The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘tech-geek corner’ Category

I love Twit­ter, but I fear my love for it remains unrequited.

I’ve been prop­erly on Twit­ter for about two and a half years. To be more pre­cise, as of this writ­ing, I have been using Twit­ter since the 31st of Jan­u­ary 2009, which works out to 931 days. I used howlongontwitter.com to cal­cu­late that, I didn’t count it up myself.

In that time, I’ve found Twit­ter to be indis­pens­able and addic­tive and while I am not the most pro­lific tweeter you will meet, I con­stantly read my time­line. I must dip in and out of it a thou­sand times a day.

What I don’t do is tweet or inter­act with other peo­ple enough. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

My tweets tend towards fee­ble and offen­sive (but orig­i­nal) jokes that prob­a­bly make peo­ple laugh uncom­fort­ably, if at all.

I also tweet, or rather retweet stuff about legal­is­ing cannabis and other drugs, because that is my pet cause.

Occa­sion­ally I may tweet some­thing that I feel strongly about, like the recent riots in London.

I tweet about what I’m watch­ing on TV some­times and the weather occa­sion­ally and even the odd food-related tweet too.

In other words, I’m not unpleas­ant or rude, just prob­a­bly not that inter­est­ing. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

I’m anony­mous online, by choice, mainly because I am so open about my own cannabis use and as its sta­tus is cur­rently ille­gal, anonymity allows me the lux­ury of hon­esty. I like to pre­tend this stance fur­thers the cause of legal­i­sa­tion, but I’m not always con­vinced it does and that’s a sub­ject best explored another day. This post is about Twitter.

The other rea­son I remain anony­mous is I pre­fer to be unknown. I am not seek­ing atten­tion for myself. If you Googled my real name, you wouldn’t find me any­where online; I’m not on Face­book, Linked-In, noth­ing. And while I have worked in the media for more than two decades, I’ve man­aged to avoid hav­ing a byline, screen credit, nor any men­tion of my real name and that has been intentional.

What it means on Twit­ter is I don’t use my real name or a pho­to­graph of myself as my avatar. That is why I suck at Twit­ter too.

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I suck at Twit­ter for the rather silly rea­son that I have been sucked into think­ing about fol­lower num­bers, some­thing I have man­aged to avoid until now.

I’ve never really been both­ered by how many peo­ple are fol­low­ing me, I haven’t done any­thing ever to inten­tion­ally gain them, never asked for them, begged for them, noth­ing like that. I’ve just tweeted when I felt like it, fol­lowed peo­ple (and accounts) that have inter­ested me and that’s about it.

I’ve always found it a bit dis­taste­ful when peo­ple tweet about the num­ber of fol­low­ers they have, in what­ever context.

“I need 27 more fol­low­ers to reach 500, help!”

“Please RT this [insert celebrity here] I really need more fol­low­ers urgently!”

“I gained 57 fol­low­ers today, all because [insert celebrity here] retweeted me.”

Worse, is see­ing celebri­ties tweet­ing each other and exag­ger­at­ing their worth by brag­ging they have the most fol­low­ers. I find this rather tragic.

Wor­ry­ing about fol­lower num­bers is a mug’s game and sadly in the last week or so, I have become that mug. Here’s why: I’ve recently noticed a few peo­ple I know online, who started on Twit­ter when I did, now have dou­ble or tre­ble the fol­low­ers I have. I am a vic­tim of com­par­a­tive maths.

I know its silly, I know its mean­ing­less, but its been on my mind recently

This is not meant to be a moan or a com­plaint, every­thing I’m telling you is obser­va­tional and self-critical, but not a whinge or back­handed plea for more peo­ple to fol­low me. I’m just try­ing to under­stand what I am doing wrong on Twitter.

What am I doing wrong on Twit­ter? Loads, it would seem.

There are quite a few peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, who don’t fol­low me back. I don’t mean celebri­ties, but nor­mal peo­ple, like you and me. Well, more like you prob­a­bly as I don’t come any­where near being normal.

The lack of follow-backs from peo­ple I like per­plexes me.

Some­times, I scroll through my own tweets and read them back, to see if there’s some­thing in them that makes peo­ple not want to fol­low me. Noth­ing leaps out.

I think I’m fairly pleas­ant, thought­ful and I’m true to myself. So what could it be?

The lack of a photo and a name is off-putting, but my anonymity pol­icy is not going to change until weed is legal. End of, as the kids today say. Its a rea­son, but that alone can’t be the only reason.

I don’t inter­act or tweet enough, but guess what? I’m prob­a­bly the same in real life, being mostly a loner and mis­an­thropic with it.

If you’re shit at life, you are going to be shit at Twit­ter. This shouldn’t come as a sur­prise to me, but it does.

How can I be more socially suc­cess­ful on Twit­ter than I am in real life? Answer: I can’t.

Quite oddly, I think I am prob­a­bly more shy on Twit­ter than I am in real life.

Often I do think about respond­ing to other people’s tweets, then I think bet­ter of it and don’t. I don’t like tweet­ing neg­a­tively, if I dis­agree with some­one, how­ever strongly, I tend not to say any­thing. And if I do agree with some­one, I don’t want to seem syco­phan­tic, so I don’t tweet.

On the rare occa­sion when I do tweet some­one and they don’t respond, even with the sim­plest of acknowl­edge­ment, then I am crest­fallen and I think the fear of that often pre­vents me from inter­act­ing with peo­ple too. Maybe you know what I mean, maybe you think that’s a lame rea­son, but its true.

When­ever any­one tweets me and they are polite, I always make a point of respond­ing. I always try to thank peo­ple for RTs too, as long as I’ve noticed they’ve done so. I guess I just try to treat peo­ple on Twit­ter as I would like to be treated.

I suck at Twit­ter because I suck at life. I’m start­ing to believe I’m not par­tic­u­larly good with either pur­suit. That’s not a happy conclusion.

Or, I could take the tack that I’m not unpop­u­lar on Twit­ter, I’m just undiscovered.

The best lies I tell, are the ones I tell myself.

If you do fol­low me, well done you for find­ing Twitter’s best kept secret!

You are truly a per­son of excel­lent taste! You have keen, dis­cern­ing eye for the hippest and coolest, that your aver­age nobody tends to pass on by with­out a sec­ond thought! You’re a trend spot­ter and a trend setter!

Ah-hem.

I’ve pretty much accepted that I will con­tinue to exist in Twit­ter obscu­rity, while oth­ers around me zoom ever higher. I’m ok with that.

I take a lot from Twit­ter, I’m quite greedy in my quest for knowl­edge, I just feel guilty some­times that I don’t put enough back into it. I’d like to enter­tain and inform more peo­ple, but that’s not who I am, not in real life, not online. So it goes.

These truths should be self-evident, but its taken me nearly 1,300 words to get here.

So now you know why I suck at Twit­ter, and now I do too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could. It worked. Happy days.

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

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

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

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

So what caused both problems?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most expen­sive thing I own is my house.

The sec­ond most expen­sive thing I own is my car.

The third most expen­sive thing I own is my iMac.

The third most expen­sive thing I own died.

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

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

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

You get the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like hello and whatnot.

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

And by cel­e­brat­ing, of course I mean writ­ing this.

Whoopeeee…

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

Go me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mid­dle age is a joy.

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

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

And I still smoke weed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twit­ter recently intro­duced a new fea­ture you might have noticed if you access the ser­vice via their web­site. This new fea­ture is called “Who to Fol­low” and it gen­er­ates a list of sug­gested users and accounts Twit­ter thinks you should fol­low based on some algo­rith­mic com­puter magic voodoo.

To say this new fea­ture has been con­tro­ver­sial would be an under­state­ment. I’ve seen scores of tweets from peo­ple who hate the idea of being told what to do and who to fol­low. Most have dis­missed this new fea­ture as a dis­trac­tion. Many wish to know how to remove it.

I don’t think you can.

Instead of shun­ning this new fea­ture, I decided to embrace it fully, by mind­lessly fol­low­ing every account Twit­ter sug­gested to me.

Every day, I vis­ited the page with the sug­gested users and sim­ply fol­lowed them all.

Some days, Twit­ter would only have a hand­ful of accounts, other days they could have sev­eral pages worth for me. They’d even refresh it later in the day, with more accounts for me. There was no pat­tern or rea­son to the way they popped up and I just relent­lessly clicked on the fol­low button.

From the first day it went live for me, I started adding accounts. When I began, I had around 1,200 accounts that I fol­lowed and I added around 800 more, reach­ing the exact total of 2,001 fol­lowees, which is my limit.

One les­son I learned from this lit­tle exper­i­ment, is that there is a limit to the num­ber of accounts you can fol­low. Every­one has a limit which is cal­cu­lated based upon the num­ber of accounts fol­low­ing you. My ratio, if it has any mean­ing or rel­e­vance to any­one else, is:

1 fol­lower = 3.66 fol­lowees (approximately)

The point is, there’s a limit and it didn’t take me that long to reach it.

If I wanted to fol­low more peo­ple, I had to either: a) gain more fol­low­ers of my own so my ratio changes or b) unfol­low some accounts.

Here’s the funny thing, even though I had reached my limit of accounts to fol­low, Twit­ter con­tin­ued to sug­gest users to me and it was dri­ving me crazy that I couldn’t fol­low them.

When I hit my limit, I also couldn’t fol­low back any­one new who had fol­lowed me. I like to fol­low back if the account seems like it has a gen­uine per­son behind it and I felt bad that it wasn’t possible.

So what were my new 800 close friends like? They’re mainly polit­i­cally minded or politi­cians, but not exclu­sively. Many of them were British Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment, or for­mer MPs, or unsuc­cess­ful can­di­dates from the last election.

Why?

Twit­ter sug­gests users by look­ing at who the peo­ple you fol­low, fol­low them­selves. Every account sug­gested has a lit­tle foot­note, list­ing three peo­ple you fol­low, who also fol­low the account.

One of the ben­e­fits of this is it increases the num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions you can see, if your new fol­lowees inter­act with your old ones. I’ve noticed a big increase in crosstalk in my time­line, between two or more peo­ple that I follow.

It cer­tainly is engag­ing, being able to fol­low the con­ver­sa­tions of oth­ers, but the reverse of that is you can end up feel­ing a bit left out too, if you’re not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the discussion.

And you’re prob­a­bly not par­tic­i­pat­ing in any dis­cus­sions, because just about every­one Twit­ter sug­gests is impor­tant, famous, pop­u­lar or all three.

I’ve had very few, if any users sug­gested that were just plain ol’ reg­u­lar Twit­ter­ers, like me. That’s a big flaw in the sys­tem, as I would much rather be inter­act­ing with real peo­ple, who share com­mon inter­ests with me, than the great and the good.

What skewed my expe­ri­ence in this exper­i­ment is the recent gen­eral elec­tion in the UK.

How so?

As a con­cerned cit­i­zen and news junkie, I had a keen inter­est in the elec­tion. That meant I fol­lowed lots of accounts related to it, from news sources, to jour­nal­ists, to can­di­dates and sit­ting MPs that I was inter­ested in already.

When Twit­ter looked at that, it gen­er­ated a list of sug­gested users that included more of the same. But the more I fol­lowed, the more the sug­gested user list became a haven for MPs, polit­i­cal activists and think tank members.

My fol­lowee list read like a who’s who from the British polit­i­cal scene. Clearly that wasn’t what I was aim­ing for with this exper­i­ment, but its what I ended up creating.

After reach­ing my fol­low­ing limit, I ended the exper­i­ment and the great unfol­low­ing ensued.

I have now purged around 400 accounts, mainly MPs from obscure con­stituen­cies, but I also used an online tool to find the most inac­tive accounts and unfol­lowed them as well. Sur­pris­ingly, many of the accounts sug­gested hadn’t gen­er­ated a new tweet in months, which actu­ally made it eas­ier than I expected to rid myself of them.

I’m still check­ing the sug­gested user list daily, but I am much more selec­tive in who I choose to fol­low. There’s usu­ally one or two accounts that appeal to me, many turn out to be peo­ple I’ve heard of, but didn’t know were on Twitter.

Any­one I don’t wish to fol­low, I click on the “Hide” but­ton and I don’t see them sug­gested again. The whole process only takes a minute or two each day and has become part of my daily online routine.

The sug­gested user sys­tem is far from per­fect, but it is worth a look. If you can spare a cou­ple of min­utes each day, have a peek. While you might not fool­ishly fol­low every­one as I did, I am pretty sure you will find a hand­ful of inter­est­ing accounts that might appeal to you.

Oh and don’t wait for Twit­ter to tell you to fol­low me, you’ll be wait­ing a long, long time. Just add @nthlondonhippy to your time­line and you can in share my every thought and action. Lucky you.

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.

Took this photo this morn­ing on my iPhone 3GS. Passed it through a cou­ple of photo edit­ing apps. Thought it looked cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?