Vacation time again. This time we are at the beach – a place I tend to stay away from to avoid tanning this hard wonned pale complextion. To top things off no wifi in the house we rented – I can’t even tap into anyone else’s network. So I thought I would be forced to enjoy the surf and sand — until I reviewed my NetNewsWire on my iPhone to discover that the team at Automatic has produced a WordPress application for the iPhone. Woohoo! New toy!
First the app is free! Thank you guys! However I would consider purchasing a tool like this. I installed the app from the AppStore on my iPhone. Even with the slow EDGE network connection, the app was downloaded, installed, and configured to work with my site in five minutes.
Obviously I’m using the app to post this blog entry. It’s pretty easy to use — the only challege being typing on the iphone screen. Don’t get me wrong, I love the technology behind the iPhone keyboard. The only issue is that I’m all bent over the phone to type. I feel like a teenager in an illicit text conversation on the phone.
Anyway more about this app later as I poke around.
Just finished this excellent book, “It’s Not News, It’s FARK“, by Drew Curtis, the founder of FARK.com. I was at Barnes & Noble the other night with my wife as she needed to pick up some new coffee table books and I NEVER pass up an opportunity to go the bookstore. It’s the bookworm in me. My wife had loaded up on a ton of books (literally) that I got to carry for her. Since I’ve finished my last book a couple of weeks ago (I’ve been sustaining by my reading appetite via online manuals and my magazine subscriptions) I quickly looked around for some new reading material. I found Drew’s book in the “Noted Books” section at the store. I took a chance on it after I read the tag line “How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News”.
Now, I’ve never heard of FARK or FARK.com until I read this book. My little corner of the Internet is quite homey and I don’t venture out of it much. So all of the material contain in the book was very new to me — and I laughed all the way through the book. It is a great book if you want a humorous look at current media practices. Drew has identified 8 different categories of basically ‘filler news’ and details them and explains how and why they are used. The overall delivery of the information had me in stitches.
Definitely a recommended book and I’ll probably have my copy loaned out by the end of the week. Sorry Drew – $13.00 bucks for a paperback is a bit steep for most people. Since I just added it to the coffee table book pile I was carrying, I didn’t realize how expensive it was. Rest assured that this copy will be well-read before it’s donate someplace.
(Yes I did visit Fark.com after/during reading the book. To be honest, I didn’t know how to navigate the site. I’ll give it another go when I have some down time.)
Looks like the activation servers for iTunes are seriously swamped with requests. Looks like their capacity planning folks failed in their job and didn’t anticipate the demands for a world wide roll-out of a new iPhone and a firmware upgrade of older iPhones and IPod Touch devices. Well, it’s not like they had MONTHS to prepare for it.
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So when I plugged my phone this morning, iTunes popped up and told me that the v2.0 was ready and if I’d like to install it. uhm… Hell yes! iTunes downloaded the new firmware, backed up my phone, placed the new firmware on the phone and restarted the phone. Once the phone is back online, it was to go back to iTunes and ‘re-activate’ (I guess). Since the servers are swamped, I get an unknown iTunes Store error of -9838.
The phone can now only be used for emergency phone calls. Which is very disappointing – but I’m also a little relieve to see that the Apple had the ability to put that functionality into the phone without the phone being activated.
Anyway – don’t call me… at least for a few hours. Hopefully Apple will fix their issues and I’ll be in v2.0 Heaven soon.
I’ve been reading a lot about photographer’s rights lately. Not that photographer’s have any more rights than anyone else – but there seems to be an unspoken war on anyone with a camera – and God help you if you actually carry a tripod someplace. It seems that anyone that has anything that resembles profession equipment outside of Disney World is watched very closely as though they were terrorist suspects. (Not that they shouldn’t be watched closely – there are a lot of freaks out there.)
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last couple of months, you know that the new iPhone 3G is being released in the US and that older iPhones and IPod Touchs will be getting new firmware – v2.0. I’ve been reading articles all day about reviews on the newest applications, the early availability of the firmware, and the App Store in iTunes — I’m very excited.
I can wait the additional 12-16 hours to get my firmware officially downloaded — thus I’m not going to download and muck around with the ‘discovered’ version out there. (There are a lot of reports that it works fine and the owners have already downloaded and played with a lot of the applications.) However, I had to upgrade my iTunes to v7.7 as soon as it became available on Software Update this morning. Since then, I’ve been browsing the App Store for software that I want to get and play with immediately.
I have already downloaded these to my machine – can’t install them on my phone till I upgrade the phone to v2.0:
AIM – AOL’s chat client eReader – software to allow you to read eBooks Evernote – My favorite Note/Snippet application now has a ‘native’ client Google Mobile App – collection of Google’s tools Jirbo Arcade – Collection of kid games MixMeister Scratch – YES! application that will allow you to scratch to your own library of music. wicky-wicky.. Mobile News Network – News aggregator of some sort MotionX-Poker – dice game – see below for link NearPics – See if anyone has posted any pictures based on your location. Not sure how well this will work on the older iPhone NetNewsWire – my favorite news aggregator has a native client People – white pages lookup application Save Benjis – application to do online shopping/comparison – useful when you are physically shopping and you want a quick cost comparison. Shazam – application that tell you what song is playing by listening to it over the iPhone mic. Spinner Prologue – maze game Travelocity TravelTools – tools from Travelocity – flight arrival times/delays, etc. WHERE – application to give you a map of popular places like all the nearby Starbucks. Zenbe Lists – List application
The only one I purchased was MotionX-Poker. Check out the video here and you’ll buy it too.
I wasn’t very productive today as I’ve been reading all these articles and applications. I suspect that tomorrow will be the same.
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