I just dropped thirteen and one half english pounds and helped out some animals. I'm crossing my fingers that tweetie gets unlocked - it's probably my all time favorite iPhone app.

Apparently a refurbished phone was sent back out with a number of malwares resident.

Personally, I don't think the question is "Why is Vodafone's QA not up to finding this?" but instead should be "Why the hell is it even possible for this kind of stuff to be installable on a smartphone?".

Though many remote applications already exist for the iPhone—including one that locks and unlocks a car—perhaps Apple could leverage the patent's motion sensing to build an app with a consistent interface that is designed to communicate with a wide variety of lock devices, making the iPhone an out-of-the-box electronic key.

How cool would it be to stand in front of your house, iPhone in hand and wave a complex gesture to unlock your house!

Finally, in the interests of completeness, I hit the rebuttal link in the Mozilla post. It was this post that really inspired me to action, although the topic itself is an interesting and thorny one.

Brian Carper, in my humble opinion, is a loon.

His diatribe on why he feels justified in installing an ad-blocker is short-sighted, foolish, and in some places, simply wrong.

Unlike Mr. Carper, I do see the necessity of adverts (as do many of his commenters). The internet simply wouldn't run without them. Google, Mozilla Foundation, and thousands of hugely important contributors to the online world would never have existed without it.

Since moving this blog to my own server, the overheads for running it have fallen to nearly zero - I use an old desktop machine to serve it and my home broadband copes just fine with the bandwidth. I'm under no illusions though that my audience of 2 (hey bro!) and my entirely non-professional writing skillz are a very long way from where organisation like Ars are.

Advertising has long been a thorny issue - I'm lucky enough living in the UK that I actually have 5 TV stations and a whole bunch of radio stations to choose from that don't carry adverts at all. For the privilege, I pay around £150 per year, tax.

There's no way that this model could ever work on the internet. Even a direct subscription model consistently fails to work - take the Ars subscription as an example:

Ars Premier is only $50 a year, just pennies a day. Sign up to find out what you’ve been missing.

They're right, it is cheap, much less than buying a newspaper every day! The trouble is, I'll never pay it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Ars-hating moron like the venerable Mr. Carper, but it just isn't a model that works for me. My RSS Feed currently contains 46 subscriptions. I value the information each brings into my feedbox every day but if they were all to suddenly decide to start charging me each month, I'd find myself trimming the list down to about one or two. I don't read all of the posts all of these feeds provide, I dip in and out, select the stuff that's interesting to me, paying for all of them just wouldn't work for me.

I know I'm not alone in feeling this way, but what is the solution?

For me, I'm more than happy to count in the advert eyeball stats, as long as companies are willing to pay other companies for ad-space, why should it matter to me? I actually find the advert layout on Ars entirely unobtrusive and largely relevant, I rarely click them, but then, I rarely want the stuff they're offering - that's entirely within the 'contract' of advertising.

I would probably be interested in some kind of Micropayment system, but only if I only ever need one provider. I don't want 5 different accounts all with a few quid in. I wonder if something like OpenID could work in the micropayment space - you sign up to your provider, who adheres to a set of interface standards for transactions, when I want to make a payment I just stick in who my provider is and off we go.

There's a whole other post about why people choose to install ad-blockers. The biggest part of it is the dreadful entitlement culture that is slowly growing. The status-quo won't last forever, but hopefully the internet will be able to react and adapt quicker than the Newspaper, Music and Publishing industries!

I don't remember much else.

Aside from the fact that Human Computer Interaction wasn't of as much interest to me as the raw adrenaline fueled hours in the OOP Practical Labs, the course was almost entirely of the "I WILL SPEAK AT YOU, NO DIAGRAMS" variety. For me, learning about the way you interact with technology should be all about doing.

I've used computers for many hours a day for the best part of 2 decades now, and I think we're only just starting to get this HCI stuff. I know that designers and developers and theorist have been talking about it for a long time, but regular, normal people are starting to take notice.

I bought myself a Macbook Pro two weeks ago because I want to learn to develop apps for my iPhone and my eventual iPad, and although there are probably ways to do it on my Linux or Windows box, I'm pretty sure you can't do it without jailbreaking your iPhone and I'm just not into that.

I love my new Macbook and I am a complete convert.

I wrote this blog post because I wanted to share a specific experience I had about an hour ago:

At Christmas time, I like to treat myself to something I've been eying up for a while, I usually hold something back from the ideas I give others so I have something nice to buy myself. This year it was a pair of atomic floyd hi-def drum headphones. Made for the iPhone they incorporate a microphone for handsfree calling. Once I'd gotten the correct sized rubber inserts on them, they sounded amazing and I was dead pleased with them.

I wanted to do some voice recording a month or so ago, so I was looking for an adapter for my old laptop that would allow me to split the microphone from the headphones so I could plug it in both jacks on the laptop and use them for the task. Alas I couldn't find one (briefly toyed with the idea of making one but couldn't be bothered).

When I unpacked my Macbook, there was a brief, fleeting pang of disappointment when I realised that it only has a single multipurpose audio jack, so I'd never be able to use the 'phones for video chat or whatever. I got over it very quickly and carried on learning how to drive OS X - a process that took less time that it took to fully charge the battery.

I plugged my shiny earphones in two days ago, to listen to some music. I decided I'd try recording something with the mic to see how it sounded and opened up the sound settings and lo and behold: I'm listening to music, and there's an input volume indicator for the mic!

My Mac just works.

It got better about an hour ago. I was listening to music, mooching about the web, when someone spoke to me. I automatically reached for the little dongly-buttony thing and pressed the pause/answer button and as the thought "Fool, they're plugged into the laptop not your iPhone" formed in my head, my music paused.

This is how computing should be, things should behave exactly as the user expects them to, based on all the other things that they've done in the past, except that this isn't completely correct.

About two days after unboxing my prize, I had installed a few bits and bobs and decided that I didn't want one of them anymore. I spent over half an hour fruitlessly searching for how to uninstall software on the Mac. I simply didn't believe, based on my previous experience with Windows, that it could be as simple as dragging the program icon to the dustbin!

I think this kind of learned behavior is one that will plague the iPad - it will just do things but I think people will mistake its simplicity for immaturity, until they get their DING! moment.

I was spooked a little because I had spontaneously decided to download, install and reactivate my account after about 2 years of not having played it.

I've played Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games since around 1999, when I joined the world of Britannia in Ultima Online. I was around 19 at this time, new to the internet and in utter awe that actual other people were sitting much as I was operating their own little guys in this vast, isometric world full of Dragons.

My gaming career has seen accounts with City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, Anarchy Online, Eve Online and World of Warcraft. The latter two for significant amounts of time.

It's interesting how each of the games listed there have something important to add to the genre. UO was the first of its kind, City of Heroes was the first aimed at a more casual audience. Star Wars Galaxies was the first to go insane and implode, Anarchy Online was the first science fiction set game{1}. Eve Online was the first (and still only I believe) 'single server' based game. WoW of course was the juggernaut. First (western*) game to break one million subscribers, its broad appeal growing it all out of proportion to the rest of the market.

I played WoW from day 1 of the European launch and played for well over a year before a new job forced me to re-evaluate the amount of time I was spending playing computer games and the fear of slipping back into bad habits.

Last night, after waiting for many (many) hours for the client and its associated patches to download, I logged in for about 20 minutes, starting a new character in the same lands that I started 5 years ago.

Things have changed, it all looks a bit different, but that feeling you get when you gain a new level; that never goes away.

I may well write down some of my thoughts on the changes at some point.

*MMORPGs got bigger quicker in South Korea earlier{2}

I'm fascinated by Augmented Reality and I think this is such a fantastic real-world use of it. It's more than a gimmick, it actually has a useful business purpose.

My friend Adam is DMing our current campaign, a story that is entirely of his own making.

We're nearing the end of our quest, having so far defeated an Orc army, dispatched the Great Bear and founded the Cult of the Great Bear (penis)*,

In our bid to retrieve the final piece of the Great Wizard (whose name I've forgotten), we have to rob the bank in the paranoid insular city of Skitt.

Last night we managed to make our way to the city, having previously obtained trading licences and secured protection duties with a local trader. Last night was all about casing the bank and formulating a plan.

The awesome thing about our session last night was that it was almost entirely roleplay, I think we made a total of 3 dice checks - Briar checked the entry to the vault for traps whilst scoping it out in his rat form, Faern made a bluff check whilst attempting to pursuade the bank manager that he was passionately interested in the mind-numbing world of accountancy in order to gain his trust to later spike his drink and Brior made a stealth check to successfully avoid being noticed skittering across the vault floor during the manager's morning security checks.

We left having thoroughly explored our options and laid out our plans. Next week, we'll get to see if we can pull the heist off without landing ourselves in hot water!

*a long story

Is it just me, or does it look like something is missing [from the home screen]?

I felt exactly the same about the iPad home screen, it just doesn't look quite right, the spacing of the app icons is too much relative to their size.

Widgets would go a long way to 'solving' the multitasking 'problem', given the right limitations by the OS, they wouldn't negatively impact the user experience - I'd be happy with a little status indicator for my chosen IM app that alerts me that someone has sent me a message and lets me either shoot off a quick reply or launch the full app to join a conversation.

Perfect.

I've had this laptop for about 2 years. It was the most advanced laptop that money could buy at the time, but even from day 1, the button didn't work.

I exaggerate a little, the button works as long as I don't suspend my computer. As soon as it awakens from sleep the button no longer responds.

As a general rule, I don't need to press the button all that often so it doesn't cause me much inconvenience, but it still irks that I have a very expensive laptop that doesn't work properly. I contacted the manufacturers when I first noticed the issue and they instructed me to re-install the driver for the button. It had no effect, and subsequent calls yielded the same response, so I gave up.

Computing is about learning to accept these errors as part of the experience. "try rebooting it", "uninstall and reinstall the application", "It's always been like that, nothing seems to fix it".

I think things are slowly changing.