tion, by using var­i­ously sized cir­cles to indi­cate your approx­i­mate loca­tion, until it is cer­tain and then places a push-pin like marker where you are. Out­side with no obstruc­tions, when the iPhone can see the sky, you get a remark­ably accu­rate read­ing of your loca­tion, so much so that if you walk a bit, the blue dot adjusts to your new position.

The loca­tion data isn’t only utilised by the map appli­ca­tion, but any app can grab it. This includes geo-tagging of your pho­tos and with some Twit­ter apps, can include your loca­tion so you can track peo­ple nearby. Spooky!

Can some­one please release some turn-by-turn, good enough to work in my car, nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware? I’ve read that Tom­Tom have already writ­ten the app, so why can’t I buy it already? My old Tom­Tom is mas­sive, com­pared to my tiny, slim lit­tle iPhone, if I didn’t have to carry the Tom­Tom with me, it would be a real bonus and my pock­ets would thank you.

And while I’m at it with a wish­list, could some­one please design, man­u­fac­ture and sell the following:

A pow­ered dock for use in my car, that has a suction-cup wind­screen mount, so I can posi­tion the iPhone like a Sat­Nav, plus a built-in, sophis­ti­cated FM trans­mit­ter that scans to find the best fre­quency and then beams audio to my in-car stereo, in high quality.

My super-dooper in-car dock/transmitter/mount is not actu­ally such a big ask and it would sell like prover­bial hot­cakes. Bun­dle it with a code to get a nav­i­ga­tion app and you would prob­a­bly sell 500,000 of them in the first year alone. I’m giv­ing you a mul­ti­mil­lion pound idea here, for free, so if one of you do this, at least cut me in for a slice of the pie. Or just send me one of these cool in-car suction-cup, FM-transmitter thin­gies for free. It’s the least you could do!

There is a third thing that sep­a­rates the new iPhone 3G from its pre­de­ces­sor, though you can upgrade the orig­i­nal to the new 2.0 soft­ware and enjoy it as well. I’m talk­ing about third party appli­ca­tions which you can access via iTunes or on the iPhone itself. Some apps are free, oth­ers cost. So far, I’ve only installed the freebies.

I’m not being cheap, its just none of the pay apps have really appealed to me and the best ones seem to be games and I’m not that both­ered. When I see one I like the look of (nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware!!!!!), I’ll hap­pily part with my readies.

There are so many appli­ca­tions avail­able already that I’m not going to actu­ally talk about any of the spe­cific ones now, but I’d rather come back at another time to give them proper attention.

What can’t be denied is that this is the real game changer with the iPhone 3G, the abil­ity to do so many cool things with it. And that’s just today, who knows what tomorrow’s killer appli­ca­tion for the iPhone might be…perhaps one of you out there in inter­net­land is already work­ing on the next HUGE thing! Just whis­per it in my ear, before your start-up has its IPO, so I can get in on the ground floor and make a lit­tle dirty lucre too…!

The one thing no-one seems to ever men­tion when they write about the iPhone is the phone itself. I think that shows you how far we come with per­sonal tech­nol­ogy and gad­gets, that the voice-communication func­tion of some­thing with the word “phone” in its name, is taken for granted and doesn’t mat­ter that much.

It does to me and one of my con­cerns about the iPhone was how it per­formed as a basic mobile telephone.

It turns out I had noth­ing to fear, the iPhone is a very robust cell­phone. Calls over my net­work on 3G are clear and the con­nec­tion seems strong. The speak­er­phone func­tion really works too, dialling a con­tact or a phone num­ber is also very sim­ple and works very well.

What’s inter­est­ing about the iPhone is the many stan­dard mobile phone func­tions it DOESN’T do. There’s no MMS mes­sag­ing, so no send­ing pho­tos as text mes­sages. There’s no way to for­ward a text mes­sage either. The iPhone has Blue­Tooth, but the only thing it uses it for is to con­nect a wire­less head­set. You can’t send a photo to your com­puter, or to another phone, you can’t exchange con­tacts with another phone, you can’t even Blue­jack strangers!

I don’t really under­stand why Apple has locked these func­tions out. At the very least, let us send pho­tos over blue­tooth. And synch­ing notes from my Mac would be use­ful too!

Some­thing else I don’t under­stand is the lack of cut & paste. It couldn’t be that hard to get a clip­board like func­tion­al­ity run­ning on it. It’s sup­posed to be the same soft­ware that runs on Macs, so what’s the prob­lem? I know some Apple big-wig men­tioned that it was on their list of things to do and they just didn’t have time to get to it, but that comes off sound­ing lame. There’s got to be some mar­ket­ing rea­son for with­hold­ing this func­tion, I just haven’t a clue what it could be!

All of these cool things do come at a cost and I don’t mean your monthly bill, though they might sting a bit too. I mean bat­tery life, or the lack of it. Surf­ing the net, check­ing emails, play­ing with apps, all drain the bat­tery far faster than you would like and its very easy to see it drop 50% in a cou­ple of hours.

I could see car­ry­ing a spare dock cable and attach­ing it to the near­est PC at every oppor­tu­nity. It’s another rea­son why I want a pow­ered dock for the car. I don’t see how I would get through a full day of seri­ous usage with­out top­ping up the bat­tery a cou­ple of times.

So am I happy with my new iPhone?

What do you think? It’s eas­ily the coolest, most pow­er­ful device I’ve ever had the plea­sure of own­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to 18 months of deliri­ous joy as I find new and fun things to do with it.

And at the end of 18 months, I can only imag­ine what sort of iPhone I will be upgrad­ing to then! It will prob­a­bly trans­port me to a vir­tual new real­ity where I’m the king of the uni­verse and every­one wor­ships me as a liv­ing god. Now, that’s a app I’d buy!