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!
Apr/091
Micro-blogging with Twitter
When I first came across Twitter a few years ago (yeh, it has been around that long), I was pretty unimpressed. Far too geeky. I could see the cleverness in the technology but it seemed that only other techie-minded people would see any value in it. Frankly, being updated about what a bunch of web developers are eating for breakfast seemed like a proper waste of time. This was before the iphone, when mobile internet use was still in it's infancy.
Amazingly Twitter has gone mainstream over the past few months. Due in no small part to the increasing ease of mobile internet use, twitter is being heavily used by all kinds of interesting groups and individuals from the Guardian & BBC to bloggers like Violet Blue .
As it happens I AM interested in what Stephen Fry is having for breakfast.
I see a use for twitter in enriching this blog by using my iphone to micro-update from my phone. There are still people out there who don't follow the blog by RSS and actually visit the site to see if there are any new posts. The twitter application you see on the right will hopefully provide a bit of interest to those readers.
I also think that just like facebook offered some interesting search-marking opportunities, so will twitter. Just like facebook, your success on twitter is measured purely by the number of followers (friends) you can convince to sign up to your feed. Then it's a case of not loosing their attention and feeding them interesting stuff.
Many of the readers of this blog are techie enough to have twitter accounts, whether they post to it or not. Thanks to Darko for leading the way, but anyone else who has a twitter account - follow me please!
Mar/091
Using the BBC iPlayer outside the UK
The BBC iPlayer is a brilliant piece of technology. Well thought out, well executed and after a long period of development and testing - it really works. The only problem is that due to the way that the BBC is funded, the iPlayer is strictly unavailable to users outside the UK. This has meant we've been unable to use the service here in France.
This restriction works as follows. When you make a request to the iPlayer service to watch a program, the iPlayer system looks at the IP address that the request came from. If that IP address isn't in the UK, it refuses to let you watch it. I've experimented in the past with using proxy servers and other methods to hide where my request is really coming from and trick theiPlayer into thinking I'm in the UK. Without much success. Until now. Due to the diligent research and plain techie genius of my sister's husband, I've found a solid way around the problem and through my mac mini connected to my big fat telly I can finally watch Sunday afternoon nature programs - my favourite thing:)
I'm not going to go into the exact details of how to do this, but I'll point my readers in the right direction. VPN - Virtual Private Networks. Many companies have a VPN to allow their employees to connect to the companies' network remotely, allowing them to access their files/emails etc. Essentially what happens is that a secure connection is created between the client computer and the network it is connected to. Requests to theinternet are now seen to be sent from the that network. If that network happens to be in the UK, then the iplayer is happy to allow the service to be delivered, regardless of where the stream it sends out actually ends up.
Suffice to say that services do currently exist whereby you can buy access to a VPN for a monthly fee.