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As you will have seen if you follow my Twitterings or see them on the sidebar here, I got an iPhone last week. When the original iPhone came out, I fell in love with it, but I couldn’t afford it at the original prices, and I also had a mobile contract to finish first. The timing for the 2.0 version was perfect, as was the reduction in price. With all the hoo-ha over the release (O2 got inundated with registrations of interest), I thought that my chances of actually getting hold of one would be low.

As it happened, I got lucky. I tried to order one online early on Monday morning when O2 started accepting pre-orders. The server went down almost immediately, and as I had work to do, I wasn’t able to try it again until lunch time. Amazingly, my order went through, and unlike many others who were unlucky, when it arrived on Friday by courier and I activated it through iTunes, the activation went straight through without a hitch. I know that others had a much less smooth experience, but for me it worked really well.

I’ve been living with the iPhone for several days now, and I really like it. I’ve been waiting a long time to get a small, mobile device that offers such a seamless experience with my Macs. 3G/Edge wireless works very well, and connecting to a WiFi network is seamless. The screen is beautifully bright and clear, so that reading web pages and emails or viewing photographs is a real pleasure. The touchscreen gestures are wonderfully intuitive and easy to use, and I even quite like the touchscreen keyboard. I’m a touch typist, so it’s never going to replicate the experience of a full sized, physical keyboard, but I think it’s a very effective and efficient compromise for a small, handheld unit. With one or two minor exceptions, everything is as beautifully designed and functional as you’d hope from an Apple product. In the past, I’ve had Psion PDAs (2 different models) and Palms/Treos (3 different models), as well as a clutch of smartphones (as well as some dumbphones). So I’ve had quite a bit of experience with using these kinds of devices, and I can honestly say that I’ve never used a phone/PDA/internet device which gets so much right. People argue that the latest Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Blackberry does everything an iPhone does, has a better camera, better battery life or whatever. But for me, the point is that the iPhone does pretty much everything you want in such a seamless and integrated way that you don’t have to think about it: you just use it.

Of course, it’s terrific when you are out and about and want a burst of information or entertainment in a handy package that you always have about your person. But I’m also finding that I use it at home a lot, where I have a laptop which replicates all ¹ of the functions of the iPhone — even portability. Somehow, if I’m browsing my email or reading RSS feeds or FriendFeed, it seems so much more comfortable to pick up the iPhone, curl up on the sofa and browse through the sites than it does to do the same at the laptop. In short, I find that it’s a device that really delights me, which is a fairly rare thing. I know that there will be someone who comments, “But it’s just a phone!” (Jonathan, I’m looking at you ), and that’s absolutely true. But it’s a beautifully designed, elegantly functional device that I thoroughly enjoy using, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t celebrate that in the same way that I enjoy looking at a Victorian suspension bridge, a beautifully turned ceramic bowl or a beam engine.

¹ Except GPS. ↑

So, the Stevenote is over for another year, and some very interesting stuff was announced. The MacBook Air is a really stunning design, I think. I love the way that they emphasise the weightlessness of it¹ by tapering the edges of the case so that they are not actually sitting on the surface of the desk. It makes it look a little as if it’s floating. Of course, there’s a compromise for losing the weight and shrinking the thickness so the specs aren’t as good as the MacBook Pros, but I think it fits its intended niche pretty well. Though it’s gorgeous, I don’t want to buy one. Correction: I want to buy one, but can’t justify a need for it.

I was also very interested in Time Capsule. As it happens, I was in the process of thinking about getting more external storage, possibly Network Attached Storage, to enable me to back up all our computers using Time Machine. Our existing discs are getting a bit too full for comfort, and would be better employed to store music or to hold bootable clones of the drives. Time Machine is brilliant — one of the best features of Leopard in my opinion, and while I thought I’d only use it for backup, it has saved my bacon a couple of times when I deleted files unintentionally. Anything which makes that process even more transparent and effortless would be a great thing. I don’t currently have 802.11n wireless in the house, and Time Capsule seems fairly decently priced for the capacity offered.

I’m also intrigued by the iTunes Movie Rentals. We have a LoveFILM subscription which we enjoy, but it has a number of drawbacks. The somewhat random nature of the order in which you receive the DVDs (depending on availability) means that you often end up with a pile of very serious, depressing films when you actually feel like watching a light comedy. It’s also not very spontaneous because of the postal delay, so if you find that all you’ve got when your parents come to visit is a batch of incredibly sweary films (for example) you’re a bit stuck. Finally, we intermittently have trouble with scratched discs (something I’ve ranted about here before). When our player hits a bad scratch, it tends to jump back to chapter one. This means that we watch films with one eye on the DVD counter, so that if it does its skipping act, you can at least laboriously skip forward through the chapters to just after the point where it failed.

If (when rentals appear in the UK iTunes Store) there is a good range of films (including foreign language films and independents), we might well ditch our LoveFILM subscription and just rent-as-we-go: for our level of usage, the price would be about the same.

¹ OK, I know it’s not literally weightless — 3lb (1.36kg) is not nothing, but it’s pretty light. ↑

A month after getting my new bike I’m a thorough convert to hub gears. Not only are they wonderfully smooth in use and pretty much sealed against the crud that comes off the path, but — as I discovered today — they are also a dream to adjust.

New bikes tend to need a bit of tightening up after a few weeks of use and settling in. Cables stretch and fixings loosen, and you find that gears start to drift out of correct adjustment. The Shimano Nexus is no exception, and on my last journey, I found that third gear wouldn’t stay in gear, and a few of the others were a bit tricky. I was anticipating the greasy, time-consuming horror which is gear adjustment when you have derailleur gears. I’ve always found that you spend hours patiently adjusting screws back and forth, only to find that if you get the bottom of the range right, the top is out, and vice versa. It’s like a bike equivalent of the ‘Right Said Fred’ piano moving experiment.

In contrast, the adjustment process with the Shimano Nexus is absurdly easy. There’s a little windowon the upper surface (and on the lower surface, in case you’ve got the bike upside down) of the hub which shows you two vertical yellow lines. When you’re in fourth gear, the lines should meet. If they don’t (mine didn’t), it needs adjustment. All you do is rotate a knurled collar where the gear cable enters the twist grip shifter on the handlebars until the yellow lines align — no tools required! A quick flip to first gear then back to fourth allows you to check that the lines are still aligned and tweak if necessary, and that’s it. It’s an entirely non-greasy, easy, two-minute job, and everything is back to smooth efficiency afterwards. I think I’m in love with a hub gear.

Well, that was interesting, but I’m glad it’s all over. After a couple of days of upheaval and camping out on Mr. Bsag’s computer, trying to find files or applications I needed, I’m finally back on my own, working computer.

I’ve learned a few lessons:

1. Do not trust the hard drive S.M.A.R.T. status — in my case, it was gaily saying everything was fine (la la la) until the second it wasn’t and my hard drive failed.
2. Backups are good. Frequent backups are even better. It’s only when you find that your last backup is 48 hours old that you realise that you actually do get quite a lot done each day, and that you’ve now lost that last 48 hours of work. I was very fortunate and only lost a few emails.
3. Web applications really come into their own when you lose your files. I still had access to my calendar, some of my email from another computer when mine broke. Of course, the opposite is true when your internet connection goes down…
4. Apple’s Migration Assistant is actually rather good. I haven’t used it before, but faced with many gigabytes of data to somehow shift onto a fresh system without wiping out default files, preferences and so on, I thought I’d give it a go. After all, I still had my backup, so if it went wrong, I could just reinstall and start again. It was very easy, and as far as I can make out, almost everything transferred smoothly, even my custom installed applications in /usr/local. Mysql seems to be broken, but that’s not too bad. I’m also glad that my backups are just plain filesystems now, rather than some obscure catalogue format, which you have to restore using a backup application. I just had to plug in the firewire drive, point Migration Assistant at my full back up, and go.

I’m so reliant on a computer for work and personal stuff, and have my computing environment so customised to my habits, that it’s amazingly disruptive to be without my own computer. The sooner I get multiple computers and easily sync-able files sorted out, the better.

I apologise for the silence around here (and for any unanswered emails), but my laptop hard drive died on Monday, so I’m in computing limbo-land. I’m camping out on Mr. Bsag’s iMac, but that means I can’t do anything computer related at work, so there’s a lot of running about and improvisation going on.

Luckily, I had a backup from late on Saturday (backing up is boring until the instant you need it, and then you are incredibly grateful that you took the trouble to do it regularly), so I shouldn’t have lost much data. However, there’s a lot of organisation to do when I get a replacement or a fix, which is not a good thing when I have a deadline looming on Thursday.

I’ll be glad when it’s all over, and I’m back on my own, configured-just-how-I-like-it machine.