mwa ha ha.
I covered Titanic’s song “Captain Of The Ship” from Full Steam Ahead.
I know… I make mistakes from time to time. Oh well.
Just another interesting design thing about the iPhone
Lately, a lot of posts have been, well, posted upon the subject of the smart design of the iPhone. Well, I’ve got another suggestion for the list of cool things. It touches upon the subject of audio harmony.
When an email comes in, the notification sound is an F# note. As well, when you lie the iPhone on a hard flat surface, the resulting buzz is an F#. Therefore, it sounds harmonious and well-crafted
It’s just another small thing, but it’s still cool that Apple thought of that.
Temple Run
By following AppStore on Twitter, I discovered a great free game named Temple Run. It’s an addictive perpetual running game where the hero is escaping from a temple with an idol. And it’s up to you to keep him on the pathway, avoiding obstacles and picking up coins. There is no end: if you hit an obstacle, or if the hideous beasts catch you, you die.
The best part of the game is that there are no levels. The maps are seemingly auto-generated, and it never repeats itself.
Gameplay is straightforward, and a tutorial presents the obstacles. A mix of tilting and swiping allow you to maneuver your way to more points.
I rated this app 5 stars in a heartbeat. It’s fun, addictive and challenging. Get it now!
Power Went Out
I’m back. We just went through 30 hours without power. Well, maybe not without: our neighbor has a backup generator and is generous about it. Plus, we still had an Internet connection thanks to a booster battery. Finally, we had our own generator that could hardly power a freezer full of chickens.
The cause? A huge storm, starting Sunday at 6 PM. My brother and myself were at home, when a crazy wind started to blow and the power went out. The rain came torrentially after that.
Normally, it would be OK. But we had been repainting the front door, and the small windows on either side had been removed, replaced with cardboard. One cardboard panel came loose, and fell outside, where a huge gale was taking place. My brother went out for about 3 seconds to retrieve the panel; he was soaked and wind-beaten in 3 seconds. We finally got a towel and some weights to keep the front shut and locked. Scary times.
The power was out all over town, and no one was connected to the Internet. With my brother’s MotoMaster, we powered the modem and router; the Internet was blazing fast.
Many trees fell all over town. Some apartments in the east end of town even caught fire. (photo: Meg Levesque)
Hydro One (Ontarian power company) repaired damage all over. Most people in Pembroke had power the next day (Monday); we didn’t. Turns out – as I discovered later that day – a tree had fallen on a power line, utterly snapping it.
By the time I discovered the busted line, Hydro One had an estimate for when our power would come: 11:30 PM… Tuesday. Dang! We remained optimistic, though. Most estimates are a little late; power usually comes back earlier than thought. And such was the case; power came back shortly after midnight on Monday/Tuesday.
As expected, we were living off our neighbor, a generous and kind man who allowed us to transfer our fridge and freezer contents to his coolers. It felt a little like we’d simply moved homes. And it was almost the case. We did sleep at home, though.
I woke up around 1:15 AM, to a blinking alarm clock and lights downstairs. Hurray! I went down at once to talk to my dad, who was still awake. A few minutes later, I went back to sleep, praising God for this.
It’s so easy to forget one’s blessings when they’ve never been taken away.
Twitter ain’t working
Uh oh… TweetDeck is giving me the fail whale… twitter.com isn’t working. What’s up?
Edit: they’re back.
I haven’t posted in a month
I just realized that I haven’t taken the time to post here in over a month. Whoops! (Not that anyone missed me.)
You can follow me and my random adventures at @KompileSoft on Twitter. I blog about Apple news, Geocaching, and funky stuff that happens to me.
As to what’s new with me? It’s summer vacation. In three weeks, I’m going to France for a month. Right now, I’m just chilling, jamming (I play bass and drums), and being epic.
Oh yeah; I forgot to mention that I saw the Broad-tailed Shadowdragon, an extremely rare dragonfly in Petawawa.
Be metal!
Grr, Facebook…
I’m kinda ticked. And it’s because of Facebook. Specifically, what Facebook did to my phone. Even more specifically, how the “backup and restore” didn’t work…
It all started with someone sending me a friend request on the Facebook mobile app. Happens often with me. Anyway, I moved to tap Send Request, then after I tapped it, I decided to press Cancel. Bad choice. It froze the whole iPhone. I’ve had this issue before, but never has it frozen more than 15 seconds at a time. It stayed frozen for quite a while, over a minute. Neither the Home button, Lock button, volume buttons or Mute switch worked. Of course, the touch screen was not working.
At this point, I decided to try plugging the iPhone into the computer to unfreeze it. Big oops. After a sync with iTunes, the phone’s display was dark but legible; the hardware worked but the touch screen was unmovable. I couldn’t restart the device.
Fine, time to restore the device. I went through the rigamarole of pressing buttons, then went off to take a shower. When I came back, iTunes was frozen and so was the rest of the Mac.
Guess what? Force restart. I was gradually hating Facebook more and more. As the computer restarted, everything of the laptop was working fine. However, the iPhone was like new – no apps installed or anything.
Now what?
I had to leave for town at that moment. Whilst I was on the journey, I put some basic settings into place. No, not perfect, but tolerable. Of course, by now I had no music on the phone, and it was boring.
I finally reached home. In the meantime I had thought of Dan Frakes’s recent experience with lost data and restoring. The guy was kind enough to point to “Restore from Backup” and I am much obliged to Dan.
I gave it a try. Fool that I was to not clean up disk space, and there were less than 100 MB left on the laptop. So I ducked into iPhoto to get rid of a lot of photos. This only freed a gigabyte, and I was still missing space for the phone to be restored. Where else but the iMovie stuff I had worked on a while ago? Maybe I’m clueless, but I couldn’t figure out how to remove the footage from the Mac.
By now, I did copy the music, my contacts, and my apps over to the iPhone; that’s one little victory (cue the Rush song) I finally win.
I’m incredibly ticked by now. And the story pretty much ends here. I have a ton of photos to get back into the Camera Roll, apps to get back into their folders, and some serious vengeance for Facebook.
Score one for Harold Camping. At least he got one rapture: the soul of the phone.
