Crackerwax

It’s true. Today was a voyage of discovery for me that lead to my uncovering of two amazing gems.

The first is that we have Ronald Reagan to thank for GPS navigation! Well, a point of clarification perhaps, he didn’t invent it but he was responsible for allowing its use by civilians.

After a Korean Airlines flight got lost over Soviet territory and was shot down by fighter jets in 1983, it was Reagan that decided that GPS should be declassified. GPS then moved from being a military only doodad to being accessible by the general public!

Additionally in 1996 Bill Clinton authorised the phasing out of selective availability. That’s the noise that’s injected into the signal to prevent it from being too accurate.

So a combination of Clinton and Reagan has meant that I can now locate my nearest McDonalds on my iPhone without batting an eyelid.

The other amazing fact is more of an epiphany.

At the end of Mr Blue Sky by ELO I always thought the robotic voice said ‘Mr Blue Sky’. No! I was wrong!

It actually says ‘please turn me over’, how mad is that? For the past twenty years I’ve thought it said ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and now I find out it says nothing of the kind.

Thing is, I now can’t hear anything other than ‘please turn me over’ no matter how hard I try.

My life is amazing isn’t it?

It’s less than twenty four hours until Apple make their latest announcement.

As ever I proffer up my predictions on the content of their Keynote.

1. iPod Touch redesigned to have physical volume control, possibly built in speaker
2. iPod Touch range repriced, possible introduction of 64GB model
3. New iPod Nano design with widescreen
4. Possible bump in capacity of 160GB iPod Classic, 80GB to remain
5. iPhone/iPod Touch firmware 2.1 released
6. iTunes 8.0 released, introduction of a subscription service sadly unlikely
7. Mac Mini possibly dropped from the Mac range
8. New MacBooks introduced
9. iPod Shuffle to receive storage boost to 4GB

I’m usually completely wrong with these sort of things but it I would say that iTunes is a dead cert, as is the new Nano and the increased capacity Shuffle.

Of course all of this will undoubtedly result in me being parted from my cash at some point down the line, although I don’t need any more iPods I think a nice little aluminium MacBook might be nice.

For those not in the know a Segway can be best described as being the horse-less carriage version of the chariots they rode around in, in Ben Hur. It sounds freaky but it’s great fun, I suggest you try one at the first opportunity.

Sadly I didn’t manage to get a picture of myself on one, scooting around Bermuda on our Segway tour but let me tell you I want one.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Three weeks ago today I queued up outside Carphone Warehouse at a ridiculous time in the morning, coffee in hand, to collect my shiny new 16GB iPhone 3G.

The doors opened at 08:02 and we all filed in to dutifully hand over our £159 to pick up our iPhones. If only it were that easy.

The queue outside was tolerable, good natured chatter and coffee make things tolerable, it was when I got inside that the pain began. O²‘s systems crashed almost immediately leaving me unable to have either a credit check or a proof of address check.

All of this lead to me standing in the shop for over three hours while they repeatedly tried to verify that I lived where I said I did and that I’d be able to pay the bills.

I got it though, obviously, and I’ve been using it for the past three weeks. I have a number of observations about it.

I’d never really fancied the first iPhone, I don’t like to be an early adopter of consumer electronics they’re normally bug ridden or prototypes in need of refinement (Nintendo DS?). So I generally wait for version 2.0 or 3.0 wherever possible, that’s what I did here.

There are lots of pros and cons to owning an iPhone though.

Pros

1. It’s a beautiful piece of design
2. The screen is a delight to use, high resolution and bright
3. It’s also covered in scratch proof glass
4. Everyone’s writing applications for it
5. It has built in GPS, fast GPS
6. 16GB of storage is great, enough for a couple of movies and a lot of music
7. It has a very well designed OS
8. Visual voicemail is superbly implemented
9. The mail client is very usable
10. MobileMe synchronisation is fantastic
11. The ringer is turned off by a physical switch

Cons

1. Battery life is terrible, three hours of full use is not enough
2. The camera only outputs 1600 x 1200
3. It has no flash
4. It doesn’t do video
5. The keyboard is plagued by lag
6. Safari crashes more often than a hypoglycaemic dieter
7. So do a lot of the other apps
8. The phone’s contact list takes forever to load
9. Sometimes calls don’t connect and all you get is crackle and noise (O²?)
10. The 3G signal quality varies wildly
11. Ringtones have to be created, you can’t just use an MP3
12. Sometimes it just locks up
13. The camera requires a screen touch to take a photo, making it very easy to drop
14. No cut and paste

That’s a lot of negative points but I still think it’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. Aside perhaps from the battery life none of the points raised are particularly unfixable and I’m certain that they will be fixed at some point in a firmware update.

The battery life is the biggest stickler though, it’s just too poor to be acceptable. If I watch a movie on my way to work (a journey of twenty five minutes) I’m down to about 70% battery life by the time I get to work. If I make a couple of phone calls during the day, maybe browse a few websites and send some tweets, by three o’clock I’m out of juice.

That really is unacceptable.

My old Nokia 6021 last about two weeks on standby admittedly they’re very different beasts but I still expect more than three hours talk time or a days standby from a phone.

All in all though I standby my love for the iPhone, it is an amazing piece of technology that ten years ago would have been impossible. I can just about overlook the battery life issues with careful placement of chargers and all the really cool stuff it does makes up for it.

Roll on firmware 2.1. That will be the true test of Apple’s commitment to the cell phone market.

In the 1980′s if you wanted to film your friends cavorting around (not like that, pervert) then you’d need to carry the slick kit and caboodle pictured on the left.

Of course now here in the brave new 21st century hip young gun-slingers like me carry camcorders like the one on the right.

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If only my grandfather was around to see these amazing advances in technology.

I swear I have not felt as tired and run down as I do right now.

I’ve had a busy weekend, in fairness I’ve had a busy few weeks, actually let’s be honest I’ve had a fucking nightmare couple of months.

I’m shattered, I’m going to have an early night, maybe have an early start tomorrow.

In cool news the new iPhone is out on Friday, will definitely be scoping out the queues on my way to work and if they’re small enough I will probably pop in and buy one.

That was a boring post wasn’t it?

This is too cool for fucking school. No shit if I had £600 to drop right now, I’d be dropping it ona Tenori-On. Look at this.

That my friends is a Tenori-On, a brand new type of instrument created by two Japanese dudes, Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori. Its original design came about as part of Iwai’s desire to build an electronic instrument of true beauty. By jove, I think he’s got it!

If you watch this video too, you’ll see one of its cooler features.

Those two ladies’ (The Tenorions) Tenori-Ons are playing in sync, their both playing little bits and bobs on each of them and the units are tying in with each other to keep it harmonious. How cool?

I can’t believe I missed this when it came out two years ago! Isn’t the future fantastic?

I’ve never been one of those weird audiophile types. They’ve always struck me as a wee bit odd listening to John Coltrane, in the dark, with their eyes closed, suspended from the ceiling by elastic bands, completely nude. You know the sort of thing.

One of their other bizarre habits, and one which is also shared by the gullible punters who buy TVs at Dixons, is buying obscenely expensive cables.

My HDMI cables cost £3.89 each, if I were to be a cable snob I’d have paid £99.95 for a Monster brand HDMI cable.

And if I’d done that you could rightly claim that I was a complete twat, because I would be.

I recall the father of a friend of mine that bought an £80 SCART cable. He used this to connect a DVD player to a 50″ low definition, back projection television. He was informed by the salesman that it would improve picture quality immeasurably. Immeasurably.

Yeah, maybe if it was fucking magic.

That’s the point though isn’t it, the gullible can be fooled very easily. As can the conceited.

If you think you have some kind of divine power that enables you to sense the effect that using oxygen free copper over regular copper has on the electrical impulse that carries your audio signal to your speakers, you’ve got to have some kind of messiah complex. It just isn’t possible.

The same goes for HDMI cables, the signal is digital it either works or it doesn’t, there’s no in between. Even worse than that is the bizarre swindle of the gold plated optical cable. What the fuck use is gold plating to a device that relies on optical integrity? None, that’s what. How could it be, unless of course gold has some amazing optical properties I’m not aware of!

All of the above just serves to enhance the glee I felt when reading this article about audiophiles being unable to tell the difference between aforementioned Monster cables and coat hangers. That’s right, coat hangers.

Oh, how we laughed.

Part three in my quest for home cinema perfection has arrived, the Onkyo TX-SR875 is now taking pride of place in the living room!

Have a look at this!

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Look at all those inputs, look at the amazing number of HDMI ports. Just look at it! It’s a work of art and no mistaking.

I’ve only got it set up for 5.1 at the moment but soon, and I do hope it is soon, I will purchase an extra set of speakers so that I can enjoy the joyous feeling of the TrueHD 7.1 surround sound that’s tucked away on all my Blu-rays.

So it finally happened, Toshiba have stopped fighting it and put HD DVD out of its misery like a horse with a broken leg.

Of course it wasn’t always this clean cut, I for one backed HD DVD at the start, preferring it to Blu-ray for its inherent backwards compatibility and strong standard feature set. Then again what do I know?

As a bit of a gadget freak I’m lucky enough to own both formats, HD DVD courtesy of my Xbox 360 and Blu-ray as part of my PlayStation 3. However, had the Xbox 360 not had an add on drive I certainly wouldn’t have bought a standalone player, in fact I wouldn’t have bought the external HD DVD drive either, I only have that because it was a gift.

My film collection includes one HD DVD, compared to nine Blu-ray titles. While that’s a pretty significant ratio it’s probably more significant that I only have two PlayStation 3 games! So in essence my cutting edge games console is actually only a glorified DVD player.

Blu-ray stole the march on HD DVD by its inclusion in the PlayStation 3 but it wasn’t until movie studios started to waiver that things looked to be swinging in either format’s favour.

When Warner announced their defection to Blu-ray it was game over. Everyone knew it.

I still maintain though, that Blu-ray will be the last major disc based format. In five years time DVD will still be around, replacing VHS as the de facto standard for the unconnected world, but HD content will be delivered to consumers as a download, ‘bonus’ content will be chargeable and you will never own the films. You’ll either rent movies or pay a fixed monthly fee for unlimited access.

This model won’t just stop there though, the next generation of games consoles will do the same with their games, in fact the next batch of consoles will probably be the conduit to all this entertainment.

The Oracle has spoken. Mark his words!

It’s finally here, after waiting for what seems like forever, my new phone has finally arrived. I’m so excited!

There will be more on this news later I suspect.

I’ve just bought a laptop! And after spending three days installing Windows XP on it, it’s now usable too!

You see it came with Windows Vista pre-installed and although it looks absolutely gorgeous, Vista isn’t the most straight forward OS to use. After unsuccesfully trying to install Photoshop, Homesite and Cute FTP I called it a day and set off on my three day odyssey of XP installation.

It’s all about the drivers you see. Samsung don’t appear to even realise they have an R700 laptop on their UK site, let alone provide any XP drivers, so I had to spend hours investigating chipsets, generic drivers and other Samsung laptops in order to find out what I needed to do to get up and running. Suffice to say, being the genius I am, I’ve finally managed to get a stable XP install running. Go me!

The really cool thing about the R700 though is the price. £599 for a laptop with a Dual Core processor, 250 Gb hard disk, 2 Gb of RAM and a 1440 x 900 17″ wide screen on it, is good value in my book. Oh yeah, it’s got a full size keyboard with numeric keypad too!

Suffice to say it’s my favourite gadget right now. Of course my Nokia E90 should arrive tomorrow, so it might not be on the perch for long…

Don’t you love E3? Ok, it’s a little less grand this year but all the cool shit still goes down there!

Not only do we get the new Halo 3 trailer (jeans creaming optional, thank you Leprekorn) and the Killzone 2 trailer but Sony have only just gone and released details of the new and improved PSP, the PSP Slim. Get in!

They’ve reduced the size making it smaller, thinner and lighter, increased its battery life and also appear to have rounded its edges a bit more. All this and it’s still got the same size screen!

The other great thing is that now it’s slot loading! Great stuff, much better than the MiniDisc style pop up loader it has currently, it always felt flimsy to me, like it was just about to snap off.

The rumour mill has of course gone in to hyperdrive, current speculation is that it’s going to have Bluetooth and maybe even 4Gb of internal flash memory! 4Gb built in would be very nice, though I’m not certain that it’s a guarantee yet.

This redesign is of course is very good news, the original PSP is shit to play for prolonged periods of time, it did have something of the brick about it . Hopefully this redesign may have cured some of those problems. I doubt it though, my main gripe was always that fucking analogue nubbin, which was as much use as a chocolate fire guard and it doesn’t appear to have moved.

Still one can always hope. You know I’m going to get one anyway…

As anybody that knows me will attest, I’m massively into my games.

It all started when my dad bought me a second hand ZX Spectrum+ (proper keys and a reset button!) in the mid-eighties and snowballed from there, I’ve had practically every console ever made and love the whole scene to bits.

Currently under my telly sit a PlayStation 3, Xbox360, Wii, Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 and I don’t travel anywhere without my Nintendo DS Lite. I’m considering getting a PSP again, as they can link up with the PlayStation 3 and do all sorts of fancy stuff, but that’s a thought for another post it’s the DS aspect that’s cool.

I’ve had my interest piqued recently by DSpec, a ZX Spectrum emulator for the DS, it doesn’t work with my flash cart yet but when it does it’ll be pretty cool. Being able to play the classic games that started my love of gaming when I’m on the train, in bed or when I’m sitting have a coffee in Starbucks is going to be superb. Fantastic stuff this modern technology.

I sat on the phone for 48 minutes last night all in the vague hope someone at Microsoft might answer the phone. As before, fat fucking chance.

So I made a decision, if Microsoft don’t want to fix it I’ll get it fixed myself and send them the bill. Right on!

Let’s see if I get anywhere with this. So far I’m £38.50 in the hole and it sounds like the company I’m using actually take the unit apart, get rid of the shit and dust out of it and fit a decent cooling that doesn’t let the motherboard warp like a suspension bridge in a gale. We’ll see how they do but to be honest they can’t be much worse than Microsoft.

I’ll keep you informed in my quest for Microsoft to pay my bill.

Looks like my Xbox 360 has finally decided to pack in at the grand old age of 18 months.

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This isn’t the first time I’ve had this kind of problem, oh no, I’ve been having freezes for a few weeks now and I even rang Microsoft last week to report them. I was helpfully told then that a simple restore would cure the problem.

My arse.

I’ve worked in the IT support game long enough to know that the first thing on tech support’s mind, when handling a call, is to get rid of that call. This isn’t my idea of customer service by the way, I’m much more thorough, however my English speaking chum possibly wasn’t.

This time though it looks serious, I even had three red lights earlier tonight. I guess that means I’m fucked really.

The upshot of all this is, that tomorrow, I’m going to have to call Microsoft to try and get them to help me get my ’360 fixed. God alone knows how much that is going to cost me.

Be warned though Microsoft I’ve got a PlayStation 3 now, and I’m not quite as impressed by your machine as I used to be.

Hah! Listen to me, as if Microsoft gives a flying fuck about me!

The PlayStation 3 is the most amazing piece of hardware I have ever owned. It is worth every penny of the £425 asking price.

I’ve just tested its upscaling of DVDs. Star Wars upscaled to 1080p on my Samsung panel looks amazing. Absolutely fucking amazing. Like nothing I have seen before. The picture is crisp, vivid and alive, motion is smooth and shadows detailed. It’s like it was on Blu-ray, it really is.

The XMB (the interface you get on switching on the box) is beautiful and surprisingly functional. Even the built in web browser is usable (this site looks awesome running full screen at 1920 x 1080).

So in summation, I’m sorry Sony. I really doubted you on this one, at least now you’ve gotten rid of king of the egos Ken Kutaragi the platform has a fighting chance.