Phone upgrade nuisances

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Before I get into the full swing of this post. Happy 2012 to you all and I hope it was a happy, safe and profitable Christmas and New Year season. Certainly was here!

But now, onto the subject of the blog, which is above. Not going to retype it here I’d just be repeating myself! Back in November of 2011 I upgraded my cellphone as my service contract was coming to a close and I was offered a discount on a new handset to re-sign with my current provider. Stupid not to really when you consider the discount was pretty significant. I re-signed and walked out of my local providers shop with a shiny new iPhone 4S. Pretty nice considering my old phone, the iPhone 3GS, was getting a little long in the tooth and iOS 5 was getting a bit slow and crabby on it. After a couple of hassles transferring number from SIM to SIM (since the 4S uses micro-SIM modules and my old 3GS uses a standard SIM) my new toy was all working nicely and I remember sitting there drooling over the sheer speed of it.

Then came the pain.

I managed to pull most of everything from the old 3GS to the new 4S doing a restore via iCloud. Contacts and misc settings came across no problems along with wallpapers and apps from the app store all re-downloaded without too much fuss. Just took some time. You’re probably wondering where the pain comes in, because all that there sounds nice and easy and you probably now want to hit me for being a whiny bitch about it. The pain comes in the form of transferring over information for apps used for things like Two-Factor Authentication. Apps like Google Authenticator and Blizzard Authenticator dropped their info. I only found this out after I went to use them about a week after I’d gotten my new phone and the old one had gone into a drawer somewhere to await a new life as a test unit for a few ideas I have in my head. What ensued was an hour or so finding my old phone, getting all the appropriate restore codes and such to move the tokens over to my new phone.

Such is the world of a smartphone user now I guess. Gone are the days of just swapping SIM module and carrying on. So much data gets stored on the phone itself that you have to be careful with everything and if you’re on-selling old gear, you have to make sure it’s properly “restored to factory” lest you become a target for identity theft. And make sure before you begin to swap to a new phone you note down any restore codes for authentication token apps. It’ll probably save you a lot of pain and frustration later.

“Tis the season, to drain power …

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… CHING CHING CHING CHING CHING, CHING CHING CHING CHING!”

At least that’s how it goes to the power companies.

It’s that time of year again. The time of year when apparently everyone in town suddenly loses half their brain cells and runs around in a mad tizzy getting everything for loved ones and near and dear. The time of year where every shop is packed to the gills with people spending up large (nor not large in my case) and I’m rushed off my feet at work because of them. Sorry about that. It’s part the reason why I’ve been neglecting this site a little.

The title of this blog and resulting first line however is not about shopping, it’s about one aspect of the season I love and adore. Lights. I love the shows of creativity and festivity … and other words that end in ~ivity associated with it all. Some do something small, but some folks around here really go to town. Walk in displays, cherry pickers, and in one case even the dog was in on it! Some out there to try gather donations for the less privileged, others out to just put a show on for us all.

How much do I love it? Enough to bust a video out!

So to all who read me, Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Also, if Santa’s late, it’s because he set the burglar alarm off. Again.

Weekend In The Contactable Boonies

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And somehow, I have mobile broadband. This is despite being in the middle of BF nowhere. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Can we get more usage though, networks? Please?

But as the title says I’m taking a weekend away from it all to relax after a long run at work, though a lot of it has also been working as well (Just can’t seem to escape it at the moment). For some strange reason I find it relaxing to do other work away from the usual monotony of my day job, so I’ve been offering my services and knowledge of audio systems and production values to the NZ furry convention, FurCoNZ, of which I also provide web/email/DNS hosting for. Yep. Three days of minimal sleep and a whole bunch of fun and excitement along with a chance to try out a new thing or two when it comes to video and audio. If there’s something new I’ve discovered how to do throughout the year this is one of the two times I’ll usually get to practice it and put it to use.

It’s also a time I can use (when I’m not doing things for the event) to rest up, relax, and shut the world off. Well, that should be more I could do that. Since upgrading to the iPhone 4S as my workhorse mobile device, I’m now contactable in the one place I was really hoping I could be left alone.

Ah well. Gotta take the good with the bad sometimes I guess. I’ll more than likely update a bit more once I return home from the insanity. Till then, peace.

Review: Russian Dancing Men on iOS

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Something I used to do a fair amount was review things on my old blog. On that one, I only really reviewed new musical things I’d just acquired. I think it’s time to expand that and what better way of doing that then combining a few loves in my life. My iPhone, gaming, and cartoons from Weebl’s Stuff.

Lets hope I don’t bollocks it up.

"Lookit mah horse ..."

Russian Dancing Men on iOS (in this case, my iPhone 3GS) is a game based around not just the Russian Dancing Men cartoon from the aforementioned source, but a lot of the other cartoons as well (such as Narwhals, Magical Trevor and those god forsaken Badger Badger Badgers). You must guide your band of dancing Russians over various types of hurdles, loop-de-loops, chasms and spiky things, and even combinations two types of obstacle, such as a loop with a hurdle in the middle of it. As you clear obstacles points are awarded as usual fare for this kind of thing, but as you chain together successful clearing of obstacles, you slowly build up more dancers, and the more you have the bigger your score climbs, and of course you get more points for timing your obstacle clearing with the beat of the music. Sounds pretty simple, especially for someone like myself who just about knows all the different Weebl’s toon songs off by heart. It’s not so. The tracks are remade and lengthened slightly for decent levels, and there’s a few quirks that I was not expecting bringing some surprise into the fray … and a few swearwords when my last dancing man has a run-in with a spiky thing I wasn’t anticipating.

Dance Completion!

The integration with iOS’s Game Centre in the forms of high score leader boards and a good smattering of achievements for finishing both levels and the game on Normal and Hard difficulties to give a bit of challenge. There’s also power-up downloadable content available for those having problems with a particular stage. With all games though it’s not all pretty pictures and praise all around. On the iPhone the buttons to clear particular obstacles sometimes didn’t respond, and with me having big heavy man-thumbs I found the small size of them a bit fumbly especially when the speed picked up. I suspect this would be a bit better on the iPad rather than the iPhone but unfortunately I haven’t got one to try it out. I was also a bit disappointed in the lack of songs in there given the incredible amount of comedic toon music available at Weebl’s. I’m hoping for a DLC soon of more tracks. Bit of Cat Face or Parsley Boobs maybe?

All in all I’m giving the game a 3/5 on the iPhone/iPod Touch. It feels like this game would be more suited to iPad, and more tracks initially would’ve been nice.

Cutting The Choke

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I’ve never been a huge rugby nut. I understand that the ball must be passed to the rear, you can’t tackle a ball-carrier too high, and that you can’t really give someone a boot to the face intentionally (not that it stops some players), but the game’s never really caught my fancy. So why is it that I care so much about a particular rugby game happening tomorrow?

I’m indeed talking about the 2011 Rugby World Cup final being held here in little old New Zealand. The country I’m proud to call home. New Zealand versus France in what’s looking to be a pretty epic match up. Yeah we came across the french during the pool play stages of the tournament, and rather ceremoniously mashed their faces right into the turf of Eden Park, so we can surely do the same if not better tomorrow night. Could be wrong. Looking back at the track record we have against the Frogs, we usually beat the ever-loving cheese out of them, except when it comes to the World Cup for some strange reason. Every sporting team in the world has their “bogey” as such. For us that seems to be the French at the World Cup. That’s not the whole reason NZ hasn’t held it since the first world cup in 1987.

A lot of it is down to one thing we know fondly know as the “Choke”. Almost every major rugby playing nation, NZ outside of the world cup has soundly beaten the snot out of. It seems to be that when a big prize is at stake, in this case the Webb Ellis trophy, we lose sight of the bigger picture or we play a smashing game … until the very end and the opponents capitalise. It’s not just the Rugby though. Netball, Cricket, League, it all happens for some reason. We have beaten them all before, but when it comes to the punch we seem to pee our pants and run home crying to Mummy and Daddy!

But that’s the past though. Right now I have every confidence in the current All Blacks side. Weepu’s kicking is fantastic, Cruden (Who should’ve been in there in the first place over Slade) is making headlines stepping in at #10 for the injured Dan Carter, team cohesion is solid and they showed against Australia last week the kind of plays that win world cups.

To that effect, I am standing in black. GO THE ALL BLACKS!

How do you kick off a reboot of an old blog?

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Well, much like this I think. You make a posting about something.

Being more geek than average human around these parts (trust me, it’s better than being the average human around here) my finger is pretty well attuned to the pulse of the technological world. The big news in that avenue lately of course is the passings of two icons – one a bit more prolific than the other by a rather large margin. I’m of course talking about one Steve Jobs and another one Dennis Ritchie, to both of which I feel I owe a lot.

Steve’s vision and drive to make the computer user friendly instead of an unwieldy leviathan reserved for military brainboxes and those that actually had more brain cells than they did teeth is what led to the first computer I got my mits on at an early age. The Mac SE/20. Looked kinda like the one in the shot beside this paragraph, but had it’s own internal hard drive AND floppy drive opposed to just a floppy drive. I still flash back to the 12 hour marathons of games like Crystal Quest and the days of faffing around in MacPaint, that is until it gave up the ghost and the CRT tube made a noise, went black, and then gave up a puff of that all knowing magic blue smoke. Dead computer was … well dead. Since then though, my old iPod kept me sane to and from work for years, until I tanked the logic board with a miswired firewire port (Whoops!), my iPhone still serves me well, and my new MacBook Air? Well that has more processing power than my desktop and uses … a lot less on the power front. The hours of enjoyment from Pixar films still remain with me, and I hope for many more. So does my 6 year old niece for that matter! He didn’t invent much, but what he did was make existing inventions user friendly, accessible, and life changing.

Dennis on the other hand, wasn’t as well known as our old pal Steve. Far from it to be precise. But the work he did, made it possible for Steve and many other IT innovators to do what they do/did in the case of the now late Steve. Dennis was a key developer of UNIX, which is used as the backend to Mac OS X and iOS. Further more, without UNIX, we would not have like-UNIX spinoffs like Linux and BSD (BSD being practically identical). He invented the high-level programming language of C, which is leveraged by so many to create the software to easily drive the modern computer. Unfortunately, the passing of this computing legend was not as well reported as was Steve Jobs. Many do believe he was worthy of just as much coverage, and to be perfectly honest, I’m one of them. Without his work, we would not have Linux or even 10% of the tools I use today to do what it is I do.

So to you both, Dennis Ritchie, and Steve Jobs, thank you, and enjoy your well earned rest, in peace.