Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Playin' Games

Last night I played a side-scrolling flying game (Aera) on my iPhone until the battery gave a 20 percent warning. It must have been a good game!

Then I played on the Nintendo DS Lite for over an hour. Usually I get bored with Nintendo games quite quickly, but I was playing a 3D Duke Nukem GBA (GameBoy Advance) game.

Saturday, October 03, 2009

An update

Well I'm back (from where, cyber-wise, I've been instructed not to tell).

Much has changed since I last blogged here. Around a year ago I bought an iPhone 3G. This was after advising a friend in South Africa not to get one, but I was more concerned that he was going to get mugged, especially as he has already had several cellphones stolen.

I've also Jailbroken the iPhone, initially for some of the themes offered by Winterboard, but now I use apps which are simply not available from the Apps Store: SBSettings and mAdvLock. SBSettings allows me to quickly toggle Wi-Fi on or off, or reboot the iPhone. It also hides Apps - like the standard Stocks app which I'm just not wanting to see.



- Posted from my iPhone

Friday, April 17, 2009

All a Twitter

"Hey there! Oprah is using Twitter!" reads the heading on OprahTwitter.com.

Good or bad?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

No App Store for my Touch

I'm delaying upgrading my iPod Touch to use the Apple App store. Instead, several weeks back I ran a "jailbreak" on the Touch, and I've been loading it up with applications including an eBook Reader, File Manager, Unit Converter and Dictionary with thesaurus among many others, and all free.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Tech Bargain!

When I recently bought a Dell computer (as an early birthday present), I got an extra $200 off the price with a discount coupon from TechBargains.com. It is not the first time I've used a discount coupon from them, the last time was for a PSP game. Thanks TechBargains!

Monday, February 18, 2008

Tale of two Wi-Fis

Okay, so I've got my hands on two gadgets. The first is a Nokia N800 Internet tablet, and the second is the Archos 605 WiFi. They both have wireless capabilities and great 800 by 480 pixel touch screens, but that is where the similarities begin to end.

Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

Firstly the Nokia N800 is not a cellphone. It does a lot of things, but its main function is to browse the internet. Now, there are a number of devices which do this, but the N800 has a web browsing experience which is closer to a desktop PC than I've ever seen on a handheld device.

The Archos 605 WiFi is a media player. It is a bit of a stretch to call it a handheld media player, but it is portable enough to carry around if you have big pockets. It also does a lot of things, but its main purpose is a multi-format video player.

Now for my Wi-Fi problem. The Nokia N800 hopped onto my home wireless network as easy as a wireless Pocket PC. The Archos 605 is another story. I have been trying for weeks to get this thing to connect to my home wireless network, but no dice. It sees my neighbor's wireless networks, both the open and encrypted ones, but not mine. To test it I even briefly connected to a neighbor's wireless access point (sorry, default, it was for less than a minute). That worked. I tried disabling all security on my wireless router, but that did not work.

Hopefully, someday soon I will get the wireless working. Until then at least I can still use the Archos 605 to watch videos I guess. Fortunately I have no desire to buy videos from the Archos Content Portal, otherwise I wouldn't be happy. It would be nice to use the other wireless features of the Archos 605 though.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Missed the List

Well, I seem to have missed the opportunity to give my Top 5+ List of 2007, since 2008 is well on its way, but here are a couple of the tech gadgets I'll hopefully be using throughout 2008:

The Asus Eee PC Notebook - a micro-notebook the size of a paperback novel running Linux. It has one of the easiest Desktop User Interfaces I've ever seen on Linux. Three USB ports allow attaching everything from external DVD drives and hard drives to printers and USB flash drives. The 4GB Solid State Drive makes for fast and silent start up, running and shutdowns. It comes with driver to install Windows XP, but that would really be a waste.

Apple iPod Touch - an amazing device - listen to music, watch videos on its widescreen, browse the Internet or watch clips on the YouTube channel via Wi-Fi. Now with the addition of Google Maps, and email client and a Notebook app this is on its way to becoming a useful handheld as well.