Unlocking O2 iPhone in the UK

With the news that you can now officially unlock your O2 iPhone so that it works with any SIM card from November 10th is great but of course you’ll need your IMEI and although on most phones you type *#06# on the keypad with the iPhone it’s easier to plug it into your computer and look in iTunes. Initially you will see your phone number and you just need to click this and the display cycles through to show your iPhone IMEI and then your ICCID before returning to your phone number.
If you are a pay monthly customer your iPhone can be unlocked at anytime free of charge. If you unlock your handset and place a non-O2 sim into it, you will still have to honour the remainder of the minimum term on your contract with O2. PAYG customers have to wait a while and pay a one off £15 fee. Details of how to do this for either option are available at the official O2 iPhone unlocking website – Unlock my iPhone

How to enable emoji on your iphone

(without needing to jailbreak it)

The simplest FREE way of doing it is to install Spell Number on your phone – UK iTunes link – then you need to open the app and enter the number 91929394.59 (include the decimal point) and then you can close the app.

Then go to Settings >> General >> Keyboard >> International Keybards >> Japanese >> Emoji (switch ON)
If you don’t see Emoji as an option and only see QWERTY and Kana then reopen Spell Number and try again.

Then you should have some additional options when typing in any application.

Oh and in case you didn’t know emoji is the Japanese name for pictorial characters, smileys and emoticons. The characters are similar to the commonly used emoticons in use for chat but Emoji has over 461 standardised icons which are built into most Japanese handsets including the iPhone.

The o2 is a success

Sadly though the website isn’t. Now don’t judge me about trying to buy Michael Jackson tickets – I’m not a fan but since Andrew isn’t a Take That fan and bought tickets I thought I should reciprocate.
The o2 blueroom website or o2priority website designed to allow o2 customers to purchase tickets before they go on sale to the general public is however not coping very well with the demand. The same happened last summer when they released the iPhone 3G so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
That time I didn’t manage to order an iPhone and in the end bought one from Carphone Warehouse instead as o2 couldn’t cope with demand and couldn’t create a waiting list either.
It’s now around 7:45 and I’ve been trying since 7am intermittently. No doubt by the time I get back from work they will have fixed the problem and sold all the tickets…

Brrr


It’s official the Arctic chill has arrived. I woke up in the middle of the night and it was chilly so chilly I had to take a grab of the weather temperature on the iPhone provided by yahoo. Now I know severe weather warnings have been issued as temperatures in the UK dipped as low as -11C (12.2F) overnight but I never really believe it in fact normally I sleep through the coldest of the weather – like modern day hibernating.

The BBC seem to not be showing the weather at all today and just says Freezing Cold- maybe it’s so cold it’s broken?

The Arctic weather is expected to keep its grip on the UK, with lows of -10C (14F) forecast for southern England and Wales into Wednesday.

New Time Capsule with iTunes library sharing…

The pre-Macworld Expo rumour mill has not been as mad as usual – probably due to Steve Jobs not delivering the keynote – but 9to5Mac reckon there will be an internet-based media server from Apple.

The rumoured Apple media server, would be based on Apple’s existing Time Capsule, an ARM-based 802.11n WiFi base station and backup system. To which would be added AFP-based file sharing, iTunes library sharing, a MobileMe tie-in for remote access (possibly with personal MobileMe subdomain), and the ability to share media with a Mac, AppleTV, iPod Touch, and iPhone “both over the Internet and while at home.”

Of course most of us with an Apple TV and an iPhone and a Time Capsule have been trying to get this to work with third party applications since they got them so it’s nice to see Apple finally listening. Shame they will no doubt want us to shell out more for them as I doubt there will be a TimeCapsule software/firmware update to allow the extra functionality.

iPhone 3G jailbroken (beta)

The iPhone Dev Team released its iPhone 3G unlocking utility, yellowsn0w, on the first of the year although it’s still a beta.

If you’d like to crack your iPhone with the beta remember version 0.9.4 beta works only with iPhone baseband 02.28.00, that’s the version installed by iPhone 2.2 Software Update, Apple’s most recent firmware update. So before you start use yellowsn0w, make sure to use iTunes to upgrade your iPhone to 2.2.

If you’ve used QuickPwn to perform a basic jailbreak before and you use Installer to load apps then you should be able to use this beta with no problems – otherwise I’d advise waiting until the non beta version is ready as I’m sure there will be better support available then when they are not concentrating on the new version although there is some basic help available now

Allegedly you won’t notice anything about it other than that your third-party SIM now works.

I’ve not tried it yet as I’m not going anywhere that needs a different SIM – always my big gripe when I am in Australia with the iPhone. I’m likely to wait to the 1.0 release.

Top ten searches of 2008 on google

It’s that time of year again when Google release their zeitgeist listing the most searched for terms of 2008 split out by country – it’s like having your very own research director except you don’t get to ask specific questions.
Top tens though work well I find – it’s a proven editorial technique alongside top trumps and image galleries.

I’m always amazed though how much information the search giant is prepared to share with us the general public. Obviously it’s an edited set of data – I know for instance despite appearances some terms searched for will never appear on this top ten list.

Unlike the AOL search data nothing personally identifiable is available – although this is more to do with it being aggregated and not the raw data.

Google is in a unique position to show trends but importantly as a yearly round up this also gives us a great insight into the hopes and fears of the online population.

In the UK for instance there has been a lot of press about the banking crisis and this has meant that banks and banking in general have been popular search terms – icesave for instance was in the media for weeks so it’s no surprise that it appears top of the financial institutions list. I’m surprised though that Northern Rock hasn’t made it into the top ten considering it’s plight earlier in the year.

Fastest rising finance-related searches in the UK
icesave
hot uk deals
natwest
hmrc
hbos
money saving expert
halifax
barclays
rbs
lloyds tsb

The most searched terms in the UK for 2008 though are
Facebook
BBC
YouTube
eBay
Games
News
Hotmail
Bebo
Yahoo
Jobs

Although if you are interested the fastest rising search terms in the UK which might indicate trends for 2008 are
iPlayer
Facebook
iPhone
Youtube
Yahoo Mail
Large Hadron Collider
Obama
Friv
Cam4
Jogos

If you are interested in the most searched for politicians or recipes then you can find the rest of the top ten search terms over at Google zeitgeist

WordPress for iPhone

So I’ve been playing with wordpress again recently as I’ve been doing a blogs project at work. I’m amazed by how many new plugins there are. It makes the blog platform better than many content management systems I’ve worked with.

Also since I have an iPhone the wordpress application is a great addition. To complete the picture I’ve installed an iPhone specific theme so if you are viewing note to self on the Jesus phone you get a different view 🙂

Google Contacts Nightmare

So a slight problem recently with contacts.
I use a number of tools and web apps in my daily life to keep things organised beacuse I work for myself I use a number of machines in a number of offices so it’s easier to rely on web applications for some tasks.

30 boxes (30boxes.com) for a calendar as this also allows my partner to add events and we can keep track of what nights we have free for stuff which is nice.
Gmail (gmail.com) for email as it’s usually reliable and has heaps of storage space and I like the search
plaxo (plaxo.com) for keeping my contacts up to date
linkedin (linkedin.com) for business contacts
mobile me (me.com) because it came free with my iPhone and works with my MacBook address book

The problem I have now is syncing al the data.

This used to be easy as every now and then I would sync with plaxo to my work machines and that would pick up new contacts and I would dump them into Gmail manually. Not too painful and simple.

Now though the iPhone sync has got the better of me. Gmail has a whacked-out idea of contacts management in that email addresses are automatically added to your contacts list each time you use the reply, reply to all, or forward functions to send messages to addresses not previously stored in your contacts list. Sounds great in theory. In practise I don’t actually know a lot of those people and I may not want them in my contacts list.

iPhone has imported contacts from Gmail bringing all this random data and that has synched with mobile me and now my phone has 1800+ contacts only around 300 of which I actually added myself.

Google what are you thinking adding all these people to my contacts list without asking me?
Apple what are you doing allowing me to sync with data that is so different from my original set without setting off alarm bells somewhere.

Gah!