IT Werkz Sometimes

Eventually sold the iPhone on eBay for a reasonable price. The winner wanted to pick up the iPhone in person, no doubt to check the condition etc. Anyway he was happy.

The previous sale where the purchaser, who on receipt of the iPhone, demanded a $70 refund, was cancelled by myself and I’ve just noticed that eBay/Paypal have billed me 10% of the orginal selling price. When I queried it via email they just pointed me at the terms and conditions. I responded that they hadn’t answered my original email question and again they responded by pointing at their T’s & C’s. I then noticed that they also charged me a further $100 for god knows what else. The only other item I’ve sold on eBay was a 160gb iPod, which sold for $200. No doubt their justification for taking half the sale money is buried in their T’s & C’s. eBay/Payapl are definitely not to be trusted when selling stuff. In fact I’d go so far as to say that Paypal, who has control over my account, is acting just like any other bank, usual trick and trap stuff.

I was trying to measure a room with a laser measure, where you point the laser beam at the other end of the room and the display shows the distance away the wall is. I tried it a few times, with a far wall and all I got were wrong figures. So I tried switching from centimetres to feet and when pointed it at a wall 20 feet away it said it was about 4 feet away. Tried it with much closer walls or objects and it did seem to display correct distances. Tried with longer distances and again it was out by a magnitude. More digital junk that hasn’t been tested very well.

I got some Altec Lansing stereo Bluetooth headphones from the Apple Store the other day and they worked. When I originally asked about them in the store I was, as usual, shown Bluetooth headsets, which were for phone usage only, but when I persevered with someone slightly more senior he did show me those that I eventually bought. When I asked did they actually pair with an iPhone and playback stereo he said they had just come in and no one had bought any yet. Turned out that pairing was no problem, though many people would get confused by how to do it as it is a bit clunky. You have no idea whether the headphones are switched on or off as there is no on light displayed, I assume to preserve battery life. You actually have to press the on/off button for 4 seconds to see whether it switches itself on – blue light is momentarily lit, or it switches itself off – red light is momentarily lit. If you do have to switch it on then you need to connect to it from the iPhone from the Bluetooth software settings and then it’ll play back OK. In fact it plays back really well, but the on/off & connect & pair processes are messy.

Quote from Field Of Dreams “If you build it…they will come”
Moto for new Internet startups “Quick, they’re coming. Build something”.

Installed some Facebook thing the other day and I can’t even remember whether it’s a plug-in for FB, an iPhone app or an app for Windows/Outlook, but the net effect is that all of my addresses on the iPhone are duplicated. Terrific.

I also noticed that Outlook actually had no addresses in Contacts, but that there were contact folders for Facebook male friends, Facebook female friends and, I think, Facebook all friends. In those folders were Facebook contacts that were of the relevant sex. I assume the app has a look at the profile of the FB user and checks the sex field where the sex has been entered. Anyway I did something with Outlook Contacts and they reappeared like magic (But what did you do? Ed). Now I have this tedious duplicates addresses issue on the iPhone. I better uninstall something but heaven knows what.

I’m going to see if I can download a demo version of Novell’s Zenworks to see if I can get my ahead around how that works. Also need to get a new version of Auction Sentry and a demo version of QueueExplorer.

Later: I downloaded Auction Sentry with no problem and also QueueExplorer, which I fired up but of course there were no queues lurking about so that got a bit upset. I had a look at Zenworks, and my oh my, that is a big download. Also doesn’t look very easy to setup so I stalled on that.

I’ve been updating my resume, because it’s been a bit of a disaster area for a couple of years, and now it’s starting to look ok. Not so much a resume as full-on advert.

I’ve been playing around with Twitter in the last couple of days since I read in the paper that it is the latest in a long line of the ‘latest great thing’. I’ve had a Twitter account for about a year but I never really got it. Not sure if I do now, but we’ll press on.

All Twitter is, to me anyway, is your current Facebook status, with absolutely nothing else cluttering up the client which makes it a bit of not much when run on a PC with a large screen and a couple of pathetic messages hiding away on a corner of the screen. On the iPhone it looks a lot better. Of course on FB I only update the status once a day or even once a week. With Twitter you’re supposed to twitter away about anything. What I do is just update when I have something to say, like some software failing miserably or even some success with software.

I’ve also been using an iPhone app called Ziibii which sort of converges Facebook and Twitter as well as Flickr, Youtube and RSS feeds and displays the result as story headlines flowing along a river. No kidding. Anyway it works quite well. I’ve used the FB, Twitter and Flickr accounts and added a couple of RSS feeds and it looks good.

The problem with this app like all non-Apple written apps is that it can only be run as a foreground task. When it is run then you get updates to all of the accounts or feeds. Typical pull stuff. What would be better, and I’m sure it’s due from Apple, is the ability for the apps to have data pushed to them and for the app to have the ability to run some code in the background to display a number against the apps icon showing the total number of items downloaded via a data push, then the iPhone user would be aware of new data having arrived via a number displayed against the apps icons to denote the number of accounts or feeds that have been updated. This functionality is currently enabled with the iPhones voicemail, email and SMS.

Of course if push was let loose and all of my relevant apps – Facebook, Byline, Brightkite, football apps, currency apps, eBay, Joost, Newsdesk, Netnewswire, Linkedin and lord knows what else – were changed to pick up the pushed data my iPhone would look like a Christmas tree blinking away like billy-o. And the battery wouldn’t last long either.