Hamarana

They are gone. For the first time in weeks, the neighbourhood is not ringing to the cries of annoyed or distressed plovers. For the first time in weeks, the evenings are silent.

The plovers are gone. Why? I have no idea. I suspect Mr N.D. did something to the nest, or the grey cat I scared off the other night came back and killed one of them. Either way, they are gone.

[Edit: July 1] Well, Plovers are back in the street, but the nest is permanently destroyed. Alas, and plovers being what they are, they are now nesting on a driveway two doors down. Go figure.

No, I did not do this, found at Pixdaus.

Go visit the Pixdaus website, lots of amazing bits and pieces. And some very decent photography.

Well well well, I don’t quite know how this has happened, but Zibri has managed to get a hold of one of the new iPhones and commenced work on patching and unlocking the baseband. Which, it seemed, he managed to get done in record time. This means that V2 of the firmware *and* the new iPhone will be unlockable.

What this means in real terms I am not sure. Perhaps the phone will be usable on any network. On the other hand if the phone is not available except on contract, the only use for an unlock will be to get at 3rd party applications not available on the App Store. And I know a lot of the devs are stopping free software now and starting to charge for it, so there might not be that much available at first.

However: If you can get a prepaid iPhone 3G, its probably going to be only marginally more expensive than a contracted one (expect under $300… if its more, its gouging) and then you can unlock it… well… all I can say is… OH YESSS PLEASE!

[edit] On the other hand, Vodafone Italy is going to be selling it as a prepaid and the prices they are quoting are huge. 499 euros for the 8G which equates roughly to $AU817 on todays exchange rate. That is too much. But perhaps Voda australia and Optus won’t charge that much (yes, they will be doing it as a prepaid as well). maybe?

I’ve just set up a new application on Facebook (damn that place can get addictive, just trawling through the apps)… and what it does is post your blog posts into your Facebook profile, using an RSS feed. The full text (including pix and links) will show up on a click of the title, but still within Facebook. It seems pretty decent, really, and links to here at Hamarana can be got via that page… my Flog

So I’ve now set Hamarana up to ping FlogBlog and hopefully its going to show up there shortly.

That is all. For now.

Well, its looking like Apple has managed to close the loophole which allowed most of us to acquire our iPhones in the past. When this version is released, at least in the USA, it is going to be mandatory for the account with the provider to be activated in the store. So, no more “home activation” and no more online purchases which would have allowed a lot of fiddling.

I don’t know how it will be dealt with in Australia, but I imagine the same kind of thing will occur.

So, there we have it. I won’t be owning a 3G iPhone until/unless it ends up on a prepaid service I can or will use.

Well, Aussies and others can now get the iPhone with warranty within their own country. I dont know what deals Aple has cooked up in other lands, but here, it seems the iPhone will only be available via Optus and Vodafone (Voda doesnt seem to have any option to preorder, its not even mentioned on site yet). Its advertised in the Apple store but any effort to buy online is redirected to a page which tells you to go to Optus and Voda.

The phone is supposed to be sold worldwide for $199 (8G version, in USD) so that means it will be less than half the price I paid for my first gen iPhone last August. It will be released on July 11.

Am I going to get one? probably not. I wouldn’t mind having it but not at the cost of having to go on a contract. If its available outright I will reconsider and only if the hackers have managed to do their work on the firmware, because I refuse to be locked into any one network, and most certainly not for 2 years at a time. I am a dedicated prepaid user who moves from one network to another according to my calling patterns and usage at any given time. Currently I am on Telstra, because its prepaid suits my current habits.

iPhone is a darn good phone, and a hellishly entertaining toy. If you are already contracted to Optus or Vodafone and don’t mind being there for longer, and are in need of a new phone, you might want to give the iPhone some consideration. It is 3G, and it has a lot more going for it than the old one. And, well, its cheap.

Features in brief:
3G, A-GPS, Microsoft Exchange Activesync, the App Store, push email, push calendar, integration is crossplatform (OSX and Windows anyway) with MobileMe (the dotMac replacement) and your desktop and/or laptop. Other features are similar to old iPhone. Go read if you want to know.

Knock yerselves out.

Reading in my WordPress Dashboard this morning I found a reference to Typepad antispam which is based on the Akismet code. There is a plugin for WordPress and I have now installed that and disabled Akismet again. I don’t know if they use the same spammer database but hopefully they dont, and G & J will now no longer have “issues” when they post comments.

If you want to use this instead of Akismet, you will need a typekey account (I had one already) and you will then need to use the API key you can get with that account, to fully install TP-AS.

Looking forward to testing it out