The dividing line between genius and insanity has never been so close. The results. These are the tunes that iTunes thinks belong together:

• Here Comes The Flood — The Divine Comedy
• Right Said Fred — Bernard Cribbins
• Pretty Flamingo — Manfred Mann
• Mulder And Scully — Catatonia
• Sunshine On Leith — The Proclaimers
• Heroes And Villains — The Beach Boys
• Love Me Like You — The Magic Numbers
• Half The World Away — Oasis
• Together — The Raconteurs
• Still Take You Home — The Arctic Monkeys
• Life On Earth — The Divine Comedy
• Chemtrails — Beck
• Songs of Love — Ben Folds
• All mine (Portishead cover) — The Divine Comedy
• Substitute — The Who
• Sorted for E's & Wizz — Pulp
• The Ballad of Tom Jones — Space
• Funny Little Frog — Belle and Sebastian
• Someone — The Divine Comedy
• Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles) — The Arcade Fire
• Disco 2000 (Pub Rock Version) — Nick Cave
• Dog — Ben Folds
• Parklife (Live) — Blur
• Running the World — Jarvis Cocker
• The Size Of A Cow — The Wonder Stuff

This sounds deceptively simple, but really wasn’t, so here’s how it went. I had an 18 month contract with 02, ready to run out in September. But last month they phoned me up, and when I said I was waiting for the new iPhone, they recommended I switched to the Monthly Sim Only “Simplicity” contract, shaving three months off my contract (since Simplicity is a rolling monthly agreement) meaning I’d be able to get a new contract come July 11^th.

This morning at 08:45 I was waiting outside Walthamstow’s O2 shop, on the reasonable basis that it would be quieter than Oxford Street, and there was a couple of dozen people queuing at the time. At 08:55, I moved to Carphone Warehouse on the basis that swapping being 24th in line for being 5th in line seemed sane. So I was the fifth person to get into Carphone Warehouse, the other people selling the iPhone today.

CPW had 24 iPhone 8 gigs, and two iPhone 16 gigs. The first four people wanted 16 gig ones, and it became a race against the (heavily overloaded) computer system as they went though the upgrade process. Two didn’t make it, and left the store. The other two were on hold for credit checks.

Switching to the simplicity tarrif was the wrong thing, because it meant I’d shifted from being a normal O2 contract user, to a non-trusted base-level user, meaning to get an upgrade I’d also have to pass a credit check. Which was fine, but O2 had apparently been recommending the Simplicity route for lots of people, and so the national queue for credit checks was loooooong.

At 10:20 – almost an hour and a half after I arrived – I left the shop to get to work, late but salvageable. Today was a deadline day.

At 11:30 CPW phoned me (I’d left a card) to say my check had gone though, and they had a phone for me, but I would have to collect it by 12:30. Since I’d got in at 10:50, I felt that leaving at 11:30 for my lunch hour was taking the piss slightly, but left dead on 12. Kings Cross to Walthamstow takes exactly 26 minutes, I have found, if there’s a train when you get to the platform and it’s the middle of the day (so stops at stations to exchange passengers are brief). I ran. I don’t run often, but I ran today to get an iPhone.

I got it. It’s shiny. I bought insurance for it after what happened to the one I borrowed.

This doesn’t end here, though.

First, my shoes were not built for running, because they dissolved by my running though the rain. By eight this evening (when I left the office) the soles were falling off.

Second was trying to migrate contacts.

One of the really cool features about OS X is the phone support. For 10.4 it supported the latest Ericcsons, and would bluetooth sync to them, and when they got a text message it would appear on your desktop. For the brief period I had a compatible phone (a few months, the on-call phone for Those Who Evolve was one) it was great. However, it’s not been updated to support any phone since then, so it falls to feisar who provide plugins for many phones.

My first attempt was to sync the old phone to the mac, then the iPhone to the mac. But for some reason whilst my old z310i would sync quite happily with the Feisar plugin, the newer one won’t (I suspect it’s because of the newer one’s Orange replacement firmware), and in attempting to fix this plugin (they’re all scriptable) I ran the unit test suite, which overwrote my entire phonebook.

I swore.

Nevermind, I thought, I’ve got backups. If nothing else, I’ve got all the contacts on my machine from the last fight with phone syncing at Christmas.

Er, no. Gone. No idea where. Fail.

After a certian amount of faffery (including grepping my entire hard-drive for a known-saved number to see if Outlook, ActiveSync or something had left a backup somewhere. Incidentally, the XDA (from the previous article) still has all the numbers, but no longer charges) I remember the existence of…

Bluebook

O2 run a service called bluebook. Bluebook is part of their data network, and (once you’ve signed up) stores SMSs for you from the wire as they go to your phone. Which is Really Fucking Handy. But not as useful as its ability to look like a valid syncing service for contacts, which my phone has been merrily syncing away to since I signed up a few months ago, silently and automatically. A perfect backup.

It’s even smart enough to allow export of your entire contact list in a sane and rational format!

And from there I can import into Windows Address Book (I’m now at home), and from there into iTunes, and from there onto the iPhone, which now has all my contacts.

All for only… 70% of the time of typing them all in manually.

But I have an iPhone, and it’s shiny. Sorry, that’s as interesting as my life gets right now. You should talk to my brother, he’s being eaten alive by doomed crabs.

I’ve never used these, and I don’t like them. But now I know about this:

This makes all the little arrows search your internal library instead. So clicking the arrow beside “Hello City” takes me to the album, and clicking “Barenaked Ladies” takes me to my entire collection of canadian bands with a double-bass in them.

The Office iPhone was bought when we launched last autumn and is a US model with the hack so we could use it in this country and install applications on it. I didn’t use many third party apps, simply because doing so was more complicated than I could be bothered to do. I look forward to the day we can develop for it easily, though.

The Good

The interface is shiny and spinny and nice. It is one of the nicest phone UIs I have had the pleasure of using. Things transition between states – often ignored in interface design – rather than instantly changing to other things.

The SMS interface, which is laid out roughly like an IM session, is a revolution someone should have thought of years ago, it’s a very simple threading implementation, but makes dealing with SMSs as a form of conversation – rather than alert – much easier.

The orientation-aware interface is very well done. It flips only when its obvious that you want it that way up.

Safari works very well, though the inability to edit (You can only append or replace) URLS was a bit annoying. Google Maps was very nicely done, and I do like the use of the multitouch interface for pan and zoom, I think they could have done more with multitouch, though.

The less good

On the opposing side, the SMS interface makes dealing with SMSs that are actually alerts rather than conversations – daily updates, calendar tasks, SMS warnings, Twitter – a little less intuitive, and I’d like the ability to say “display messages from this contact individually”.

I didn’t get on with the keyboard very well, possibly it takes practice, possibly my fingers are too big.

The iPod bit… sucks. I hate to say it, but it does. The new interface makes the way I use playlists more difficult (I tend to flip though my oversized music collection adding stuff to an “on the go” playlist. Previous iPods let you do this from any playlist, artist or album list. In the new interface you can only add to On The Go from a dedicated full track list), the recessed headphone socket is incompatible with my headphones. You can’t operate it while its in your pocket, because there’s no tactile feedback for the volume or track changing interface, you have to bring it out and look at it. Coverflow’s useless unless you have art for everything. As a replacement for my 5^th generation iPod, it wasn’t wonderful.

The ugly

I will, however, be buying one. Not because I want one, although it’s a nice enough device I don’t believe it’s worth £300 and a new contract.

No. I will be buying one because some enterprising bastard pinched the borrowed iPhone from my pocket on the tube home on Monday night, and it falls to me to replace it. Which is, of course, the big problem with having and obviously shiny, obviously expensive device that you have to bring out of your pocket to operate.

I’ll stick to my Z310i for now.

Q: How do I open HQX files in Tiger, since they’ve dropped native support?

A: Open it in Safari. Not even kidding.

And the question.

Internet! Answer me!

What does it mean when, on a G4 powerbook, the green light around the power adapter is pulsing on and off?

Note: I do not remotely expect this to be a good thing.

Will it blend?

I have an idea, and I’m going to say it here because if it’s true in six months time I can point here and say “Called it”.

This is my Idea:

The phone network in the US is pretty much locked down. If you want to do anything to do with mobile phones, you pretty much have to deal with get into bed with one of the big companies.

In the UK, that’s not true. That’s how companies like… well, Hotxt get their (er, our) app onto your phone without having to sign a pre-nup with Orange. (Three is a slightly different thing, it’s trying to run a US-style “Sign. Here.” system, and it doesn’t appear to be doing that all that well. I digress).

One of the big problems Apple has/had in the US is with AT&T not keeping up with registrations, with the division of understanding between an “Apple Product” and a “AT&T Product”, and generally with associating it – and co-labeling with – another major brand.

If I were Apple in the UK then, and I had people on-hand who knew how this kind of shit worked (Which I don’t, obviously), I’d do what Virgin Mobile do, and be a “MVNO” – a Mobile Virtual Network Operator – the mobile equivalent of all those “Free Dialup” offers late last decade, running their branded stuff on other people’s networks.

It’s not as if they don’t already have the ability to take subscription payments (.mac & iTunes) and everything already.

Apple Mobile. Coming autumn 2007.

This is interesting, because O² are also one of the only UK ‘phone networks without an “all you can eat” data rate available.

There are many ways around it, but my current favourite is Growl.

Growl is a notification system for OS X, where programs send messages to the central demon, and it pops up a little dialog message that eventually fades away. They're nice for debug, so I have this:

<?PHP
require_once 'Net/Growl.php';

$growl =& Net_Growl::singleton('Net_Growl', array('Messages'), '[Password]');
$growl->_options['host'] = '[MyIP]';

$GLOBALS['growl'] = $growl;

function debug($message){
    $backtrace = debug_backtrace();
    
    array_shift($backtrace);
    
    if (is_array($message) || is_object($message)){
        $message = print_r($message,1);
    }
    
    $title = sprintf("Debug - %s - %d", $backtrace[0]['function'], $backtrace[0]['line']);
    

    $GLOBALS['growl']->notify('Messages', $title, $message);
}

Where does iTunes store my list of Podcast Subscriptions?

Whilst at LUGRadio Live there was a wireless network in the main area, which I connected to. Unfortunately it was one of those which automatically redirected you straight to a login page for every request you put though it. It did this with 302 headers.

So when iTunes decided to update my podcasts it went up to the network, requested the URL, got a redirect and then decided this redirect was the new URL for the Podcast, so now I’m subscribed to a dozen podcasts at wirescanner.wlv.ac.uk.

I could unsubscribe and then resubscribe to the casts, but that will involve losing my archive, a lot of which aren’t in the feed anymore. The feeds don’t appear to be kept in the iTunes xml file, and I’m currently running a grep -R wirescanner / over my entire hard drive to see where the hell it could be. Google is being no help either.

Since I can see my next answer being “Use Free Software”, I shall start my defense now by saying that I use Banshee at work, and I’ve tried rhythmbox, juk and all of the others. None of them do all I need them to.

I hate computers.

1. Watching Anime DVDs
2. Watching Anime DVDs on your Laptop
3. Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook
4. Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook, which is displaying them on the TV screen
5. Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook, which is displaying them on the TV screen, and using your bluetooth mobile as a remote control.

Win

These are some I’m enjoying:

• The official TMBG podcast – Tracks that wouldn’t make an album, and the occasional long sketch I’m thankful I could skip. [iTunes Link]
• Ask a ninja (Video) A ninja asks all your questions [iTunes Link]
• G4 TV Game reviews and such. Making fun of larpers from the unasilable position of being addicted to WoW. [iTunes Link]
• iMadeitup Music by Adam Rabin, previously lauded here as the music group Mailbox. [iTunes Link] [RSS Link]
• del.icio.us Mashups [RSS Link]
• LUGradio The occasional good bit buried within screeds of high handed bigotry against other people’s choice of operating systems. [iTunes] [RSS]

And if you can tell me the name of the track that accompanies most of this, I’ll be your friend forever.

They’ve recently released all three for free download (Free as in beer, though they are supporting an Open Source conversion of the engine). This is how I got them to work on my Powerbook.

One, Mac Classic

The Marathons are old software, so you’ll need a Mac Classic (that is, OS9) environment to run them in. Fortunately Apple supply you with an install of OS9 on the second OSX install disk you got with the laptop. Dig it out, set up a 1 Gig disk image somewhere on your system, and install OS9 to it by clicking the icon when you put the install disk in.

Then, go to System Preferences and then Classic, and when it finds your new Classic install, click Okay.

Two, Marathon.

• Download Marathon.
• Extract it.
• Double-click the icon

Controls

You’ll need to redefine the controls, as they default to a number pad the Laptops don’t have.

That’s it.

For shits and giggles, now attempt to run a game released 11 years ago under Windows XP without resorting to Dosbox

Okay, so I need to do the rm *.m4p afterwards, but still.

So, question one, what does it do, and question two, what is it for?

You will require:

• The “Generic 3G Scripts” from Ross Barkman’s home page
• Your phone to be connected to Vodafone Live.
• A Powerbook with bluetooth.

Download the scripts, unsit them and dump them in /Library/Modem Scripts

The easy bit is getting the Powerbook to talk to the Z500. You turn on Bluetooth on both and then “Setup Bluetooth Device” from the Bluetooth system preferences.

You’ll need to tap in the security number the Powerbook gives you into the Samsung.

The settings are as follows:

Phone Number/APN: “internet”
Username: “web”
Password: “web”

(note, these are for the UK Vodafone Live service. Ross Barkman’s site has listings for many others on his site. He is a god within our midsts and should be bought beer)

The modem type is “Generic 3G CID #1”.

That’s it, it should just work now.

One of the reasons it took me quite so long to buy a laptop was because I don’t trust them. I trust, to some extent, every machine on this network, because I built it by myself out of the very-expensive-lego that is the PC hobbiests stock in trade. Zephyr was built by me, Boilingpoint is made out of old bits of Reef is made out of old bits of Atoll is made out of old bits of Maelstrom, the circle of life.

I have owned, in my lifetime, three laptops. The middle one is Nemo. It’s a 486, it has no battery, no network, no memory. It’s single use is if all my other machines are dead and I need to vent in text format.

The first one is called “Despair”, and this is its story.

The Prince is the only person to have kept his psudonym from the days when I was writing in Opendiary as Ithen and was scared silly of real people reading my diary. He is one of the vanishingly small number of people that I’ve kept in touch with since pretty much playschool. He’s a very good actor, a very good friend, and we both gloss over the fact that we’re both too disorganised to meet up more than once every nine to twelve months or so. I have sung duets on stage with him, screwed up dance routines with him, and watched him wade deep into “Dude, that’s a bad idea” territory by asking one of our close-knit group of dramatists if the reason she’s so on edge (At the last rehersal before exam performance) is because she’s on her period. Okay, on that last occasion I remained as far away from him as was physically possible in the suddenly-awfully-small drama room, but – despite my desires – I was still there.

I was on holiday from university, and was wandering up to London to window-shop on Tottenham Court Road when I ran into The Prince at The Fictional Railway Station. Somehow I found myself a couple of hours later sitting on a couch in another actor’s apartment, fixing his computer. Actually, trying to get a P133 running windows 95 at 640*480 in 256 colours to access the Information Superhighway via the man’s Virgin.net subscription.

Geeks quite often find themselves in this situation.

There is a canonical Head and Shoulders advert that ran for many, many, many years on UK Tv, where they wash half a mans head in normal shampoo and half in Head and Shoulders. The man whose flat I was in was at pains to point out that he didn’t have black hair anymore, and never had dandruff anyway.

In return for getting his damned machine onto the New World, he gave me a laptop. I played Solitare on it for an hour or so until the battery started to go, so I plugged it in.

There was a series of entertaining crackling noises, then nothing. The power supply never spoke again, and neither did Despair. It was named later on.

I tell this story because my Powerbook power supply did exactly the same thing this morning. Blew the fuse on the lead that goes into it. So I tried my co-worker’s one (Recharging from his power supply worked fine) and it blew the fuse on that too.

I now have less than one hour’s charge left on my powerbook, and no way to recharge it.

Looks like I’m going to the Apple Store tomorrow.