My Car packed it in this morning. Pretty sure it’s the clutch, completely dead. It’s gonna cost a bucketload and it’s turfed my dreams of both going to the snow this weekend, and getting an LCD TV.

Quick List of the 3rd Party apps currently installed, starting from the top:

Cro-Mag Rally - 3D racing game, Mario Kart style. Pretty fun game.

iPint - Balance game, slide a beer into the patrons hands, then be rewarded with your own virtual bevvy, stupid as hell, but it’s worthy for a spot at this point.

Light - White screen, what can I say it works.

Shazam - This thing is impressive, press the tag button andΒ  hold your iPhone to some music, and Shazam will try and tell you what the song is. And it actually works.

Facebook - Facebook app (duh), status updates, IM, and most dangerous of all, direct picture to facebook uploads, that could end in tears.

IM - Just a Safari link to www.meebo.com

Cube Runner - run your spaceship through a maze of cubes, Fun.

Super Pong - Not sure why it’s called pong, it’s a brick bash game.

Hold’em - One of the best Poker games I’ve played, on any platform.

Monkey Ball - Marble Madness with Monkeys, uses the accelerometer, nicely polished, but hard.

Twitterific - Twitter client, post pics, upload location, all the twitterness action.

Airme - Upload photos to Flickr, with full location mapping and even current weather, the only Flickr app I’ve found to do location, which astounds me with all of the iPhones location features. Works like a charm.

Remote - Control iTunes on your Mac/PC, full control, does everything.

Wordpress - Links to my Wordpress admin page, using a wordpress plugin that shows an iPhone friendly interface (WPhone)

Just search for any of the listed apps in the store. FYI to take a pic, press and hold the home button and on/off button for 1 second, it will flash and drop a screenshot in your camera roll. Post your suggestions.

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.

The iPhone gets released on Friday, and even though I’ve paid the deposit, I don’t have heaps of confidence in getting one on the release day. A little bird recently told me that Optus and Vodafone both have 4000 units each. And Telstra only got 1000, due to them jumping on the bandwagon a bit too late. it’s going to be a long, long day. Quickest possible, Optus contracts take about 15 minutes.

My only real advantage is that I live in a regional area, with a local store that will have stock on the day, they may have less stock, but they should have less people waiting.

My Windows box was having trouble recently, automatic updates was detected as off by the security center, but it was apparently on… but it wasn’t, and also file sharing buggered up, access denied for everyone. I’m not sure whether it was spyware, or some sort of corrupt Windows update, anyway I did the regular spyware / virus scan, it found a couple of things, nothing too out of the ordinary. The only thing I needed to do was do a whole bunch of Googling to see who else had the issue. Quite a few had the Auto updates problem, so I started with that. I found a fix for it, which also fixed the file sharing problem, happy days! I found the fix right here, but here’s the basics:

Might or might not work -

Register the file wuaueng.dll:
Click Start, select Run
Type: regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
Press OK.

Pretty straight forward, worked like a charm!