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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.

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.

I was in the Apple Store in NYC standing next to an iPhone today, ( i touched one)

It would have been cooler to have posted this post from it.

The Origional Bolt is dead, After 10 years of online-ness, they closed it today, that is 10 years of my online life closed, all the REG’s i have met and know from there have moved around, some i can keep in contact with through Facebook, Tedious Path, and helldot[seems to be down]. but it wont be the same without the Wiccan Board.

Bolt(folio) is no replacement, if your an old Bolter and want to keep in touch please check here.

Ben in his blog makes refrance to MySpace. I dont use Social networking sites to tell me who my friends are, they are more like a wiki,

one where every one can fordge links to eachother and common inttrests or groups, I have both a MySpace, and a Facebook. Myspace sucks, mainly because its UI is attortius, Facebook is better, but i am guessing they would have learnt a lot from MySpace, this all goes towards making it a usefull way of keeping track of people.
The two complainte, One no pingbacks, or useable blog addresses, (this blog post will be sindicated in facebook, but you cant ping back to the origanal or anything), Two. no RSS feeds, call me sad, but RSS made me a lazy surfer.

There is a Google Earth Panorama Viewer Tutorial that kicks arse, when i get around to fixing PhilipMcGaw.com I think i will distribute my panoramics as KMZ’s as well

My Free Fon was delivered yesterday, but i have only just got round to writing about it, as Rich says, it is quite good, I have now got three AP’s running in my house (with my Fon box being AP3)

Its Public AP i beleve runs in a VPN through your network to there servers, as such it totaly bypasses any of your network, making it imposible for a person conecting to it to get access to your network.

One anoying thing about them though, (reason that the Fon AP is not high on my prefered conection list) is that between the LAN port and its privert SSID is a Router, compleate with NAT and firewall, this stops me accessesing my own network in the open way i ushaly do.

Seth said yesterday that the One Year offer page had gone, and as such i dontated my invite to him. I think ben will be getting his soon, and then we should have a more technical autopsy of the free Router (including how to flash it and stop sharing your wi-fi).

Fon are an obscure American startup, who let you share your broadband via Wi-fi, and in turn let you borrow other peoples,

Well they are one year old and are offering routers for free, so if you go here, you can sign up and get yours for free (Ben can tell us what free it is).

I signed up yesterday, and hope to be pumping-out gratis 802.11b/g soon!

Following Bens post, I desided to see what he was talking about (i have a life, and dont watch a lot of TV), yes i have seen the posters, but i have not seen the adverts, so off i went to the mac website, and here is there list of 15 resons to choose a mac over a Personal Computer. Continue reading »