Finally got an iPhone

“Dear Mr Jobs, your work here is now done, it’s taking 2 years for me to fully make the transition to Apple, however my quest is now complete, and apologies for taking so long…”

If I was writing a letter to Steve Jobs, it would go something like that

Well, my journey started a couple of years ago, with a iPod Shuffle, then iPod Touch, then MacBook Pro, then iMac and finally I’ve got a iPhone.

Every device I’ve bought from Apple has wow’d me in 1 way or another, and they “just work”

I’ve been fighting getting an iPhone but I just couldn’t wait any longer. The last year has been a bit of a roller coaster to be honest. I remember reading tech blogs saying that o2 were due to loose their exclusivity. Then there were reports that Orange would be selling the iPhone, and even Tesco, but no sign from Vodafone. Then finally Vodafone jumped on the bandwagon, and finally started to sell the iPhone.

As I’ve been with Vodafone for as long as I can remember, I wanted to stick with them. My plan was to wait for them to release the phone, then buy a pay as you go version, stick my sim card in this, and wait for you contract to run out, however…..Vodafone for some reason don’t want to do a Pay as you go version ?

Anyway, my contract ran out in January, and though “Well, the next gereneration iPhone will be out in a couple of months, so I can wait. After reading some recent tech blogs, it seems that the new iPhone HD won’t be officially announced until the next WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) (Monday, June 28, 2010 to Friday July 2, 2010), and each time a new phone is announced, there is normally another month delay….Grrr !

So I made the decision and bought an iPhone 3GS from fleabay, use this until the new phone is out, then extend my contract, and stick it back on fleabay

I think I got myself a bargain, Brand New Sealed, Black, 3GS, 16Gb for £420 delivered, and on Thursday it turned up !.

Now I’ve been a iPod Touch owner for a couple of years now, but the iPhone takes it that one step further, granted my iThingy now makes calls, is able to send texts, and works without being on wi-fi, but it’s the other little thing that really do it for me. The location service is something that only kinda worked on the iPod touch, it’s nice to “select my location” and have everything map to me, and not the local exchange.

Another thing I’ve noticed is the speed difference !….Geez this thing is quick in comparison to my iPod Touch 2G, browsing, gaming, and well everything is just a lot quicker.

I so wish I’d taken the plunge a couple of years ago when they first came out, Love it !

Unboxing photos below, and again hats off to a designers for making the box look so cool !

Tags: 3gs, apologies, Apple, bandwagon, bargain brand, Brand New, contract, couple, dear mr, everything, exclusivity, Fleabay, HD, iphone, ipod, ipod shuffle, ipod touch, jobs, journey, letter, location, Mr Jobs, pay, phone, quest, roller coaster, sim card, something, Steve Jobs, Tech, Tesco, thing, touch, transition, version, vodafone, work, world wide developers conference, writing a letter, wwdc

ScutterCast

Apologies for no posts for a while, however I’ve been mad busy on one of my other projects.

About a month ago, myself and a couple of my resident posters over at Red Dwarf Forum decided it was time to do a Red Dwarf based podcast. We’ve been discussing who will do it, what we’ll talk about for a while, and last Monday we recorded the first episode.

The podcast itself took about 5/6 hours to edit together, which for me was quite good, as I’m still quite new to all this podcasting stuff.

Below is the software I’ve used to put the whole thing together, there are probably a lot quicker and smarter ways, but open to suggestions

Initial recording was done using skype, and a piece of software on the mac called “Skype Call Recorder“, which does the job well, however recorders all inputs as 1 file with no channel separation. This although good for the job, makes editing a bit of a pain, as we found Antirealism was too quiet, and Ori-Studfarm was too loud. I’m pretty sure this can be fixed quite easily by using hardware, and probably something I will look at as the episodes come along.

Once I had the audio file, it was editing time. I ran the file through Adobe Soundbooth, to hopefully clean up the background hum of a 4 man skype conference call, and attempt to increase Antirealism’s voice, and lower Ori-Studfarm’s. I then went to town on the editing, we recorded around 90 minutes worth of audio, however in the end, there was only around 35 mins used.

Once I had the cleaned audio, it was then time for GarageBand to work it’s magic. Dropped it into Garageband, chopped the audio into sections, then added stab music in between the little breaks. It was time then for the intro music, the intro message from Kyten (thanks to Tony Lunn), the outro music and the background track. I was planning on having just the clean vocals without a backing track, however there was still quite a lot of background humm, and thought the best was of applying a “sticky plaster” was to attempt to mask it out with an audio track.

The final work that needed to be done, was to add the images, I’ve always wanted to do an enhanced podcast, and was the main reason I bought the mac in the first place. This then meant listening to the podcast, listening for key points in the episode review and getting screen shots from this point. This was done with a peice of software on the mac called Snapz Pro X, which allows you to take a screen capture of anything on the screen, as the Cmd+Shift+F3 doesn’t allow you to take screen captures when you are running a DVD.

The final peice of the jigsaw was hosting. As we plan to do all 55 episodes of Red Dwarf (currently 52 + the 3 Easter specials), I made the assumption that these would be around 50Mb each x 55 which would be nearly 3Gb of space, and if only 10 people downloaded, we would need 30Gb of bandwidth.  I took the advice of a fellow podcaster (CarBozman), and went with podbean, as this is a dedicated pocast hosting site, and I can’t describe just how happy I am with this. It gives more stats then I know what to do with, and after a discussion with Tony, we will probably be moving all the other projects to podbean.

That’s it, episode 1 in the bag, and everything set up for episode 2 and the other 53 episodes.

If you wish to have a listen yourself, you can find them either on Itunes by searching for scuttercast, or by going to the podcast site for the Enhanced version or the MP3 only version

Also please check out the newly WordPressed version of www.reddwarfforum.com, many updates on the new Red Dwarf episode.

Tags: adobe soundbooth, antirealism, apologies, background, background hum, background track, backing track, call, call recorder, cast, channel separation, conference call, dwarf, editing, episode, garageband, humm, intro message, intro music, job, last monday, lot, mac, music, open to suggestions, plaster, podcast, posters, red, Red Dwarf, screen, scutter, skype, software, stab, Studfarm, time, Tony Lunn, track, version, while