Baggas' Blog

Fascinating graphical stats from the BBC, which illustrate the continuing growth of social networking, especially Facebook, which just passed half a billion users. And it seems to me that on a per-capita basis Australia is at the forefront of this revolution… and we spend the most time doing it as well!

It’s hard to overestimate the radical change facebook (and twitter to a much lesser extent) with the increasing availability of mobile internet, has had on our lifestyles in the last couple of years. We communicate with, and are connected to people, in a fashion that is completely new. Who could have imagined this sort of thing even 5-10 years ago?

Amazing.

Social Networking Stats (click for large version)

After an hour’s download and installing at home, I’ve spent most of this morning playing around with iOS4 on my iPhone (and seeing a few patients in between…)

And thus far I’m impressed. I love the folders feature, although it took me a while dragging app icons around on my phone to get it all organized. Now I can get to all my apps so much faster, without swiping through pages and pages of icons. And I can also download heaps more apps to play around with. Yay!

One weird thing is that I’ve downloaded the iBooks software onto my iPhone, but can’t find the App icon anywhere. I can load the app by searching for iBooks on the search screen, but the icon is nowhere to be seen (and I looked in all my folders several times!). Weird and annoying.

I like the customisable backgrounds, little GPS icon and the new location services screen. Multitasking seems quite functional, and there is no hit in terms of performance, although I haven’t really pushed it too far just yet. In fact the whole phone feels considerably more zippy than with OS3.

For a good detailed rundown on iOS4, see this article from Gizmodo.

In other Apple related news, the Perth Apple Store opens this Saturday. Look forward to checking it out, but I’m afraid it will have to wait til I get back from my UK trip (leave next Monday).

Microsoft has just announced it’s revised Xbox 360 console and it does look pretty cool.  Slimmer and shinier and faster and quieter and cooler (hopefully). It’s ready to work with the new motion sensing peripheral now called Kinect (previously Project Natal) which looks like it could be a lot of fun if it works as well in real life as it does in the demo videos.

New Xbox-360 with Kinect

Perhaps most importantly, in this release they have fixed what I have always thought was the Xbox-360′s biggest flaw – no inbuilt WiFi. In an increasingly online world where people are wanting to play online, download demos, purchase games and content Microsoft have been shooting themselves in the foot by not providing an easy and instant way for users to connect their console to the internet either requiring an ethernet connection (which most people don’t have in their living rooms) or the purchase of a separate WiFi dongle. It’s been a real shame too, because Microsoft’s X-box Live in my opinion is a cleaner and easier to navigate environment than the PS3. Glad they’ve finally rectified this huge problem by including inbuilt WiFi.

Only main things I would have liked to have seen are user changeable generic hard-drives and inclusion of a Blu-ray drive. It is in this last area in particular that the Sony PS3 has any clear benefit over the Xbox. If Microsoft could have changed that then they would given themselves a big advantage.

See the post here at Engadget for more info…

Apple today yesterday quietly released the newest update to their base model MacBook laptop. With updated graphics and CPU and longer life battery, it’s also about the cheapest Apple laptop ever. And with it’s smooth lines and cute glossy white colour, it’s also the perfect gift for the Mac-savvy woman in your life who needs her very own laptop!

If you want a more detailed first-hand account of it, ask me some time next week…

Actually it’s not a new site – it’s an old site with a new home. Karl’s phenomenal worship guitar blog (easily the best of it’s genre) has finally got it’s own domain : guitarforworship.com I was just updating my blogroll and thought I might as well mention it here also. So if you like guitars or worship music or especially if you do both, then make sure you go and pay Karl a visit! (Liking U2 also comes in handy as well).

Long term readers of my blog (if there are any who didn’t give up years ago) will notice the increased frequency of posts lately. Looking back at all the twitter summaries and not much else I’ve decided to put a bit more effort into keeping this blog ticking over in a more interesting fashion…. oh and it’s providing me with yet another distraction to keep me from my Masters study (assignment due next week, exam in 2.5 weeks) – epidemiology is just too dry to maintain my interest for more than 15 minute blocks I’m afraid….

So for your entertainment tonight, here’s the current track playing on my CD changer (I have been enjoying a U2 marathon this week, but Zooropa just finished and I couldn’t be bothered getting up off the couch to put the next one on – Pop). I like this CD of John Mayer and this track is an awesome slow romance number – but the album cover is a shocker – just reminds me of some bad picture of Robbie Williams from the 90′s – and what’s with the super-size record company logo on the front?! – anyway, close your eyes, try and think of anything but that picture of John Mayer, and enjoy the song…

While those of us in Australia have to make do with just our small screen iPads iPhones for a while longer, I thought I’d mention a few cool apps I’ve been using lately.

Ever since I got my iPhone I’ve been looking for a good to-do list app. I’m a big user of to-do lists and often have an old fashioned paper version sitting on my desk at work or the bench at home. I’ve tried a number of free and paid apps including Things, Tasks, and others, but never found one that really suited me. They are either too complicated or not powerful enough or not quick to use. In fact the one list program I use the most on the iPhone is a simple shopping list app called ShopShop that Jenni found. It’s created for creating a number of simple lists that you can cross off (ie when walking around a shop) and even email to other users of the software so they can import lists into the App on their own phone (Jen does this for me sometimes). I use this app not only for going shopping but also for longer term lists of things I need to buy, or tasks related to various groups I am involved in etc. It’s not very sophisticated, but it works.

But now I’ve discovered 2Do. This is a very impressive list app that is worth every cent of it’s A$5.99. It’s visually beautiful, easy to navigate, but packs a powerful set of features under the surface. I really like the tabbed interface where you can easily view tasks in different categories, or all at once. Very easy to create a new task and assign it to a category, set a date and priority, associate it with a contact, set all sorts of alarms and reminders. It supports push and can also send you an email at the time of your choosing. You can associate your tasks with audio recordings or photos from within the app. You can tweet them. It also allows you to sync your lists with the online free toodledo server so you can edit it on the web also. There is truly a myriad of options which you can check out on the website. But the good thing is that it does it’s basic functions very well. Lists are easy to see and tasks are easy to create and edit. This is fast becoming one of my most used apps.

The other App I’ve discovered recently is Gowalla. It certainly doesn’t enhance your functionality in the same way that 2Do does but it takes social networking in interesting new directions. Basically it’s a way of letting people where you are and seeing who else is around or has been there by “checking in” to various locations based on GPS. These locations might include restaurants, shops, cafes, museums, nightclubs, churches – generally any public place is legit. You can then also cross-post these to your facebook or twitter account, and upload photos from the location. There’s also a bit of a game to it where you earn badges and stamps on your “passport” and also collect these virtual items that your can then drop off in the places you visit. I can already hear some people say “what’s the point?” – really it’s just another amusing way of sharing your life with people online, with a functional and attractive app. Heavy duty users of facebook will probably understand. Others may not. Check it out if the idea appeals to you, and take a look at my profile if you want.

3 Other Apps I will briefly mention. The first is the Opera Mini browser, which was just released the other day. It’s faster than safari, but the pages don’t render as nicely. Secondly Doodle Jump, a totally addictive game where you are a little doodle man jumping up platforms (it’s better than it sounds, really). Screenshots of these two below. Thirdly, Angry Birds, another addictive game where you fling birds using a slingshot to try and smash buildings in order to kill evil pigs (once again just trust me on this – it’s quite good)

And finally, once we eventually get our supersized iPhones iPads in Australia, hopefully this app will be available – Pocket Bible for iPad. It’s the ultimate Bible reading app on any platform and the iPad is perfect for this use. If you’re into Bible software then just check out this sneak peak video…

There is some evidence that playing some Wii games does give you a moderate workout (see here).

However I’d like to see more study on the issue – specifically does playing Guitar Hero make you a better guitar player? I’m sure there’d be no shortage of volunteers to take part in this sort of research…

Thought I’d mention a nifty piece of Mac OS software I’ve been using. Read on if you have a Mac and either an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3… if you don’t have those you might as well save time and stop reading this now!…

Right, now that we’ve got rid of those non-Mac and non-Gaming console people we can continue with Rivet. This program basically enables your connected games console to access your music, video, and photo libraries on your mac. These consoles talk nicely to Windows out of the box but unfortunately they are not designed with Mac OS in mind. Rivet takes care of this smoothly and easily. Set it to load when your Mac starts-up and it just sits in the menu bar. There are no extra steps – right away I was able to browse and play my media content from my Mac on the Xbox 360 and PS3**. It’s very handy if you have a large collection of video files (home movies, TV shows, movies, whatever) as they can be immediately accessed and played on the console. Podcasts (video and audio) are handled as well, and all your iTunes playlists show up too. This last feature is very useful at this time of the year so I can pump my gigabytes of Christmas Mp3s ‘all through the house’

So if you have a Mac and a console download the trial version of Rivet and give it a go.. there’s a good chance that, like me, you’ll soon be going back for the full version too.

** Yes, I now have both consoles. I was in the market for a Bluray player and was soon convinced (despite my initial hesitation) that a PS3 was the way to go.. As far as gaming consoles go I still like the Xbox better – the interface is nicer and easier to navigate, and there is a better and easier to find selection of downloadable demos which the kids like playing. The Xbox360 interface has been hugely improved over the last year or so and the new avatar section is really good. I believe it’s due for another big update any day now as well…

I can’t really contrast the actual games though as I haven’t played much on the Ps-3 – my feeling is that the graphics and games are comparable. I did enjoy stuffing around with this funny game called Little Big Planet on the Ps3 last night. Oh and it has this interesting feature called Playstation Home which is similar to Second Life.. something to explore when I’m bored… but mostly the PS3 has become our home theatre media hub – great for playing Blurays, DVDs, and streaming videos and music (via Rivet). One big plus is it’s a lot quieter than the Xbox which makes it better for that application.  So there’s my haphazrd initial review of the PS3

*** Hey, and if you know me and have an xbox 360 or  PS3 let me know who you are and maybe we can add each other as ‘friends’ Presently I have no PS3 friends and only some random people on Xbox that I played a game against like once a few years ago, so having some people that I actually know would be cool. (here ends the pathetic appeal for friends..lol)

It’s a quiet day at work and I haven’t posted here in some time so thought I’d share some of my musings.
Today I find myself thinking about Blu-Ray…

For a number of reasons I have held off getting a Blu-Ray player up to now but it seems to me the time is probably right to get one.

• Blu-Ray is clearly the dominant only HD movie disc format following the demise of HD-DVD (I still have a few of those along with my X-box 360 HD-DVD add-on). There does not seem to be any obvious successor in the pipeline so Blu-Ray will probably be with us for a few years to come
• Most shops have a decent sized Blu-Ray section now with an increasing selection of titles at better prices. This is only going to improve further. Nowadays if I’m thinking about buying a DVD I’m always reluctant to do so knowing there is a better higher-def alternative out there. When I get the new Star Trek movie or a new U2 concert disc, I’d rather it was the best possible experience available..
• Blu-Ray players now seem to be coming down in price, and the strong Australian dollar is only going to help that

So I’m starting to look at Blu-Ray players – might use up some of the credit on my interest-free store card account thingo as I shouldn’t really be spending disposable income on that sort of thing at present (so I’ll spend 2011 or 2012′s instead! lol)

Any suggestions of good, cheapish Blu-Ray players would be appreciated… I’m intending to stay away from the Sony Playstation 3 as we already have 2 games consoles in our home and don’t want to complicate things by adding another – plus I believe they don’t work with universal IR remotes.

Hopefully I’ll get a Blu-Ray player soon and the Santa can bring a few discs this Christmas…

Just read on Rodney’s blog that the Amazon Kindle book reader is finally being released in Australia, which is good news.  We tend to lag behind the US in so many bits of cool technology so it’s always nice when we finally catch up.

It seems Amazon have reached an agreement with one of our mobile networks here to provide 3G coverage without needing a contract – more details in this story from CNET.

While this is good news I won’t be rushing to buy one – partly because I can’t afford it at the moment, partly because I’m not convinced the eBook reader idea has reached maturity, and mostly because I still love reading and accumulating proper physical books! Also if I am going to read a book in electronic format I’d rather do it on a multi-purpose device like my iPhone or the possibly upcoming Mac tablet. See my previous post on these matters.

Now what I’d really like to see is for amazon to finally open an Australian version of their store – although an amazon.com.au site would not be healthy for my finances. I’m currently doing my best to avoid going near amazon and eBay so as to control my book and gear buying habit. It’s been several weeks since my last purchase so not doing too bad

I’m still not a huge Twitter devotee and if forced to choose between it and facebook I would pick the latter, but I do still cross-post to it and follow my feed every day or two on my iPhone.

If, like me, you’ve dabbled in Twitter you may not understand some of the bewildering abbreviations they use. This article gives a great run down on some of the features of Twitter, and there are plenty of other twitter related resources on his site as well : Twitter FAQ

Today a piece of software was released which I’ve been waiting for every since I got my iPhone – Laridian PocketBible. I’ve been a long time user of Laridian software on my Palm and Windows Mobile PDAs and phones and have acquired quite a large “library” of Bible versions, commentaries and other books from them. The great thing about this company is that when you switch to a different platform you don’t have to re-purchase all the books – you can download them all onto your new phone for free. So now I have my Laridian library on my iPhone at last!

The bibles and books are stored on the memory of the iPhone, thus once you have downloaded them initially, an internet connection is not required, unlike the YouVersion Bible software I have been using over the last couple of months. Some of the books I have on my phone include :

• Bibles – NLTse, NIV, TNIV, ESV, NRSV, NASB, MSG, NKJV, Amplified, and God’s Word (of course) plus many more..
• Study Bibles – ESV, NIV, NLT, Life Application study Bibles. Also ‘antique’ ones like Scofield and Ryrie (for curiosities sake) etc
• Commentaries – IVP New testament commentary, Life Application Commentary, Ancient Christian Commentary, Matthew Henry etc etc
• Devotions – My Utmost, Morning and Evening etc
• Books – Foxes Book of Martyrs, Pilgrim’s Progress, Imitation of Christ etc
• Dictionaries – a number of Bible and Theological Dictionaries, Greek and Hebrew, Bible maps etc etc

So as you can see, a big part of the appeal of this software is the range of resources you can have at your fingertips on your phone. Flipping between books is easy. There are powerful search functions included. Highlighting and bookmarking passages is simple and these can be categorized for later retrieval and sorting. The Settings page is well populated giving a range of options to customise the view. Font type and size can be changed, you can have red-letter on or off, view Strong’s numbers, set your preferred translation, dictionary etc, choose to show or hide the status bar, title, and buttons.

There are a few features that I feel could be improved but some are just things that I need to get used to. For example text does not scroll in the usual iPhone scrolling style, rather you advance text by pressing the left area of screen to advance a page or a verse at a time. I’m sure I’ll get used to this but it still would be nice to have the option of more traditional style iPhone scrolling. Another thing is it doesn’t seem to support having more than one book open on the same page, like previous versions of PocketBible on other platforms. I found this a really valuable feature, being able to view two bibles (or a bible and a commentary) at the same time – I really hope this gets introduced soon. Logging into your Laridian account and downloading books is very easy, but it would be nice if they somehow incorpprated the ability to purchase new books directly on the iPhone, rather than having to do so on their website as at present. This is not a big issue for me (since I already own most of their stuff) but for new customers would be a great feature. Plus I’m sure they’d sell more books that way!

Another possible idea for them would be to consider implementing some sort of social networking feature. This is one of the few things I liked about the YouVersion software – for any passage you can link to a section called Contribs which includes other people’s submitted thoughts/blogs etc – almost like a ‘wiki-commentary.’ Obviously this is quite a big step outside what Laridian software have done to date though. Another possibly easier suggestion (which YouVersion doesn’t have) would be to allow posting of verses to Twitter/Facebook etc. This would be in keeping with these ethos of a wide range of other iPhone apps which allow posting of all sorts of things. These are just pipe-dream suggestions though.

Having said all this, Laridian have made it clear on their blog that this is just the first release, and they have a number of updates already planned in coming months – so hopefully we will see some of these issues dealt with, plus other cool new features coming soon. (EDIT : I’ve already been informed on facebook that the split screen feature is  definitely in the pipeline).

Overall this is a great piece of software that finally makes my iPhone experience complete in a way. Even on it’s first version PocketBible is far superior to any other Bible software for iPhone in terms of both it’s functionality and the amount of resources you can get for it. If you are looking for Bible software for your iPhone then look no further – go and download this straight away and start building your library. Laridian also regularly offer good discounts like 20% off all books so make sure you subscribe to their email newsletter.

Here’s a few more screenshots from the program. I love the fact that it’s so easy to take screenshots on the iPhone (hold down home button and press the top button..)

For anyone who, like me, didn’t catch the Apple event last week with Steve Jobs et al, here’s an incredible, really nice, abbreviated version where they discuss their fantastic, great products…

Apple released iTunes 9 today, and it is probably the most significant update we’ve seen for the software in some time. New features include a redesigned iTunes store, enhanced ‘LP’ albums, improved library sharing over a network, and further improvements in the Genius function (which I have increasingly grown to appreciate..). But the feature I like the best is the new ability to arrange iPhone applications. You can now rearrange the App screens on your iPhone from within the iTunes software. Much easier dragging and dropping the app icons using a mouse on my iMac than using my finger to push them around on the screen. Very impressed with this update!

Note : make sure you update your iPhone to the 3.1 software to take advantage of this feature.

Rodney Olsen has an excellent blog that I like to follow. You can also hear him most days presenting on Sonshine FM 98.5. Currently he’s blogging about a topic close to his heart – cancer and it’s effect of people’s lives. As a doctor I’m only too aware of how common and devastating a problem cancer can be, but if it’s not directly impacting your life then it’s easy for people to foget about it. Rodney is planning a big cycling trip from Perth to Albany in October to try and raise money for cancer charities.  Please visit his blog, share your stories, and show your support for this worthy cause… Breaking the silence on cancer.

I’ve had Snow Leopard on my iMac for a few days now, and aside from having to update a couple of programs, I haven’t had  any major problems. And it certainly seems to me to live up to what I expected. Generally faster load times for most applications including Safari and Mail and a few minor enhancements which I am gradually discovering.

Sadly though, it seems that I am one of the lucky ones. For a sizeable minority of users, Snow Leopard has been a bit more of a scary experience…

This article from ilounge chronicles some of the woes that people have been having. It’s an uncharacteristic and unfortunate let down from Apple, particularly badly timed in view of the upcoming release of Windows 7. Windows “fans” (had to use inverted commas as it’s hard to imagine a true “fan” of Windows) are sure to gloat if Windows 7 has a smoother release, which I imagine it might.

So while personally I’m happy with Snow Leopard, I might decide to wait until the next point update before I install it on my MacBook Air as well – I’ll just stick with the warmer climate Leopard for now and hope they get all the bugs ironed out fast.

SO next week (on 9/9/9)  we finally get some remastered CDs of The Beatles’ albums, according to this story :
A Splendid Time is Guaranteed for All: The Beatles Remastered

What’s notable is that they are releasing mono remasters of some of these albums, more like they were originally heard back in the 60′s. Apparently these mixes carry lots of little differences and details to give a quite different experience to the current (1987 era) CD versions. Very tempting, but perhaps for the time being I’ll just stick to my 1987 box set (complete with roller door… hehe – take a look at the picture. I still love that box – has pride of place in my music wall) – hard to justify spending that much on a bunch of albums I already own, even if they are much better versions. Sooner or later I’ll have to get them though as I do love The Beatles.

Also on 09/09/09 we’ll see the release of The Beatles RockBand game, which looks cool. I’m not a serious gamer but this is very tempting too… maybe something I’ll look at getting later in the year when I’m not so crazily busy.

And coincidentally on 9/9/9 there’s also a big music related Apple event scheduled where they are likely to be releasing new iPod models. Usually these events are held on a Tuesday so the fact it’s on a Wednesday on the same day as these other Beatles may herald the long overdue addition of The Beatles’ catalogue to iTunes. I won’t be buying them, since I already ripped my 1987 CDs into iTunes a long time ago, but it’s an important step so the younger generation of non-CD-buying iPod listening youths can have better access to some of the most important popular music ever made… Will also be interesting to see if Steve Jobs makes his first post-transplant public appearance here..

Another test post, this one. I just downloaded the wordpress app onto my iPhone, which is cool. Now I can write or edit blog posts, check comments and much more from anywhere, even my bedroom where I am now. The photo below is of my bedside table – posting it only for the reason of testing this app… Hope it works… If you can see this I guess it means it does

Spent the first part of the evening playing with Apple GarageBand – such a fun and easy piece of software. The new version makes recording guitars so much better as it gives visual representation and control over virtual amps and stomp box effects. I also added in some nice clarinet and organ sounds. It took 2 clicks to send it to iTunes and now I have the fruits of my labour on my iPhone. Very cool. I could easily waste a lot of time on this program…

Anyway typing on an iPhone is a little slow and I have stuff to do so I’ll end this now.. hope it works

As part of my renewed blogging vigour over the last few weeks I’ve been updating my blogroll – getting rid of some dead links and adding a few fresh ones.

Let me just draw your attention to a few of the ones that I read on a regular basis

1. Scot McKnight – this guy is a theology professor in the US who was written some good books and blogs about a heap of interesting religious topics. The problem with his blog is he makes so many book recommendations that I just can’t resist so my amazon.com account, and subsequently my credit cards and bookshelves, become overloaded.
2. Hello Internet – Ben has his own video show, and also posts a lot of stuff about movies, music, books, and comics so if you’re into those sort of things (and most of us are into at least one of them) then check it out.
3. Slacktivist – another Christian blog and one of my favourites. This guy has a prophetic voice that I tend to agree with most of the time. In a well reasoned, often humorous and occasionally scathing way, he examines some of the excesses and inconsistencies of the Christian Right/fundamentalists (mostly in the US but still somewhat relevant to the rest of us). Recent examples include those crazy anti-rock & roll Christians who think U2 is satanic, the misguided creationist Ken Ham (who I’m sad to admit is from Australia..), the kooks claiming universal health care will lead to mass euthanasia, and of course his ongoing brilliant step-by-step demolition of the Left Behind series. Check it out if you think you will resonate with that.. otherwise maybe best you don’t.. but he does post on a lot of other interesting stuff as well.
4. Guitar for Worship – my mention of U2 in the last section inevitably leads me to Karl’s blog which is based on guitar and worship (nothing like a nice obvious blog title) – not only does he love The Edge but he also writes humorous yet insightful posts on guitar, tone, worship, and gear. Biggest problem with this page is it fuels my gear and gadget habit. Every time I read his page I have to fight the urge to immediately go on eBay and hunt for pedals (often unsuccessfully). But I just can’t stay away (from both ebay and his blog)…

Was going to write some more but I can smell a nice curry cooking and wanted to get in some GarageBand time before dinner, but with those 4 blogs you’ll have hours and hours (or longer) of material to keep you busy… enjoy!

Interesting piece on Slate here about ebooks and the Amazon kindle, a devide we are yet to see here in Australia but which has started to take the US reading market by storm. For the first time, after several unsuccussful forays by companies like Sony, ebooks are starting to get some mass traction.

I can see the advantages of eBooks, especially from the point of view of not having to carry books around, copying and pasting notes, purchasing books instantaneously etc. Especially for students the benefits are potentially huge.

However I’m still sold on the idea of “one-device-to-rule-them-all” – phone, book reader, media player, computer, camera, video recorder etc If only we had such a device so we don’t have to carry all these other things around… the iPhone is the closest we have (although it’s camera/video functions remain grossly inadequate) and there are some good ebook readers available for it. The best I have tried is Stanza, which links to a lot of free and commercial online catalogs to download books. You can also sync with your computer for books you’ve downloaded elsewhere. I’ve found it to be quite usable for novels – quite easy to read and navigate. At present I have the Stainless Steel Rat on there which I am slowly reading when I get a spare moment, plus I’ve downloaded a load of classic literature as well. The biggest downfall of the iPhone for book reading is that it’s small screen makes it unusable for textbooks…

Perhaps the rumoured upcoming Apple Tablet computer will be the ideal device for book reading – smaller and easier to carry around than a laptop, but with full computer functionality (in contrast to the Kindle and other ebook readers) and with a touch screen please! I digress but imagine if they make it so you can use your nifty iPhone apps on the Mac tablet as well, thus bringing the coolness, utility,  and diversity of the App store from the smartphone world to the computer world! Now that would be cool. And I’m only guessing but it probably wouldn’t be too tough on the programmers as the iPhone and OSX are built on the same basic core anyway (or so I’ve been led to believe…) If you haven’t already thought of that Steve Jobs and crew, you can thank me for the idea… (I’m sure Steve’s a big reader of this blog so he’s sure to take notice…)

[take a look at this concept picture.. how awesome does that look. I want that!]

Anyway back to eBooks… there’s still a big big reason why I’m not sold on the whole idea – I love books. And not just the content of books. I love the physical cardboard and paper things which sit in my library and cause me the constant challenge of shuffling them around to make room for new books. I love just sitting in that room surrounded by them looking at all the cool ones I’ve read and have yet to read. I love having a book on my lap, with a led pencil handy to underline useful or witty insights or quotes (still haven’t come up with an effective solution to remember my underlinings though…) I like collecting and hoarding books that I think one day I might find interesting, or fancy well bound ones from the Folio Society. I love big books with hard covers. I love all my leather bound bibles. If I had more time and money (mostly time) I’d be one of those people who likes looking in secondhand bookshops trying to finding classic antique books. If I had more money I’d be buying classic guitars, but that’s another story.

SO the gist – ebooks are a good idea; still need the right device to be released (c’mon Steve!); but will never replace the charm of actual, physical books for me..

Partly I’m just doing this post to test my blog after I upgraded to the newest version of WordPress today at work (where are all the sick people?), but to make it at least slightly interesting for some people, here’s a useful link I discovered : 25 (Most Wanted) Tips For iPhone 3G

Some of these tips are genuinely useful, like switching quickly between alphabet and punctuation keys. If you’re an iPhone user take a look – you might discover something you didn’t know. I did.

Ever wished there was an easy way to save YouTube clips on your iPhone or iPod, or even to have them download automatically?

Here’s a great website I’ve discovered : http://www.rsshandler.com This site allows you to enter the details of a YouTube Feed or Playlist, and then creates a URL which you can use to subscribe to a “podcast” of the clips in that feed. That might sound a bit complicated but the instructions on the site are very easy to follow. Once you’ve generated a feed URL on the website, open iTunes – go to the ‘Advanced’ menu, then ‘Subscribe to Podcast’.. copy the URL into the box that comes up and Bob’s your uncle.

It works great. You can susbcribe to YouTube’s feeds (eg Featured, Most Popular etc) or create your own playlists (for example I’ve created a Humour, Music, and Family playlist. The only drawback is it seems not all clips can be successfully converted into iTunes format, but most can.

Give it a try! If you need any advice about it send me an email and I’ll try to help.

Cheers

Now this is an area where I think I’ve only barely scratched the surface yet, but the iPhone is a veritable treasure trove of useful apps for musicians and music lovers. Here’s a few of the ones I’ve tried so far…

Shazam

This is one of the Apps that iPhone users love whipping out to impress their friends. And there’s a reason for that – it’s just cool. Basically if you hear a song playing and want to know what it’s called and who sings it, Shazam listens to the song through your iPhone’s microphone, processes it, and then gives you the answer – as well as the option to purchase the song for yourself on iTunes or search for it in YouTube. Seems to work about 90% of the time. I’ve used it in the car, and even in a crowded restaurant, with surprisingly good results. Definitely worth downloading.

ooTunes

This is an internet radio program which you can use to listen to streaming radio stations from around the world. I first downloaded this when I wanted to listen to the JJJ Hottest 100 live instead of our usual 2 hour delay here in Perth, but have since discovered plenty of other cool stations from Australia and around the world. There is something cool about being able to tune into country radio live from Nashville, plug my iPhone into my HiFi and enjoy. Some stations are very high quality and even support listing of the currently playing song, lyrics display and links to buy the song. Other stations are poorer quality and some don’t even work so it takes a bit of experimenting to find the best stations. Also a warning this is probably an App you’d only want to use when connected to a WiFi network as I’d imagine this would use up your 3G download quota pretty fast. But keeping that it mind it’s well worth downloading.

Y! Music

Another app suggested to me by Deano, this is a similar program where you can tune into a range of radio stations. Seems to be less range than ooTunes (though still huge) but in general the stability is better with less drop outs and fairly good quality. I’m just tuned into a Reggae station at present. This program offers the ability to skip forward tracks so must work differently somehow. Free, and very useful.

Guitar Toolkit

There’s a myriad of guitar related apps out there. This is a paid one which I think was $9.99 – you can probably get much of the same functionality by getting a few different cheaper ones, but I found this to be the most elegant and powerful one I saw. It combines the following features :

• Tuner – accurate, works well, allows alternate tunings
• Fretboard / Scales – playable fretboard where you can display a huge range of different scales in different positions along the neck
• Metronome – Set your bpm and time signature (from a large selection) and off you go. Very useful
• Chord library – extensive chord library showing a large number of inversions/positions of just about every chord you can imagine. certainly more than I would ever use. And you can strum them all too.
• Instrument – this app can be used for 6 and 12 string guitars, 4 and 5 string basses, and includes a huge library of alternate tunings, as well as settings for left handed players

As I said, this is not free, but it’s an incredibly versatile and powerful app that I would recommend to all guitarists…

I still need to find a similar app with chord library and scales for my Mandolin. Must add that to my to-do list.

MiniPiano

Free single octave piano keyboard. Works fine, but very simple.

Piano Sharp

Similar to mini-piano but allows you to switch to higher and lower octaves. Also includes a library of classical tunes that it will play for you, and you can record your own compositions. Worth investing a few $ if you’re a keyboard player.

My Songbook

This is a very cool litte program, which basically stores a library of songs with lyrics and chords on your iPhone. Perfect for sitting around the campfire or a small group singalong or if you just feel like playing some music (I always keep a spare guitar in my car boot for such an eventuality…) It includes a built in search function so you can find songs on Google or Chordie.com, which has a large database of user submitted songs. You can also add your own songs but the uploading process is a little convoluted. There is an auto-scroll feature so you can use it hands-free while playing, and it will also transpose for you so you can find the perfect key to suit your voice. Definitely a great app to have. I’ve got 100s of songs ready on my iPhone for whenever I need ‘em

iPod

Ok, so this is not an App you can download in the store, because it’s a standard part of the iPhone, but I had to mention it because it’s just cool. This is about my fourth iPod to date, but it takes things to a new level. I love having my music constantly in my phone in my pocket. I can play any song in an instant and don’t even need to carry headphones around (although the sound is so much better with them – the in-built speaker is not too bad). Navigation on the iPhone (and iPod touch I guess) is a vast improvement over the classic iPods – I can find what I want so much faster. Also scrubbing within a song to find a particular part (eg a guitar solo I’m trying to learn) is easy and efficient. Cover Flow is just cool, like flipping through CDs on a shelf – great for getting ideas if I’m not sure what to listen to. And I really like the Genius feature – pick a song and it will create a playlist of related stuff – and the playlists are really good. Having access to the iTunes store on the phone is nice too in case I ever want to purchase a new song when I’m out and about.

This iPod is becoming much more a part of my daily experience than my old ones. The only limitation is that it only has 32Gig or less or space, but I still have my 160 Gig iPod classic for when I want to carry a more exhaustive music library around (or when I want to save my iPhone battery) – look forward to a 64 or 128 Gig iPhone in the years to come perhaps?

Been very busy since getting back from Queensland just over a week ago, and this week promises to be even busier with work, study (picked up an extra unit – studying Diving & Marine Medicine now), church (out 3 nights this week), and family things to fit in.. but I want to keep this blog ticking over and work is mercifully fairly sedate at the moment so time for a quick post about iPhone games.

I’m not what anyone would call a serious gamer, but I have found since getting my iPhone that I’ve been playing games more than usual. Perhaps it’s just having quality games constantly at my fingertips which load instantly on my 3GS and can be played for just a minute or two… or for much longer. So here’s a few of the games I’ve played around with so far.

Fieldrunners

This is a brilliant little game, recommended by deano and ob1. Basically you set up defenses against invading forces to stop them getting across a field. Lots of fun, starts easy and then gets more challenging. An easy way to waste hours of time. Owen loves this game too.

Real Racing

Excellent car racing game. Brilliant graphics and sound. Amazing that such a high quality game can be played on a phone! Works like any other console racing game – you work your way through a tournament with a series of progressively harder tracks and better cars. You steer by tilting the phone side to side like a steering wheel. It offers internet league races and local wi-fi challenges with your friends as well. Definitely the best graphics I have seen so far on the iPhone and well worth a few $$.

Waterslide

I just downloaded this one yesterday for free. Another game where you control the movement of your character by tilting the phone. In this one you are sliding along these massive waterslides which arch above a city landscape, trying to earn points, avoid obstacles like crabs, and not fall off. Reasonably good graphics and fairly simple fun for a few minutes here and there. And it’s free! You can’t beat that.

Paper Toss

This game was number 1 on the iTunes games list I think. Not sure why. It’s harmless enough, reasonably good graphics. You just flick a paper ball across an office trying to get it into a bin, taking into account the wind speed and direction from the office fan. Kinda amusing for five minutes or so at a time. Once again, it’s free, so you might as well get it.

Galactic Gunner

This game is a crack up. You are a gunner in a space ship shooting bad guys by touching the screen where they are. Think Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. The graphics aren’t bad but the funny thing is the dialogue. Your commander has a strong Aussie accent and uses a lot of slang, which seems kinda weird in the context of a space battle. Once again, reasonably fun for a few minutes at a time. Worth getting just so you can laugh at the dialogue.

TowerBloxx

Another cheap game with nice graphics. You have to build skyscrapers by dropping blocks onto them with a crane. Sounds boring but is actually quite amusing. Also involves some planning as to where you are going to build towers within your city to maximise profits/population. Quite good if you like that sort of thing.

Bejeweled 2

Surely I don’t have to explain this game to anyone? If you’ve seen this game on consoles, or PC, or facebook then you know what to expect. This version seems just the same. As always I love the encouraging voice telling you when you’ve done something good or excellent. I even caught Jenni playing this one last night … yes, we’re a two iPhone family now

Pac-Man lite

Didn’t want to spend $7.99 for the full version so I went for the free-lite version to try it out, but this is a pretty faithful rendition of the old classic. I love the little joystick graphic at the bottom. Very retro.

And I’d have given anything
To have my own PacMan game at home.
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade;
Now I’ve got it on my phone.

~ Brad Paisley “Welcome to the Future”

It’s a week now since I got my iPhone 3GS so a good time to post some of my thoughts about it. I’ll post more on some of the apps I’m using in the coming days/weeks.

Firstly let me say that the iPhone is a revolution. I’m been a long time PDA/Smart phone user (moving form Palm PDAs to the brilliant Treo which my wife still loves through to a couple of fairly good Windows Mobile HTC phones) but I’m a fairly late adopter to the iPhone. Part of the reason for this was being locked into my old contract and the other part was feeling that the iPhone was far from being mature, lacking in basic phone functionality like MMS, Video, Cut and Paste etc. The recent release of the iPhone 3 software and the new 3GS hardware dealt with most of those reservations.

I’ll discuss various aspects of the iPhone separately but at the outset let me say that two of the biggest reasons why this is such a joy to use are speed and integration. By speed I mean the speed at which programs load and run – there is virtually no lag or delay – almost everything loads in less than a second. Obviously there can be delays relating to the speed of your internet connection but that’s an network issue, not a problem with the iPhone itself. I’ve gone with Vodafone here in Australia and have found that 90% of the time internet connection/speed is more than adequate.

Integration is the other awesome thing about the iPhone – just how well the mail, messaging, calendar, contacts and related apps talk to each other, and how smooth and simply it all works. This is no real surprise though, coming from Apple. Having a Mac computer and a MobileMe account makes this whole experience even easier and smoother. Through push notifications all my contacts/calendar/bookmarks/email etc are instantaneously kept in Sync between my iPhone, my iMac and my MacBook. Push email through MobileMe works very well – there is virtually no spam and the email client is very easy to use. Using this hint I’ve been able to easily set it up so it sends as my main baggas.com email address instead of @me.com, which is nice.

As a phone it seems fine.  Call quality is good. As I said previously integration with the address book is fast and smooth. Visual voicemail is a cool feature where you can see all your voicemail messages on the screen and choose which one you want to listen to or just delete, without having to listen through them all in order or follow a bunch of menus (ie “press 3 to delete”) – it’s all there on the phone, just like SMS/MMS. Very cool. I don’t think all phone networks offer this functionality though.

The Camera is still probably the iPhone’s Achilles Heel. Apparently the 3 megapixel camera has been improved compared to the old iPhone 3G but it’s still not great. I like the autofocus or touch to focus feature. Photos of still subjects in good light actually look pretty nice, but in lower light or subjects that aren’t perfectly still (like 1 year old girls) the photos are blurry/grainy. Even compared to my old HTC phone there is a massive lack of settings here – no ability to adjust the camera in any way, and no ability that I can find to edit the photos at all. I’m really surprised at how little attention Apple seems to have given to this, given their excellent desktop photo software. It may be that there are third party photo editing Apps available for the iPhone but it’s one area I haven’t looked into… yet.

Taking Video recordings is a little better than photos. The videos aren’t bad quality for a phone, and you can do some basic editing like trimming your video clip which is implemented nicely. And sending your videos onward via email, MMS or uploading to MobileMe or YouTube is handled very easily and elegantly. Here’s the one and only video I’ve done so far, as a test mainly of the uploading process. The light in this room was a bit dim but it gives you a rough idea. It took me only a couple of minutes to take this video, trim it, and upload to YouTube. Very simple and smooth process – ideal for if you are out and about and want to share a video right away… I’ll try and take another video out in the sun in the next day or so to get a better idea.

Media playback is through the iPod section. What can I say about this? It’s an iPod! Music playback is flawless. The genius feature works well to create instant playlists of related music, you can flip through album covers using CoverFlow (never been a huge user of this on the Mac but on the iPhone it’s very nice). Searching for music works well and is very fast through the global Spotlight search (which you can also use to search the enture contents of the iPhone for just about anything). You can shake to shuffle which is kinda cool, and you can use voice controls (more about that later). Glad I went for the 32 Gig version so I can fit plenty of stuff on there. It won’t completely replace my 160Gig iPod classic, but it’s a nice option for when I only want to carry one device (which is most of the time actually). Media controls and a mic are built into the new headphones, which are fairly good.  Video playback is very nice on the widescreen – very usuable for watching TV shows or movies while commuting/travelling.

Voice control is another new feature on the iPhone which other phones have had for years. I’ve never been a huge fan of voice recognition stuff but the iPhone adaptation works fairly well. It gets it right for phone control about 80% of the time (eg “Call Jennifer mobile”) but probably only about 2/3 of the time for iPod control – maybe because the iPod database is many hundreds of time bigger than the phone database? I still haven’t quite learnt all the commands it recognizes yet. There’s also a nifty Google search App you can download which enables voice searches and is location aware, so if you say “Movie show times” or “Chinese restaurant,” it will fairly reliable bring up local results.

GPS seems to work well. Satellite fix outdoors takes only a few seconds. You can now buy turn-by-turn navigation software for the iPhone (I haven’t yet). The new iPhone also features a compass which you can see in the stand-alone compass App, or use in Google maps to orient your map. There are a  number of GPS apps you can download but this seems to me to be a relatively under-explored area of functionality.

Web browsing on the iPhone is a dream. This will not be news to previous iPhone users but compared to Windows Mobile the difference is immense. It’s great to be able to see the whole page rendered and then smoothly zoom in to view the sections you want. The text magnifies and renders beautifully and scrolling vertically and horizontally is easy and smooth. I love the way the iPhone responds to touch. It’s so easy to learn and use. The new iPhone 3.0 software also supports tethering where you can use the iPhone as a modem for your laptop via USB or bluetooth. Old news for other phones but I found this so much easier than it ever was on my old WM phone. Within 30 seconds I had my MacBook Air accessing the internet through my iPhone over blueooth. Simple. With a decent sized data plan road warriors may consider making this their preferred method of accessing the internet. Vodafone currently seems the best for this in Australia – I’m on a plan which includes 1Gig of data but you can add on more data if necessary. Optus have decided to charge people extra for tethering, and Telstra I’m not sure about, but the amount of data in their plans is paltry (a shame since they have the best network – offer a decent value data plan and customers would flock to them). Another beauty of the iPhone is it’s implementation of WiFi – if a network is available it will always either automatically connect or give you the option to, thus potentially saving a lot on your 3G usage.

Anyway that’s enough for now. If you couldn’t tell, I love this phone. It’s not perfect, but still amazing. The other awesome feature I haven’t mentioned yet is the App store, where you can download a myriad of free or cheap Applications for a multitude of uses, from games to networking to productivity… over the coming weeks I’ll start blogging here about some of the Apps I think are cool.

I continue to not be too active here in this blog due to study/family/ministry/work/facebook etc, although have been a little more involved in our worship team’s blog here : http://wccworship.wordpress.com/

In the process I’ve recently discovered a few brilliant worship guitar blogs that have really got me inspired. Here’s a few of them :

• Guitar for Worship
• Guitar Praise
• Worship Guitar Guy
• Les Paul Player Doctor

They are all now fixtures in my newsreader and all are excellent, but I’d recommend the first one especially. This dude has a mountain of good material, loves U2, and is pretty damn funny too. So if you’re into that sort of thing, check it out. In the meantime I’ll be off hiding out in facebook as usual.

Yuu may have noticed a lack of activity here of late, partly because I’ve been so busy and partly because my online presence (like that of many other people) has sharply veered into the realm of facebook. I hate to say it (because I really hated it at first) but I think the “new” facebook has ultimately turned out to be an improvement, greatly enhancing the social interactivity of the site whilst reducing a lot of the spam and the preponderance of silly applications that were dragging down the old facebook. They are all still there, but much more nicely compartmentalised. In fact the new facebook has also in my mind effectively replaced Twitter – it gives the same functionality of microblogging with status updates, but allows for a much more elegant way of replying and communicating based on these updates, and with a much larger “audience.” I’ll still cross post to twitter using ping.fm (in fact as of today I now have the Australian leader of the Opposition “following” me on twitter) but facebook is where it’s at. Amazing how it continues to grow, and penetrate into more and different demographics. Wonder if the creators of facebook ever imagined how far this would go – from a niche site for uni students to arguably one of the two most crucial sites on the web (along with Google).

The other thing area that facebook has tentatively moved into is chat, with the little web-based chat in the lower right corner. I’ve used this a couple of times now and it’s not bad, although a little unreliable. The potential utility of this is that if facebook is becoming your communications hub, then instantly all of your FB contacts are on your chat list. It keeps it all centralised. At present though, facebook chat is under-cooked and very low powered. If they want this to compete with MSN, AIM, Yahoo etc then they will need to beef up it’s features and create stand-alone desktop software so it will run when your browser is closed, allow more customisable contact lists, availability status, invisibility, file transfers, and ultimately video and audio chat. Not sure if this is their goal but the potential is there. For Mac users, you can go part way to achieving this using Adium, a neat and powerful program that combines all your different chat accounts into the one client – and facebook chat is one of those. So you can chat with facebook friends even without your browser open. Probably there is similar software for Windows, but I haven’t been bothered to look for it.

I’m not planning on abandoning this blog any time soon, but the chances are you’ll be seeing me a lot more on facebook…

CNET : Is microSD the music medium of the future? This story is something I don’t really see the point of.  Sandisk are partnering with the major music labels to release albums pre-loaded onto Micro-SD cards – the idea being to “bridge the gap between the physical and the digital”

Doesn’t make sense to me. I either want my music in one of two formats – either a digital file for my iPod or a physical medium such as a CD with artwork and liner notes that I can file on my shelf. The other advantage of CDs being the quality of the sound is generally better than most compressed digital files such as mp3, aac, wma etc. The disadvantages of the Micro-SD concept are many. If I want digital files I will download them from somewhere like the iTunes store or just rip them from CDs I have bought (my method of choice since that way I have the best of both worlds) – I’m not going to go and physically buy cards with songs on. This would mean either having to continually swap cards every time I want to listen to a different album or to use a computer to transfer them onto a larger card or hard drive based MP3 player (like my iPod). One of the big advtanges for me of an iPod or similar MP3 player is the ability to carry around a library of music so you can select what you want to listen to based on your mood, or just randomise it. So why would I want to carry around a bunch of little fingernail sized cards that can easily get lost? Crazy. Plus it will also necessitate people going out and buying new MP3 players and phones which support Micro-SD. In an age dominated by iPod and iPhone, I can’t see this happening to the extent required for this to be successful.

The future of music is continued growth of online downloads and ongoing improvement of MP3 devices to play those downloaded files. Wireless purchasing like on the iPod touch and iPhone will gradually become more widespread for those who want to get new music while they are out and about and listen to it immediately. Hopefully at some point a worthy successor to the humble CD will catch on and gain wide acceptance (like Blu-Ray is succeeding DVD, albeit very slowly). This will be some sort of high definition audio contained on a standard sized disc, with all the usual booklet/notes/lyrics etc. I know there have been a few candidates in recent years but none has really caught on. This is where the industry needs to get together to build consensus but in times dominated by digital music downloads and the recent video format wars I guess it’s not a priority issue. Whatever the future of audio is, Micro-SD is a dead end alleyway.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been regularly entertained by LaHaye and Jenkin’s “Christian” fiction novel Left Behind. Well actually not by the novel itself, but by the excellent commentary provided by Fred on his slacktivist blog. Over the last few days Fred finally reached the end of the book – a momentous occasion. His post on the final pages gives his usual humorous analysis of the events (or non-events) contained therein, but more importantly he goes back and looks at some of the larger issues surrounding the book and gives his reasoning why this should be considered as the “Worst Book of All Time.”

Somehow it seems a little sad. Although slacktivist is still high on my list of must-read blogs due to his great political, religious and journalistic commentary, it just won’t be the same without “Left Behind Fridays” Hope Fred doesn’t take too much of a break before he delves into the next book Tribulation Force – could this book be any worse than the “Worst Book of All Time”? I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

I’ve seen noted before the eerie similarities between the current US presidential race and the final season of The West Wing (my all time favourite show). Today I discovered an interesting Australian blog about US politics, Kan Da Shan, who in this post, goes into some detail listing the similarities…

Social networking – it’s the big buzzword at the moment. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and many others are the latest extension of the blogosphere, and are reaching a much greater crowd for whom maintaining a proper blog would not be considered. Politicians such as Barack Obama and many other well known personalities are using these sites to their advantage.  Even my wife now has her own facebook!

The two main sites I’ve used are facebook and twitter, which have different, but sometimes overlapping, uses. Facebook has been good for connecting with current friends and family, old friends from school and Uni and elsewhere, and even allowed me to maintain some contact with some Canadian friends I met in Uganda last year. The applications of facebook are myriad – from messages and chat (as Jen discovered for herself last night), photo and video sharing, through to a vast range of mini apps, ranging from the useful to the completely stupid.

Twitter is much simpler – you just post a short, SMS length message which goes onto a timeline of messages from you and your twitter friends. It’s hard to explain the appeal of this but it can be good for just posting quick status updates or having extended (though sometimes difficult to follow) conversations. A primary use of twitter for me (as for ob1 and others) is to feed twitter posts into my blog so as to maintain a level of activity here when I am to busy to create full blog updates.

And these are just two examples – there are plenty more other overlapping and different social networking sites.

The problem for some of us then becomes that if we are signed up to 2 or more of these sites it becomes :

• (1) a chore to keep them all up to date
• (2) difficult to keep up with the activity on all of them

I know there are some apps which attempt to solve problem 2 but I am yet to investigate them. However I have found an excellent solution to the first issue – http://ping.fm

Using this site you can type in your twitter style update (or a longer blog for sites which support that) and it will be instantly sent to as many of these different networking sites as you are registered for. As I said my 2 main sites are twitter and facebook, however along the way I have signed up with plurk, livejournal, myspace and several others – so this stops them from lying completely idle. It also has the advantage that I can update ping.fm (and hence everything else) not only from a web interface but also by IM and a range of other mini-apps, which is useful for mobile updating. Definitely worth checking out if you use any of these sites. Currently it’s still in Beta (though works perfectly) and you need a code to register. The current code is “pingitlikeitshot” but if you find that doesn’t work let me know and I’ll try and get you a newer one.

EDIT (Aug 16) :  new code for ping.fm is “vivalaping”

The Global Ambition of Rick Warren

this is a great article from Time about Saddleback megachurch pastor Rick Warren, author of the Purpose Driven Life. Warren cops a bit of flack on the Christian web, both from conservative dogmatic types and from some emerging types, for being a bit of a lightweight, too compromising, not conservative enough, not liberal enough etc etc – but perhaps this is part of his success. He has managed to present the gospel message in a way that connects with the average person in a real and meaningful way. Although a very smart guy, he keeps his message simple and direct so as not to overwhelm people.

So I’ve always kinda liked Warren, but his story gets better. Not content with having a massive church and being a best selling writer (who gives away most of his earnings though), Warren is now moving more into the political sphere. Fortunately he’s not just becoming yet another of the divisive, condemnatory Religious Right – rather he seeks a more conciliatory, unifying approach to Christian involvement in politics. He seems to see the role of the church as being a force for good, making positive changes in the world, rather than just a defense against bad.

He says he is more interested in questions that he feels are “uniting,” such as “poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights”

Interesting article about Warren, his global PEACE plan for Christian mobilization, and his upcoming political forum where he will have both Obama and McCain together for one of the first times this campaign.

Ok time for me to knuckle down and get started studying, before I get too far behind. This is challenging for me in a number of ways :

• never done serious university study whilst working full time and having a family before
• never studied externally before – seems harder to find out just exactly what I am required to do. There has been little information forthcoming from the uni thus far
• it’s over 8 years since I’ve been at Uni and the technological landscape has changed considerably. Over the course of my 6 year medical degree in the 90s the internet gradually emerged from being completely non-existent to being a useful, but still quite peripheral, adjunct to our studies. Few students had laptops and they were rarely seen in class.

So in view of the third point especially, does anyone have any advice for me? I sat down this morning to start reading and taking some notes and then wondered if I should actually be putting these notes into my laptop instead of my awful handwriting. Should I be using a simple word processor (eg Word, Pages etc) or is there other software out there which is better suited to study and note taking?? (only Mac software please!)

Like many, I’ve been watching the release of the iPhone 3G with interest. At present I have no definite plans to get an iPhone although I’m sure I will end up with one in the next couple of years. The main thing holding me back is that I’m less than halfway through my current phone contract and I’m fairly happy with my current HTC TyTnII phone – but if I found a way to get an iPhone cheap without having to pay huge contract fees I would jump at it. The other thing is, even in it’s second iteration I’m still not convinced the iPhone is a complete product – as a phone it lacks simple things like a decent camera, video capabilities, and MMS – I still cannot fathom why it won’t work with MMS. So for now I shall continue to bide my time, whilst still envying those cool people who have the iPhone already.

The other new release from Apple is their MobileMe service, which is an upgrade of .Mac which allows automatic over the air syncing of calendars, contacts, email and more between your Macs, PCs and iPhone. I’m quite excited about this one, having tried to achive similar things previously with Google with limited success. If I had an iPhone I would sign up for this in an instant but even without one I am quite tempted to do so anyway. Will be nice to have synchronized calendars on my Work and Home PCs and my MacBook Pro, which I can then sync to my phone with Missing Sync. I’m also planning to invest in a MacBook Air in the next couple of months to use for my Masters degree study and travel (just booked flights for my first Uni trip over to Townsville in October) – so keeping that in sync as well will be great. In fact, I think I’ve just talked myself into trying MobileMe. I’ll sign up for the free trial and let you know how it goes.

United Airlines offers in-flight iPhone and iPod Connectivity | The Apple Blog

Over the last couple of years I’ve spent many hours on planes, huddled over my iPod watching shows and movies on the little screen. In fact I watched the first three seasons on Battlestar Galactica (awesome show) in this manner. And almost invariably if you look around the cabin on any flight you will see several people with those characteristic white earphones in their ears. So the above story definitely appeals to me and I’m sure many other travellers. In a nod to the increasing ubiquity of these devices, United Airlines have installed iPod connectors in some of their planes so you can browse your iPod or iPhone and watch or listen to your own content on their screens, as well as keep your device charged. Certainly beats huddling over a tiny screen and definitely good to have more choice beyond the usual in-flight entertainment. Hope this comes to Australia soon…

In other iPod news, I noticed today that you can now purchase some TV shows via the Australian iTunes store. Only a couple of years behind the rest of the world! Hopefully movie rentals will follow. My guess is they’ve finally got their act together and done this because of the upcoming Australian iPhone launch.

• The Exigent City – this is a fascinating in-depth article from the New York Times on the history, sociology and architecture of refugee camps around the world. They also have a good article on the groth of new cities.
• Ben Witherington writes an excellent post on God’s freedom, love, and human free-will. I’ve been pondering some of these issues lately so this is very timely.
• On the US election, this article compares the online presence of Obama and McCain, and this article looks at McCain’s strategy in searching for a Vice President – Google!
• Apple News from the WWDC conference. A better, cheaper iPhone with 3G and GPS, coming to Australia soon (wonder how long I will be able to resist?). An upgraded .Mac service (no trouble resisting that) and a new Mac OSX ‘Snow Leopard’ next year. Read a summary of some of the buzz here. My only disappointment is that I was hoping to see an upgraded version of the MacBook Air with more storage and RAM – guess I’ll keep waiting for that one… until the next Stevenote..

Along similar lines to my last entry about wild west cowboys to be blamed for legalism in 20th century evangelical/fundamentalist churches, one of my favourite bloggers Fred the slacktivist weighs in with his take on C.S. Lewis’ book Prince Caspian :

I haven’t seen Prince Caspian yet, but since it was the “No. 1 Movie” this weekend, let’s revisit what that wonderful little book was about:

Prince Caspian is about beer.

He then goes on to quote Lewis from Mere Christianity discussing this very issue of legalism, especially relating to alcohol. And Lewis, as you may or may not know, enjoyed his beer. Fred’s interpretation of Prince Caspian is that the bad guys (Telmarines) represent excessively legalistic “anti-beer Christians” and the mission of the Pevensie children is to help Caspian and Aslan restore joy and wildness to the land.

It’s a long long time since I’ve read the book, and I’m also yet to see the movie (not sure when it comes out here in Australia) but it’s an interesting take on a classic children’s book. I’ll have to try and revisit it sometime soon.

You can read Fred’s post here.

Came across a video similar to this one on cnn.com today and thought I’d go on The Google and see if I could find a YouTube version to post for y’all. This is not exactly the same but it’s essentially the same basic story – classic Bushims! Ain’t the internets a wonderful thing!

Heard an interesting statistic yesterday – apparently only around 1% of those who have the iTunes software installed actually purchase music from he iTunes online store. The inference being that most of the rest of people are filling their iPods with illegally downloaded content. I doubt this is the case. Certainly  proportion of people will be using downloaded tracks, ad most probably it is much more than 1%, however I’d still say the vast majority of those 99% of non iTunes store users are not. Rather these people are the millions upon millions of people who have bought or been given an iPod, and simply use iTunes to transfer their CD collection to it. Mums and dads and teens and kids – most iPod owners probably wouldn’t know where to find music on the undernet if they wanted to. As I commented in another post, I rarely buy stuff from the iTunes store, but I do still buy a lot of CDs, which I always immediately rip to MP3 and load into iTunes. I think most people are in the same boat, using iTunes simply as a way of getting their music onto their iPods, rather than as a way of getting new music. It would be interesting to see a statistic of how many people actually use the full capacity of their iPods – my guess is a lot would not.

Interestingly though, even though only 1% of iTunes software users shop through the store, it has still become the number one music retailer in the US, surpassing Wal-Mart. I would imagine we will begin to see that 1% figure start to rise a little bit, in view of that.

Out of Ur : The Passion of the Heist

Lot of buzz at the moment about the newly released video game Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV), which looks like it will be the biggest game release of all time, and probably one of the biggest media releases ever, with sales in the same league as the takings of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters. And the reviews of the game have been extremely positive, some even going as far as to compare it favourably with The Godfather. And I’m not immune to this – I must confess I’ve been tempted to get the game for my Xbox360 and give it a go myself, despite never being much of a hard core gamer and definitely not having the time to do so.

Now those two words “confess” and “tempted” should be read in a biblical sense, well at least if according to this article and some of the comments. In it, the writer confesses his previous forays into the GTA series playing the GTA : Vice City game :

I had no problem preaching on Sunday morning (in real life, of course) and selling drugs from the back of an ice cream truck (in Vice City, of course) on Sunday afternoon.

It’s all reasonably tongue in cheek but he does try and raise the question seriously as to whether playing these sort of games is an appropriate activity for Christians, and whether the church should respond in some kind of fashion similar to the response to the Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter, both of which have spawned a panopoly of Christian books (in my opinion a massively overblown response). He also raises the question as to whether all this virtual killing and vice is a sin in the same way that Jesus equates having anger or lust in your mind with the real thing in Matthew 5:21-30.

Interesting questions, which I guess parallel in some ways the broader argument in society about whether violent video games lead to violent behaviours (an argument I’ve never found especially convincing). The replies in the blog comments are also quite fascinating. Several commenters conclude that playing games like this is most definitely a serious sin, and one even suggests we should pray for those who play GTA IV. But another commenter makes a cutting remark about Christians making a fuss about a violent video game whilst being unconcerned about a war in Iraq which has killed over 500, 000 real people (particularly aimed at the American church I think).

As for me I’m still in limbo on the subject. Is this sort of thing a sin? maybe. But I don’t think killing pretend people in a computer game is a direct equivalent of Jesus’ comments in Matthew 5 :

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgement. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement. ” Matt 5:21-22 (ESV) [+/-]ERROR: Please add &action=doPassageQuery or &doReadingPlanQuery or &getQueryInfo or &getVerse or &getDailyVerse or &doQuery or &getReadingPlanInfo to your request URL.
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Maybe this partly applies here, but I think the main issue in Jesus’ comment here is the breaking of relationships – being angry with your brother (whether a literal family member or a fellow Christian or simply a fellow human). Pretending to kill a purely fictional character in a computer game is much less serious – actually if that’s a sin then deriving pleasure from a violent movie or book is possibly worse, since these have depictions of actual people rather than virtual ones.

I’d be interested to hear what others think. But in my mind at least the jury is still out. Will I play the game? maybe… But I’ll confess it’s not a feeling of guilt or conscience stopping me, but simply my lack of time and having too many other priorities.