tl;dr

I found this in a discount shop, What!, in Cwmbran, one aisle over from bargainous catering-sized packs of biscuits. It is perhaps the worst made knock-off I’ve ever seen – that is one seriously happy Hulk!

Personal, Photos

An email from Richie contained this summary of his first three hours of iPhone ownership. I thought it would make a great customer testimonial for Apple, so here it is. I didn’t have the Myriad Pro Semibold font that Apple use for their adverts, so I had to get Dave to do the Photoshop job for me. Thanks Dave! You are hewn from raw awesome.

I think Richie liked it.

Personal, Tech, iPhone Tech

What do you think? The flat colour on the dots around “.co.uk” needs work (probably a simple emboss effect to bring it into 3d) and I need to edge the whole thing somehow (probably just round off the corners). Other than that, I’m pretty pleased with this. Comments? For starters, how many of you know what this is?

Personal

One of the things I like about Twitter is how often it scoops my RSS reader. On my laptop I run the TweetDeck client, which can maintain regular polls of search terms into search.twitter.com. One term I search on is “O2″, dating back to the iPhone 3G launch hassles when I was monitoring the stock levels in Twitter. This search term meant I found out about the O2 MMS security problem several days before it hit the tech news, and it showed up something else interesting today: the contents of a customer survey that O2 had emailed around.

Finding an invite to the survey in my own email, I had a look. After a bunch of waffle about various things (”are you aware of visual voicemail? How many times a week do you use the App Store?”) I got to the stuff about MMS. From memory, the broad outlines of what the survey wanted to know were:

• was I aware that the iPhone couldn’t do MMS?
• had I used MMS before owning an iPhone?
• had I tried sending/receiving photographs via email on my iPhone?
• same, but using social networking sites instead of email?
• same, but using an alternate MMS-capable handset?
• how convenient/inconvenient did I find these alternatives, compared to MMS?
• would I use an app from the App Store to send/receive MMS, at the rate of 1 MMS = 4 SMS from the allowance, if it was free?
• same, but if it cost £2.50?
• same, but if it cost £5.00?

We’ve seen rumours that AT&T might be bringing an MMS app to the iPhone; I would suggest that O2 are in the early stages on considering this option too.

Personal, Tech, iPhone iPhone

Take a look at this screenshot of this listing on Amazon:

There are two key bits of information here:

“Price: £24.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK”

“All listed prices on applicable products sold by Amazon.co.uk now include the new, reduced VAT rate of 15%. This has been applied automatically to the price of your item so you don’t need to do a thing.”

Hmmm. So, yesterday, did this item sell for £25.53? Did it? Or have you, Amazon, in fact, swallowed the VAT increase and kept the price the same?

Lying gits. I’ve emailed them about this. They said this:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.co.uk with your concerns.

I understand that you are disappointed that the price of “Mad Catz Universal Rock Band 2 Triple Cymbal Expansion Pack (Xbox 360)” did not decrease following the reduction of the UK VAT rate.  Amazon.co.uk has included the new rate for all products that are subject to the standard rate of VAT and this has resulted in the prices falling on hundreds of thousands of items.

Occasionally one of a number of factors that we use to determine price can cause a price to stay the same or rise, but expect to see price reductions across the website as a result of the new VAT rate.

We make every effort to keep abreast of the changes in the status of items, and we feel that having an on-line computerised catalogue allows us to update it more regularly. Publishers do, however, change the list prices of titles regularly and with so many titles in our catalogue there will unavoidably be a few instances where an item’s price may have changed without our knowing it.

Please accept our apologies for any disappointment. We will not be able to offer any further discount on “Mad Catz Universal Rock Band 2 Triple Cymbal Expansion Pack (Xbox 360)” but I hope you will be able to take advantage of the many discounts we do
offer on your next visit to our store.

So that’s… no answer at all. Bah.

Personal

Oh come on now people. I enjoyed Phoenix Nights, and I very much enjoyed his first two standup DVDs, Live at the Top of the Tower and Live at the Bolton Albert Halls. But the last one of those came out in 2003! What has he done since? The terrible Max and Paddy; some guest appearences on Parkinson; a standup DVD with the same material as Bolton; some clips on Comic Relief; a Christmas cash-in DVD rehashing the Comic Relief and Parkinson clips; and the frankly unfunny reality TV spoof on BBC a few months ago.

I feel I can categorically state he’s written no new funny material for half a decade. Rubbish.

Personal

I want some headphones that:
- sound OK
- fit like my Sennheiser CX-30s
- have the button/microphone thing like my pack-in Apple headphones
- aren’t outrageously expensive, say, £30 or so

Why do these not seem to exist? CX30s are widely available for £15 so it’s not impossible to meet these price points. I don’t believe in spending any more on out-and-about headphones, as they are likely to get damaged or lost. Plus, there’s not much point in buying high-end headphones for use on a train. For that reason I also prefer canalphones for noise isolation and portability (I find in-ear headphones very uncomfortable, whereas canalphones are fine).

Why don’t these seem to exist? Ultimate Buds UB3 look like they’d fit the bill but I can’t find a UK stockist. I’m on the verge of chopping up my Apple headphones and grafting Sennheiser drivers on. Bah. Bah, I say!

Personal, Tech, iPhone Tech

I am trying to convince Toby to buy an Xbox 360, so I keep sending him good deals, like this one:

Personal Funny

Graham Linehan, in addition to co-creating the ace Father Ted, is also writer and producer of the even acer The IT Crowd. Season 3 of this starts tonight. From his blog:

Anyone who wants to start being nasty about me or the actors or the show, this is not the place. There are several sites out there where you can get your hate on and no-one will just instantly mark your comment as spam.  And best of luck with getting that script commissioned!

Heh, well played sir!

Personal TV

Great Western trains have a livery where lots of placenames are sort of woven into a pattern running down the side. It’s a cute idea, showing the range of places you can go on their trains. Places like those in the picture for example.

I am amused by the juxtaposition of Little Slaughter and Valley of the Rocks. Clearly, Little Slaughter is a scary place to live. Not as scary as Huge Slaughter of course, but still the kind of town were some Real Bad Shit could go down at any second. Not a place to ever let your guard down, that’s for sure. If you told your co-workers casually one day that you were going to Little Slaughter on your holidays, you can bet they’d stop discussing you on their coffee breaks.

But the other place, Valley of the Rocks? “Valley of the Rocks”? Come on guys, you’re going to have to work harder than that to pull the punters in. I live in South Wales, I’ve seen a lot of valleys in my time and I assure you rock was not in short supply in any of them. Take a cue from the other guys, go for Vally of the Untimely Demises of something. Decimation Depression. Bloodbath Basin. Jazz it up a bit! That’s what people want now, a bit of local colour.

Personal