iPhone 3GS

Recently upgraded from the iPod touch (1st gen) to the iPhone 3GS. Wow! Together with the 3.0 software, it's a superb package. The 3GS is much faster than the old touch. The on-board camera is pretty average from what I've seen of it to date but the video functionality is quite neat. 3G reception on the O2 data network is not too bad at home and in town centres, but there are plenty of notspots when out and about in rural Worcestershire.

Boxee

Boxee is now installed on Apple TV.

See more info about Boxee at http://www.boxee.tv/

BBC iPlayer is now accessible on the Apple TV!

iRobot Roomba 530

Finally, it's here - the iRobot Roomba 530! An absolute bargain from Lakeland (compared to the official selling price). Here it is "earning its corn" in Robert's office.

The upstairs carpets have never been so clean. Annie loves it. It's currently ranked up there with TiVo and the (sadly now long gone) Psion Series 3 as "one of the best gadgets ever" and loved almost as much as her MacBook Pro...

Gadget Show Live

Lilly and I went to the NEC on Friday 17 April 2009 for day 1 of the first ever "Gadget Show Live" event.

It was a 3 day sell out. Hall 1 had about 100 or so exhibitors, big and small. Hall 2 was set up to be the Sony Super Theatre. We went to the 2pm show. It was an hour of live fun and games! We're now looking forward to next year's event...

NetBooks and MacBooks

I have finally got my 3G USB modem working with the Acer Aspire One running Linux (Linpus Lite)!

After trying other flavours of Linux (Mandriva 2008 and Xubuntu 8.04) with varying success, I recovered to the Acer supplied OS from the supplied CD. This time, though, I decided not to run Live Update to get the latest patches for the operating system. Once again, I installed the Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux software, but this time it connected to the 3 network and I was online at HSDPA speed.

Acer have recently announced a forthcoming patch to support 3G USB modems, so when that comes out I will hopefully be able to use Live Update to get the OS fully up-to-date.

I had a bit of bother with my MacBook tonight after I popped in a blank DVD to backup my iTunes purchases. iTunes decided to display the spinning beach ball. Force quit iTunes didn't work. Then I made the big mistake - restarted the MacBook. It started up but didn't boot into Mac OS X, the optical disk drive just kept spinning and the fans started whirring!

The first few recommended solutions didn't work at all. Hold down the trackpad bar. Nope. Press F12. Nope. Leave it for 10 minutes and it will eject itself. Nope. In the end, technician Annie shoved a business card into the slot to stop the disk from spinning. That did the trick! The disk immediately ejected itself...

Certified technologist

I took the CompTIA DHTI+ certification exam on Thursday and passed - hurrah!

Back to reality

Now that the course is over, I've started revising for the DHTI+ certification exam on 29 May (subject to confirmation). In the meantime, it's back to the dreary old day job tomorrow...