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I now have a working iPhone 3G 8GB as my main phone; thanks to Apple and the relies of the iPhone 4G it was good value for money

I have copied the settings from my previous blog post into the device, and that works very well; Now just have to sync it with my iTunes and then I will have a working proper Phone, with email and everything .

Loupie can now have my Nokia 1661 to take to South Africa, and I wont mind as much if it is eaten by an elephant.

Also I have just managed number 31 in my 101 things, however Natalie beat me to her smart phone achievement.

My old ‘laptop’ is a Advent 4211 NetBook, and is getting a wee bit long in the touth for day to day use, coupled with its small 10 inch screen, and lack of graphics power (built in graphics card). also my desktop, is due a hardware refresh, allowing me to use my old mac mini as a development box for testing things on.

So the question is Mac or PC, and to be honist its not a hard question to answer, I am looking to replace my MacMini (mid 2007, Intel core duo 2GHz 1~Ggi Ram), With Loupie having a uni-body aluminum Macbook (not pro . October 2008 – June 2009), so that gives me an idea of how powerful the Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 with 2gig of ram is; and the answer is much more powerful than the Mid 2007 Mac Mini.

Looking at apples current line up, and knowing I was after a laptop, I set out to chart the two most important parts of this desision, Cost V Power. Cost I could get from Apple, meaning power was going to be slightly harder. thankfully OSX Daily had been there for me [1] allowing me to plot Price, against benchmark. According to the benchmark for Loupie’s mac her benchmark  is 2706 and my Mac Mini’s is 2593, both well below the lowest benchmark of the current pros of 3390.

While I still have a number of people I know at university, mostly through TermiSoc, it may be worth using the Apple Education store, as there should be no reson why I may accidently be able to order the machine at education store costs…

I am looking at going for the 15″ Macbook Pro as that offers the Largest benchmark jump, for least jump in pennys requiring removal from my pocket.

Against my 4211, and Mac Mini it stacks up as such:

So the next challange is finding some pennys.

With the iPhone 4 coming out, and O2 changing there data policy on the new contracts, from unlimited to about 50omb, people started to worry, about hitting that; to which the nice man at O2 said that 97% of the users of the mobile network don’t use 500mb a month, meaning that 3% do use more…

Well that is all very well and good, and who can argue with that logic, I for one cant; however, with the change in data allowance happening at the same time as the new iPhone coming out, and its ‘true’ multi-tasking capability, people will be running network attached applications in the background, where as before I would have to wait for a push notification before I looked at Twitter, or would check it on the bus, I can leave the client running while using Skobbler (free, and good) as GPS in my car, and staying signed into Skype, etc.

So why the change now? well at the moment they can say this will only affect 3% of the customer base, however on Thursday with the release of the iPhone, I think that 3% will get much bigger, very quickly, and it wont a be a few users, with abnormal use. but much closer to the norm.

O2 are quick to point out that you have free access to the cloud wifi network, however, every time I try to connect to that, i am required to sign in, so its not much use for jumping between that and the 3G while walking along a street, native, transparent handover between adjacent networks, and 3G would help this a lot though.

With the iPhone 4 coming out there will be a number of people wondering how to get there new device to play nicely with the networks.

These are the settings that I found to have worked with Loupie’s iPhone 3.

I am very happy that Apple have chosen to sell the iPhone 4 without any  network locks direct from their shop, and when I have some cash I will be getting a black 16gig one.

At the moment I have an old O2 Simplicity £20 rolling contract, on which I get 1200 SMS, 600 minutes of talk time, and UNLIMITED internet, however if I was to change contract, I would only get 500MB of data, 300 minutes, and I would have to pay 20p per picture messaging (used to cost me 4 free SMS…). So on that I am in no hurry to change my service; and as for changing provider, the other providers that have announced there tariffs are all worse than what I have currently.

My only challange will be getting a new ‘micro’ sim to work in my iPhone.

The O2 data settings are as follows:

• Cellular Data
  • APN: mobile.o2.co.uk
  • username: vertigo
  • password: password
• Visual Voice Mail
  • Doesn’t work
• MMS
  • APN: wap.o2.co.uk
  • username: vertigo
  • password: password
  • MMSC: http://mmsc.mms.o2.co.uk
  • MMS Proxy: 193.113.200.195:8080

I don’t think I would miss Visual Voice Mail as its not a service I have ever had, so don’t know what the advantage would be.

Other networks should have about the same settings, but also have a look at my post about unlocking a 3G modem, which lists the settings for all the main UK providers.

At work we are trying to launch an application called Alfresco the company behind it bill it as an “Open Source Enterprise Content Management System”; the two parts we are interested in are the Share Application, and the Explorer parts, (and perhaps if we can get those two bits working the Records Management part).

At work we have a copy of the Alfresco Community edition software installed centrally, and I have one installed on my local machine. I have joined up to the online community, and they run on the enterprise version of the software.

It looks like it could be an awesomely useful application however it still feels very much like beta software, its the sort of thing I would install just for my own use as a way of replacing my ‘my documents’ folder and having version control, CIFs access, web access, and Sharepoint access to my documents from anywhere in the world.

Will have to see how it goes, and hopefully it will all work out in the end.

Before Christmas the company I host with (iFuse Hosting) was taken over by a company that no one has heard of, a magical holdings company called Yomura Holdings. who don’t have a website, don’t show up in Google (other than stories of them buying up loads of small hosting companys). as such we were still sure they were a figment of our collective imagination. But they did keep sending emails telling us that our service would improve and reliability would be better.

Well since they took over the mostly reliable iFuse hosting has had a number of extended outages, and response to support tickets and emails is non existent.

Things have got even worse recently when they invoiced my for my hosting fees, I went to try and pay them but have they wanted to take my money? have they responded to my trying to give them money? well no. so unable to contact them (they have no contact details in the public domain that I can find) my account has been suspended.

Due to my set up not being the normal set up on the server, (thanks to Ross being Awsome when he did work there) everything other than CamCrew.co.uk still works

Now with a lot of digging and poking it seems that Yomura Holdings is a part of LTT, Libya Telecom and Technology who have a twitter account, so I am now waiting for a response from them.

I store all my images on my mac in iPhoto 09. and as you can guess this has resulted in a library that is a little on the large side.

One general accepted way to speed up iPhoto is to vacuum the database using the inbuilt sqlite command. this is a bit like defraging the database and reducing the stuff contained in it.

1. Open Terminal and type cd and a space
2. Drag your iPhoto library into the terminal window and hit Enter.
3. Copy the command “for dbase in *.db; do sqlite3 $dbase "vacuum;"; done” and paste into the terminal window.
4. Hit carriage return, wait till the line prompt comes up and your finished. The larger the library the longer the time the vacuuming will take.

Mine took just shy of 15 minutes (did I forget to say I had a large library?) all in all it didn’t speed it up any where as much as I would have liked.

Another way of recovering a few bits of a second from iPhoto slowness is to remove the photo counts next to each album and library in the left-hand pane. The task of updating these counts whenever you modify your images appears to cause iPhoto to slow down sometimes.

To disable the item counts

1. Open iPhoto’s preferences,
2. Goto the General tab,
3. Uncheck the “Show item counts” box. (there may be a delay of a few seconds).

That may show an improvement for you; it also may not.

If iPhoto continues to be annoyingly slow for me, I may get desperate and try Fat Cat’s iPhoto Library Manager to see how that works with my iPhoto collection.

On the Weekend Loupie, a few of TermiSoc and I went to see the SteamPunk exhibit at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. The trip was suggested by Stewart Starbuck as he was going to meet up with a group of Steam Punk geeks from Brass Goggles, and invited others from TermiSoc to come along for a Trip. so all in all there were 6 of us intrepid adventurers; As well as the three mentioned there was bma, Laces, and Sayyan.

The exhibit itself was in a small gallery on the basement level. along with the steam punk exhibit there was a work shop to learn how to make steam punk jewellery and an area where you could play with Maccano.

Apart from the size of the gallery, everything else was really cool. We went for lunch in the (well according to Laces) the Burning Baby, or as the rest of us called it The Eagle & Child. a small pub of No notability at all

The Eagle and Child was once a favourite watering hole of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They often met for discussion (and argument) over a pint.

On the bar wall is a signed note to the landlord written in 1949 stating that J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis have drunk to his health. well we mostly stuck to one drink each.

[View with PicLens]

While at the University of Plymouth studing, I came accross a peice of software that was used to keep all the machines clean and free of student installed crap. The University installs a application on every one of there terminals called Deep Freeze by a company called Faronics; It is about £22.50 for an install licence (you get 30 days of trial).

I have had a play with this software before, and based on that trial I have had a go at installing it on my parents computer; in the hope that it reduces the time I have to spend keeping the computer clean.

Deep Freeze works by freezing all the data on a patition and removes all changes made everytime the computer is re-started, to avoid wiping out all userdata I have the Documents and Profile folders on a diffrent patition.

I hope that at the end of my trial that it will have worked as well as I hope it will.

Although for those times support is required I have installed Cross Loop, fundimently Cross Loop is VNC wrapped in an easy to use userinterface that allows you to connect to another computer without needing to open up firewall ports and such; making it easy for parents to allow me to connect to their computer remotly.

For some unknown reson, since my dad bought the full copy of My Heritage’s Family tree maker the computer has been running slowly. and taking an age to do anything (well that could be because its a 1GHz dell box, with 512 meg of ram. but that should be more than enouth to run Windows XP Pro.

As part of the re-installing software I had to choose a PDF application, and as we all know Adobe Acrobat reader is never the sensable choice. Previously I have used Foxit’s Reader which has been light and always done what it says on the tin, being that it claims to be:

• Foxit’s NO BLOAT PDF Reader
• Small download, fast, accurate rendering

However what it doesnt tell you is that every stage of install it will try and install crap you dont need, and that you have to make sure you de-select from the install. I am not sure how this behavure sits with other people,. but I consider it very anoying.

I have included the Screenshots from the install process below so you can see what it looks like:

[View with PicLens]

Also on this note:

• SUN -  I do not want the Yahoo bar with my Java
• Microsoft – No I dont want any extra crap when I am forced to use MS software
• Apple – Why on earth would I want Safari with my iTunes?

I am sure this list of Grrr will grow.