June 2009
24 posts
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Reduce iPhone 3GS Battery Drain
For the past few days I have been struggling with my iPhone 3GS’s battery draining at what seemed an unusually high rate. By mid-day, only four hours after unplugging it from its overnight charge, the iPhone was already approaching 50% with minimal use.
Enabling the battery percentage meter (Settings > General > Usage) highlighted the problem further: the iPhone seemed to be draining...
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iPhone 3.0 + Tumblr: almost, but not quite.
Say it with me: Cut and Paste is the most versatile feature to come to the iPhone. Ever. Yes, it took forever to arrive, but now it’s here dammit, and it’s time to make some good use of it.
Since the release of iPhone OS 3.0 and my subsequent purchase of a 3GS (Yes, I’m a sucker for new gear, so sue me), I have been spending a lot of my downtime exploring what the new OS update...
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Beejive IM with Push notifications hits the App... →
We’ve all been waiting for the first IM apps with Push to arrive following the release of iPhone OS 3.0. After rumours of delays due to glitches in the Push infrastructure, conspiracy theories and Illuminati plots, the day has come.
Beejive IM’s Push-enabled version can now be downloaded from the App Store, and it brings with it a number of other improvements to boot.
Why are you...
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Mini-Review: My Brute for iPhone
If you’re into social “MMO” type games, the iPhone or iPod Touch are about as good a platform as you’ll find for your genre. Unfortunately, the kind of social games the App Store is awash with tend to be poorly-concealed clones of old staples like iMob, iMafia, iKnights, Vampires, Zombies and so on - barely more than re-skinnings of bug ridden leveling games based on barely...
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Use Twitter to sabotage Iran's 'net police
Feeling subversive? This was just sent to me:
” If anyone is on twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians’ access to the internet down. Cut & paste & please pass it...
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iPhone 3GS sports hidden 720p video playback →
Well well what do you know - no sooner do I invest in a new toy that someone discovers a nice little hidden feature:
“With Apple’s new iPhone 3G S hitting store shelves in Europe overnight, the device was thrown within minutes onto the operating table and gutted, revealing a Samsung-branded system-on-a-chip (SoC) featuring a multi-format codec with untapped HD video playback and...
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iPhone 3GS - First hands-on impressions
Let’s get one thing out of the way: it’s fast. So fast in fact, that previously tedious task switching between apps like Mail and Safari now feel almost like true multitasking.
Within Safari itself, pages load at a very close approximation of desktop browser speeds. Pages loaded with Javascript and containing multiple images load in an instant, and switching between pages feels...
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Tether your O2 iPhone 3G/3GS (3.0), for free, now →
This quick hack actually worked: point your iPhone to http://help.benm.at, go to Mobile Configs, Choose your country, and then your provider. For UK 02 Customers the Vertigo option seems to work in enabling tethering, without the need to jailbreak or any other complex procedure.
O2 is pretty pissed about this, but despite threats to cut off abusers there seems to be no way for them to actually...
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Monday Fail Roundup
I’m not sure what’s wrong with the interwebs today, but I couldn’t help detecting a higher and usual fail ratio in the ebb and flow of today’s news inanity. I will therefore take up the role of grumpy old man, and list them here for your perusal.
HipHopGamer finds a way to use the term “Killzone” to boost views to a completely pointless article which can be...
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The Revolution Will Be Twitterized →
It seems that Twitter has finally found its niche, beyond allowing people to broadcast their bowel movements: as a perfect tool of political dissent.
As we speak, the hash tag #iranelection is atweet (new word there) with proxy IP addresses used to bypass Iran’s current post-election ‘net blackout. It would seem that state censorship just isn’t as easy as it used to be.
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Dear O2 (and Apple): Thanks for Nothing.
Consider this an open letter to O2, the UK’s exclusive iPhone carrier, and by association Apple, a company who needs no introduction.
As a long-time O2 customer and long-time iPhone user, I would like to express my deepest disappointment in the way the company plans to treat me, and many others like me, with regards to the upcoming iPhone 3GS upgrade path. Or rather, the lack thereof.
You...
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“If they start making products people don’t want, and start losing users, then...”
– No Shit, Sherlock.
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Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age' coming to a TV... →
I almost choked on my sandwich. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is apparently on its way to a TV adaptation. Now, this is one of the seminal books on nanotechnology, a story so utterly cool that the mere thought of bringing it to the TV medium makes my head ache. And the producer? George Clooney.
I don’t know whether to laugh maniacally...
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XBMC/Plex: meet Ember Media Manager
Jason Schnitzler is one productive guy. Only a couple of weeks ago he announced his intention to build a media manager to fit somewhere between Media Companion and Media Info Plus, and boom. He’s already done it.
Ember Media Manager is a free solution to organise your movie files, including IMBD scraping, posters, thumbnails, fanart, nfo’s, media flagging, and everything else you need...
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“Apple’s (AAPL) new iPhone 3.0 software includes features that, if...”
– Apple, Google Consider App-Sharing Tools
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“To study the [speech] gene in action, scientists introduced the human version of...”
– Transgenic Mice Engineered With A Human Gene For Speech
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Bing! Is Microsoft's new search any good?
OK, I’ll start with the obvious question: WTF is up with the mediterranean holiday postcard look of Microsoft’s newly beta’d Bing search engine? For a moment there I thought I’d ended up at a travel agency.
With that out of the way, first impressions of this repackaged Live search aren’t too shabby. The layout is clean, with a sidebar on the left hand side allowing...
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Follow E3 '09 Live
This year’s E3 holds many a promise. Secret Microsoft demos, unexplained early starts hinting at groundbreaking announcements (or possibly an expectation of bad time keeping), leaks galore for some of our favourite gaming franchises and a massive, towering pile of garbage.
With so much going on, it’s important for the clued-up gentleman gamer to have at hand the latest sources of...