so despite my initial fears I I did manage to get an iPhone, there couldn’t have been more than 10 people at the Optus store I went to at 7am. They did however have very limited stock. I was 4th in line and by the time my turn arrived they ran out of 16gb black models. I wasn’t particularly fussed about the colour. So for the past 30 or so hours I’ve been installing apps syncing mail accounts, all that jazz. The verdict? Even more impressed than I expected to be. The interface is just so intuitive you pick it up and feel comfortable straight away. Physically it feels sturdy and robust, and the size is fine, I notice it less in my pocket than my old phone. I’m yet to find a flaw that truly irritates me, a couple of tiny ones that don’t fuss me too much, no video recording, no copy and paste, that’s all I can think of right now. When I first used the qwerty keyboard I thought oh oh, I’m not gonna enjoy this. But after just one hour of use, I was only marginally slower than my old phone. The trick is trust, if you think you’ve missed a key, just keep typing, 85% of the time it will fix it up, no matter how bad it looks. I’ve installed a bunch of fancy apps, I’ll post a list with mini reviews at a later date. Oh and FYI this post was written entirely on my iPhone.

So me and my friend Ben replaced the LCD panel of my Macbook last night, and it went pretty damn smoothly. There were some scary bits where we had to pull out plugs that didn’t look like plugs and strange plastic tidbits, but all in all, we simply followed the guide on ifixit.com and it worked quite well. AU$419 for a 120GB hard drive and a 13.3″ LCD panel, not too shabby, bought from Macfixit.com.au. Here’s some piccies.

Before

After

Made a couple of additions to my site today. As you can see all of the titles to my sidebar items have corrosponding icons for them, gives it a splash of colour I guess. I’ve also brought the Moblog back after being on hiatus for a very long time. My old moblog was a completely independant PHP script that I wrote, but not having control of my web host’s PHP settings and wanting to enable certain features, I had to abandon it. This time round I’ve gone with a much more simple approach. This time I’m using Flickr to host my photos, I can send a picture message to my assigned flickr email address and it adds it to my photostream, I’m using a Wordpress plugin called Pflickr, which was designed to display a random image for a desired amount of time, I modified it slightly to not grab a random picture but to grab the latest picture added. It works very well and I’m pretty happy with how it works. Kudos to Christos for developing such a nice simple widget for me to mess with.

When you click swap, your sketch is uploaded. The next person to click swap will get that sketch, and you will get whatever they drew. Have fun!

Pretty fun. I’ve put my URL on some of my pictures, if you got that from this site. Post a comment!

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I just had a very surreal experience. Someone approached me at work wanting to print off something he did at home and he doesn’t have a printer. “Ok, where’s the document?” I said. He handed me a floppy disk, that’s right, a floppy disk, “I tried to open it at the library but it didn’t work”. I asked him if he had the document saved anywhere else, he didn’t, it was just on the floppy disk. It gets worse. I put it in a floppy drive we had on one of the older computers, as I expected, it wouldn’t read the disk and asked me to reformat the disk. The gentleman noticed the dialog box and said, “I think this disk was last formatted about ‘94, ‘95″. I just looked at him with a blank stare, “You’re telling me you’ve been using the same floppy disk for 14 years?”. He nodded. I couldn’t believe it, I almost burst out with laughter. A 14 year old floppy disk and he’s wondering why it’s not working, what a classic.