Aug/090
Back to YouTube
sorry vimeo. Youtibe is back. I'll keep in touch. I'll continue to host all mu video production from the ground up. I'll tag it and describe it for you, but it's all in preparation for the hard release to youbube from now on.
Everything that reaches the Listingslab-Productions.eu playlist will be hosted and shown by the youtube player rather than the vimeo player. It's better, and here's why.
If you embed a film from youtube into your website...... it workd on an iphone. You hit the link which looks broken for everyone else and it opens in the iphone's youtube viewer. Check this post out on an iphone and tell me the video below doesn't work!
Jun/090
iphone cut and paste
The new iphone software was released today and it includes Cut and Paste at last. My London mate @TommyDarko posted something about it a few weeks back. He knows about this kind of thing and was helping apple beta test the new OS before the full release went out to numpties like me today. He reckons Apple have nailed it, and so do I. Its easy, intuitive and it properly solves one of the few annoying issues I've had with the iphone.
Aside from that there is other cool stuff in this update. My picks would be Internet Tethering (allowing you to connect your laptop to the internet through your iphone's 3G connection if you happen to out of wi-fi range), better calendar and if some scally nicks the thing, you can now click a button to wipe all your personal data off it wherever it is through the excellent Mobile Me service.
With the new hardware available (iphone 3G s - the S stands for speed apparantly) which even though it looks exactly the same does have some significant improvements to things like the camera and GPS chips, there's never been a better gadget. Sure there are the naysayers who bang on about blackberries and the like, but really the mobile phone using world is polarised into only 2 camps. Those who have, use and love the iphone. And those who don't yet. Heck - even my Auntie Carole has one!
Feb/091
Doing something annoying and stupid
Yesterday I was down the valley at Carrefour nice and early. I had a busy day in front of me. I decided to give the van a clean at the jet wash. It never stays clean for long in the snow, but it's good to wash the dirt and salt off now and again.
So I cleared out the mess of tissues and fag packets in the door pocket and failed to notice as I shut the door that I'd locked the driver's side. There it was. All doors locked, keys in the ignition and even worse, my iPhone sitting on the front seat. The spare key was on my girlfriend's keyring, 40km away and the number to call her on my phone. Merde. How stupid and annoying.
Suddenly stripped of my 21st century toy - my portable brain-replacement - my iPhone, I was helpless. To find the number I needed the Internet, to call it I needed a phone and that's all before I had to explain to my lovely girlfriend that due to my blunder she'd have to take a few hours out of her busy day to come and rescue me.
I did have a notebook and a pen with me. A low-tech solution to a high tech problem is often the best approach and luckily at some point I'd jotted down a number for one of the ski instructors my girlfriend works with. So with a 5 Euro phonecard and a short struggle to re-learn how to use a public payphone, I was back on the grid.
I made a few calls and retired to to the coffee shop to wait for the cavalry which was arriving directly.
Feb/090
More ski touring
The four of us carried on a great week of skiing with a ski tour from Flegere to Vallorcine. That's about 20km by road. Even on skis taking a more direct route we probably covered around 14km over the 4 hours before stopping for lunch at the Buet hotel & taking the Vallorcine bubble back over to Le Tour and skiing home.
I've been trying to use my iPhone's GPS to track our ski tours, with some success. Unfortunately the device ran out of batteries half way through this tour, but you can clearly see our route on the following GPS track mapped onto Google maps right up until the point where the power ran out.
View Larger Map
It was another lovely day out in the mountains.
Oct/081
Moleskine®
One of the main reasons I got myself an iPhone is to allow me to do a lot more of my day to day emailing etc away from the office. It's certainly very good at that.
But there are times when I need to make notes and for that, the iPhone is crap. I've generally got lots of scrappy A4 lying around with notes on that I never get round to transcribing onto the computer.
So the other day I bought a moleskine notebook & I love it. Low tech it might be, but it's perfect for the job. Apparantly it's a very famous kind of notebook, used by European artists and thinkers for the past 200 years. Picasso used one, so did Hemmingway and even Van Gogh. I can see why.
Oscar Wilde