This morning on the BBC, news that Scottish brewer Brewdog has brewed a  32% ABV beer – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/8380412.stm

Now this is obviously a limited edition high priced drink, which they’ve made to prove they could do it (I always thought the only way to get that high was with distillation, but that would mean it wouldn’t be a beer). And good luck to them I say. I’ve tried many of the ‘strongest’ beers at beer festivals over the years, and they’re all normally OK for a small shot sized glass of them, but that’s what Whisky’s for, Beer comes in pints.

And the name is wonderful as well, Tactical Nuclear Penguin. If I see this available for a taster I’ll certainly give it a go. But for £30 I’d still rather have a bottle of Laphroaig

But predictably someone’s moaning about it (Jack Law, of Alcohol Focus Scotland). What’s the point? If they were banging this stuff out by the litre for a £1 then yes there’s a problem. But at £30 a bottle you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck from any cheap £5 bottle of gin/vodka/’whisky’ from the local off license. So once again a rent-a-gob has been found to have a go at someone who’s actually trying to do something interesting without actually engaging their brain.

Apologies for the repeated terms, but I spent a lot of time on Google trying to find a solution to this one. So hopefully this might appear near the top of the list for someone else’s benefit. (I hope it helps you in that case).

The problem was:

Whenever I tried to open an application on my iphone it would start to load, then almost instantly return me to the home screen (crashing out). This only appeared to affect apps from the iTunes App store, both free and purchased. My Cydia apps were fine. As were the apps that come preinstalled on the iPhone.

I tried all the solutions listed on various forums

• Restarting the iPod
• Installing a new free application via iTunes
• installing a new paid application via iTunes
• Removing an application on the iPhone and then reinstalling
• Removing an application on the iPhone, restarting and then reinstalling
• Syncing everything again with my Mac

None of these worked at all.

In the end the solution that did work was to restore my phone, set it up as a new phone and then resynceverything else. Luckily I always keep my calendar synced with iCal and Google calendars, my email syncs with Gmail and my contacts are synced with the Mac Address book. Plus iTunes copied all my apps back across for me. The music was all safe as well, it just took a while to resync everything back on. In fact the only things I actually lost were my Cydia apps, but they were soon put back on.

comment below just to try and advertise this:

iphone apps crashing immediately. iphone apps not starting. only built in iphone applications working. iphone applications stopped working

So I’ve had the iPhone about a month now. Got to say I’m pretty impressed with it so far. It’s nice and speedy, the screen is nice and useable. Not been overly bothered by the size, which I was initially worried about, but it seems to disappear into jeans pockets reasonably easily (even with my other phone already in there.). As an iPod it works brilliantly. And with Runkeeper Pro (my Runkeeper Pro review) it’s been brilliant out on runs as well.

The battery does go down very quickly, but I’m guessing that’s actually the amount of WiFi usage I put it through. But I have now finally bitten the bullet and signed up for a 02 Pay as You Go sim card, so this could be the difference as I try to use it as a proper phone, and also seeing how good/bad 02s network is. Got rather used to using it on fast wifi all the time :).

The balance is tipping towards making it my full time phone. At the moment though it’s the worry of how good o2′s network actually is that’s stopping me comitting by porting my number across (I’ve had it for nearly 10 years now and don’t fancy changing). But with Orange about to release the 3GS on their network as well, I could be very tempted to migrate. Though then there’s the worry about wether Apple will release a version 4 just as I get locked into a contract.

So I’ve decided to try and shift some of the beer induced lard from around my middle. I’m starting at about 14/4 and would ideally like to end up at around the 12 stone mark.

In aid of this I’m going to be following a points based diet system that begins with the initials WW.

But as I’m weak, and also quite enjoy running I’m going to endeavour to pound the pavements and trails of Nottingham[shire] more regularly over the coming months. Over the years I’ve had ups and downs with running, sometimes getting up to the point where a 10 mile run doesn’t phase me, and other times blowing my knees out by trying hills to fast. So I’ve decided to take things nice and slow this time. I’ve set myself what I think are some nice achievable goals:

(for reference, at the moment I can manage 5 consecutive 10 minute miles without complete collapse or spending the next 4 days hobbling).

• Dec 2009 – Be capable of doing a 10k run in an hour.
• March 2010 – Be capable of running 13.1 miles in one go
• May 2010 – Run a proper half marathon course
• July 2010 – Run 20 miles in one go.
• September 2010 – Run the Robin Hood marathon through fair Nottingham.

Other than the 10k one I’m trying to avoid setting times for them as I’m not sure how fast I’ll get. But I think a sub 1 hour 10k should be doable based on what I can do atm.

So there’s going to be a weekly update of my progress, hopefully with an increasing weekly total.

I’m also going to try and post up more running routes as there seems to be a dearth of them this side of  Nottingham on the web (Forest Fields/NG7/NG3) . And a lack of the middle distance ones as well. So hopefully I’ll start correcting that, a little. Some of them may look a bit disjointed as I’ll have to ‘fudge’ the start points, rather than having hordes of runners starting their stopwatch on my doorstep :).

So, one day with the iPhone so far. Some ups, some downs but on the whole happy with it

On the downside I forgot to check which version of the bootloader it was running. It appears that 5.09 is currently ‘unlockable’, so I’ve had to resort to sending off for a turbo sim

The jail breaking on the other hand was pretty painless. I used Pwnage tool to create a modified Ipsw file which was then pushed back onto the iPhone using iTunes.

Had some problems getting some tunes onto it, but I think that was more of a limitation of my work pc than the phone, will be checking when I get home to the mac.

Getting it onto work’s wireless network was very simple, in fact finding the settings on the intranet took longer than the set up. Once on line installing apps, both from cydia and the app store was quick and easy.

Just about getting to grips with the keyboard now, this is being typed up while I wait in town, and the only reason it’s not being posted from my sunny bit of Nottingham is the aforementioned lack of mobile phoneness. And not quite sure of the easiest way to sort out links on posts yet so i’ll do those once this has been posted

So, after prevaricating for a while I’ve finally decided to take the plunge on an iPhone. Mainly swung by the fact that a friend is selling their 3G for £50, and if it turns out to be a mistake T-Mobile will upgrade me to a HTC Hero for nowt. So either way I end up with a nice new phone.

I plumped for giving the iPhone a go as I want a small device that saves me carrying iPod and Phone, and then a GPS unit when I go running, plus a nice instant startup web tablet at home on the wifi would be nice (as well as during meetings at work….) The HTC hero looks good on the phone part and the internet part, but not so brilliant as a media player.

So now I need to look for a couple of bits and pieces:

• A decent case
• Possibly some new earbuds with inline controls
• An armband case for running
• Some apps, would like somethings to help with:
  • Run tracking (ie; GPS stats and routes)
  • Flickr, be nice to make changes on the move
  • Twitter, thought there’s no shortage of those
  • WordPress, update this thing from anywhere
  • Games, I get bored quickly :)

I’m sure I’ll get distracted by many shiny things as I go along

Happy Mac Days.

After many years of lusting I’ve finally dropped the cash on a new Apple MacBook Pro. To be specific the current 2.53GHz 4GB 15″ Macbook Pro.  I’v had it about a week now, and just about getting used to it now.

Points I like

Things I’m still undecided on:

Only other bug bears are just me getting used to the slightly different way of doing things with the OS. The windows part is just different enough from MS Windows to catch me out, and the underlying Unix is different to the Linux I normally use as well.

Luckily all the software I’ve been using is available in a Mac or Unix version which is helping a lot with the trasition.

So far everythings been great, now major problems with anything. Certainly seems to be helping me to get cracking on getting photos sorted.

Now just debating about when to move to Snow Leopard, and if I really need to get a Wacom tablet

So the results are in for the Tory’s open selection experiment in Totnes – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8183907.stm

Personally I think this is a brilliant idea.

The BBC’s objections appear to be:

Only if there’s a major financial outlay to get onto the ballot. As long as all candidates are given the same oppurtunity to put forward their case then money shouldn’t be an issue. Yes there is the case that a local celebrity may have more clout through their name than the man on the street, but that’s a problem with the current system as well.

£2.40 per vote every 4 years? That’s not really that much of a cost is it? And that cost is for a one off experiment organised on a small scale. I’d assume there’s some form savings to be made if this was run on a larger scale.

The BBC does point out that the Internet could be used to reduce these costs as well. Quite possible a very good idea, at least for delivering each candidates information. But it would require a lot of effort to ensure all the reliability of the current paper based system for the actual voting to be done online.

If this was applied to all parties then this would cancel itself out.

This isn’t a a bad side effect, this is a great side effect. Allow everyone to get involved in politics, remove the culture of voting for whoever the party puts whoever they are. And if we’re lucky it’ll drop the party culture Parliament as well, let’s see MPs voting for their constituents rather than as the whips tell them.

So spotify is about to go mobile , http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8169971.stm, and as usual it’s being touted as a ‘something killer’. In this case Apple’s iTunes.

I use spotify on occassion. Having a huge music collection that isn’t completely ripped yet it’s often much easier if entertaining to plug the laptop into the HiFi and then use spotify to stream the album than it is to try and find it. It’s also great at work when I forget my portable drive with the music collection on it. There are some gaps in the library, but they tend to be the very obscure or back catalogue things, and it seems to be improving all the time.

But as a mobile app? It could be great, but there’s a couple of things need fixing before it’s going to really take off:

1) Mobile networks need to catch up on the speed and availability. I’m on T-mobile and still find it takes far to long to load even simple pages over 3G let alone stream audio. OK, phones doe voice but that’s at a much lower quality than I’d want to listen to music at. Plus I regularly lose 3G coverage, and that would be far too slow for audio

2) Phones need to get better battery life. I reckon a solid 2 hour listen to spotify on any mobile device at the moment would run the battery flat. So that’s pretty much one reasonable train journey and your mobile’s dead.

3) Allow you to download the tracks. Following on from 1+2 there’s plenty of times when I’d like to listen to music when I don’t have mobile signal. So it’d be nice if I could have some way of saving or caching these tracks.

So until that little lot get’s sorted then I think I’ll be sticking with having offline copies of songs and only save Spotify for those days I forget to take the portable drive to work. The only thing I can see it being used for would be to turn an iWhatever into a nice little portable streaming device on a home wireless network.

But the interesting thing could be waiting for see if Apple approve’s this for the iTunes store. That could be an indication of how worried they are by it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8157043.stm

To be honest this just sounds like a barrage of hype. So far all I’ve seen from apps is a way of presenting a better interface to information on the Internet.These apps seem to fall into 1 of 2 categories:

1) This category purely relies on the platform it’s on. So it’s a basic phone utility, or a very basic GPS locator.  But these apps are all a bit boring and really they don’t become interesting until they can see the internet, when they fall into category 2 which is

2) Applications that interact with the internet. So now your GPS location can work with Google’s Maps and show you where you are, and then access their API to show you where you want to go.  

Now there’s nothing to stop the GPS data from being provided to the browser on the device and all the same functionality will be available without a dedicated App.

So apps only really make sense if they make accessing the data on the web easier than it is through a browser. And that means that Apps only really become imperative if there’s data that wants accessing. So there’ll be a proliferation of apps for every social networking site that appears (I’m still overwhelmed by the number of twitter clients out there atm).

The only other real reason for preferring an app over the browser is if the app can run in the background and keep you updated about events and postings.

So Apps will only ever be as big at best as anything that can be posted on the internet. And the majority of people will still access that internet through the large PC/desktop with the nice screen and fast connection.

And that’s not even touching the quality of most of the apps I’ve seen.

So nope, it’s not the next big thing.