Archive for January, 2008
Blast from the past
Jan 27th
I found an article today that was published in an internet magazine around 5-6 years ago. I was asked about finding the perfect Internet Provider…
Moving the goalposts
Having said this, ISPA membership is not the be all and end all, and an ISP can still be the mutt’s nuts without being a member – and a member can still cause massive headaches for its customers. This was the case for .net reader Sam, when she discovered that the goalposts were slowly starting to move, where her ISP was concerned.
“Until 1 November 2002, I’d been with BT Anytime for two years. It was priced at £14.99 a month for unlimited access which gave me peace of mind when I was online – no more having to watch the clock,” Sam tells .net. However the terms and conditions with BT’s Anytime service were changed and eventually the monthly payment was hiked to £15.99 a month, and the time you could spend online was limited to 150 hours a month – after which customers would have to use a pay-per-minute service from BT. Hardly Anytime anymore.
“Immediately I knew I had to find another ISP to avoid all those restrictions,” says Sam. “It would have been like going back to the days of paying per minute, having to watch how much time you spend online for fear of running up a huge bill. I thought about changing to another dial-up ISP until I discovered Freeserve Broadband. Just £79.99 for the self-install equipment and £27.99 a month thereafter. To think that it’s only £12 a month more than BT were charging and now I get high speed, instead of trying to dial up for half an hour to get online – it’s bliss.”
I had to laugh, especially because I seemed perfectly happy to be paying not only £80 for the Speedtouch USB modem…which looked like a green jellyfish, but also £28 per month for 512k broadband! Now I pay £7.50 per month with o2 Broadband for up to 8MB – and of course you get the modem/router thrown in for free, much like you do with most ISP’s thesedays.
Anyone else out there paid what they now realise to be over the odds for 512k broadband? I’m glad that broadband internet is coming down in price when everything else seems to be going up.
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Loading ...Come into my Crib
Jan 20th
Since I couldn’t be bothered to take lots of photos of my PowerBook (I know, what’s wrong with me?) I thought I’d treat you to a guided tour of the home office, Cribs style…
I am enjoying playing with iMovie 08. Funny how I don’t think I once touched iMovie 06 when I had it for all those years with the Mac Mini, but this is quite a lot of fun to play with. And I actually discovered some new effects by pure accident tonight which I guess is the best way to find them 
Oh and by the way, the PowerBook is crazy beautiful. How I managed to get this for the silly price I paid is beyond me!
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Mail on the iPod touch
Jan 17th
On Tuesday night I mentioned the new iPod touch upgrade which sees 5 new apps being added: Mail, Stocks, Weather, Maps and Notes, all for $20. I felt no real urgency to buy the package but 12 hours later I did so as I felt the Mail app would be particularly useful. I have one of my IMAP e-mail accounts on the iPod touch now, aswell as IMAP GMail.
I synced the iPod touch with the iMac to get my mail account across and for some reason it carried over all of my POP accounts even when the boxes were unticked or even blanked out in iTunes. I followed the instructions here which resolved one problem but still the e-mail inboxes were on the iPod touch…with no way of deleting them via Settings > Mail. The only account that was listed there was my Google Mail 
So, I did a restore of my iPod. When that completed it showed 1.1.3 as being the latest update (which was installed) but no mention of the apps I’d bought yesterday. I looked in my account settings but nothing was turning up. The only way I could find of getting these back was to locate the receipt e-mail from iTunes I received after the purchase and click on ‘Report a Problem’. It opened a page in iTunes where I then clicked ‘Done’ and it brought back my apps. But how totally not obvious was that? There needs to be an easier way, boys and girls of Apple.
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Hi, I’m Sam and I’m an Appleholic!
Jan 15th
Today most Apple geeks, like myself, would have been following at least one liveblog of the Macworld 2008 event. I was refreshing TUAW and MacRumorsLive which was one of the more reliable feeds and had some great pictures from the event. As everyone expected, a new ridiculously thin MacBook was announced, the MacBook Air. At £1,199 I think it’s safe to say that all I shall be doing is looking and not touching I wasn’t expecting anything within my price range (£500, haha) and I don’t need a portable notebook to that extent anyway.
I did buy myself something today, however. Nope, not the $20 iPod touch upgrade which sees 5 new apps such as Mail, Stocks, Notes, Weather and Google Maps. The only one of those which would appeal to me is Mail. I have zero use for Stocks and as for Weather, well…there’s any amount of free apps out there which do the same thing…or I could just look out of the window I may buy that if I have a bit of spare change over the coming days/weeks. But, what I did buy myself was a 15in Apple PowerBook for £289!
I have been browsing eBay for a couple of weeks for PowerBooks as I could do with a portable machine to take to the studio – and to friends, and to my parents! I had one eye on a PowerBook for £250 which was running Tiger but the spec wasn’t excellent…and it had a few things replaced so not exactly in tip-top condition. Then I found this one with double the spec of the other plus running Leopard with 1GB RAM. So, with 4 days left on the auction I chose the Buy It Now option and promptly sent my payment.
I’m really looking forward to receiving it. I still need to get rid of this Apple Mac Mini G4, however, as it’s sitting there looking all redundant. If anyone out there is looking for an “old skool” Mac Mini in the most excellent condition (check my Flickr stream and see for yourself) for £220 (o.n.o) excluding shipping (UK only) then do drop me a line
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Software Search
Jan 11th
I’ve been making a little list of software I plan on buying soon. I figured that if Uncle Steve (Jobs) doesn’t release anything I want (or more importantly can afford, haha) this Tuesday at Macworld 2008 then that leaves the door open for me to concentrate on getting myself some much wanted apps. One of those I plan on buying is iWork 08. It’s priced at £55 on the Apple Store UK but only £44.99 on Play.com. I think I know who I’ll be buying that from!
I am also keeping a very close eye on the MacHeist bundle. 11 apps for just $49 when ordinarily it would cost $368. The great thing about this bundle is 25% of each purchase is donated to charity. I wouldn’t say that I am keen on all the apps, but the one catching my eye is Pixelmator, which by itself would ordinarily cost $59! This app (along with Snapz Pro X) is currently locked until they reach a specific sales goal. When that one does get unlocked then I’ll be reaching into PayPal for $49 
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...What do you call yours?
Jan 11th
Last year I took a walk around my neighbourhood and my phone started alerting me to wireless networks in the vicinity. I noticed that generally people had kept the default name of the router, such as Linksys, Belkin, BTHomeHub and that kind of thing. If anyone picks mine up then they’ll see fruitbytes – I like to give my network a unique name What’s yours called?
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(RSS) Feed Me!
Jan 10th
For as long as I can remember I’ve been using NewsfireRSS to get my several-times-daily fix of news from my favourite sites and blogs. I have looked at some alternatives out there such as Vienna but since I’ve paid for Newsfire then I didn’t really feel inclined to give that up.
I had heard several people out there recommend NetNewsWire but since that was around $30 to register then I stayed put. That was until the announcement came yesterday that NNW 3.1 was now available completely free of charge. I downloaded it to see what all the fuss was about and thought it was pretty nice, but still not sure if I was ready to elbow NF just yet. That was until I made a discovery – NNW synchs with your iPhone or iPod touch!
I set up a mobile account on the NewsGator website so now I can receive my RSS subscriptions on the iPod touch when I’m browsing in bed or over breakfast in the morning. Then when I head up to the iMac I won’t have to read the same thing twice as it will automatically synch and say “Yup, she’s read that!”.
So yeah, I think NNW has stolen my heart away from Newsfire. The only thing I would change is the automatic feed refresh which will only refresh often as every 30 minutes. I know I can just manually refresh whenever I like, but the option to have certain feeds do it every 5-10 mins or so would have been nice. But, it’s just a minor niggle and not something that would sway me one way or the other when it does other wonderful things. Anyway, maybe not having feeds come in every 5 minutes will mean I get more done as I’ll be less distracted. Oh wait, I have Twitter for that…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Best of 2007
Jan 1st
I had a thought last night about the best and worst things of 2007 – techy/webby/internetty/gadgetry wise of course. But, since I want to be all positive at the start of 2008 I’m going to leave out the bad stuff. So, here’s my list…
Best Purchase – My 20″ iMac
Best Social Networking/Interacting Site – You can forget your Facebook’s and MySpace, my vote goes to Twitter
Best Application – Okay, so I can’t decide on just one since 2007 has seen me using several great apps, so here’s my top 3: Twitterrific, Skitch and Picturesque.
Best Customer Support – I’m going to go jointly with Invision Power Board and o2 Broadband. IPB support replied to one of my support tickets in literally just 2 minutes last month. They are always quick, friendly and helpful but that was record breaking support. Been a IPB client for 5 years now and I don’t see that changing anytime soon with customer care like that o2 Broadband, as I’ve undoubtedly mentioned before, are friendly and helpful which for me is quite refreshing since I came from the awful BT Broadband where support wasn’t their strongest point
Best Discovery – Family Guy. I watched a couple of episodes early last February and by the end of the month I’d collected the whole series on DVD 
For some reason I’d never bothered with FG before but it’s overtaken The Simpsons as my favourite animated TV show (incidentally, I know I wasn’t going to mention worst things here but just a word of warning: if you were thinking of watching/buying The Simpsons Movie, don’t. Woof.)
2007 was a pretty good year for buying the toys I wanted. I think I had far more willpower last year for saving my money than I had the year previously. The beginning of 2008 is going to require a little more of that willpower as Macworld 2008 is approaching. I have no idea what goodies are going to be announced and I sure as hell don’t need another computer for a looong time but it’s nice to have the option and the funds if something special (and much needed) did come along. Since it’s just two weeks away then I think I can hold off buying that digital camera until the Stevenote is over. I’d like to see a tablet Mac sometime in 2008, but I’m hoping Uncle Steve has the decency to wait until my iMac is at least 12 months old so I can justify the purchase
Happy New Year!
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