jPhone went walkabout

In February, my 32GB iPhone 3GS and I parted company on a train. I’m not quite sure whether it was stolen or whether I left it on the train – I was on the way back to Edinburgh from an exhausting and emotional trip away and woke up just in time to leap out of the train at Haymarket.

When I got home I realised the iPhone was missing and tried to locate it using find-my-iPhone. There was no response – not really a surprise because the iPhone’s battery was bound to have run out by then.

I tried find-my-iPhone the next morning and it worked – the phone was located on an estate in the south of Edinburgh. I printed the result and took it to the police who advised that they couldn’t take action unless it was handed in. I then used find-my-iPhone several times to have the phone make a loud noise and display ‘please return this phone to Bruce – call him on ‘.

No-one called me, and the iPhone seemed to stay in the same place so I eventually went to the street where the iPhone was and used find-my-iPhone on Hexie to make it noisy so I could locate it. This didn’t help and I certainly wasn’t about to start knocking on doors and accusing strangers of having the phone so I remote-wiped it and gave it up as lost.

I then had a 6-month wait for my contract to end – paying for a service I couldn’t use because a replacement iPhone would have been too expensive. I did buy an ultra-cheap dumb-phone to use with the contract, which I got reduced by a small amount but I was still forced to pay for a data connection I couldn’t use and a talk allowance which was far more than I needed.

My hostess inspires me

At the beginning of September, my hostess finally succumbed to the reality distortion field need for a real smartphone and bought a refurbished 32GB iPhone 4 on contract. A few days later, when my 3GS contract ended and I was allowed, even encouraged, to upgrade, I tried to do the same. It turned out that O2 had run out of 32GB refurbished iPhones. I would have walked from O2 but they had the cheapest phone deals in the UK. I cracked and ordered a brand-new one with a sensible data and voice plan and insurance. This phone, or a replacement provided by insurance, is damn well going to make it through this contract. (You may recall that my original iPhone died in a soup-related incident.)

Also, IOS now permitted tethering, so I no longer needed a separate broadband dongle for Hexie – just as well because the dongle had recently stopped working. I’d been toying with the idea of getting a cheap, second-hand 3G or 3GS for mounting on Vilior’s handlebars for navigation and videoing my travels. So I replaced the dongle’s contract with the cheapest contract I could get for a refurbished 8GB iPhone 3GS.

Results

Both iPhones work just fine – the iPhone 4 stays snugly in a silicone-rubber protector, tucked away in a deep pocket. The 3GS goes in Vilior’s handlebar and keeps me on track and on time. The angle it needs to be at for videoing is counter-productive for navigation, so I’ve temporarily given up on using it for both and just use the 3GS for navigation. If any freelance work comes my way, one of the biggest temptations will be to get another 3GS or iPod touch for videoing. I’m looking forward to setting the videoing device to using time-lapse photography for long cycles, then getting it to upload the frames to my main mac, which can then assemble frames into a movie and maybe even upload the movies to digital evidence – watch this space.

In the meantime, here are some movies of travelling around Edinburgh in my first week at Napier and proof of the huge difference in screen-resolution between the 4 and the 3GS:
Craiglockart to Merchiston
Merchiston to Servants’ Quarters – lots of red traffic lights!
iPhone 3GS screenshot
iPhone 4 screenshot

Bah – I thought I’d try to get ahead of my forthcoming studies by starting an online course in Java. The course uses the NetBeans IDE and the only mac versions available are for intel-based macs. My main mac is an 2·0GHz XServe G5 – from well before the transition to Intel.

I’ve found Eclipse and MochaCode and might try these. Also, I’m sure Leopard Client came with an installer for XCode, Apple’s own IDE. But to avoid me getting totally confused, can anyone recommend an online course for these? (Yes, I know this seems lazy – but I’m posting while waiting for onions to caramelise – and will look properly later.)

Other options seems to be

• trying the Netbeans installation and course on Hexie, who has an 1·6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 1024 * 600 pixel screen and doesn’t talk to external monitors
• waiting for the course to start and seeing what facilities I get at Napier
• bending the plastic for a new-ish Mac Pro. (This would be my preferred/fantasy option, especially if I can get one from just before Lion came out so I can have multiple boot disks:
  • Sludge Leopard – because Lion is still at ‘point-nought’
  • Lion – because that’s where MacOS is at09
  • linux
  • Windows.

I’m tickled to learn of the existence of tofu interconnects, especially as they work in 6 dimensions. Soya products transmitting information in hyperspace?

Some time after 11pm yesterday, my dad called to tell me that ambulance staff were attending my mum after an apparent stroke. I threw some clothes into a bag and looked at train and flight possibilities while Elly looked into taxis.

About an hour later, my dad texted to give an all-clear: ‘stoke symptoms now abated. Speech & movement now normal. No need for hospitalisation. Cause was a TIA – a transient episode. See GPO tomorrow.’ So the mad dash for Worcester was put on hold.

Some time after 11pm yesterday, my dad called to tell me that ambulance staff were attending my mum after an apparent stroke. I threw some clothes into a bag and looked at train and flight possibilities while Elly looked into taxis.

About an hour later, my dad texted to give an all-clear: ‘stoke symptoms now abated. Speech & movement now normal. No need for hospitalisation. Cause was a TIA – a transient episode. See GPO tomorrow.’ So the mad dash for Worcester was put on hold.

He emailed today to say ‘Mum has to visit the vampire at the surgery tomorrow for blood samples to be taken & have an ECG. As from tomorrow, she is to take aspirin to thin her blood. This is for a month to check on the effect on blood pressure. This is not madly high but needs to be kept in check.’

I suspect, admittedly on zero knowledge of her medication regime, that the pain-killers taken in connection with having broken her femur neck in March and other medication stemming from diabetes complications may be responsible – but I will look into that when I make a planned visit to Worcester on Thursday. During this trip I get to meet my brother’s new girlfriend – oo-er!

I phoned home this morning – dad sounded OK but mum sounded rather tired – hardly surprising after a scary episode. My mum is nearly 81 and my dad is 83 so I guess I’m lucky to have them both – and that mentally both are fully functional as far as I can tell.

On a slightly better note, my offer of a place at Napier was made unconditional today (they were waiting on a reference to confirm that I really am suitable for the course) so I’m a step closer to trying to get my head around Java and OSI models – and to buying a new mac with a student discount. Yeehah!

I’ve finally finished sorting Vilior but it’s been too wet to do the alpha-shakedown so I’ve finally got around to uploading photos from February, March and April. Can you feel the tediousness of my prose yet?

Update 1
May’s pix are here.

Update 24

June’s pix are here.

Update 3
July’s pix are here
August’s pix so far are here.

This pleases me wildly.

As of 5pm this evening, I ceased working for NewsCorp. Tomorrow will be my last NewsCorp payday. I’ve been a Murdoch minion since early 2010, when Leckie & Leckie was bought by HarperCollins.

I’ve left mostly because I’m sick of commuting and hence often not getting home until 8pm – I will miss being involved in educational publishing and, had Leckie remained in Edinburgh, I imagine I’d still be there.

So what next? A month of sorting things at Servants’ Quarters and on Arran, then this. So I will end up with an actual qualification in IT rather than just being a dilettante.

Comments

ggreig
Good luck with it! My conversion course was a good thing for me.

silverwhistle
Well done! And well done for escaping the declining Evil Empire!

Thoughts on drinking my first tin of Irn Bru just after midnight last night – I was inexorably reminded of an old advertising jingle:

Plink-plink! Fizz-fizz!
Oh what a relief it is!

Only an hour to go before the restricted diet ends – and what have we learnt?

In no particular order

• It’s much to write blog entries using a real client (Xjournal) rather than the basic web interface.
• The Clash’s London Calling is brilliant accompaniment for kneading chapatti dough and then rolling out chapattis – in fact, to me, it’s brilliant full stop. The Fall’s Dragnet isn’t.
• We’ve had plenty to eat, most of which has been ok. I can’t say I’m fond of porridge made with water – and my hostess doesn’t like porridge anyway – but the various lentil concoctions (caramelised onions and garlic, red lentils and stock) with rice and chapattis have been very enjoyable and filling.
• My hostess has most missed tea and coffee. I’ve missed tea and the 20 or so tins of Irn Bru or Dr Pepper I’d drink in a normal week. (We both thought that hot water was better than black tea. I usually loathe coffee – the mere thought of it can make me feel sick.)
• Our final food bill was
  

  Item	Amount	Cost	proportion used
  Tesco Scottish porridge oats	1 kg	£0·99	about half
  Tesco Value long grain rice	1 kg	£0·49	all
  Tesco Value penne	1 * 500 g	£0·09	only 1 of the 2 bags we bought
  Tesco value veg stock cubes	2 packs of 10 cubes	£0·20	only 2 of the 5 packs we bought
  Tesco market value brown onions	2 kg	£1·18	19 of the 22 onions in the bag
  Indus red split lentils	2 kg	£2·69	around 1·75 kg
  Tesco plain white flour	1·5 kg	£0·52	around 0·9 kg
  Tesco swede	600 g	£0·70	all
  Tesco market value carrots	600 g	£0·76	500 g
  Tesco pure vegetable oil	225 ml (remnant of a 1 litre bottle)	£0·32 (22·5% of £1·44)	about 50 ml
  apples, oranges, garlic	varying amounts	£1·39	all
  salt	a few pinches	£0·10	all but a few grains thrown over our left shoulders
  Total		£9·43

• It takes ages to knead chapatti and aeons to roll them all out. Fortunately, the kneading can be done while onions are caramelising – they only need stirring occasionally. (In general cooking from scratch takes longer than I’d normally have in an evening. How did our parents do it while working full-time too? I begin to understand why convenient foods cost so much, even though they’re churned out by mostly production lines.)
• There’s lot’s more washing up too!
• I don’t have the knack of rolling chapattis out round. How is it done?
• I wish I’d lived like this as a student – my overdrafts would have been much smaller (or maybe I’d have spend the same amount on other enjoyments!)
• We’ve not suffered physically apart from me having some headaches which could easily be due to early mornings and commuting – and not wearing the right glasses on Tuesday. In fact today we’ve done an amount of heavy lifting – humping a new-ish dishwasher AARRGGHH!! and freezer into the flat.
• My hostess likes driving white vans!

13 minutes to go – I can hear the Irn Bru in the larder calling.