Spotted this little puppy via Tim Verpoorten’s excellent MacReviewCast podcast:

A free iPod Touch/iPhone game every day almost until (almost)  Xmas – the app-a-day advent calendar.

I am unable to offer reviews yet of the quality of these apps yet as they are untested here but as this stuff is free it’s not like you could complain or cast aspersions eh…

(Ho ho ho…)

 

Just spent a few days getting some “Winter rays” on the Island of Fuerteventura where it seems to be around 25 degrees even in December and a litre of the local brandy is 7€ a litre…

Anyhoo, the choice of TV in out apartment is a tad limited, the obligatory BBC World, CNN, CNBC and the obligatory  dollop of German, Dutch and Italian channels. Thankfully my Geek travel bag includes an iPod video-out lead and phono-to-scart lead meaning the dearest and I have been overdosing in 2 episodes of Midsomer Murders each eve courtesy of the iPod Touch and an iTunes-enabled netbook I’ve been feeding it with every day.

My point is that any video  iPod is a superb portable video player you can easily hook up to hotel TV Scart or comp video in socket  in most countries enabling you to watch what you consider to watch premium pre-recorded content you’ve already amassed. In my case premium means all of the Star Trek series, Columbo, The Outer Limits and lots of (mostly B-rated) Sci-fi movies grabbed from Channel 5 and late night BBC using eye TV on the Mac though Hauppauge kit for Windows boxes would do the same job.

Although the official 4th/5th Gen Apple video-out lead is circa £30 you can buy a Hong Kong knock off for under a fiver on eBay and a phono-to-Scart adapter for a couple of quid.

(Sent from apartment 237, Player Park Club, Fuerteventura using the hotel’s wiFi which only works by the pool and 3G is very hit’n'miss..)

P.S - interesting to note that Google ads has spotted I’m blogging from a Spanish speaking IP address and placing Spanish ads at times.. clever eh..

 

Funny how you sometimes miss stuff that is right under your nose.

iOSMaps is a case in point – a natty little free iphone/iPod Touch app that displays Ordnance Survey OpenSpace data and does all the whizzy postcode and place name search bits too.

OK, so it’s lacking in the imagery views you’ll seen in other iPhone viewers but considering this has been written as a freebie I thought it was rather neat.

Futher details at the explore portal..

 

If you been using the Nokia E51 as a tethered 3G bluetooth modem but found it a bit hit & miss you may find the usb option seems to be a more consitant connection method.

To set it up you’ll first need to download the Nokia E51 isync plugin and run it once.

Next, plug the the usb sync lead in between your phone and your Mac

Choose “PC Suite” when prompted on the phone’s display

At your Mac click to System Preferences<>Network

A new device called Nokia E51 should appear in the device list on the left hand side –  open the Advanced tab (lower right):

For the modem type choose Nokia

For the model type choose GPRS

Leave everything else blank and click OK

Click Show modem status in Menu bar

Click Apply

That’s it.

To connect simply click Connect or use the modem icon in the menu bar.  (This method will probably also work for other Nokia phones listed on the Nokia isync plug-in page too.

 

For any MSI Wind owners out there running OS X, if yours has the RTL8187SE wifi card there’s some fab news – the OS X driver is now available.  Click here to download..

 

Continuing on my (SAD) obsession for remotely controlling computers the good people at Logmein are looking for beta testers for their iPhone/iPod Touch client.  If you are not familiar with Logmein it’s similar to Microsoft’s Remote Desktop and Apple’s Screen sharing\VNC but includes a VPN, so the secure tunnelling means the bad guys will struggle big-time to hack your traffic and access your PC or mac.

But what makes it a no brainer for me is the fact that every lunchtime I can drive my home iMac at from behind a very tight corporate firewall using a locked down PC.  No messy port re-directing, no restricted access webpage warnings, no faffing about with ssh,  logmein just plain works, just like  back-to-my-mac ought to have…

 

The other day I was looking for a simple program to pull audio files off of my daughter’s iPod so that she could sync to a different computer rather than using the normal iTunes backup feature.  Many supposed ‘Free‘ Windows iPod Managers seem to be bundled with trialware ‘spyware removers‘ – the modern day equivalent of a protection racket?

Then I stumbled across Floola, a cross platform program that comes in Windows, Mac OS X and even Ubuntu Linux flavours. Unusually it’s a fully working program provided for free (if you find it useful you are invited to send the author a small contribution, but only a purely voluntary basis.)

Caveat – you won’t be able to use Floola for any protected music you’ve purchased from the iTunes store.

 

So there’s been bucket loads of hype about the 3G iPhone over the past few weeks and my geek chums are scrambling to get their hands on one. I actually bought an iPhone (MK 1) last month to find out what all the fuss was about. Carphonewarehouse were clearing their stocks and relaxing the requirement to commit to a £35 per month in-store 02 contract, you just handed over your £169 and legged it. Thanks to a clever piece of free software called Ziphone within of minutes I was able to bypass the usual iTunes activation process and make the phone ‘SIM free’.

For the two weeks I owned the phoned I was disappointed with it’s performance as a regular phone (although it was a pretty good PDA) . We have Vodafone antennas on our roof in the office which ironically positions us in a near blind spot. Our corporate Noka 6021s, 3109s and Blackberries fight for a signal but for the most part keep their heads above water.. but the iPhone spent most of it’s time hunting for a signal.

I also didn’t get on well with the form factor which is also why I bypassed the N95 ‘Jesus’ phone. Having used a sleek Nokia 6300 until then the iPhone felt like a extra wide brick and I was very conscious of it’s frailty compared to the Nokia. Horse for courses I guess, I do hammer my phone and get about 10-20 calls a day so phone functionality is top of my list, anything else is icing on the cake.

On a more positive note I thought the edge performance was very acceptable (200K’ish) meaning a google search page come up in 2-3 seconds, ditto email, good enough for me me.

So the new kid on the block for me is the Nokia E51, it’s as sleek and slender tas he 6300, sports 3G HSPDA, 802.11B/G WiFi and will run anything the N95 will run, the only shortcoming being the lack of internal GPS (a £15 spend eBay).

And the Apppe Mac Community for the most part seem to be blissfully unaware that Nokia actually support Apple’s painless isync utility that evens launches iPhoto and makes Activesync seem rather clunky and dated, not to mention Google’s android project which could be something that sneaks up from behind and catches us all off guard.

There’s something to be said for ‘product maturity’ that companies like RIM (the Blackberry people) have made millions from.. a game Nokia are also ahead with phones like the 6300, 6500 and E51 etc.

(P.S Joikuspot – A neat little app fro any S60 WiFi enabled phone that turn into a 3G to WiFi hotspot)

 

Well, my mate ‘Bob’ just called to say he and a bunch of his mates in and around London bought 8GB iPhones today from the CarPhoneWarehouse for £169 locked to 02 but no on- the-spot requirement to buy an AirTime  contact.  Apparently CPW would only accept payment via a credit card but otherwise there was no obligation to take up an airtime contract.

Update Friday April 25th 13:00 – this story now confirmed, and yes I manged to pick one up just in the nick of time!

Anybody want to buy an iPod Touch?….

 

Windows XP has a useful feature where, presssing the Windows key and the L key the computer is locked requiring CTRL-ALT-DEL and a password to log back in. I wasn’t aware of how to achieve this on a mac until Adam Christianson mentioned it on his Maccast podcast..

From the Finder click GO<>UTILITES<>KEYCHAIN ACCESS

Under the main Keychain Access menu (top left) Choose PREFERENCES<>GENERAL

check - Show Status in Menu Bar..