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Sunday
Dec022012

I've sold my iPad

The question is, how long can I manage without it? Will I resist upgrading to the 4th generation model, known as "the new iPad" to Apple and iPad 4 to everybody else.

Day 1 - 27th November 2012

My iPad sold on eBay today, but not to my first bidder. I'm relieved because he/she/it seemed a bit of a chancer. I quoted our exchange of messages on the bottom of the sale page Apple iPad 1st Gen. 64GB Wifi+3G. + sleeve. NO dents or scratches. 

Q: Hi jovike. Can I pick it or buy it from you tomorrow. 
A: Hi Bippu, I've already answered this question. See also postage options. If you win, after you've paid, you can pick it up. 
26 Nov, 2012
Q: hi you know my biding. if you want sell me your ipad i can pick from your address. its easy both of us. and late me know before Sunday evening. thanks 
A: Hi Bippu, pick-up is already an option. I will not change the end time. 
25 Nov, 2012
Q: hi why you want to sell your ipad
A: Hi Bippu, I want to get a newer model. 
24 Nov, 2012

You have to be careful, as a Twitter friend informed me: scams exist. If crooks collect the item they will later deny it. If they pay cash it will be counterfeit. I won't allow home collection in future.

I wipe the iPad and remove the micro-SIM. The plan is to put this tiny card in an iPad 4 when I get one.

Day 2 - 28th November 2012

Posted the iPad. Still not missing it. I also sold an old iPhone 3 that has been sitting on my windowsill for a couple of years. £69.00, not bad.

Day 3 - 29th November 2012

Max the doggie came to stay today. Dogs are better than iPads.

Apple releases iTunes 11. This is very similar to iTunes 10, but controls are moved around and the colours and fonts are better. One change that will affect me is that only one window can be open, so it's now laborious to check that I have up-to-date versions of apps. With any luck, iTunes 11 will notice all app updates and download the latest version so I won't have to do this manually. It's a bug I've reported a few times.

The Etsy app is updated. This is a site for artists and craftspeople to sell their creations. Hm, that would be nice to play with, but hardly vital.

Day 4 - 30th November 2012

Not missing the iPad. People expecting more app reviews on @iPad140 will have to wait. I still tweet the occasional price alert there, and I keep track of new iPad apps I download as well as apps that go Universal: ie, apps that used to work only on the iPhone and iPod touch, but now work on all iOS devices. 

Day 5 - 1st December 2012

 

Returned home from enjoyable walk with Max at Trent Park. We've been burgled. The glass in the back door is smashed, and many things are in disarray, particularly in the bedrooms. Nothing seems to have been taken though. We later found some cash had gone, which was hidden in clothing. The police were there promptly, as was a Scene of Crime Officer in the evening, and a contractor to secure the back door. We ate curry at midnight, tidied the bedrooms at 1-2 am and then settled down to watch The Killing III. Not thinking about iPads at all.

Day 6 - 2nd December 2012

Half of a front tooth has broken off. Still not thinking about iPads.

Mactracker updated. This application lists the specification of all Apple hardware and allows comparison. Last week the new iPad was not on here. I think I consulted it then to compare iPads 1 and 4 to inform or perhaps stimulate my buying decision.

Day 7 - 3rd December 2012
 
Feel rough. Back to bed after walking and feeding the dog.
 
Day 8 + four months - 8th April 2013
 
I have missed the iPad a few times. Although news videos and YouTube are accessible on my phone (and YouTube on Apple TV although the search is not as easy) the iPad is more comfortable to watch for a few minutes because of the larger screen. I get the same pang of loss when I miss a television programme, and have to sit in front of the desktop instead of propping up the iPad wherever is handy. Various games, drawing and painting apps, Photoshop-type apps and web-editing apps are less fiddly with more screen size. Once I suddenly realized I could no longer use HelloPhoto for digitizing old photographic negatives because this needs two devices.
 
There are rumours that the iPad 5 is a month or two away. I shall wait for that. 
Thursday
May192011

New stuff!

Anyone who uses iTunes and the social music site last.fm will need to know that ScrobblePod is my find of the day. At last a replacement for the crashy/CPU looping iScrobbler which was abandoned by the developer.

This reminds me: abandonware on the iTunes Store. Your Articles Today - Daily Google Reader News was a great RSS reader with the most elegant black and white GUI. The latest version I downloaded (before it disappeared from the app Store) no longer links to Safari or Instapaper so I'm thinking about removing it from my iPad. All it will do is pull down new stuff from Google Reader. What to do? The developer is on LinkedIn and Facebook so I could bug the guy but I think not. I've seen many shareware apps abandoned and the fact that I've made a payment has never cut much ice with developers — other projects become more important or they will plead poverty. The only solution I can see is sharing the love: get on the App Store and rate and review the apps that I like, thereby spreading the news and increasing the popularity of the app while it's still supported.

PS I've abandoned the last post (below) about iPod/iPhone apps. There are too many of them now. I must add that the Defender game has now arrived! Defender! is a reasonable copy of the original and Planet Defence is older but looks better.

Sunday
Feb132011

formspring.me

Ask me anything. I have big books, mostly with pictures, so I can look it up if I don't know. http://formspring.me/jovike

Monday
Nov102008

My 267 favourite iPhone/iPod touch apps (2008)

I’ve filled my iPhone with apps: time to prune. Let’s evaluate, starting with the apps I use most often:

Twitterrific ★★★★★ is an application for the Twitter messaging system. Twitter is useful for letting people know what you are doing or thinking more immediately than a weblog. As an example you can see my last three “tweets” on the sidebar of this weblog. I follow friends, newsfeeds and interesting people such as Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Jonathan Ross and Robert Llewellyn. Other such apps are available but this does all I need. Twitterrific caches messages so it’s useful to sync before going out of signal range, for your reading pleasure in the wilderness.

Twitterfon ★★★★ attractive Twitter client with small clear font. Twitterfon does everything from trends to nearby tweets in a logical way. I was using Twitterfon as my primary Twitter app now although now it has started showing adverts so I’m switching to Twitterrific. The adverts keep displaying even after clicking on the link which is annoying.

Nambu ★★★★★ is yet another Twitter client for the iPhone. This has a beautifully laid-out screen on which the last five tweets can be seen - more than most other Twitter apps. Favourite tweets can also be displayed and this screen includes direct messages. The search pane has advanced options, a history and trends. Optional panes are built-in for tr.im, pic.im, FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Laconica and identica. Tweets can be favourited or flagged privately. The only option I’d like to be added is to switch between real names and nicknames.

AirMe ★★★★★ takes pictures on the iPhone camera and uploads them to a Flickr stream. Your photo can be available globally in less than a minute! The iPhone’s camera has been criticized for having only two megapixels but I seem to have got some good pictures from it. The only caveat is that you have to set the title and tags — words used to search for images in Flickr — before taking a photo because AirMe will start to upload immediately.

MyRail lite ★★★★★ shows British Rail station departure and arrival boards, also station times for each train with a neat graphic. It can also search for the nearest stations based on map location. Absolutely superb. This is great when I’m travelling/commuting. Update National Rail have not renewed the licence for MyRail and it has stopped working. NR have brought out their own app which costs £4.99. This has upset a lot of people who have nonetheless bought the NR app because it is so useful for commuters, but then given it one star reviews on the Apple Store. Shameful situation.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary ★★★★★ is the world-famous English dictionary from the Oxford University Press, not as big as the Shorter two volume edition but still an awful lot of lexicographical goodness, and definitely not American English or some house style guide that would spell “authorize” wrongly. Probably worth £14.99 as the print version of the Concise edition costs £10.00 more. This 11th edition contains over 240,000 words, phrases and definitions. Many of the entries have a recording of the word being spoken. (NB Webster’s International Dictionary is also on iTunes, for £34.99. There is also the free WordWeb.)

Things ★★★★ is for “Getting Things Done”, a most simple-to-use (yet sophisticated behind the scenes) to-do list, or organizer, or notes application. It syncs over wi-fi with the same application on a local Mac. I’ve just bought this to replace the hundreds of bits of paper I have lying around the place.

Blue Defense! ★★★★★ is a superb shoot-em-up with waves of smoothly animated glowing things and bosses that split and flow towards the home planet. They must be destroyed using the constant firepower at the player’s command. The game is silent: no sounds to interrupt my music. Perfect. It may be worth buying an iPhone just to play this.

GeoDefense Lite ★★★★★ is a superb tower defence game. This means setting-up towers that blast away at creeps along a path with the intention of stopping them reaching and and overrunning the target. There are many types of sci-fi-themed tower in this game, it’s fast and the graphics are great. I’ve now got the full version.

Bloomberg. ★★★★ Maybe overlooked because it is for business, but this is a very well-designed application that can be configured to get the latest news reports about various regions albeit with an economic bias. ‘Muse’ news is often not about finance at all. And of course, Bloomberg does stocks, markets and commodities with beautiful graphs: it’s a very sexy way to watch the world go to hell in a hedge-manager’s handcart loaded with redundant bankers’ bonuses.

London Bus, Tube and Rail Journey Planner ★★★★★ includes a superb journey planner (linked to TfL) and details of routes, stations (incl. zones), 20,000 bus stops (with postcodes) and timetables, including first and last times. The app is focussed on busses but the planner includes all modes of transport including the river bus and walking! A nice touch is the Track me feature so you can see which stop you are at throughout a bus journey.

GeoDefense Swarm ★★★★★ Once you have conquered GeoDefense then Swarm is the next step. Swarm puts the same towers and creeps into an open arena without defined paths. The graphics and gameplay are superb.

Space.DeadBeef ★★★★★ is a great shoot-em-up with exemplary graphics, another proof that the iPod has really arrived as a gaming platform. A fast 2D aerial battle with only one life, but the game can be resumed from the last level. The first big boss, a metal snake, is really well done.

Alien Swarm ★★★★★ is a dream come true for me. A perfect clone of the arcade game Galaxian. It takes my mind back to a pub video game in Highgate. The money I wasted then… and the time I’m wasting now! One more go, hold on.

NetNewsWire ★★★★★ is an RSS reader application that I bought years ago for my Mac. Now it’s free and also works on the iPhone, very nicely. On a good day this will summarize many websites and let you home in on the latest news that interests you without having to spend hours on the web. It’s also great for grabbing lots of news and blogs when online and reading them offline later, on a train for example. Items can be clipped for later follow-up, and all the feeds synced through Newsgator or .Mac with your home computer. It’s essential to get into the settings and choose a unique name for your iPhone/iPod feed, and I would also recommend having rather less feeds on the phone than a Mac: my iPhone choked on 9,000 items, but is quite happy with 5,000. Web pages and YouTube videos are displayed from within the app. I love NetNewsWire.

Bix ★★★★★ is an excellent version of Qix, a classically simple arcade game in which the player has to draw lines to bound off over 75% of an area while avoiding bouncing balls - some of which give special powers when trapped. This works well on the iPod, with a simple flick to change direction. In this version there is no option to draw lines slowly for extra points nor are there fuses to chase the player: I expect these will come in a future version.

tvGuide ★★★★ is a cheap TV guide with an excellent layout, presenting a lot of information in a small space. Only flaw is that the schedules are split at 12:00 (AM and PM) with no overlap, like an atlas where the road you want is on the edge of the page. So frustrating! Maybe the programmers are early-to-bed types who go out for lunch.

TVGuide.co.uk TV Guide ★★★★★ shows a “now and next” listing for UK channels. Touching the channel links to a BBC iPlayer page in Safari. What’s great about this app is how easy it is to set-up the channels that you watch and exclude the ones you don’t, from a comprehensive list.

Centipede ★★★★★ is a great conversion of the arcade game and, as with Missile Command, Atari have added a version or two with modern graphics. After playing for a while, I can see spiders and fleas when i close my eyes.

OnBox.TV UK Lite ★★★ is a free configurable TV guide for the current day - pretty good but after midnight it will show tomorrow’s programmes. Update - not working and removed from iTunes. Lucky I got the free version. They may be back: OnBox.TV information.

Calc ★★★★ is an improvement on the built-in calculator: it has three sheets of functions and a tally-roll (paper tape). The ANS key inserts the result of the last calculation, literally a nice touch. But only eight significant digits? One of the smallest apps available: 96 KB.

Labyrinth LE ★★★★★ simulates a metal ball in a wooden maze. Perfect - so sensitive! Built in spirit levels.

PCalc Lite ★★★★★ is the best calculator: accurate, with 15 significant digits. Features RPN, degrees/radians, constants, unit conversions and “42” on the icon. Grab it while it’s free. The full version has more features such as hex and a paper tape.

Bloom ★★★★ is a superb generative music application from that nice Mr. Brian Eno, whose career I have been following since 1973. The app will make its own random music, or I can tap the screen to enter my own sequences, which then change gradually over time. Mesmerizing.

Sentry Alpha ★★★★ is a good space shooter with tilt control. I can’t get enough of games like this. This one scrolls down and has level bosses.

If you’ve been missing Inquisitor ★★★★★ since upgrading Safari to the new beta, then this is for you. Fast search with a built-in browser, great design, with news links supplied where available from Yahoo.

Tube Status ★★★★ displays the service level of the railway lines on the London Underground (aka the Tube), DLR, Overground and Rail. Touching a tube line displays the latest bulletins. Other Tube apps exist but this is simple and free. A paid version with a map is due soon: TubeDeluxe.

Weightbot ★★★★★ is for tracking bodyweight and it understands stones, the imperial measure in Britain! Everything about this app is polished and easy to use. Weightbot calculates BMI, draws lovely graphs and keeps a remote backup of weighings. Excellent.

Dr. Awesome ★★★★ is Qix for the iPod - move by tilting which works very well, being quicker than swiping the screen. The medical theme of viruses and mutagens works well in the game but I could do without my contact’s names as patients. Very playable.

Illuminations ★★★★★ is a great tilt-controlled arcade game with a fireworks theme - better than Asteroids! Quite fast and difficult with enemies often on an effective evasion course, so it is a relief to have smart bombs, like in Defender.

Antimatter ★★★★ is a great arcade game in which blue cotton buds - sorry, cosmic strings, must be hit with a stream of antimatter to change their colour to red. Progressively more difficult. Superb graphics.

iGo ★★★★ is the first Go game for the iPod to offer a computer opponent. iGo seems to play a strong game, maybe too strong for me as a beginner. A few games can be stored, but selecting them for play or deletion is very confusing due to bad interface design; however the board and game play is straightforward. (There are two other apps available that contain classic Go games for replay and analysis.)

Topple ★★★★ is a wonderful free game with differently-shaped cartoon blocks that must be turned and placed into an increasingly unstable tower - tilt might fix it enough to get a few more blocks on top to get the required height before it all collapses - great fun.

Azkend ★★★★ Lively, enjoyable match-3 game with some extra twists of its own. I like the theme of the game too: Tibetan Lovecraft.

Droidz ★★★★ The last time I played this, I used a keyboard and joystick. It’s uncanny how they have copied the sound effects and the gameplay of 1985 classic Paradroid in this arcade game, in which floors of a spaceship have to be cleared of robots. Starting as a lowly 001 droid, more powerful droids can be shot at or taken over in a separate mini game where each brain tries to turn relays to their own colour, and it’s here that cursor keys (or a joystick!) would be better than fiddly touch control. Still, a great recreation.

Whoa! This old post is far too long. If you want to read the rest of it, I’ve kept it online at my old Blogger hangout: Wibbly Weblog

 

Friday
Jul272007

Owning-Up

 


Owning-Up
Originally uploaded by jovike

Surrealist and jazzman George Melly’s uncompromising, witty autobiography. He also wrote two other memoirs of his earlier experiences of childhood and the navy: 'Scouse Mouse' and 'Rum, Bum and Concertina' and the trilogy is now a Penguin Classic.

 

His last biography, about his then approaching 80th birthday 'Slowing Down' is also published by Penguin.

Goodtime George. That's what they called him: Goodtime George. I've been reading his first book of autobiography on and off for a year or so. Great stuff. I nearly saw his last concert but forgot to go. He said it would be his last tour. Sigh.

Temperance Seven member and Jazz Record Restorer John R.T. Davies Dies. In this obituary is quoted a long description of his working methods.

Don Arden - Intimidating rock impresario. His methods were less pleasant.

Bad news from Manchester: Tony Wilson dies of cancer. He always impressed me by being quietly-spoken.

The Sea and Cake have made a 'rock album' - sounds like "krautrock loungecore" Sounds intriguing. Rock Cake I really hope they are as good as they are described.

Rip and Goodbye: "the complete dissolution of my library of compact discs". Many comments.

My All Time Favorite Prog Rock Recordings - chapter 39. Not mine, someone else's.

The shirt that Wreckless Eric wore on the cover of 'Reconnez Cherie' has turned up. His news section is better than most people's blogs.

Fake Steve Jobs on Robin Trower: Today's Music Depresses Me.

British rock fans of a certain age have copies of ZigZag magazine knocking about in their attic. Mine are in what I call our library. They smell great. Since 1996, rocklist.net has been putting old polls from ZigZag online. Essential Rock Albums.

Always sad when someone that everyone has heard of dies in obscurity. It happened to Mike Sammes but luckily Jonny Trunk was on hand to save some of his treasures: Music for Biscuits.

Trunk records are pretty good; also worthy for their excellent and lengthy sleevenotes are those other musical magpies RPM, for instance 'Magpie - 20 Junkshop Pop Ads & Themes' contains Andrew Bown's theme music to 'Ace of Wands'.

I've got some Joe Meek and Pet Clark compilations from RPM. Essential these days to get the dates and cover art for iTunes, so this Petula Clark discography comes in handy. Great graphics and some moody expressions from Pet.

Big Al Davies' Treemo channel.

Kevin Ayers' MySpace page:

This myspace site is presented by Kevin Ayers' management. Kevin is aware of myspace and thinks it is very cool, but he doesn't have a computer let alone an internet connection. He wishes people still sent telegrams. He is very touched by the kind messages left on his page and that there is still space in music collections for his efforts.

Also among my very few friends on MySpace are Foul House because my friend's daughter is the singer. They are great live and should make an album ASAP.

 

The loudness wars: Why is there so much variation in volume in my music collection?

jTunes "The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won't Let You Hear."

Pitchfork.

The label Repertoire are putting out some nice editions on CD. I just got a triple disc of all the Pretty Things singles.

Vinyl Vulture: Record shops in London. The Digger's Guide to London.

Desmond Briscoe, Radiophonic Workshop founder, 1925-2007. Musique concrète and diegetic sounds.

Making Flippy Floppy - what a silly name for a music blog. How about a sensible name like Wibbly, or monkeyfunk, or Bubblegum Machine, which posts two wacky mp3s each week. Adult material such as emotion can be found in The Lefsetz Letter. Lefsetz also points us to Jeff Beck's 'Led Boots' at http://music.msn.com/crossroads which got me right there.

I don't know why people call Revelations: a musical anthology for Glastonbury Fayre "legendary" because I've got a copy downstairs. It's out on CD now, which is handy but it won't sound as good or have such an elaborate cover and inserts.

In Quest of Absolute Fidelity: The Saga of the Black CD – Finding Black Gold!

Uh-oh - or, as it says here: WOW: CBS Acquires Last.fm for $280 Million which is a shame because I've been on last.fm since it started as Audioscrobbler. You can bet they are going to screw it up somehow, like Yahoo did with LaunchCast and mailing lists and now Flickr.

Suzi Quatro unzipped. I never knew '48 Crash' was about the male menopause.

Music blog by Pliable: On an Overgrown Path. Good for classical music and exposes the fools who think the BBC or the Proms are "brands".

Richard Godwin admits he can't follow opera plots. I like that.

A musical pantheon: The desert island challenge: 24 records.

Great mp3s! The Barry Gray Music Sampler.

Motorhead Blogger.

Back in the groove: young music fans ditch downloads and spark vinyl revival.

Vinyl Vulture.