Announcing the 96 Hour iPhone 3G Net-Based Campout

Starting at 8:02 this morning, I will be comprehensively combing the internet for every morsel of information about the iPhone 3G I can find. Everything will be aggregated here and on my Twitter feed.

So primarily, I'm donating my body to the world as a crawler for UK iPhone 3G news for the next 4 days. My main aim is to whittle through all the goddamned BS and try and find something out about the Pay/Go iPhone 3G.

I might even record some video roundups, using Screenflow to capture the internet and myself simultaneously.

So, what will be powering this crazy coverage you ask? The Mac mini will be my primary station and the one from which I follow most of the news and the one I'll be using to post about it, both here and on Twitter. Also lending a hand will be my Eee PC, serving up yet more news and allowing me to continue the quest away from the desk.

My camcorder will be recording me for the video roundups of course, my iPod touch will be handling (Some) of the entertainment I'll need to keep myself from slashing my wrists and, should the iPhone 3G actually be available on Pay/Go this Friday, my RAZR's last job will be Twittering the line at the Carphone Warehouse I'm buying from. Or, from the Cambridge Apple Retail Store (I'll explain in the morning).

That's 96 hours of iPhone coverage. Suck it Laporte :P

In all seriousness though, Leo rocks. I'm looking forward to and may well I may well join Leo's coverage of the worldwide launch if he wants me. For that, I'll take my Eee and use store Wi-Fi.

Wow, I'm gonna have to go sleep soon.

Jens Out

The new Setup in Pictures

What's under the white on the screen? It's a secret.

Live Blog: The Setup Renovation

http://www.scribblelive.com/Thread.aspx?Id=1031

Update: All finished now. The hi-fi ended up moving up a shelf. The Wii has moved about 8 inches to the right to accommodate the VGA Switcher's new home. Between them is Wii Remote Number 2. On top of the Switcher is the Mouse Dock and Wii Remote 1 in its charging station. Behind the Switcher, angled through the gap at the side of the book case is my USB fan.

Beside the Wii on the right is currently the Eee, but that gap is eventually the Mac mini's home. To the right of that gap are the Wii games. Most of the Wii Accessories moved into the Wii Games' old home, the others have entirely new homes. For example, my 3 wheels (The Ferrari multi-format one and the two Wii Remote shells - including the official Wii Wheel) are in that redundant PS2's old home.

I swapped the power strips so the 6 is at the back powering everything, the 4 now upfront for charging things.

Final big change, I moved the monitor back and the speakers forward, so there's now way more space on the desk.

It's a pretty nice setup. I'll have some pictures soon...

...Maybe.

Updating The Setup

Last post I mentioned my plan to redo the setup here just to unclutter the cables situation. Well I've decided to go a touch more drastic. I'm going to strip everything on the desk and the bookcase beside it out (Excluding some stuff on the bookshelf which will absolutely not be moving). That comprises the PC and all the related devices, the monitor, the printer, the VGA switcher, the Composite > VGA box, the Wii, the hi-fi & its speakers, all of my games & DVDs and the total removal of the redundant PS2.

It'll probably also require the reorganisation of a couple of crates and I'll be moving some of the Wii accessories (Though most will superficially remain where they are - hopefully neater though).

All of this is leading to the eventual installment of my new "desktop", the Mac mini. I put desktop in quote marks because it's actually going to sit on the bookshelf by the Wii, replacing the hi-fi which will move up a shelf or down two.

The other big news is that I might ditch the Dell after all. But only if my parents agree to pay me some money for the add-ons of this year in exchange for releasing it to them (Value £184, I'd hope for £150 from them). To recap, those add-ons are a Blu-Ray reader and a better graphics card.

I'd use the £150 to buy an Elgato eyeTV Diversity (Dual tuner Mac USB TV Tuner dongle) - that would replace the Dazzle*Stick as my TV, I'd let them have that...I hate it anyway. That would only cost £79.95, so I'd spend the rest on a big USB external hard drive - 400 or 500 GB. Half of that drive would be Time Machine for the Mac mini's drive and half would be additional media storage, mostly for TV recordings.

This would basically be me set. Yes, I'd lose Blu-Ray watching in my room, but I would still be able to do it elsewhere - either on the big living room TV or wherver they put the Dell. I'd also lose PC gaming, but the PC games I play most nowadays are things like Grid Wars 2 (Which has a Mac version) and older first person shooters (I keep going back to the First Person Shooters of 2003-2005 for some reason). Even Penny Arcade Adventures will run on the Mac mini!

Plus...I plan on getting a 360 anyway. So between Wii, that and the (Admittedly somewhat limited) games that work on the mini, I'll be set.

Speaking of Wii, MOHH2 is kickass.

I'm thinking of Liveblogging the rebuild from my Eee...Mainly as an experiment with livblogging, but also as a way to vent any frustrations with cables or whatever.

Anyway, that's all for now. Catch you later.

Goodbye papa, please pray for me,
Jens

Housecleaning

Switched to a new design you may have noticed, it reflects the gradual change in tone up in here. I'm also currently in the process of tagging all the posts in the archive, and since I don't have any exams until June 3rd now, I should be getting that done in the next week or so.

I'm now on Twitter, dunno what I'm going to do with it, but I imagine I'll find some use for micro-blogging in the future. Follow me if you use it, but right now it's probably not worth joining just to follow me.

I'm hoping to get around to those exam reviews next week, I have some issues with all three I've done so far so stay tuned for that.

I finally enabled Advanced Desktop (Vanilla Xandros) on my Eee the other day, so I've been kind of geeking out. That's how I roll, yo.

Nintendo are bringing a turquoise DS Lite out. Hot damn. That might be the thing that makes me upgrade. That thing is lush.

Rumours abound Apple will unveil a 3G iPhone soon (Like, within 3 weeks) which will go on sale shortly thereafter worldwide. The most exciting rumour is that it may be sold contract-free at the fll price, with carriers offering rebates (Similar to the one offered by Carphone Warehouse and O2 recently) to drive contract sales. Well if I can get a 3G 16GB iPhone for £269, contract-free, then I might just have to go for that instead of the Sony.

I'd be more aprehensive about an 8GB, it wouldn't be a big enough upgrade on the touch.

Right, I'm off to spec up a computer to drool over at VooDooPC's website. I'll finish the upgrades to the blog soon.

Goodbye my Coney Island baby
Jens

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

So, today, I went to Toys R Us.

I played a little Tux Racer on the Eee they had on display, then took the ticket to the checkout, shoved my card in the slot, entetered my pin, claimed my Eee and left. Took about 10 minutes total including some time ogling the Doctor Who stuff. Painless.

I've got it setup and I love it, It works like a charm. Been hitting up forums, the chatroom from Forumula1.net, watching YouTube, iPlayer and MP4s. Even chatting with my frinds via Microsoft's Windows Live network.

The biggest job was redoing Firefox using the Minifox theme, Tinymenu extension and moving the navigation toolbar contents into the menu toolbar, before removing the empty navigation toolbar. All done to maximise viewing space.

I also did away with the status bar as irrelevant.

Right now I'm letting it charge for a while because it's been taking a pounding since it achieved full charge at around 1 or 2 (I forget). I ran it to dead at about 4ish I think and ran from outlet power for a while, before allowing it to charge a bit, then punding it again.

It's pretty, small, light and it was dirt cheap.

Love it.

Jens Out

ASUS To supply my next desktop too?

ASUS announced the stylish and powerful Essentio CS5110 - a silent-running multimedia PC with Intel Core2 Duo processing, 250-500GB of storage, up to 4GB of RAM, a 256MB nVidia 8600 GT (Not the finest card ever, but capable) and a blue-glowing (Wii-style) slim slot-loading Blu-Ray optical drive.

No word on pricing, but if the price is right, this beauty, or an updated variant of it:


Will undoubtedly be the replacement for my aging Dell Dimension 5150.

I had considered a Mac Pro, but I'll be paying for it with EMA and I do want to, you know, buy it before 2012.

Jens Out

Eeet'll have to wait

Unfortunately, the way my pay has worked out (And because I hate filling out forms so I still haven't reeived my £50 tax rebate), the Eee is going to have to wait until next month. Think Good Friday sort of time.

In the meantime, I've ordered Medal of Honor Heroes 2 on Wii and F1 06 on PSP. Regular readers will know I think Heroes 2 is all the way awesome and most of you will have worked out that I love Formula 1.

Originally, I was going to play F1 06 on my brother's PSP. Under that arrangement, the only motivation to get the PSP version rather than the PS2 version was simple: we do not currently have a single PS2 operational in the house. Even though there's one 2 feet away from me right now.

It has no power cable. Seriously, we have no idea where it went.

Anyway, the plan now is to buy myself a white PSP Slim and Lite. Partially as something to play with until I get the Eee, partially because there's some PSP stuff I want to get into. Certain games and features, you know.

It's hardly going to be a major PMP for me though, my iPod touch does an awesome job of that as it stands.

I also just bought Sugar Tunes Numa Numa, a version of Numa Numa by Balan. And it's awesome. So awesome.

Oh by the way, remember my intention to exploit the US's shitty economy when I got there this year? My main purchase is probably going to be a MacBook Air. The way I'm expecting things to go down, I'll still have at least $190 left over for other stuff. Probably more once I ramp up the amount of overtime I do because I'm no longer at school full time or at all (Afetr the exams basically).

I think I can push it up to $1000 of spare cash.

One thing I'm excited to do on the America trip is put full coverage of it up here. I aim to video and photograph what we get up to, sharing those pics and videos with people here and at This is Interesting as well as recording a video diary for you on the Eee.

I'm going to try and find soemthing to test the whole using the Eee to do a multimedia report on something remote from my desk between getting it and heading Stateside. I think it'll be good at it.

Yes, I know I'll need a USB HDD. I'll get one.

Anywho, I think that's enough for now.

If anyone's still reading this, please leave more comments...I'm getting awfully lonely on here.

Jens Out

Preparing for Eee

Hmm. I'm expecting to go grab my Eee tomorrow. For that reason, I've been thinking about the stuff I need t get done to prepare for it. First thing I've decided I need to do is take a cross-section of my daily bookmarks to put on it.

Actually, that's a half-truth. First I looked for a good game to run on it. OpenArena fits the bill nicely.

Anyway, my first factor for choosing sites is width. This blog will work fine on the Eee, but some sites are simply too wide. GameSpot.Com is an example of another workable site, which is cool because I want to watch their videos on the Eee.

Well that's done now...What's next?

Ah, move documents onto the Flash drive. Done.

I think that might cover it. I don't really need to scrounge around for many apps, it comes with apps for doing most of what I want to do anyway.

Of course, all this assumes I get my tax rebate.

In other news, I've joined the team at This is Interesting, so you can check out some of my stuff over there - I'm a bi-weekly contributor. Yeah, that's right, a posting schedule.

Bet you wish there was one here.

Dream on.

Jens Out

Only the inevitable

The trend in computing recently spells the end for the humble desktop, the old king of the personal computing world. Usually running Windows, it is a familiar sight.

But users increasingly need more customisation, better asset management and are more and more taking their computer on the road. In the coming years, OS X/Darwin and Linux are going to lead notebook and handheld computers on a charge into dominance at the expense of Windows and its natural habitat, the desktop.

These are the beginnings of a sea change for computers, and the poster children are two radically different solutions to the same problem.

Apple answered changing user needs in the portability market with MacBook Air, the device which aims to be to the notebook what the iMac was to the desktop a decade ago.

Asus answered cries for more portability and customisation with the Linux-focused Eee PC. They further addressed the need for the cost of computing to plummet and the difficulty of it to decrease rapidly.

Apple and Asus are just two companies who are seeing a new way forward.

In the year 2015, the desktop will be relegated to the realms of the pros and a role as a base. In the home, users will freely roam around the house wielding notebooks tailor made to their needs, running Wi-Fi at speeds unthinkable at present to connect to internet up to 30 times as fast as it is now.

On the road, uses will take their computers with them and connect to fifth generation mobile networks, true mobile broadband, at speeds up to half of that available over fixed lines, blitzing current-spec third and conceptual fourth generation networks by an order of magnitude.

When a computer is unnecessary, phones like Apple's iPhone Air or any one of the millions of phones running Google's dominant Android will connect to those same networks and provide users with speedy, intuitive access to communication and information.

Social networks like MySpace and Facebook will have given way to more tailored content sharing communities, linking users with content and its creators based on interest.

Microsoft, its monopolies long forgotten as the once dominant computer company sells its operating system and becomes a solutions and consultancy firm.

The buyer? A bit player looking for the fast track to marketshare in the OS space.

They're still working the dead weight out of Windows 9.

These have been visions of the future,
With Jensonb

Eeek

Well, what a difference a day makes. It turns out I'm not going to need to buy a PS3, my dad's getting us one. Which saves me basically £300 hard cash. Some of you might expect me to go back to buying the Xbox, but I decided not to.

Instead, I decided to get a hold of a computer. The geek in me was getting antsy. Of course you've guessed, the computer I'm getting is the Asus Eee PC. I'm getting the white one with 4GB of Flash and a webcam. It probably has a specific name, but I can't really be bothered to find out what it is.

Does this mean I'm not getting the Air? Not necessarily. What it does mean is whether I get the Air or a different Mac, I will still have a nice, light notebook for writing in bed and so on.

In other news, I got some really great news today, between moving operations from Petrograd (Peterborough), the heartland of English mediocrity to somewhere in Scotland, which by the way kicks ass, we're taking a slight detour for 2 or 3 weeks.

To the Everglades.

Yeah, Florida. It's awesome. I've been waiting to go to America for years. Finally I'm going to get to go to Disney World, see the awesome American food and purchase consumer goods at rock bottom prices (AKA exploiting the USA's shitty economy).

We intend to rent a villa over there and take in all the stuff we want at a leisurely pace. As a geek, I'll be taking at least one computer and my camera(s) and updating the blog on what we're up to as we go. As a part of that, I expect I'll be taking a fat USB HDD and several big SD cards.

Then we'll return, not to a house but to a boat. My dad really wants a boat. We were going to get a smaller boat and a camper van, then decided that was stupid and merged the two into a bigger boat.

Then we'll redo the house we buy to have it just the way we want it.

Well that's the future for me.

Live free or Die Hard,
Jens