Last couple of years have been cold, this year looks like a Christmas of old
For my American friends, who will be feeling the cold, some Fahrenheit cheer, I’ll be drinking some beer!
Have a great christmas.
Unlike the long northern autumn of discontent as unsuspecting iPhone customers bricked their unlocked iPhones by updating to iPhone OS release 1.1.1, I was smart enough to turn off the auto-update feature in iTunes, and my iPhone has never skipped a beat, running 1.0.2 unlocked using the Optus network.
There’s not a lot of changes in the later versions, iTunes on iPhone is neither here nor there for me. But there was one feature in 1.1.1 I was longing for, and that’s a louder external speaker. You see I don’t own a bluetooth headset (although I’ll buy one the next time I’m in the States: $139 for a Jawbone in the Apple Store Palo Alto last time I was there) so I use the speaker function for handsfree when I’m driving, in the exact same way I did with my Nokia before it. The problem with the iPhone is that the speaker volume is dismal, and it’s unusable at speed; I can converse on it at 60km/h but not 110km/h for example, the ambient noise is too loud.
So today I took the plunge and upgraded to 1.1.2. Here’s how using a Mac.
Time: approx 1 hour, it took me 3 hours.
Starting point
download iNdependence for iPhone here.
Now here is where the fun part starts. If you’ve got a virgin iPhone running 1.0.2 it’s easy, if you’ve got an unlocked (say anySIM or similar) iPhone you have to “revirginize” it.
For instructions (and files) for revirginizing your iPhone go here. The short story is that you can’t upgrade without doing this because it simply won’t work, and worse still could actually damage the phone.
Follow the instructions. There are a couple of so-called automated scripts you can use, but you still need to be fimiliar with terminal/ ssh to use them, where as the instructions for doing it manually using terminal are straight forward.
Download the Virginizer Pack, open terminal and copy and paste the various parts. One word of warning if you’re not familiar with command line on a Mac, you need to have your download in your user folder (yourname), not the desktop or elsewhere. I took me a few minutes to work this out.
Next step
So you go through all of that and you’ve got a virgin phone. At this point I thought I was being clever and installed 1.1.2…then got completely stuck again. You need to strictly follow the instructions from iNdependence at this point. Short story is that you have to do certain things to the phone prior to the upgrade. There are full instructions in the iNdependence help file, including how to downgrade from higher version as well. The key point: you have to downgrade to 1.0.2 and do stuff first to unlock a 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 later.
The rest was fairly easy. You press some buttons, get iTunes to install the update, press some more buttons, you shut down and open the phone maybe half a dozen times, then done.
Australians beware
Really strange thing: with my unlocked 1.1.2 iPhone the keypad for dialing numbers didn’t work. You’d dial one number then the screen would disappear. I looked everywhere for a solution and didn’t find one, aside from a guy on YouTube who solved it by hacking the country code on the iPhone. Turns out my iPhone was set to Australia on the International region screen, for what ever reason this causes the keypad to play up. Turn it back to United States and bingo: it works.
I think I may have mentioned this here before, but I’m involved (as a contributor, or “founding Gooruze”) with a great online marketing site called Gooruze run by Vibe Capital (from WA’s glamour couple Rachel and Clay Cook). It’s a social networking come sharing site where you can contribute or read about online marketing advice and news. The participants are quite literally from a broad church of internet marketing so you get perspectives on all sorts of areas, some of which I didn’t know an awful lot about before starting there.
I’ve been remiss in not spending enough time there lately contributing, side tracked as usual but I’m trying to get back there every day to take part. If you’re looking for something fresh, something that isn’t just the same regurgitated posts you see on some of the so-called make money from blogging and similar sites, Gooruze is worth a look.
Homer every day for 39 years, complete with the same music from the original. Hilarious (via Andrew Sayer)
This is simply one of the most amazing things I’ve even seen. Given it’s had 20 million+ views on YouTube and is appearing in Top 10 lists for 2007 it’s not new, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it.
I’ve long longed for a hobby outside of the internet and since the firewall using conference supremo Phil Sim got me across to one of his conferences last year I’ve found myself playing poker more and more online.
I’ve had the opportunity to play in a casino a couple of times, more recently in Perth + Brisbane, but I’ve always been a little bit shy: the $100 min stake doesn’t help + the game in person is a little different to online.
I’ve been looking at joining the Crown Poker Club when I move to Melbourne (link). Free to join and you get an invite to a freeroll beginners competition which comes with prize money. I’m not sure how she who must be obeyed will take me heading off to Crown for 6pm on a Friday but I’m looking forward to at least trying.
Anyone else a member or plays poker not online with any advice? Don’t think I’ll qualify for the Aussie Millions but it’s a nice dream, as long as I don’t go poor trying 🙂
She who must be obeyed told me today she’s starting in the new job January 7, and I haven’t even called a removalist yet, let alone called a real estate agent (husband of the boys God Mother is a real estate agent, and he’s one of the few honest ones).
Plan is for her to go across, possibly with the boy, and for me to follow later in the month once we’ve got the house sorted and presumably somewhere to live other than with my mother-in-law in Blackburn South. ETA of late January at the latest because the boy starts school early Feb and one of us (hint hint: the one who works for himself…from home 🙂 ) has to take responsibility there.
Hoping to get up to the December bloggers meetup in Perth, will be my last one so looking forward to it presuming I’m free to go.
I love the Flock browser, 99.9% because of its stability, the social networking stuff is a bonus; but the one thing that has continued to annoy me about Flock is the use of Yahoo when you type something into the URL box (as opposed to the search box, which is easy to change).
Someone on Twitter today (apologies to that person, I forget who it was) pointed me to the following instructions that allow you to change the default URL search from Yahoo to Google I feel lucky, the default position of Firefox. If you’re not sure what I mean type a site you’re looking for into the URL box in Firefox, for example if I typed in “Google Translate” in FF it would take me straight to Google Translate, in the default of Flock it would take me to a Yahoo search page which is annoying; it sounds like a small thing but for stuff like translate I used the URL box in this fashion.
Here’s the trick, via Simple Thoughts, a site I haven’t visited in ages; nice to see it’s still going.
1. Type about:config in the Flock URL box and press Enter
2. Type keyword in Filter textbox and you will see only the preference keyword.URL.
3. Double-click on keyword.URL and change the value to: http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=
The latest inflation reports for Australia are showing the seasonally adjusted underlying figure of 4% with headline inflation around 3%, but I’m starting to not believe it.
We’ve always been impartial to Bakers Delight White Flour Loaf bread (recommended for those in Australia…just great bread). Around this time last year it was around $2.20 or $2.30 a loaf. This morning I discovered that it had gone up yet again, this time from $3 to $3.20. That’s $1 in 12 months, and I can still remember paying $2-$2.10 a loaf for it in early 1996. There has alway been price rises, but this year a white flour loaf has gone up a whopping 45% and it seems there’s a 10-20c price rise every month or two. Sure, it’s only a dollar, but apply 45% to a range of other goods as well. Certainly our shopping bill has seriously risen this year, where as we might have spent $100-$130 at Coles a week (not including meat) we’re now spending $150-$180, and that’s with us buying most of our fruit and veg from the local farmers market (in bulk, cheap and wonderfully fresh). I’d hate to think what it must be like on struggle street at the moment, maybe this is part of the reason why voters chucked the Howard Government out?
