The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘tech-geek corner’ Category

Remember the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld?

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

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

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

I mean me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right now, I just feel tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t that most independent bloggers?

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

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

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

Why does Apple hate independent bloggers?

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

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

So why do Apple hate me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why do Apple hate me?

Why does Apple hate all indepedent bloggers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year fuckers!

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

Do people still write cheques?

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

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

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

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

How cool is that?

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

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

How much would you pay for a northlondonhippy iPhone app?

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

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

Ah-hem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As part of my never-ending quest to seek nothing but the truth, I’ve decided to provide the only genuinely honest review the decade that’s nearly finished.

It fucking sucked. Really, it did. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

Besides iPods, name one good thing about the noughties? Even its nickname is pathetically lame.

The decade started with the Millennium, which was supposed to be the biggest celebration of all time. I spent the night in central London, on the River Thames, broadcasting live to all over the world. Maybe you saw me there, I was in charge of a broadcast tent near Lambeth Bridge, blocking people’s views of the fireworks and River of Fire.

Ha, the River of Fire was the first major disappointment of many in the noughties, a damp squib rather than spectacular and a giant let down for those who braved the cold to witness it. I’ve never heard such a loud, collective, “is that really it?” in my life.

London crowds can be drunken and angry and the night of the Millennium was no exception. As the clock struck midnight and I was transmitting live on behalf of four different foreign broadcasters, someone unplugged our generator cable and everything went dark.  

Don’t worry, one of the technicians managed to get it reconnected and it all worked, though the cables were covered with human urine, which wasn’t so pleasant for the engineer. On top of that, the crowd attacked us and tried to steal our expensive TV gear. I can remember smacking peoples’ arms and hands away from tripods and lights as the fireworks began.

We were all ready for the Y2K bug, a peculiar glitch in some older computers that prevented it for handling 4-digit years, meaning some unpatched computers would think it was 1900, not the year 2000. We expected the telephone network to collapse, the power grid to crash, along with all the jumbo jets flying overhead.

It didn’t happen, nothing happened, crisis averted.

But that didn’t mean the noughties were crisis free, because less than a year later, George W. (for What the fuck?) Bush stole the election and became the most powerful sub-normally intelligent person in history. His presidency dominated the decade and his policies made the world a much shittier place.

Think for a second, if Al Gore had claimed the presidency instead. He should have won it, he did win it, but the Supreme Court had other ideas.

Do you think we’d be in Iraq if Gore had two terms in the White House? Probably not, but then we most likely wouldn’t have Barack Obama now.

Who’s to say?

The Bush presidency was built on the foundation of the Neo-Conservative moment and the Project for a New American Century. How’d all that turn out?

Let’s see, the entire economy melted down to near collapse and we seem to be engaged in George Orwell’s never-ending war while his Big Brother keeps track of our every thought and action.

Cool.

Bush was stupid, his advisors no smarter. They dug one stupid hole after another, each a little deeper than the last.

When the attacks of 11th September 2001 took place, you couldn’t imagine a worse commander and chief to have at the helm, unless you enjoy children’s books about pet goats, in which case he would be your number one choice.

9/11 changed everything, but the real shock and awe was how we felt as we watched the twin towers come crashing to the ground.

I’m old enough to remember when the World Trade Centre was built. I’d been lucky enough to visit the observation deck more than once, its a view you wouldn’t be able to duplicate again today without a helicopter.

We were devastated by those attacks, fiendishly simple, yet executed to maximum effect. I remember thinking that this was the beginning of the end of western civilisation and soon we would all be crawling through nothing but rubble, drinking brackish water from puddles in the streets.

How wrong I was!

9/11 was a blip, a lucky shot, a once in a lifetime terror strike from a group whose success exceeded even their own expectations. I’m sure they didn’t think the entire world would change so radically as a result of their actions, but change it did.

Keeping us secure became the number one priority, the cost being a dramatic reduction in our liberty and personal freedoms. Any extreme, radical action taken by a government could and would be justified by tagging it with an anti-terror bent.

Do you want to monitor all telephone calls and email messages? No problem.

Do you need my banking and credit history before I get on a plane? Sure thing!

How about my shoes, should I take them off too? Gosh, hope I don’t have holes in my socks!

Think how quickly we all simply adapted to these new realities, we made hardly a peep as our civil liberties were systematically stripped away.

Its become such a farce now, here in London you practically can’t even take a photograph in a public place without the police swooping down on you like you’re Mohammed Atta, scoping out another attack.

Think that’s good for business and tourism? Think again?

Terror is not the only thing that’s been scaring us in the last ten years, as the environment’s been on our minds too. You won’t see any government declaring war on climate change, even though its probably more of a threat to more people than terrorism could ever be.

The effects of climate change are apparent to anyone who can be bothered to look, yet there are people out there in the world who try to deny this inevitability. If you tried to deny the threat of terror, you would be labelled a traitor, but being a climate-change doubter will not earn you the same label.

Its probably too late to slow down climate change because we pissed away the last decade arguing about it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn tragic as the recent Copenhagen Climate Summit heartily illustrated.

The wars in the last ten years have been quite tragic too, especially the two major conflicts instigated by the West, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq was justified with false pretences and blatant, pre-meditated lies. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and I had no access to any of the intelligence available to our leaders. They knew it too, but made up a bunch of nonsense any way.

I can remember being the only idiot in the world who thought that America and Britain wouldn’t go to war in Iraq. I genuinely believed they had no grounds to initiate a conflict and that they would back down at the last minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong, but not as wrong as launching that illegal and pointless war.

George W (for War Criminal) Bush and Tony Blair should both be sitting in prison cells in The Hague, awaiting their trials for crimes against humanity, but no one has the fucking balls to send them both there. The International Court should have charged them already, even if extradition would never happen. They both should pay for their crimes and sins.

But they won’t.

How many innocent lives have been lost in that pointless war? Iraq was far from perfect before the “allies” invaded, but the electricity flowed, the streets were safe and Iraq still had an educated, functional middle class.

I’m not a Saddam Hussein apologist, the guy was a nasty piece of work, repressive, iron fisted, unpleasant and vicious. But so what? Lots of countries are lead by shitbags, we don’t invade them and impose regime change just because we feel like it.

Regime change on its own is not a valid reason for war. In the case of Iraq, it turns out it was the only reason.

Saddam Hussein got strung up in a hastily organised hanging. There’s mobile phone video of it on the internet, that I’m sure you’ve seen by now. It was a very undignified end for an odious, horrible man. Though back in the 1970s, Saddam was friendly with America and funded by them, because he opposed Iran.

Things change, shit happens.

Afghanistan is a different shade of grey.

After 9/11, there was some sense in going into Afghanistan since that’s where the terror bases and training camps were. That’s also where the leader of the bad guys lived, oh what’s his name again?

Osama something or other.

They had the chance to capture or kill him in Tora Bora and blew it. He’s still allegedly alive and on the run in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The problem with Afghanistan is after they chased Al Qaeda out, they were left fighting the Taliban. Big countries like America are crappy at fighting insurgencies and guerrilla wars, see Vietnam for proof. They’ve been dragged deeper into a civil conflict than they need to be.

Today, Afghanistan is a lawless basket-case of a nation, with a corrupt, ineffectual government at its centre and powerful war lords scattered throughout the country.

President Obama seems to think more troops will help and the decade is ending with him announcing further deployments.

When will they ever learn?

How’s never sound?

And speaking of America’s first black president, Barack Obama is one of the good things to come out of the noughties, but he wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for George W. (Where’d he go?) Bush. Bush paved the way for Obama, with his stupidity, mistakes and far right ideals.

Whether you agree with Obama’s policies or not, having a mixed race president in America is good for the entire world. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime, and like most people I was moved deeply by his election.

Do I think he’s doing a good job? Its way too early to tell. He hasn’t even been in office for an entire year yet. We should give the guy a chance. Ask me again in 3-7 years, when he’s finished and I’ll have enough information to form an opinion. Clearly, I wasn’t a voting member of the Nobel panel, because I never would have given the prize to Barack, at least not yet, anyway.

Personally, it wasn’t such a hot decade for me either. Both of my parents passed away, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2008. I miss them both every day.

This was the decade I well and truly entered middle age. I’m going to be forty-fucking-seven next month. The last decade saw me diagnosed with a stupid illness and I had a sustained period of unemployment while I was between jobs.

The illness, Hashimoto’s Disease, is allegedly under control and I did manage to secure gainful employment, for which I am very thankful, but neither period was particularly pleasant for me.

The progress of technology is one good thing to come from the last decade, I’ve got the some of the coolest toys I’ve ever owned currently in my possession.

I’m on my 3rd iMac, the latest a 27” beast with a quad-core processor that is lightening fast, its like having a stylish supercomputer parked on my desk.

By far, the most amazing thing I own is my iPhone 3GS, it is a gadget of unrivalled beauty, power and usefulness. If I had to choose one piece of kit that’s revolutionised my life, its my iPhone. It does more than I could have ever imagined and its abilities just keep growing with every app I install.

Citizen journalism came of age in the noughties, with websites similar to this one springing up at a rapid rate. The word “blog” didn’t even exist ten years ago and now there are millions of them.

Blogging came along when I needed it most, I started this one nearly 6 years ago during my dark and depressing period of unemployment.

Blogging gave me something to do, something to focus on, something to make me feel like I was still a functioning member of society. I had a way to contribute, a way to participate. Somehow, I still mattered, even if I felt like I didn’t.

Blogging may have saved my life. I would have continued to sink deeper had I not discovered Blogspot back in 2004. 

And that’s where you all come in.

Without an audience, blogging is a bit pointless and while I am still not and will probably never be mainstream, I’ve had a level of support and interest that still astounds me. I’m thankful for every visitor I’ve ever had who has dropped by and hung out with me virtually.

Without all of you, I’d just be some guy writing longwinded essays for my own amusement. Ok, even with you all around, that statement is true, but its still better for having you all here.

Thanks very much for stopping by, you’ll always find a warm welcome here and I always put out on the first date.

I wish each and every one of you the very best of the holiday season. I hope the next decade sees all your hopes and dreams come true.

PS
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I left out of my review of the decade, but this short video review from Newsweek Magazine should fill in many of the gaps. Its quite US-centric, but its only 7 minutes long, so enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And who wouldn’t want extra storage?

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

That’s a fairly bold statement up there in the title. How will I ever live up to its promise?

Simple, its completely transformed how I interact with the internet. (And please note not “simples”. I am sick of that shit already).

Again, another fairly large claim about a “complete transformation” of my surfing habits.

I ain’t lyin’ neither.

In the old days, I used a browser to explore the internet. I’d plug something into a search engine and let it transport me to another site, which might then lead me to yet another site, and so on and so forth, until I returned to the search engine to start again. Of course, I bookmarked sites too, but the point is I had to think of a site I wished to check out, then navigate to it again.

Over time, I developed my own internet rituals, visiting my favourite sites on a regular or semi-regular basis, checking for new content. This style of surfing meant I would occasionally arrive at a site to discover it hadn’t changed since my last visit, but I wouldn’t find that out until the page loaded and wasted some of my valuable online time.

And then, I discovered RSS feeds and readers. Suddenly, I didn’t have to visit all of my favourite sites to check for anything, instead I waited for their headlines to arrive in my regularly refreshed RSS reader. If I wanted to explore the article further, I could click once and easily open the page in my browser.

But RSS readers don’t work in real time, there’s no push-type system to receive the headlines. Instead, they refresh automatically at a pre-defined interval or if you are a bit obsessive like me, manually refreshing every 10 seconds just in case. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then I discovered Twitter and Twitter clients. The “client” part is important, because if you’re accessing Twitter via your browser, you are missing out on some of its usefulness. I’ll come back to that.

Twitter is more than just reading about what people had for breakfast. There are other meals and snacks to read about too.

No, what I really mean is beyond following individuals, you can also follow websites. Websites with RSS feeds can marry them up with a service like TwitterFeed and auto-generate a tweet linking to new content published on their site.

I use TwitterFeed here on my site and it auto-generates a tweet to my Twitter account, @nthlondonhippy with the title & first line of the post, along with a shortened bit ly link to the full text.

Admittedly my site is not the busiest in the world, but if you are following me on Twitter, you will be alerted to any new content. Even if you are not following me, you still may discover the tweet and it might even be how you ended up here right now.

I would speculate that around a third of the accounts I follow on Twitter are auto-generated from websites I regularly visit. Headlines and links flow onto my computer’s desktop via my preferred Twitter client, which at present is TweetDeck.

I follow many news outlets, loads of the Guardian newspaper’s Twitter accounts, the New York Times, various Apple and gadget sites, celebrity news sites, conspiracy sites, all sorts really. My tastes are varied and diverse, but luckily so are the choices available to everyone on Twitter. If you’re interested in something, chances are there’s a Twitter feed (or 20!) that would cater to you.

Twitter is also a frightening good source for breaking news. As Twitter exists in the “nearly now” and moves in real time, when something happens anywhere in the world, it doesn’t take long for it to bubble up to the surface.

There’s an organisation that uses Twitter for just this purpose, @BreakingNews – BNO News, which is run by a 19 year-old in the Netherlands. They’re scary fast and often beat the more traditional old-style media outlets by 10-15 minutes. In the age of “now”, that’s quite an edge.

And yes, I do work in the old-media, but it doesn’t worry me. The smart old-media outfits will adapt and change with technology and most of them have started already. Twitter is re-writing the rules here too.

This is where a Twitter client really comes into its own. If you’re logging onto Twitter via their website, you are presented with a fairly usable interface, with one flaw, it doesn’t refresh automatically. To see new tweets, you must manually refresh the page. It works, but its not ideal.

A Twitter client is a stand-alone app, that sits independently on your desktop and they can refresh in real time or nearly. Many of them are feature-rich and allow you to do all sorts of cool things with Twitter, often with one-click.

I have been using TweetDeck for a while, but there are others available, most of them have free versions, so you can try them out and see if they work for you. I like TweetDeck because it is column based and is collapsable into a single column, which is how I run it most of the time.

With TweetDeck, you can have separate columns for your main feed, your mentions, your DMs plus you can create other columns to filter your stream even more. You can search with a hashtag and see real-time results and you can create groups from your main followers list too.

You can also do things like reply, send a DM or retweet with one click, as well as following and unfollowing with the same ease.

With it set up like this, a quick occasional glance keeps me up to date and can alert me to anything that might interest me, while I do other things on my computer. Like write this post.

While I’ve been working on this fine piece of Twitter related prose, I’ve helped someone with an iMovie ’09 question and replied to several tweets addressed directly to me. I don’t see it as a distraction, but rather it augments whatever I’m doing and in this case, actually informs and enriches it.

If I have any sort of question that I haven’t been able to answer with more traditional means, like search engines or forum posts, I’ll tweet it. Before long, an answer will come back, one that wouldn’t have been easy to find any other way. Call it the collective knowledge and experience of everyone interacting on Twitter at that moment, or the “hive mind” if you will, but whatever you call it, it is a quite powerful tool.

You can instantly collect opinions and reactions to something from a broad cross section of the planet, or find local knowledge of an event or situation right now.

Twitter has become my point of call for just about everything online. I use it to keep track of the news, of websites I like and subjects that matter to me. I engage in dialogue with other, like minded people, sharing my own knowledge while at the same time, benefiting from other’s.

More significantly, I don’t surf in the same way I used to; I don’t really browse using a browser any more. Instead of seeking out subjects of interest to me, I have them streamed onto my desktop continuously and in real-time, cherry picking the specific pages I want to see and only then opening them up in my browser.

Just as the internet has evolved in the last 10 years, from slow dial-up connections with mainly text-only pages to fast, always on-broadband and media-rich content, our ways of interacting with the internet have changed too.

Twitter has become my internet aggregator, my media and information filter. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it too soon to tell?

How about you?

Has Twitter changed your surfing habits? Do you use it as I do? Or have you found some other benefit I may be overlooking? I’d genuinely like to hear from anyone who might have any thoughts, so please feel free to tweet me and include my Twitter ID: @nthlondonhippy in your tweet, to make sure I see it and respond. Thanks!

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

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

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

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

Following people:

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

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

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

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

Unfollowing:

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

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

Followers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding people:

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

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

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

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

My tweets:

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

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

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

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

DM’s and @ messages:

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

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

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

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

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

Invest time

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

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

Know what you want from Twitter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t put anything new up here in a couple of weeks, so I guess I should just post something.

This is that something, or rather it will be when I finish it.

I’ve only just started and I don’t know where this is going, so how will I know when its finished?

I’m still not feeling 100%, so this could turn into a hippy health bulletin. There’s a little bit to report.

After countless treatments with my chiropractor, my back is now 99.9% pain free. I’m sleeping well and moving well.

I’m still feeling listless and occasionally a bit breathless, but I saw an endocrinologist this week who explained why and made a recommendation that should help.

With thyroid problems, like my Hashimoto’s Disease, your blood is tested for two things, your T4 levels, which is the actual thyroid hormone and your TSH, which is Thyroid Stimulating Hormone and made by your pituitary gland.

While my T4 level was good, my TSH level is still on the high side and should be lower. Lowering it involves increasing my dose of medication again and another blood test in a month or so. I’m going to go see my GP next week to sort all that out and hopefully I’l be feeling some benefits in a couple of weeks.

That wasn’t much of an update, was it?

How about an update on my site?

If you haven’t noticed, even when I’m not putting new posts up here, I am still adding quality content…well quality if you are interested in my musical tastes or what I had for breakfast. I’m talking about my Last FM playlist and my most recent Tweets.

The Last FM widget on the right, shows you the last handful of songs I’ve listened to from my home media centre, my iMac and my iPhone. It also tells you when I was listening, so you can keep up with it in real time. I don’t know why you would want to, but you can if you like.

I’m still enjoying Twitter and I do tweet a fair amount daily, often at weird times, like the middle of the night or early morning. I’m sometimes around during the day and at night, it depends on my weird schedule. I tweet all sort of random crap, from interesting links to odd and surreal jokes.

Today, just for fun, I started using a hashtag for a virtual Glastonbury festival online – #virtualglasto – for people like me who will watch from my sofa, shielded from the elements and poorly cooked veggie burgers. I’m actually looking forward to Springsteen on Saturday night and I hope the BBC don’t fuck me over and only show a couple of songs. We want the whole goddamn set, goddamn it!

Mainly, I’m posting today because I’ve been getting so many new visitors. I’ve had another significant rise.

This is to let all you new visitors know that I’m alive and well and living in north London, just like always. Keep bookmarking me or grabbing the RSS feed and before you know it, I’ll post something amazing that will inform, entertain and amuse.

Just not today.

I think I’m finished now.

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! )