So after a month of waiting and constantly refreshing the Apple Store order tracking website, I finally received my iPhone 4.
What a piece of hardware.
The design is amazing, the Retina display is even better than I thought it would be, the battery life is way longer than my previous 3G and the performance just rocks.
Honestly, the reception issues are visible in the (buggy?) signal meter but I could not actually feel any performance degradation on both calls and data usage.
One thing though. The idea of cutting my SIM card to fit into the iPhone 4's micro sim card tray was not pleasant at all.
In an interconnected world, the idea of damaging my SIM and having to ask and wait for another one freaks me out.
As I could not find any example of a T-Mobile UK cut SIM card, here's my notes on how to cut your own sim mod(have a look at the pics in the bottom):
- Have a good look at the picture at the bottom of the article
- Place your SIM card so that the cut corner is on the top-left
- Observe the horizontal, parallel continuous lines on the SIM circuit
- Put the tray on top of the SIM card and align it so that the SIM circuit does not seem outside of the tray area
- While the tray is on top the SIM card, align it with the bottom of the card so that the circuit horizontal, parallel continuous lines appear inside the tray area
- With a sharp knife (I used a swiss army knife) and a ruler, mark a line at the right bit of the SIM card plastic 1mm after the circuit.
- Mark a line at the bottom of the card, very very close to the circuit
- Take a deep breath and with a scissor cut the SIM card along the marked lines
- Round the new (bottom-right) edge by cutting a very small bit of it
- Have a look at it, make sure it looks good enough to continue
- Mark a line at the top of the SIM card plastic, 1mm after the circuit
- Cut the the marked line with the scissor
- Round the new (top-right) edge by cutting a very small bit of it
- At this point, you can attempt to fit part of the card into the iPhone's tray
- Look at the SIM circuit inside the tray and observe if the horizontal parallel continuous circuit lines appear inside the tray
- If you need to adjust it, try to cut any excess plastic in the bottom of the card
- Once you managed to partially fit the SIM card into the tray, confirm, again that the horizontal parallel continuous circuit lines appear inside the tray
- Go ahead and mark a line in the left part of the SIM card, 1mm after the circuit
- Cut the edge of the top-left corner of the card, 1mm after the circuit
- At this point you can attempt to place it into the tray
- Should any adjustment be needed, just file the excess plastic and constantly attempt to fit it
This worked flawlessly for me.
The 'No SIM card installed' message immediately disappeared once I popped it into the iPhone.
There's always nice and not so nice surprises when you upgrade your OSes.
If you just upgraded your shiny eeepc 1005HA to Canonical's latest and greatest Lucid Lynx, you probably have noticed that, annoyingly, the sound volume Fn keys are now dead.
At first I thought that they just weren't mapped any more, but after running xev and hitting the flawed keys for a while, I concluded that they were actually not active at all.
My next step was to try and load the eeepc-laptop module, which modinfo's description is "Eee PC Hotkey Driver" and that did nothing but complain:
$ sudo modprobe eeepc_laptop
FATAL: Error inserting eeepc_laptop (/lib/modules/2.6.32-9-generic/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/eeepc-laptop.ko): No such device
Apparently the kernel is ignoring some fn key acpi events on this version. The fix for this is to append some acpi boot options on grub as described here.
In a nutshell, the quick and dirty fix is pretty much:
$ sudo vim /etc/default/grub
Append the acpi options to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT var, mine looks like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"
Finalise it by forcing ubuntu to accept the grub configuration change:
$ sudo update-grub
Everything should be rocking (depending how loud or not you rock) after a reboot.
I'm a huge fan of the Boxee "social" media center and have been using it almost since it got out.
XBMC did a great job for years running on my now deceased, modified, abused, original Xbox (remember the days when the term jailbreak did not exist?). The luxury of playing SMB/CIFS mounted media on TV from that do-everything headless Linux box is something I consider a basic need (almost next to water), really.
Boxee runs great on any intel Mac (it's also great on Linux and Windows they say) and it definitely does not disappoint on a Mac Mini. It does have its bugs and annoyances, but most you can live with, especially because I'm sure the cool cats at the Boxee HQ are working hard to kill them all (\m/).
Perhaps the biggest annoyance of them all is the fact that Apple, or His Highness El Steve, silently decided that from OSX 10.6.2 everybody would have to buy the new, 2nd generation Apple Remote.
And what an Epic What The Fuck Moment (tm) it was when I updated the Mini to 10.6.2 and was convinced that my Bose Remote stopped working. Then, after finding my 1st gen Apple Remote in the middle of nowhere (these things have legs, lots of them) and being totally convinced the Mini's infrared receiver was
dead, I decided to google for "10.6.2 remote".
Where there's Google there's hope and the value-added solution is Candelair. Free, simple and problem solving.
Speaking of the Bose Remote, I've configured mine to control Boxee.
Controlling Boxee with the Bose Remote is quite easy. If you have a V-class Bose Lifestyle entertainment system, this will work just fine if you:
- Press the "System" button on the Bose Remote
- Select the "Remote Control" section on your screen
- Select your Boxee connected source (I use DVD)
- Set "DVD Device" to "Music Player"
- Set "DVD Brand" to "Apple"
- Set "DVD Code" to "1115"
- Don't forget to point the Bose infrared emitter to the Mini
- Select "Star Wars Episode V" from the Movies section and then press the "Play" button
If you feel annoyed by the fact that pressing the "Menu" button can still sometimes open Front Row in the middle of some Boxee browsing, the easiest thing to do is to move/rename it from /System/Library/CoreServices/.
Right.
I know I just came back from the pub, but my iPhone seems to have been sipping on those pints of Guinness (2 of them, really) I had.
Alcohol and iPhones seem to combine into a form of non existant service with 3G. Weird.
The Portuguese are well known for their discoveries around the world. Today, it looks like some (a whole lot) of us are still doing it, except that this time in a 21st century way.
That's right, have a quick look at The Star Tracker Talent Map where you can see that we are pretty much everywhere. I personally have friends and family around London, Dublin, New York, Praia (Cape Verde), Macau, Luanda, Salvador da Bahia, Berlin, Brussels and the Moon.
There is at least one thing in common with the old days back in the 15th and 16th centuries: going back home. Thankfully, today we don't need to go back home by boat at 600 baud rate speed just to hear the latest news.
Today, we have transoceanic terabit internet pipes.
Today, sorting and finding information is a (hell of a) business.
Today, more than ever, we have Sens-O-Matic^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HiPhone devices constantly connected to Sub-Etha^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe internet.
Today, we seem to make a big deal out of privacy but it is not really that hard to find what you've done last Summer^H^H^H^H^Haturday.
Today, everybody knows that all we need is a data plan but the Telecoms seem to want to dictate^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfool you with voice plans.
Tomorrow, we will all have internet connected ponytails (Avatar won't play on 3D TV's 'cause they won't exist and I seriously doubt my hair will be as long as it used to be).
Keeping in touch these days is easy. Most use Skype (please, email is a technology from the 70's). Some are a bit more adventurous: they run their own PBX software at home and have bought a Portuguese phone number on Startel and receive free calls from family and friends all the time. As Telecoms slowly open their mobile gates to the internet, some even use SIP software on their pocket iDevices (be careful, Telecoms don't like that).
The news are not considered news if they're not on the internet. Still, it's quite hard to find a decent Portuguese TV stream. SIC Noticias can sometimes be seen on Sapo XL, TV Tuga and if you're feeling lucky, on Justin.tv.
TVI also seems to have a news channel now, TVI24. I've noticed that it usually only plays live news as the rest seems to be blocked for legal reasons (who cares, it's mostly crap anyway!).
When it comes to online, decent news, my first choice has always been Público, a quality source of less horrible and sad news that seem to torment the country for the last years. There's obviously a great deal of other sources but I really find myself browsing Altifalante almost daily just for the sake of its simplicity and the fact that you can eyeball most news in a matter of minutes. Not to mention that twitter has still to release their trends page for Portugal and Altifalante also does a fairly good job on providing these (how come José Sócrates is not there? *grin*).
SAPO's SAPO News iPhone app also helps following the latest and greatest news just by browsing newspaper and magazine covers. Give it a try.
Now that PrintScreen is gone, the main source for geeky Portuguese news is definitely Planet Geek. No geek survives without those.
As life is not complete without a little sport(ing) and SportTV does not have (will they ever?) anything like Sky Player, there's probably nothing wrong when searching for live match streams on nuestros hermanos' excellent Roja Directa or just by browsing sport channels on Veetle. Their quality is so good, it should be considered legal!