Last week, Apple released iPhone Software 2.2. This update had many new features including Google street view, emoji’s for Japan, improved performance and podcast downloading. Podcast downloading has been on the list of features people want on the iPhone ever since Apple rejected the Podcaster app. Fortunately I was able to get it onto my jailbroken iPhone and had been using it up until IPSW 2.2. Since I have now had a good chance of playing with them both, I can have give my opinion on these two different ways of getting podcasts into your device.

Podcaster is an application available on Cydia and it does pretty much what you expect, lets you download podcasts right on your iPhone. When you open the app for the first time, you will want to subscribe to podcasts. This is a very simple thing to do where you enter the address of the RSS feed and it will look for podcasts. Then you can select the episode you want, go into it and press the download button, and it goes into the download queue. At anytime, you can press the refresh button and it will look for any new podcasts in any of the feeds you’re subscribed to, and shows you that there is a new podcast available to download.

Unfortunately this app isn’t at well built as I’d like. The program crashes randomly or when you try and give it something to do. This is especially bad when it is downloading a podcast, because you lose what you have downloaded up until the last time you paused or quit the application. Another issue I had was when download, it didn’t hold the Wifi connection. Whenever the iPhone turned the screen off, the Wifi connection would drop shortly after, which would cause the program to crash when you woke the device back up again. To get around this, you ould have to stop your iPhone from going to sleep, which would reduce battery life significantly. The last little grip with it that I had was the slow and somewhat unresponsive playback of podcasts. When you push the play button to continue playing a podcast, you would have to wait a while for it to start playing. Sometimes you would have to tap some of the icons multiple times to get it to respond. These gripes are frustrating!!!

One the other side, we have the new Podcast downloading support that iPhone Software 2.2 brought to the device. For iPhone podcast downloading, you go into the iTunes Store, search for the podcast you want and then tap the download button beside the episode or episodes you want. You do this for all the podcasts you want. This puts them in the download queue and they go and download in the background and go to the iPod app when they are done for you to play. The podcasts pretty much behave in the same way as they do if you synced them over from iTunes. From each of the podcast pages in the iPod app, there is a button which takes you to their page in the iTunes Store so you can download any new episodes when they come.

There are limitations to this app, all of which Podcaster doesn’t have. These include the lack of any RSS feed downloads. You are limited to the selection of Podcasts they have in the iTunes Store. Although they have the majority of podcasts and for most people, have all the ones they would want, but it would be nice if that restriction wasn’t there. Another issue is that you can’t subscribe to podcasts. If you want to download podcasts, you have to manually navigate through the iTunes store to their page and tap the download button. There is no notification of new episodes, no notification of podcasts currently on your device, nothing. It is all manual, no automated downloading or anything. This is something they really missed the ball on because it would make it close to perfect. The last problem I had was with iTunes syncing. In the iTunes application, I have it set that it won’t sync podcasts. You would expect this to mean leave podcasts on iTunes and the iPhone alone, do not do anything. Well what it turns out to mean it sync all the downloaded podcasts on the iPhone and delete them from the device. This is not what I want. I want to keep them separate and I want them to stay on my iPhone and out of my iTunes library. This is by far the most frustrating feature/bug with the podcast downloading and hope it is fixed in the next iTunes/iPhone update.

Both of these app have their ups and downs. For Podcaster, I like having my podcasts separate from iTunes and my music library. I also like being able to subscribe to podcasts and check for updates. For iPhone podcast downloading, I like having the experience the same as when I listen to music and the better integration with the iPhone features and functions. I also like the stability of the whole process and the background downloading. What I dislike about Podcaster is the crashing, instability and unresponsiveness of the app at times. I also wish it could hold the Wifi connection and make the downloading process smoother. It would be nice to also have better integration with the media player already on the iPhone. What I dislike about the iPhone podcast downloading is the whole manual process of downloading podcasts and the lack of subscription and automatic downloading. I also hope they fix the iTunes syncing issues I have because they are just a huge pain in the arse.

As you can see, I am very torn between the two apps. They both have very strong good points, but they also are weak in others. If only each of them could take the strengths of each of the applications and fix all the problems, we would be left with two amazing apps. For someone who manages their podcasts in iTunes and only wants to be able to download podcasts on the road, the podcast downloading in 2.2 is perfect. For someone who keeps their podcasts separate from their music and enjoys a less messy way of getting their media, Podcaster is a great app for that. I hope that they can both sort things out so they can both be used by any podcast consumer.

Starting from the 15th of November, secondary students from across the country have been sitting NCEA exams. The majority of these exams span over two weeks, which covers most of the students subjects. I myself only had 3 exams this time round, the final time round. I had none on the first week but I had 3 exams the next week on consecutive days. As with my Level 1 and 2 exams, I did no study at all. I know, that is bad and I should have, but everything will work out in the end.

My first exam on that second Monday was Statistics and Modelling. This was the exam I was looking forward to the most. This was also probably my most important exam of the 3 because I put a lot of weight onto getting at least 2 of the papers which will make this my 3rd University Entrance subject. Generally I found the papers in this exams pretty alright. Once of them I found so alright that when I got to the end of the paper, I was wondering where the excellence questions were. It was either an easy paper or I am really good at that topic. I could have done a bit better in the other papers if I had prepared for them better, which I kinda wish I did have now.

My second exams on the Tuesday was Physics. This was the exam I was dreading the most. It is the subject I am worst at out of all the ones I take. I decided at the start of the exam, that I was only going to do the 2 big papers worth 6 credits in the exam. My reasoning behind this was that I already have credits from the waves topic and I don’t really need to sit it again for a better (*cough*) mark. I also didn’t do the atoms paper because it wasn’t worth many credits. Getting either one of the Mechanics or Electricity papers would give me enough subjects to use it as a UE subject. Anyway, I did as much of the papers as I could and I would be lucky to pass one of them, even luckier to pass both.

My last exam was Geography on Wednesday. I didn’t really want to do all the papers here because I hate writing essay type responses. I did the skills paper which was pretty alright. The skills is definitely the thing I most enjoy about Geography (other than the field trips, but we don’t get credits for that. :D) I did do one of the written papers which was on natural processes. I answered the questions to the best of my ability with my limited knowledge at the time. Hopefully it was enough to get me a pass at least.

Now I am free from all the testing at this level. I am also unofficially free from secondary school forever. For everyone else who sat exams, or is still sitting exams, I hope you get the grades you deserve. Good luck to you. Now that this is all over, its off to University next year! (I hope.)

I’ve been using Windows Live Messenger 9 for at least a year now. At the end of 2007, one of the beta builds got leaked on the internet and I was quick to snap it up and use it as my main IM client for Windows Live messenger. Although for most of that time, it was the same old build that had a few of the new upcoming features to Windows Live Messenger. Well two months ago, a new build got released in public beta as part of the Windows Live Wave 3.

At first when I installed the build, I only used it for at least 15-30 minutes before uninstalling it and going back to the old beta build. This wasn’t because I didn’t like it or I had problems with it, the reason was because I need Messenger Plus! Live with Windows Live Messenger. Without it, I am missing some of those extra features that make my IM experience great! It wasn’t soon after that till I was forced to upgrade, and without MP!L ready for it, I downgraded back to WLM 8.5. There is little difference between the beta 0 build that I had and WLM 8.5. Eventually Patchou released a public beta build of Messenger Plus! Live that supported Windows Live Messenger 2009.

Upgrading from 8.5 to 2009 is a huge jump. The first thing that becomes apparent is the contacts window. The has 2 additions to it, those being Favourites and Groups. In favourites, you have your favourite contacts at the top of your contacts window at all times. This makes it easier for finding and those important contacts that you want to talk to, without searching through your large contacts list of in all your categories. I personally don’t use this feature and ended up disabling it because I already have a tier like contacts list using categories. There contacts are always at the top of my contacts list so I felt that this feature wasn’t necessary for me. Although in saying that, our group of favourites can be made more distinctive by making their display pictures a different size from your regular contacts.

That is another change in WLM 2009. Instead of seeing the little green men with the status beside them, this has been replaced by a little square dot. You do have the option to change this to a bigger size, ranging from the small dot to larger squares displaying contacts images. These squares changes colour depending on the status of the contact, or if you are showing the display picture the ream of the square. While on the topic of status, the team have decided to strip all those unnecessary nonsense status and have kept it to 4 simple status, available, busy, away and appear offline. These are the most important ones and are the ones most people probably use. I can’t remember the last time I have use any of the other ones that are in WLM 8.5.

When going into a conversation window, the first change becomes apparent. The conversation area and the display picture area have been switched around. The display pictures are on the left side of the conversation windows now. This is very unusual to start off with but you soon adjust to it. The display pictures also have similar properties to the ones in the contacts window. The square rim around the display picture of you and your contact changes colour depending on status. If your contact is online, it will be green, busy then red, away then orange and offline (or appearing offline) it has no colour and is faded. This is a very helpful and cleaver of seeing your contacts status while having a conversation with them.

The last big feature of WLM 2009 that I am excited about is the Multiple Points of Presence. This is more of a backend feature that one specific to the software. What this does is allows you to sign in to WLM from multiple locations at once, without signing out of one of your other places. There are many good ways this feature could be used, for example signing in on 2 machines in different locations, or if you’re using 2 machines at once. This feature could later on expand to other messenger services such as Xbox 360, Windows Live Web Messenger, Mac Messenger, Windows Messenger on Windows Mobile and so on. When you are signed on in two locations, message sent and received will be sent to both locations so you don’t have to worry about not getting the message when you’re on one machine or another. You can also sign out other locations right from your one if you must. I found this feature useful for me when I was logged onto a remote machine. It allowed me to message people without minimising my remote desktop or logging out of the WLM on my main machine. I did however come across issues with this, for example at times messages only went to one location (rare occurrence) and when logging off from one place closed the conversation windows from another place. Once they fix this up, it’ll be all good!

There are a few other features that I didn’t cover such as groups and scenes. I haven’t really played around with groups because I don’t have many contacts using WLM 2009. I have had a quick look at scenes and all this really does it change the look of your main contacts window and the conversation window on your contacts computer for you. If they have a scene, it will be shown on your conversation window and this will change everytime they change scenes. Other than that, I think I’ve pretty much covered most of the major new stuff in the upcoming Windows Live Messenger 2009. This is going to be a great release!

Tuesday this week was my last day of high school. It was only a half day, but no worked happened, at least not for me anyway. Just before lunch started, someone had set off a fire alarm and the fire department came. Anyway, in the afternoon we had prizegiving practice which was alright. I knew I was getting a prize at that stage, I just didn’t know what for. After that we got to go home. We would have to return later that night for the real thing.

I went out to dinner with my parents before prizegiving. We went to a small steakhouse. I had Beef Teriyaki which was really good. I would be willing to go back there for a meal. After that we made our way to school for the prizegiving. When I got there, I had a look at the booklet they give to the parents to see what I was getting a prize for. My certificate was for Excellence with Diligence in Statistics and Modelling, Merit with Diligence in Electronics and Diligence in ICT. That wasn’t bad I guess. Another part of the prizegiving was the farewell of the year 13’s. For this, the dean read out our names and what we planned on doing next year and we walked across the stage to get our leavers t-shirts. This was this years school t shirt with all the names of the leavers on the back. That was pretty much the night.

The next day, we returned to school for the leavers mass. This was a mass for the year 13’s as well as the year 12’s. On this day, all the year 13’s wore their leavers tshirts to the mass. As well as the mass, there were also pictures and later on some videos of us year 13’s. That was really interesting to see and watch. That would be the last time we all meet together like that. The next time would be when we return our gear and sign out, which will be the last time most of us will see each other.

So now I am done with school. All I have left to do is the 3 exams I have in a weeks time. After that, it’s off to University next year. Goodbye Kavanagh College, it was nice having you for the past 7 years.

Our last unit in Electronics at school was Robotics. For this, we got to use the Lego NXT robots and program them to do different things. This was the unit most people were looking forward to because it means we can play with robots, Lego, not learn any theory and it was a very easy standard to achieve. There were many different robots, all built differently, that all did different tasks. Most of these robots did obvious things like Line Following, Object Avoidance, Light Sensing and such.

The one me and my robot partner, Martin decided to do was the Line Following Robot. it seemed like a simple enough one to do and shouldn’t be too much of a problem. After doing the starting paperwork, we then got given one of the Robot Kits. Lucky for us it was already pre-built so we didn’t have to make it from scratch. This allowed us to quickly getting into the adding of sensors and the programming. The annoying thing about the robots was the software used for programming them. It was a flowchart based language which was really annoying, and even painful due to the really slow lab machines. But it wasn’t too long till we hard a nearly working robot. After some minor tweaks in the power levels, we have a fully functioning line following robot.

Because we did that so fast, our Electronics teacher made us an “extension course.” The original course was a curvy lined course, which was pretty simple to achieve, but the advanced course had sharp angles in it, which required different programming techniques and such to get around it. After a bit of fiddling around with code, we couldn’t get anywhere near getting it to work on the new course. In theory, our ideas would work, but in practice, weird things happened. It just never seemed to work. It required some more thinking and different approaches.

After looking at some other robots on YouTube, I came up with the idea of adding a 3rd sensor onto the robot. This still didn’t work, but we did once get it to go around over half of the extension track, but it struggle on some of the angles over 90 degrees. This is when we admitted defeat. Unfortunately when messing around with the new course, we seemed to have lost out curvy lined program that we needed for the assessment. We managed to modify one of the 3 sensor codes to work with the curvy line.

Some of the other cool robots was another pair that made a line following robot. It also went around the curvy line but it hopped around instead of going around more smoothly. My friend Aaron made a light sensing robot which found the darkest place in the room and went there. This worked alright, but it was pretty average. My other friend Morgan made a Collision Avoidance Robot (again,) but this time with the Lego Kit. His seemed to have trouble at times which it strangling itself and hitting into things. Another pair did this same robot except took a different approach. It worked pretty well and looked cool. There was also a completely original robot that another pair made, and it was put on a table and avoided falling off the edge.

Making the robots and programming them was really awesome, and it was really great to see other peoples ideas and robots doing the same, and other tasks. This was definitely the best part of the year because robots a the best! Now all that I have to do is finish the paperwork for the standard so I can get my credits for this unit. I wish I had some spare money lying around so I could get some robots, I love playing with these things!

Over the past few days, I seem to have been struck with a bit of bad luck. I seem to have the worst luck with computers at times, but it is not normally a group of things going bad in the space of a couple of days. This time it has been overwritten files, disappearing files, corrupt files, and closing unsaved files. Where to start..?

First off, in Electronics we are programming our Lego robots. We had been trying many different approaches at trying to tackle a second problem after easily accomplishing the first task. During all this mess, we had left all our programs unsorted in the default directory that the programming software saved to. We were shuffling around with so many versions of code we hadn’t organized this well by keeping the default untiltled-1 filename. Anyway, for some reason our original program for the assessment of the first task went missing, and the closest thing that would work needed a bit of modification. When we went to the computer to get it, it wasn’t right. Somehow, someone else got access to the computer and managed to overwrite our working program. After a lot of hunting for it, I did manage to find a similar, modified version which I has to remodify to get it to work again. This was a huge hassle.

The next morning when I booted up my comptuer and launched Firefox, it didn’t do what it usually does. I was expecting it to launch and load up my 15 or so tabs from last session. But for some reason it just loaded with an empty tab, empty bookmarks toolbar, empty bookmarks and history in fact. All this had gone and all I had was a 6kb bookmarks html file and those bookmark backups Firefox does automatically. I first tried to restore them, but all I got was an error. It seemed like I had lost around 3 years worth of bookmarks. I needed to get them back but i didn’t have time to try then and there. Later on in the afternoon, I tried to see if there was anything that Recuva could find. I had no luck there. I decided to go to Google with my problem but it didn’t help me much. I tried to restore from backup one more time without luck. I decided to Google the error I got and this time I got lucky. It turns out my backups couldn’t restore because the sqlite database was corrupt. After deleting these files from my profile, the restore worked and I was once again left with my huge collection of bookmarks. I didn’t have any of my history, which is disappointing, especially since the Awesome Bar ain’t so awesome without history, but at least I have my bookmarks, which is a huge relief.

But wait, there’s more! I was doing an assessment in ICT at school in spreadsheets, worth 5 credit (ones that will come in handy I my add.) This is the last one of the course and I was zooming through it. I had one more task to do which was a write up with instructions on how to use the spreadsheet I created. After copying a similar task from another assessment and spending a good amount of time changing it to match what I was doing, I acidentally printed the wrong instruction list and closing without saving the new one that I had done. All I was left with was the wrong thing printed and a blank document where the correct copy should have been. Now I had to redo it again, which I did very sloppy because I could’t be bothered spending all that time repeating it again.

All these problems could have been easily prevented, or files resored ithout hassle if I was better organised and had good backups of my work. This would mean I’d have the original code for my robot, I’d have a backup html copy of my Firefox bookmarks, and I’d still have that good instruction document for my assessment. Anyway, everything turned out fine but it was a bit of an inconvenience and a huge shock. There is nothing worse that the feeling of when you lose important data on your computer.

Earlier this week saw the launch of a new mobile virtual network operator, Black + White. This is a virtual network running on the Vodafone network. The market this operator is going after are prepaid customers, and getting them on a monthly bill. One thing that makes them different from the other players, one one of the good things they have to offer to the table is no contracts. You can cancel at anytime, and if you notify them 30 days in advance there is no disconnection fee.

As a prepaid user myself, like many of my friends are, for us this is in no way appealings. Some of the reasons we are on prepaid are because we can only spend what we have so there is no debt. We only pay for what we use so we are no wasting money on minutes that would go wasted. It’s really cheap and convenient and we are not tied down to a contract of any sort. We are the low users, don’t really call much and don’t text much either, or if we only text, for $10, we get a considerable amount of texts that usually last.

The base plan on B+W is $30, and for that you get $0.60/m calls and 600 texts per month. That’s $30 and your calling on top of that. If you compare that to prepaid on Telecom or Vodafone, you would have to make 70 minutes worth of voice calls for to costs to be equal. And on that point, if a prepaid customer really does that many minutes on calling per month, they should probably be on a plan of some description. In comparison, for $30 on Vodafone, you get 600 texts, 30 minutes and 1 BestMate. You are stuck on a 12 month contract, but the disconnection fee is very little on this plan that you might as well pay for it than extra for the minutes on B+W.

The other plans are more on par with the current offerings of Vodafone. The only real difference in that you are not tied down to a 12 or 24 month contract. I wouldn’t know how many prepaid customers pay over $60 a month on there phone, but if they do, they should probably be on a plan that offers them a better deal. The only reason I can see that a person doing this wouldn’t get onto a plan is the contract period, but even then the savings would probably be able to pay for any disconnection fee or plan changing fee if one occurred. If ones phone usage fluctuates a bit through the year, then I could see them jumping onto this.

And seeing as the Vodafone plans and B+W plans are quite comparable, I don’t see anyone jumping ship. If you are already locked into a Vodafone plan, playing the disconnection fee and going onto B+W isn’t going to gain you anything, just maybe make you look a bit silly. If you are already out of your contract period, then there is really no reason to switch because if something better came along, you can already easily jump ship.

I don’t know much about this but from what I see, I don’t see this really taking off. Its a nice alternative to what is now on offer but the only thing they really bring to the table is no contract terms. As for marketing towards prepaid customers, I don’t know how many users would actually benefit from going onto a plan with them. I was thinking about switching to them before I knew the plans because I thought they might have something that could appeal to me. All I spend is $10 a month on Vodafone for 2000 texts to other Vodafone mobiles (Peppery in other words.) I would like a plan that can give me at least 500 to any mobile in New Zealand for around the same price I pay currently. Unfortunately only Telecom offer this on prepaid, but I can’t use my iPhone with them (yet.)