Confluence

Confluence
Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

The closest train station from my parents is in Bad Oeynhausen and there is absolutely no public tranportation to speak of. So I pack my Brompton and bike the remaining 18 km along the meandering rivers. Astonishingly I can take the entire route on a very flat bike path that is mostly disjoined from the major traffic roads. Quite a beautiful path too, the picture shows the confluence of the Werre and Weser rivers.

iPhone at Starbucks

iPhone at Starbucks
Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

The iPhone has an excellent conduit to the Internet and I am using it right now as I tick-tick-tick on its virtual keyboard. But unfortunately with T-Mobile you have enter your user name and password every time you enter a hotspot, like the one I am using here at Starbucks. That makes the whole experience less than appealing, especially if you just want to briefly surf the web. They really have to fix this, I'm the US the iPhone seamlessly switches from EDGE to WLAN.

Oh, and I got a free sample of coffee, Arabian Mocha Java.

My First iPhone Error Message

My First iPhone Error Message
Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

...and hopefully the last one I wil ever see. And entirely my fault

iPhone activated

DSCN6558.JPG
Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Temptation paired with an utter neglect of reason. Or simply the most beautiful gadget I have ever laid my hands on - the iPhone. I didn't make the debut of the iPhone in Germany, I was away on vacation. Arrived on Saturday but was too busy uncoiling from the trip, besides that we had relatives over for a visit.

I had some time on Sunday to peruse through the incredibly negative German news coverage of the iPhone. Let me recap very briefly: too expensive, no SD-card slot thus too little memory, no 3G thus too slow (what about WiFi?), touch screen very playful but useless for business users, and too expensive...

So by Monday I was again in doubt. But as if to break free from all this cloudy negativity I suddenly was in the T-Punkt store on the Schlossstrasse in Berlin. At the entrance they had this very corny spinning wheel operated by a seemingly bored woman. Awful, are they trying to sell my aunt a new set of knives? Inside they had to 4GB iPhones there to play with. Inquired about the iPhone and all the while quite excited to be finally fondling it for the first time. Screen seemed to be much brighter than the iPod touch and everything was snappier than I could imagine.

The sales rep and the bored girl told me almost nothing that I had not previously known about this coveted device and after a brief moment of contemplation (went down the street for some Zen-time and a nice platter of sushi) I decided I wanted it. Sure they T-Com might very soon lower their fares and I might save a couple of hundred Euros and sure, they will eventually insert 3G capabilities in a year or so, but, but but.

There are no regrets anymore: it is by far the most amazing piece of gadgetry I have ever laid my hands on. More to come.

i-phone or iPhone? Top oder Flop?

i-phone or iPhone? Top oder Flop?
Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Snippet from N24 television on the launch of the iPhone in Germany. It's really disheartening how the press wants the iPhone to fail, pure sensationalism. Good tech journalists do not appear on TV otherwise they would not constantly misspell iPhone as in the caption above.

The coverage has been overly negative, the purported cons of the iPhone were exaggerated to the max, the main disadvantage being the missing 3G capability - no mention of battery life being drained by 3G chips in other phones (eg Nokia N95). Although the tarif at T-Mobile may be high, no other tarif in Germany offers a data flatrate at that price and the T-Mobile has over 8000 hotspots here which can all be used - for me in Berlin that's really quite enough. Apparently journalists do not seem to understand that WLAN is much faster than any spotted 3G connection will ever be, so what's their peeve?

Herr iPhone, bitteschön

Herr iPhone, bitteschön
Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

German Mr. iPhone doing the introductory video. He must have studied the original US Version, hand movements and intonation are almost identical. Where do they get these guys? Are they actors or are they recruited from Telekom? Watch the video here

Update for my Navigator speaks MacOS

More and more manufacturers of electronic goodies are providing software designed for macs, at least that's my impression. Case in point is the navigator I bought today, the Garmin nüvi 200. I had already consigned myself to running the update procedure through Windows (via Bootcamp on my iMac), but lo and behold: they have a Webupdater for Mac OS. How sweet! Attached the navigator via USB and it even mounted on my desktop. Software found the device and I was able to upload the newest update.

You all know that I installed Leopard the day after it was launched. And I chose the default installation, which more or less shoe-horns the OS over the existing Tiger installation. Well yesterday, after attempting to open a large file, the dock suddenly disappeared and very shortly after that the entire system froze and I was forced to do a hard reboot. When I did a login to my non-administrator account the dock was not there at all and just occasionally reappeared for about 2 seconds before disappearing again. The dock worked fine in my administrator account so I assumed that it was something in my home folder.

Another weird thing I noticed: on emptying my Trash I had over 28,000 files in there. I hadn't been doing any serious file manipulations, what the heck was happening? Took about a minute to delete all the files in the Trash. Repaired permissions - took very long- and got the message "ACL found but not expected on APPLICATIONS" and "ACL found but not expected on Library". Whatever..

I was coming to the conclusion that it was perhaps not such a good idea to do the default installation of Leopard. In previous updates of Mac OS I always preferred a clean installation, i.e. essentially starting from scratch and manually reinstalling all your apps and preferences - loads of work I wanted to avoid.

Today I solved the problem, at least my dock is now there again and not doing the disappearing act. When the dock appeared very briefly I noticed a JPEG File (not as an icon) that was on the top of the Downloads stack. It was 3.8 MB in size. When I deleted this file, suddenly the dock appeared again and stayed put this time. I have a hunch that the dock had some kind of problem creating the icon of the picture file and thus always disappeared again to rebuild. More of a stacks problem than dock problem I assume.

Let's see if the Leopard will surprise us again - I hope not