It took me a lot of deliberation, but finally I decided that the upgrade was definitely worth it. I now have, in my hands, a shiny new iPhone 3G.
But man, what a hassle. I was one of the lucky ones that managed to get one on launch day. I queued from about 7:45am with about 10 people in front of me and ate my McDonalds breakfast in line. There was the odd comment from miscellaneous chavs passing by, but I was totally happy to stand in line all day if necessary.
Unfortunately, O2’s service was quite disappointing in some respects:
- The server crashes slowed everything down so much it was ridiculous. I think it took about 90-120 minutes for me to get through in the end.
- The store staff wouldn’t tell us how many 16GB phones they had in stock. As it turns out, that number was about 4. Which is small, and irritatingly fewer than the number of people in front.
So all this being said, I had to settle for an 8GB, which isn’t really a big issue for me as there’s only about 5GB in use, and there’s plenty of songs to keep me happy on there. However, I think the larger storage would have been nice.
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Continue reading “iPhone 3G: A Review”…
10:43 pm | Posted in Apple
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As you’ve all probably heard, a couple of weeks ago at the WWDC Conference, Apple has announced the iPhone 3G. Back when the first generation was released here in the UK, I got one for £269, unlocked it and have been running it ever since, principally because I was currently in-contract with Orange and didn’t want to buy-out of the remaining contract.
However, with all the subsidies now available and the much cheaper price of £159 on the £35/month contract, I took the leap of faith a couple days ago and listed my iPhone on eBay. Final price: £220. Not bad, considering it’s 9 months old and the back doesn’t quite fit on snugly due to the hardware unlock I used.
Anyway, this being the first thing of interest in quite some time, on opening day my intention is to liveblog the event as it happens on July 11th. So, depending on precisely where I go to buy the thing, I may see you there!
7:54 am | Posted in Apple
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Thanks to Johannes, Reflection (the theme that I use for my photoblog) has become very popular over the last couple of weeks. Apologies again for those who tried in vein to download it whilst I had server issues - that should hopefully all be sorted out now.
This post is just to let you know that development is still very much alive and well and I have a bit of free time to do some work on it over the next few days. Here’s a preliminary list of improvements:
- Create a simple admin interface for easier modification of header image and little features that I’ve hard-coded in.
- Add support for tags - really, I don’t see the point in adding category support at this point in time.
- General code improvements to make the animations a bit faster, and port everything over to the latest version of mootools.
- Clean up CSS - much simpler ways of making the drop-down menus work.
- Fix rendering support in IE6 since it’s currently all broken.
Please let me know if you want anything in particular, either in the comments or drop me an e-mail.
6:24 pm | Posted in Web Development
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I’d been meaning to write about this little story for a while but totally forgot about it up until now. With this long simulation running in the background, it looks like I have an ideal opportunity.
Anyway. Was back home a couple of weeks ago to do some task that I can’t remember, and went to turn on the PC to the lovely sound of click click click hum *pause* click click…
Now, I’ve worked on enough machines to know that any kind of clicking sound is a very bad thing — usually indicative of imminent, unrecoverable hard-drive failure. At this point, I had a major heart attack since that drive had about 40GB of tagged, organized, irreplaceable and unfortuntely, not-backed-up photos.
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Continue reading “Backups…”…
5:56 pm | Posted in Computing, Linux
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Due to popular demand, my photoblog theme — the creatively named Reflection — is now available for download.
Update: Reflection 1.1 has now been released.
I was quite shocked by the amount of people that said they wanted this thing. I thought it was actually okay, but not good enough to publish. However people seem to think otherwise so I decided to put it up.
Design-wise it’s all very simple. There’s a heavy amount of AJAX behind the front page, but it’s handled in a graceful way should JavaScript not be running. Everything on the site uses mootools for any AJAX requests or effects, which is a cracking little library. By far and away the best 3rd party JS library I’ve ever seen.
Anyway. If you want it, go grab it and tell me what you think.
5:33 pm | Posted in Photography, XHTML/CSS
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Like pretty much everybody else out there, I use Google Analytics to help me figure out how much traffic I’m getting and where it’s coming from. And finally, I’m starting to get some more visitors!
Until very recently, it looked like this site was pretty much blacklisted by Google. I’d type in my name - in quotes - and find this site on about the tenth page. And hell, it’s not like my name is even common. But I noticed a week or so ago that I was getting 30-40 visits per day, which is far higher than is usually logged.
Pretty much the most common keyword is linked into my CheapVPS review; in fact, I was pretty surprised to see that it’s actually the fourth result for CheapVPS. I’ll be writing a follow-up to that story soon.
Other than that, better photoblog integration is on the way, just as soon as I can find some time. We’ve got about ten different things going on depending on the day thanks to Christmas, and finding the time to sit down and figure out something to write is pretty slim (hence why I”m writing this at 3am… whoops).
3:22 am | Posted in Personal, Site Development, Web Development
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After a week of toiling over JavaScript, Mootools and a heap of other IE rendering bugs, the finished photoblog is finally here! You might also want to check out the cool mosaic feature which shows all the images I’ve posted.
Now unfortunately I ran into a few problems, and so the photoblog is now running on a separate instance of WordPress, but that’s not too bad. In fact, the user tables are shared so that if you do have an account here already, it will automagically work over there as well.
Anyway, go check it out. The plan is now to integrate it a bit more tightly into this blog right this minute, so enjoy.
3:08 pm | Posted in Photography, Site Development
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I’ve not really been too happy recently about how this blog’s set up. Personally it’s a bit confusing to have my personal blog entries on here, but in-between them have a load of photos that serve no real purpose other than to look good.
So things are going to get mixed up a bit. The photos will be in their own separate website (probably under a subdomain), and the posts will be on the main site. But they’ll all be stored centrally under one WordPress installation - the plan is to use the power of WordPress templates to do this.
More news later when I actually finish this off!
2:34 pm | Posted in Site Development
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Many of the readers of this blog will know that I am a giant, giant Apple fanboy. In fact, whenever I’m in Birmingham it’s an absolute necessity is to visit the Bullring Apple Store (as Sarah will no doubt painstakingly tell you). Unfortunately for me — or rather, my bank balance — a couple of weeks ago, I got a first-hand chance to play with the new iPod Touch. And, at this point, I think that you may see where this blog entry is going.
Rather surprisingly, however, I didn’t purchase the Touch. Since it’s quite large and my pockets are reasonably small, I decided that I’d wait a week and combine both the lovelyness of the Touch with my phone by getting the amazingly-hyped iPhone.
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Continue reading “New Toy!”…
7:37 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing
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