Best.

Game.

Ever.

Period.

Pictures of the Special Edition.

Since I got my iPhone, quite a few people seem to have expressed an interest themselves, and refuse to believe how easy it is to get an iPhone and unlock it. So here is a simple guide of exactly what I did, what it has, and so on.

Update (30th April 2008): Moved the guide to a proper page now, and added some more info: http://william-hook.com/iphone/

I have been getting LOADS of emails recently with random spam, mainly to “blog@william-hook.com”….and since I had a catch-all email setup, I got pretty much everything and everything related to spam. So I’ve killed it. The only account that exists now is the alias that I usually use for stuff (mail@…), but I sometimes use other addresses, but if someone needs that it’ll just bounce. Hopefully that’ll cut out 90% of the spam I’ve been getting.

Honestly, it’s russian, the usual enlargement emails, drugs, pills, and other random bs that I DON’T WANT.

If I ever meet a spammer in real life, they better run for their lives, as I’m actually going to murder them.

I got an iPhone yesterday, after O2 had announced that they were cutting £100 off the price, I decided to go for it.

And I must say, it’s an incredibly nice phone. Everyone says “oh, it doesn’t have MMS or 3G so it sucks”, but honestly, that does not bother me at all. I never use MMS, and on the one or two times that I have, email would probably have sufficed. Also, 3G doesn’t bother me much because Stafford has shocking coverage with Vodafone (who are the best 3G network, apperantly), so….so what?

The phone itself is a nice size, not too big, not too small, but it is a bit heavier compared to the Sony Ericsson W880i that I’ve had. Still, for all the features it has, it’s a good size. The interface is very nice and easy to use, and compared to the tiny keys on the W880i, it’s a dream to type on…even with the on-screen keyboard. I also watched an episode of The Gadget Show on it last night, from Monday, and, it’s a nice screen to watch media on. I used the “Videora iPhone Converter” first, which coverts your videos to work on the iPhone, then you have to sync it, then go to the iPod section, and go to “Movies”, then tap it and you’re set.

Of all the talk about the iPhone on the net, I’ve yet to come across any mention of the sound quality for the phone itself - it’s pretty good. I’ve made a couple of calls with it and for the most part, it actually does have a “stronger” and more bassy sound then the W880i has, when on calls. The SMS feature is also very nice, it’s extremely easy to follow a conversation with the “threaded” view.

I also unlocked it as soon as I got home, because 1) I’m still on Vodafone, and 2) I don’t want to pay for the contract. Using ZiPhone, all you need to do is take it out the box, plug it in, download ZiPhone, unzip it, run it, hit “unlock and jailbreak”, and it’ll do all the work for you. As my phone only had 1.1.2 on it, I also had to upgrade it (to version 1.1.4, which works perfectly), but it should be pretty obvious how to do that.

So far the only issue I’ve found is that I have too much music, I’ve had to not sync some of my albums, as I have around 8.5GB of music. If Apple do indeed release the 3G iPhone, and they have a 32GB or 64GB model, I might just get one of those and then give this one to my dad. 64GB would be a great size for me, as I could load all my music onto it plus quite a bit of video too.

Overall, it’s well worth the £169, so if you haven’t got one, and you live in the UK, get one.

Image from Wikipedia.

It’s a pretty sweet film, I saw it today at the cinema, pretty good plot, good acting, and some rather good camerawork too.

I recommend it. Now, off you go to the cinema.

I ordered 5 HDDVDs off Amazon US. Why? They’re only $11 now, so why not? I’m not paying £24 for Terminator 3 at my local HMV when I can get it imported for $11 plus a bit of postage.

So…all very well. Placed the order on the 20th March, and they finally arrived today. Almost. See, Royal Mail, being the bastards they are, decided to charge me almost £20 in customs fees. So they put a “you owe us money!1!!!11!!1!” card through our door, which says “come and pay us”…so I had to go and get £20 out the ATM in town, then come all the way back to their depot, get the box from Amazon, and come home.

This is the second time I’ve become extremely annoyed with them, as in December they decided to lose my BluRay burner off eBay which I sold - that was a £100 mistake.

I don’t like them anymore.

Before you sue me, Mister Bush, I would encourage you to read this:

Ok, so George “Dubya” Bush is a supposed “war criminal” - gotcha

A purported ex coke addict? - Right.

But please, Oh please George, why did you have to become one of those filthy stinking filesharing pirates? The RIAA would have everyone believe that these pirates are the most evil of the evil people on the planet. Hitler was nothing in comparison to someone sharing the latest Britney Spears album.

The following video is an interview done by Fox news.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb7iOvS7Akc

Wow George, I didn’t realise you could get the Beatles on iTunes.

Oh wait, thats right - you cant, nor can you get them on any legal music downloading platform for that matter.

Also, according to this article by the Washington Post, ripping your own legally purchased CD’s is also against the law.

Guess you can just add that to your list of bad things you’ve done huh?

The above post was found at this site, which, at the moment, is down.

Picture This. It’s one of those things that goes into the “I’ve never heard of it and probably would never watch it but it’s actually awesome” categories. Mark pointed it out to me.

Now, generally, you’d immediately see that it’s a short film (around half and hour long) about snowboarding and think “yawn!”, but don’t. It’s actually one of the best productions I’ve seen in a long time. The photography is simply stunning, and the soundtrack fits in really well, and it’s actually superb if you listen to it seperatly. A lot of it is filmed with a fisheye lens, which, usually, would make it rather rubbish if you overuse it, but they got it just right - not too much, but not too little either.

In fact, I can’t express how much of a good thing it is….you just have to see it. Seriously. Go and see it right now. And listen to the soundtrack. It’s brilliant.

(Click to enlarge)

The amazing soundtrack:
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - 26
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - The Descent
The Ark - One of Us Is Gonna Die Young
Ratatat - Wildcat
Ming & Ping - Beautiful Things
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - Kiss The Sky
Men Without Hats - Pop Goes the World
Junior Boys - In The Morning
Awol One & Daddy Kev - Rhythm
Royksopp - Circuit Breaker
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - Prog Punk

I had a good weekend.

First of all, I went on Saturday to see Cirque Du Soleil’s Delirium, at the Birmingham Indoor Arena. Basically, Delirium is a 2-hour-long show that is basically a music show. It’s a series of acts backed to a soundtrack, and, simply put, it’s amazing. The music is actually very good, and the performance is very good. My favourite part in the whole show was during the song “Cold Flame”, and featured one very talanted performer - she managed to keep about 7 hula-hoops spinning for the whole track, on her arm, foot, body, legs…you name it.

If you can get hold of the soundtrack, it’s quite good too, plus you can hear it, albeit without the visuals and wirthout the awesome sound of the NIA.

The stage is quite large too, I managed to get a photo of it before they told us to turn our phones/cameras off:

I would rate the whole show a 9.5 out of 10, it was that good, and well worth the £55 ticket.

We (I went with dad) also went to Pizza Express before the show, however we timed it a bit badly and ended up getting into the NIA just moments before they started. And we missed desert. So when it finished, at 10pm, we went back to Pizza Express and had a coffee, and I had another garlic bread with mozzarella on it. I like them. They’re tasty.

So, that was Saturday. Sunday was quite fun too, I went to Alton Towers again and managed to get five rides on Air, and about seven rides on the Spinball Wizard. It also started to lightly snow at about 16:45, before we left, which was quite annoying, because for “safety reasons” they said only three people could go on the Spinball Wizard at a time (usually you can fit four people into the car thing). Also, a tip - don’t have a whole 600ml soft drink right before you go on. It’s a bad idea.

Also, they have a new part of the park which is basically a pirate ship type thing, and you have water cannons, so you can wet people who are watching you. One small problem, they have cannons too. It doesn’t seem to be that popular at the moment, because it’s cold, but once it gets warmer I think it’ll become more used.

(Click to enlarge)

So, that was my eventful weekend. Fun eh?

I saw it today. Worst movie ever. I want my £5.90 back.

I got a Canon EOS 400D! Well, strictly speaking it’s my dad’s, since he paid for it, but I went and picked it up from Curry’s yesterday. £394, plus Canon have a £40 rebate on at the moment, so it’s pretty good value.

Only one small problem so far…1) the 8GB memory card I ordered off eBay only arrives on Monday, and 2) I’ll have to borrow our existing 256MB card on the weekend, from the old camera. And I can’t do that until tonight, when dad gets back from Italy. So, last night, and today, I can’t use it.

Ah well…you’ll hopefully see some good photos on my Flickr soon.

I went to Crufts today. Saw lots of dogs and stuff, some of them are absolutely cute as anything, and I saw some of the judging of the Staffordshire Terriers. I also managed to see the mini BBC studio that was setup for their nightly broadcast, they’ve basically got two cameras on tripods, one handheld one (still quite big though), and one boom camera. Interestingly, they’re all fully HD compatible but the BBC aren’t broadcasting it in HD. Which is odd.

I’ll upload some photos to Flickr in a few hours.

After Crufts, I went to see Vantage Point, which is quite a good film - it’s similar in style to Deja Vu…basically, the movie is “replayed” a few times from the same period in time, but from the “vantage point” of different characters. Toward the end they slowly start to merge together though, and the story is pulled off quite well. Overall, I’d give it 7.5/10.

So, that’s pretty much it.

Well, at least my Christmas Present has a bit of a use. The Toshiba player I had came with two free HDDVDs in the box (300, and The Bourne Supremacy), but they also had a mail-in offer to get five free discs.

So, I got them in the post today - Children of Men, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Full Metal Jacket, Swordfish, and World Trade Centre. Free!

So I’ve now got around £175 worth of free discs (that is, if each disc was priced at £25 which most of them are at HMV), and the player cost £180, so…I basically got an HD DVD player for £5. Neat.

It’s cold. It’s bloody cold. In fact, I’m absolutely freezing. I turned the heating on but it doesn’t seem to have made a difference. It’s like there’s some hole in our house that is letting in tons of cold air.

Right now I’m kinda missing the nice warm 34c that Adelaide has today………

I’ve switched.

I was using A Small Orange for my webhosting up until a few days ago, however I’ve switched over to MintHost last week. ASO were very good, and I never had a problem with them, but they were actually quite slow and their plans were a bit expensive. I’m still in the process of getting everything transferred over (I’ve done my account so far but I host a few other people, including my dad’s site, so I need to get them moved over). When I did my blog though, it decided to half blow itself up, eventually giving me tons of errors with my plugins yesterday, so I decided to delete all the files and completely reupload it. It’s pretty simple to do really, all I had to do was redownload WordPress, the theme, and my plugins, then reupload them all and make one small edit. Thankfully it’s all working again now.

So now, for £5 a month, I get 1,000MB of space and 20,000MB of bandwidth. Pretty good price. At least it’s not one of those absurdly insane “750GB OF SPACE FOR $1!!!!!!!” hosts that you often see. I mean come on, overselling much?

Next thing. I was browsing through Last.fm’s events today. I have it set to show London-based stuff as default because even though I don’t live there, they usually have the best stuff. And it’s an excuse to go to London.

Anyway, I came across an upcoming concert in April - Cirque du Soleil’s “Delirium”, which, from the preview on their official site, I would really like to see. It looks spectecular (as is the norm with Cirque du Soleil), and I’ve not been to a concert or anything since around 2001/2002. It’s showing at the O2 Arena on the 18th and 19th of April, at 19:30. Tickets are £51. Hopefully dad can get the Friday or Monday off work, because then we can go down to London by train and see it, because I’d love to go.

And finally, the title of this post will start to make sense now. I got a new chair! I was previously using some random chair of dad’s before, but this new one is a proper office chair - it’s a lot nicer to sit in too. Plus it was a steal at only £23. It’s listed on the Viking Direct (where I got it from) website as being £45, but Fr3d managed to find a link to get it cheaper, so him, myself, and Acksaw got one (we were discussing it on IRC). Here’s a photo of it:

That is all.

Woot. So, I came across this post on Jase’s blog, outlining how to make your Wordpress blog automatically detect if an iPhone or iPod touch is visiting. So now, if you visit my blawg from one of those devices it’ll look sexy and load quickly. Like this:

(Thanks to Jase for the screenshot, too. )

So, that’s the compatilibity issue sorted out. Now, I’m also thinking of creating a nice little Webclip for my blog. What is a webclip? It’s a small PNG image that the iPhone will use as an image…..more info here (click the “Create a Web Clip Bookmark Icon” option).

Neat, eh?

Got a PS3 in the UK, or Australia, or any other non-US country? Here’s a neat trick. Go and make yourself a new “user” on the system, and name it “USA” or something so you know what it is. Then, sign up again for the PlayStation Network, but this time, use a US-based address and pretend you’re in the US. You’ll also need a different email to your main UK account, but once you’ve signed up, you’ll get access to the PlayStation US Store.

Big deal? Yep. There are tons of extra video clips and developer videos and game demos and such - in the UK, we’ve only just got the “Conflict: Denied Ops” trailers, but the US store has the demo too. Burnout Paradise? There are developer videos and a few extra trailers which the UK doesn’t have. There’s also a demo of Nascar that I’m downloading, as well as a whole host of movie trailers and so on that are not yet on the UK store. Honestly, it’s worth doing so for the demos alone, and it won’t cost you a single cent unless you buy something.

Try it. You won’t be disappointed.

Sunday night. Ordered shopping online.

Monday. Delivered. Driver asks how old I am, I say 16, so he says “you have to be 18 to accept delivery” (I was the only person in). There’s no wine or anything in the order, so I thought, like, what the hell.

Monday night. Dad called them up to arrange redelivery.

Tuesday. Different driver arrives, parents are out again, gives me the shopping with no questions asked.

Like, make up your mind Tesco. And why do I have to be 18 to accept a few bags of food that has been paid for, and yet I can drive a possibly lethal car at the age of 17. Stupid, eh?

Got it on PS3. It’s pretty darn sweet actually, the graphics are awesome. I do feel it has some issues, but for the most part it’s a pretty darn good game. Well worth the £40 (ouch!) I paid for it.

If you’ve got a PS3 and want to play with me, my PSN ID is “WilliamTM”.

Our digital camera has been to Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and Switzerland.