stevegerrard.org

Some good friends of mine are trying to sell their villa in Bodrum, Turkey, so if you are interested and are in the market, have a look at it on their website: gumuslukvilla.co.uk

No Flash support. Come on!! the best browsing experience?????
No multi-tasking..
No camera, so what about video skype??
No OLED screen..
Screen resolution at 1024×768 so does not support HD video..
No video out interface..
No SD card slot..
No USB port..

All in all, still very much a slave device to a Mac (or PC)

It does look very nice through and I’ll problable end up buying one!!

My good friend Peter Costello commented on the fact that there have been precious few contributions made to all that is stevegerrard.org, so just for you Peter here’s the first entry for 2010 (but also I would suggest you search elsewhere for online reading material!)

It’s rare that I get too excited about an application, given the sheer amount of new desktop and mobile apps coming on to the market everyday. Having had an iphone for over half a year I’ve seen quite a few interesting new apps that make you think “ahh, that’s quite cool, but how much will I actually use it?” One common issue that bugs me is how to share files and photos with my family, especially since Ayfer and I have become de-facto official photographers of my niece Tzipi, I somehow need to get hundreds (actually, nearly thousands) of high quality photos to my family, which can be a real pain as its far to large to email, hence the only options are a USB stick or to burn DVD, both of which require physically meeting up. Other options would be to use space on my web-hosting account which requires using an FTP program, fairly un-user friendly for most people, or I could sign up for MobileMe which although is quite a neat and complete offering, I do feel is a little limited and rather over priced for what you get. So this marvellous application I speak of is Dropbox.

In simple and consise terms the Dropbox concept is a centralised folder that you have on all your computers or devices that allows you to automatically see what is in that folder be it on your work or home computer, and is available on Mac, PC, and Linux, and there’s even an iPhone app as well.

All you do is sign up for an account, install the software and you can then instantly share documents, photos -pretty much all files – as long as they are in the that Dropbox folder. Within the folder itself you are free to create further folders and better still you can give public or, more importantly, provide selected access to those folders to you family and friends.

What it means for example is that if you save all your documents to that folder whenever you make a change and then save it, it is automatically updated on all your computers rather than just the one you are working on. In turn this means the the previous hassle I had of putting on a USB stick or burning a DVD with hundred to photos of Tzipi and then physically having to take to my sisters house no longer exists. Instead she can also sign up with Dropbox and I share that folder with her. “Simples” as a Russian meerkat would say.

For the princely sum of diddly-squat you get 2 Gbytes of storage, and if you want more (50 or 100 Gb) you can pay a relatively small monthly fee.

What else, well, all yoru files are fully backed up online, you also get full web access to the files if you aren’t with one of you own computers, and you can see the complete revision history and previous versions of updated files, a bit like Time Machine. For files that you want you give open access to anyone there’s a “Public” folder that allows you to dump files in and then dish out a URL to anyone.

Clever huh?

For the few days that I’ve been using it I am really impressed. Its so simple, so logical, and so useful. Brilliant!

Yup, it snowed last night. It was quite surreal actually; after a lovely meal at the Lokanta Turkish restaurant in George Street, we head off to the Bee’s Mouth for a quick drink, only to emerge just 1 hour later, and a good 10cm of snow!

Of course, the obligatory, inevitable, and fairly lenghtly snowball fight followed. Here’s a couple of pics taken on my iphone when we were on Palmiera Square:

Ayfer, John M, Philippa, and Antonio

with the local snowman

In the morning,instead of going to work, Ayfer went for a wander and took some great pics that you can see on Flickr.

Here’s a few of the best ones:

In the a space of 48 hours it’s all gone Pete Tong. In pretty atrocious conditions successive semi-finals in the mens singls and mens doubles have not gone my way. In the singles I simply didn’t play well enough, and in the doubles last night, and excrusiatingly tight second set was lost 11-9 in the tie break… Merde!!! (as they say in France).

The slight consolation is that wer’e in the Mixed final on Saturday so at least there is some chance to salvage something from what has been a pretty dire week on the tennis front!! :((

The Grasshoppers quadruple is still on; having secured the Winter Mixed with Jenny, I’m still in the hunt for the singles, mens doubles, and mixed! Will my flat look like a large gleaming trophy cabinet, or will I grab defeat from the jaws of victory in spectacular fashion… only time will tell!

First up is the mens doubles semi against Giles and Matt; should be a close one.. will keep you posted…!

I recently started getting the message “could not activate cellular data network: You are not subscribed to a cellular service”. The way to solve this is to go to the “Cellular Data Network” stting under the General/Network option, and change the data APN from idata.o2.co.uk to mobile.o2.co.uk.

Also, for MMS you should change the APN from idata.o2.co.uk to wap.o2.co.uk.

I just need to vent my frustration that the supposed new iMac are still not out yet. I’m ready to go an replace my 4 year old iMac G4 with the latest and greatest from Apple, and there have been reports that it is iminent since the begining of january, but ziltch so far.

Current rumour suggest it will be based on the quad-core “Nehalem” Intel Core i7 processors which should make it a significant upgrade to the current dual core versions, but with Apple you never know so well have to wait and see. Also its not clear whether the appearance or form factor will change.

All I know is that i want it to happen soon!

At last, we woke up to a beautiful blue sky, and after a hearty breakfast we pack our stuff, which doesn’t take long at all since all we brought with us was literally toothbrushes and beachgear.

Today was a day for serious sunbathing as we’ve got to at least look as if we’ve been on holiday before we get back some and we’re running out of days.

This photo below on surface of it looks like a shot where I say to Ayfer “do that running thing in the sea and look playful and sexy” However I can reveal that this shot is the moment when Ayfer was attacked by a vicious sea creature and she came within an inch of her life.

Something truely horrible and scary bit her on the toe during her first attempt at swiming in the Pacific ocean. The next picture is not for the feint hearted, but it reveals the true extent of the horrendous injuries that Ayfer suffered at the hands of the monster; the cut is almost 2mm long. (it’s the middle toe if you need it pointing out)

Horrific injury

Fearing for her life Ayfer did not have another attempt at the ocean and spent the next hour complaining why the monster was not attacking all the other (hundreds) people. I however did not go in becuse it was too bloody cold.

We both got truely sunburnt (yes, even Ayfer) but its been a good day and long overdue. Tomorrow morning we get a flight from Santiago to Rio for our final stop before returning home. Lets hope the sun can last!