After the big blog update a week ago, a few more updates have happened elsewhere. The first is the yum9me.com main page. The old page has gone and been replaced by a simple page, written by TheSkorm in a few seconds. I like it over the older one because it is much cleaner, it works correctly on more browsers (curse you Internet Explorer!) and there is less clutter and jankness to it.

The second update was to my tumblelog theme. After using the dashboard theme for a little while, I started to lose interest in it and wanted a new theme, I just hadn’t seen any that I liked. That was until I saw a theme ported from a Wordpress theme on Alisha’s tumblelog, that’s when I knew what I wanted. I decided that I would use the Wordpress theme on this blog, and hopefully one day, she would be able to release the theme to the public.

Well that day did come shortly after, and managed to get back on my radar so I grabbed it. It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it so I modified it a little. The main modifications are the removal of the Disqus comment integration, and the Last.Fm and other site integrations. I also removed the followers down the sidebar. My intentions were to have a few links down the side for Mobile, Archives, RSS ect. I did have this working for a moment until during some other edit of the theme, it broke, so I completely removed it.

I also changed the description down the bottom of the theme to match that of the one on my blog, except with a couple of appropriate word changes and rearrangements. This is also where the about button will jump down to, if clicked. I also decided to have the links under the title be for my main page (or as I decided to call it, Portal,) my blog and my tumblelog. I also applied this to my blog.

I like how they both use the same theme because now they seem more unified and part of one system, which they are, instead of two separate unrelated sites. So hopefully all the changes can last a year or so before I decided to change them.

I’ve had my iPhone now for well over a month now and I still think it is a great mobile phone, an amazing all round device. There are hundreds of reasons why this device is so phenomenal, but sometimes it’s those tiny, insignificant features that just blow you over the edge. Here I am going to tell you about some of those little features I have discovered on my iPhone.

Back in the days when I actually sent a lot of text messages, it was easy to lose track of what was said earlier on. If the person took a long time to reply, it was easy to forget what you even said to them in the first place. And sometimes its easy to forget what you just read, and are currently replying to. The iPhone’s chat like, threaded text messaging is a simple feature that I would have loved on earlier phones a few years ago. Now I can read past sent messages, read the message I am replying to, even go back and read conversations from a few days ago, without having to exit anything. It is all right there in front of me.

All of the phones I have used in the past, you have a very limited contacts manager. You are limited by the number of contacts you can store, and the number of phone numbers and other details you can associate with a contact. Most of the newer mobile phones probably aren’t as restrictive as ones from a few years ago but the iPhone being my first “modern phone” I wouldn’t really know. Anyway, being virtually limitless to the number of contacts and the number of numbers associated with them is great. I myself can include all 3 of my mobile phone numbers along with all my other contact details. This makes a perfect contact book!

One day I went plugged in the headphones to listen to some music (the iPhone is a music player as well :D) but then I remembered that the last time I use the phone, I had the volume up full so I could hear through the external speaker. I quickly went to pause the music so I wouldn’t break my eardrums and then went to change the volume down. To my surprise, the volume was down. I thought this was weird and unplugged them and the volume bar change. I really love how the iPhone has two different volume meters for the headphones and the speaker. It may not seem like much, but it is greatly appreciated feature!

Coverflow. The best way of listening to music the way it was intended! I have always been an album person, choosing to listen to an album over a single song. Coverflow allows me to do this is a visually pleasing way, which resembled how you would find an album in your CD collection, except its automatically put in alphabetical order. Flicking through looking at all the album art makes choosing what to listen to more enjoyable, and easy.

Sometimes when I am feeling adventurous and just want to dive into my music collection on my iPhone, the improved way shuffle is handled, in comparison to the way it is handled on other devices (iPod Nano/Classic.) On those devices I would be required to either go through a bunch of menus, or play the first song and select shuffle mode afterwards. Being able to choose to shuffle in any of the lists, whether it is by album, artist, or even all song, just one tap of a button starts the playlist playing in a random order. So much more friendly!

And that is my little list of features that I have found in the iPhone that are useful and really make me that much more happier that I own this revolutionary device. I know some of these features aren’t necessarily iPhone specific (well not for long anyway :D) and some are on other phones or media players, but having them in my iPhone makes me a happy camper. It’s amazing how something so little and somewhat insignificant can make a fair bit of difference.

Last week, the small group of us doing the Polytech computing course finished our second unit, which was on Operating Systems. For this we looked at two different operating systems, the first one being DOS (where we actually used Command Prompt because most of the commands are the same) and Linux (Kubuntu if you need to know the distro.) The reason we looked at these two is because for the standard, we are required to look at a single user and multi user operating system.

The first section involved a bit of research and learning the terminology of how Operating Systems work. We weren’t tested on any of this stuff. Then we were messing around with basic commands in cmd. Then we were trying out some basic commands in the Linux console. For this we used a Kubuntu Live CD. We didn’t get into anything that technical, basically only file manipulation stuff, and this was mainly due to the time limits. For example, we only had 5 hours on Linux, 4 if you exclude the test week, 3 if you exclude the week everyone was away/sick. It’s very difficult to learn anything advanced in that short amount of time.

The unit seemed shorter than the first one but I think it was because it was broken up into sections, so it seemed like we weren’t working on it for long. Anyway, now we move onto our final unit, System Programming. For this we were given Atmel AVR Butterfly’s, which we get to keep, for programming. I’m not really sure what we are going to be making the things do but they seem like pretty sweet gizmos. Can’t wait to get into it!

Last Friday afternoon, a package arrived to my home. In this, contained Peppery’s old iPhone. I wasn’t that eager to open it and start playing with it, so I eventually got round to having a look, and taking pictures of the re-unboxing. The first thing you notice about the iPhone, is that the box is gorgeous! Then when you get inside, you have in front of you, a shiny device. You wouldn’t know the device is a phone, if it wasn’t called the iPhone.

Now that I have had a play with it for a week, you would think I’d have something to say about it. Yes, I do, but the thing is, everything has already been said, over the past year of its release. The iPhone is an amazing device. It does everything well. I could go into detail about what I love about this phone, but go Google “iPhone Reviews” and pretty much everything is covered in there.

I could go on and get into specifics, but I don’t want to, I don’t need to. If you haven’t already experienced an iPhone, you are really missing out on something. This device offers so much, and every iPhone owner wouldn’t be disappointed by their investment. I got this for a more than reasonable price and I absolutely love this phone. I’m sorry if you expected a review or something, but you really have to use this product, instead of reading about all of it’s features. Now I’m going off to play with it, my precious!

…for now.

There have been many updates to my blog and tumblelog over the past few days. All the blog changes are hidden away. Peppery has been doing some stuff with servers and what have you, as well as updating the blog to Wordpress 2.6. On the tumblelog, the changes are more apparent, with a completely new look. The reason for the refresh was not because I felt like it, but because my old theme had disappeared from the internet. The full story, as what was posted on my tumblr, is as follows.

Yesterday at 10am, Vodafone New Zealand announce their plans for the new Apple iPhone they are releasing on the 11th of July. We had been waiting for weeks to get this information and a couple of days before launch, they finally gave it to us. I can see why they waited till the last minute (look at what happened in Canada.) The prices are really expensive for the average mobile user and New Zealanders were not pleased at all with what Vodafone had to offer.

At 10am, on the dot, the Vodafone New Zealand site was hit by many users that wanted to see the plan. But to everyones surprise, the site went down immediately due to the huge amount of traffic. You would think Vodafone would have foreseen this happening and done something to prevent it, but no, they were pretty useless so we had to get the information from other sources until the Vodafone site was back up, which was over an hour later.

Anyway, the price of the iPhone plans start at $80 and go right up to $250 with 1GB of data. This is insane. From the tables below, you can see the full details of the plans as well as the total cost of ownership over the 2 year contract period. The most expensive plan costs $6000 over 2 years. You also have to option to get the phone by itself for $1100 to use on a YouChoose plan.

The plans are pathetic and the prices of them are outrageous, especially when compared to the rest of the world. Vodafone New Zealand is doing the exact same thing Rogers in Canada are doing, taking advantage of the monopoly. In saying that, New Zealands mobile costs are expensive, even before the iPhone, so when you look at it like that and compare the iPhone plans to the current plans, you get a reasonable deal, in New Zealand.

I hope something happens soon to lower mobile prices in New Zealand, not just for the iPhone, but in general. This will probably never happen, especially since there is only one GSM carrier and two in total. With little competition, there is no reason, or incentive to lower prices. I wanted to get an iPhone from Vodafone, but it doesn’t look like I will be able to. I will still get an iPhone somehow, sometime soon, you mark my words!