Since getting back from Cyprus (a whole month ago) I have been quite obsessed with GeoCaching, even more so than usual (as you should have guessed from my last post). Plus with more and more of my friends taking part I think it is one of those rare hobbies that isn’t going to slowly fade into the background. As a big bonus this hobby also gives me some much needed exercises (specially since I recently quit the gym). Anyways I had a great geocaching day yesterday with Nick & Rob, we walked down to Black Pill and found four caches (one was a multicache). In total we trekked over 12 miles (nearly half of that was done on a twisted ankle ouch!).
It was a really good day and even though I managed to twist my ankle I did find a good walking stick (thank you Nature) and as well as general geocaching we had a nice pint and some tasty food at the Woodsman pub (does that counteract all the good the walking did?).
You can see our path here if your at all interested (google maps FTW).
Other than Geocaching I have been doing lots of Halo playing (Halo 3, Halo ODST, Halo Wars) which is uber good fun. I have also just started to use blipfoto which was pointed out by frosty. I am not sure how long I will keep it up, but I have managed to post a photo entry the last three days. If you want to keep up with what I’m posting then you can follow my blipfoto RSS feed.
So there ends another blog post, what to do now?
Option 1: Tidy up before Jay gets home.
Option 2: Go get snacks from the corner shop namnam.
Option 3: Play Halo
Option 4: Read Halo
I will leave my choice a mystery
October 4th, 2009 in
Misc | tags:
Gaming,
Geocaching |
1 Comment
I am as I am sure all of you know, very competitive which occasionally gets me frowns from some folk. This competitive streak runs through a lot of what I do, throughout my academic career I was very competitive with shepherdnick (every % counted!) and I am very competitive in my games (although sadly my game-playing skills do not match my competitive nature as no matter how much I “play to win” I inevitably lose). This mentality has followed me even in to the world of Geocaching as although I know that “the numbers don’t count” the fact that Trazer.W (someone I recently introduced to Geocaching) was rapidly gaining on my modest 26 finds filled me with dread! No way can I let him overtake me! The same goes for RicheJByrne, beechyboy, jwfrosty & Shepherdnick. RicheJByrne/Triard has had to remind me several times that Geocaching is not a competition (I can feel his distaste of my competitive nature even in his gtalk messages!).
You know what though? Being competitive is good! The friendly rivalry between me and Shepherdnick was the reason I got a First in Computer Science, I would not have worked nearly as hard if I didn’t have to keep up with him. It helped me get (and keep) each of my previous Jobs, it’s the reason I enjoy gaming, the reason I love arguing discussions and it is the reason I am going to keep on discovering as many new and exciting caches as quickly I can.
As I mentioned at the top, I have gotten more than a few frowns and scoldings about being “too competitive”. However I would argue that being competitive is not bad, but being unsporting. You must not cheat (obviously) and you must be HAPPY when you lose. You must remember that it is the competing itself that is fun. This does not mean that you don’t try as hard as you can to win as unless you “play to win” it’s not a real competition (and if it isn’t a real competition wheres the fun?). I should try to tone it down a bit when around those who get annoyed about it. However it is a big part of who I am so I don’t think I could ever get rid of that urge to compete and you know what? I wouldn’t want to.
Now I think with all this talk of competitions it is about time to start a new one, or at least restart an old one. I throw down the Blog-A-Week gauntlet to all you bloggers out there! Let it begin!
Right, this post is a little different from my usual ramblings about, well myself mostly. Thanks to Frosty’s tweet I thought it would be a good idea to go through my iPhone and write down what I think about them, maybe introduce people to a few apps they might not have downloaded yet. So here we go! Feel free to leave comments about your own thoughts about any of these apps or any app that I have missed out.
Edit: Try loading http://www.tobeon.co.uk/wordpress on your iPhone!
Tweetie – £1.79
Tweetie is probably my most used app, although there are free twitter app alternatives out there I think if you are a twitter user/addict then it is definitely worth shelling out the squid or two it costs to buy this app.
The Interface/Appearance is superb, there are a few themes that you can choose from and the tweets themselves are presented nice and clearly, one big thing regarding the interface is that as Tweetie supports @reply conversations you can click on a tweet and then follow through that conversation forward or back (which is very useful).
Tweetie allows you to search for tweets by keywords or by your current location and it lets you load the current twitter trends. It integrates twitpic, yFrog and Mobypicture as well as Instapaper (which I use on pretty much every link that gets tweeted by my friends!) It also integrates with tweetshrink and tweetlonger plus automatically shortens urls using bit.ly for those times where you are having trouble with the 140 character limit.
It supports multiple users (which is great for me as I have my own tobeon twitter account and my urbandead twitter account tobeonUD). It also provides @reply threads, it
Finally one of the features which I love to bits is the fact that it saves your tweet as a draft, so if you hit the home button and then come back your tweet is still there ready for you to post.
So umm yeah, go get Tweetie now! :p
Daily Mugshot – Free
Straight forward app that lets you take your mugshot and upload it to your dailymugshot.com account. It can be a bit flaky at times but overall it pretty good and because its so damn easy I have managed to keep up (mostly) with my dailymug shots (linky)
ShopShop – Free
This app has been very useful for me, as I will inevitably end up losing a piece of scrap paper. This app let you add items to your shopping list and mark them off when you have bought them. It saves whatever items you put on to make it easier next time (so rather than having to type out the item name all over again you will prob find it after typing the first couple of letters). It is also helpful because you can add things as you think of them wherever you are, again very good for me who has a memory like a sieve.
Alcohol Aware – Free (tho there is a pay version)
It is quite a nice idea, this app lets you track your drinking habits and gives you some stats (how many units have you drunk in the last week? last month? last year? etc) it lets you add custom drinks with photos or you can just use the default ones (that’s what I do). Unfortunately once you get going and start filling it up it does slow down to a crawl and has a habit of crashing. As I have been using it for at least 10 months now I don’t think i’m going to stop even if it gets slower and slower and slower… been using it too long to quit now! Oh one down side, the name doesn’t fit on the homescreen grrrr
Wikipanion – free (although there is a pay version for £2.99)
I think this xkcd sums this app up pretty well. (Although it was talking about the kindle) simply put its a nice interface for wikipedia. Highly recommended
Cha-Ching – £1.79
I cannot praise this app enough, since it came out a month or so ago I have been using it to manage my money, it has been so ridiculously useful I cannot put it into words! Not only is it simply useful to help mange your budget, but it can come in handy in other ways. For example earlier in the month someone manged to clone my creditcard! OH NO! Of course I had to go through all the usual banking hoops to verifiy that i was who I am, how much did you spend on this date? when was the last time you put money into your account etc etc all things which I would never be able to remember, but with a quick look through cha-ching all the details were there! Oh and in case you are thinking “ummm details of your spending on your phone, that seems dodgy” you can password protect it (which I do). It also syncs to Cha-Ching for Mac although I found once I got the iphone app I hardly ever use the mac version any more. Overall this app is the number one most useful app I have or expect to ever have on my iPhone.
BBC News
Not an app just a link, but its pretty cool to be able to quickly load up the latest news in a nice 2min video summary
Shovel – Free
Digg, thats pretty much it! It has a habbit of crashing every now and again but otherwise it does its job well. Shame you cant actually digg things (but that is a restriction on the API its not a bug in the app). Shame it doesn’t integrate with instapaper, oh well!
Facebook – Free
I use this app much more than I actually use the facebook website, it is very stable and has a pretty damn good interface (other than a few nitty gritty things, like if you click on “soandso has commented on your status” rather than seeing the comment you get linked to soandso’s profile). It’s free so if you are a facebook user you should download it. Oh quick rundown of the features I suppose! It lets you see your news feed, your status feed and your notifications, you can check your inbox load your profile or other peoples profiles, check your friends list, view photos and it is integrated with the facebook chat service. You can post comments, wallposts, status updates the lot. It is basically facebook on your iPhone simple as.
Wordpress – Free
I posted the previous post using this app, it works pretty well although can be a bit slow, not many features other than to edit/post pages/posts/comments. but thats all you need really!
1Password – Free
Shhhh keep your passwords safe! I use 1Password to do this, I generate a nice big fat random password for pretty much every site I use, much better than using the same few passwords for pretty much every site. you still have a single point of failure but overall it is a lot better (I trust 1Password much more than that dodgy forum or the not-entirly-secure social networking site etc etc) . It syncs with 1Password on your mac so you can add passwords manually through the app or via the mac software. Simple straightforward interface, shame it can’t autocomplete your passwords for you but never-mind! The app is free, but the software for your mac isn’t.
Mobile Allowance – £0.59
Check up on your O2 balance, this app shows how much money you have spent, how many minuets and texts you have used as well as how many are left. PRetty straight forward it, it does it’s job well and I think its worth the price of the app just so you can keep an eye on your spend. If you are a heavy user it will most likely save you money as you will be less likely to go over your limit if you know how close you are too it!
Instapaper – Free (but there is a pay version for £5.99)
Wooo! Instapaper! This app is the bee’s knees, load up all those articles that you have marked “read later” it downloads them to your iPhone so that you can read them later even if you don’t have signal. The free version is must for any instapaper user, and I am planning (as soon as Chaching tells me I have enough money) to buy the full version, not so much for the features but to support the developer as he has made a service which I use all-the-bloody time :D
Movies – Free
Loads up your local cinema and tells you what’s playing when, there are other features such as boxoffice lists, reviews, movie release dates yadda yadda yadda but to be honest all I am interested in (and I imagine most people who download this app are interested in) is in using it to check the local cinema times. Highly recommended as you will never know when you will have that sudden urge for a cinema trip :D
Trains – ???
This app has saved my bacon more than once, it displays the next x trains to arrive/depart from your station of choice. This includes when the train is due to arrive/leave and what the actual predicated time of arrival/departure is. This is uber useful, a quick check can tell you the train you are meeting your significant other on is going to arrive early (so you better hurry up and get over to the train station pretty sharpish!) or if a train you are planning to catch is running late so you don’t need to panic rush to the station. It is a shame that you cannot lookup specific date/times but the app makes no claim to be able to do this. Definitely a useful app to keep on your iPhone, you never know when it come in handy :-)
Update: I can’t actually find it on the app store! Oh no! If anyone else can find this app then please post the link (and the cost)
FixMyStreet – Free
FixMyStreet is a service by MySociety (check out www.fixmystreet.com and www.mysociety.org), it let’s you report local problems to your local council quickly and easily. The App is very straight forward, make sure your contact details are set up (so you can receive a reply) take a photo of the problem you have found (pot hole, graffiti, fly tipping etc) write the description and press send. Then with the power of the inter-webs your geocoded problem report gets sent to the council. Although this (hopefully) is an app you wont have to use very much, it is very good to have in your iPhone arsenal so next time you see something that makes you grumble about how “the government man” should sort it out but never does, well send in a report because they can’t fix it if they don’t know about it.
Planets – Free
A brill little astronomy app that points out exactly what everyone wants to find in the sky… the planets! It gives you a little N E S W Map with the planets dotted in their appropriate places, it uses the iPhone’s GPS (obviously) and also gives you a nice screen which displays what time each planet is viewable and if it is viewable with the naked eye or if you need a telescope to spot it. So next time you are aimlessly looking up at the sky and wonder if that bright star is really a star well you can whip out your iphone to find out if you are looking at Sirius or Saturn.
Last.fm – Free
Exactly what you would expect from a Last.fm app, choose a radio, (personal, friend, tag, artist etc) and let it play! This app has had lots of bad reviews but that it is only because lots of people download this app thinking it is something that its not, last.fm is a service that tracks your listening habits and gearing a “radio” station to what you should like, it is not something that will let you choose an artist and listen to their music for free, it will however generate a station around an artist so you can discover new music that you might just like! This app has a nice easy to use interface and has been very stable with me. Highly recommend to any last.fm user.
Note: this will scrobble what you are listening to on the app, obviously as you cannot run background apps it will not help you scrobble tracks that you listen to on the normal ipod mode, however the Mac app will (once you sync your iphone it pops up asking if you want to scrobble all the tracks you have listened too on your iphone since the last time it synced). Just make sure that you have last.fm (mac app) running when you sync.
Geocaching – £5.99
This is the most expensive app that I have downloaded but I don’t regret it for a second! It is a must have for any geocacher (with an iPhone). It does everything you would expect a geocaching app to do, locate caches near you and guide you to them, let you read logs and hints (if you choose too) allow you to log your own finds, see all the caches with an inbuilt map find the objective of travelbugs and see what travebugs & geocoins are in a cache. It even lets you save caches for offline viewing (for those low-signal areas!). It has been a little unstable in the past but the most recent update seems to have fixed the teething problems it was having. As I said above if you are a geocacher this really is a must have app, you may not be used to paying so much for an iPhone app but it is just so damn useful, as you have it wherever you go you can check for nearby caches even if you were not planning on doing any geocaching (you might be surprised to find one within arms reach!).
Shazam – Free
I am sure we all know what Shazam is, a cool little app that lets you record a sample of music and will tell you what you are listening too. This is an app you probably wont be using all the time but if you dont have it (or had it and deleted it) you will regret it when that one song comes on that you cant quite place and it will just keep bugging and bugging and bugging you till you go insane!!!!
It keeps a record of the songs you have “tagged” so if your memory is like a sieve (like me) then you can look back to see what that song was that you heard, forgot, tagged, then forgot again.
Dactyl – Free (There is a Dactyl 2 for £1.79)
Ah Ha! We are on to the games now, although I have more games than I am listing here, these are the ones that have stood the test of time and I don’t think I will be deleting. First is Dactyl, simple little game where you have to try to defuse the bombs as quickly as you can (bombs turn red, you touch them to turn them black again) very quick and addictive game.
Mines Classic Free – Free (duh)
Some people play solitaire, others play freecell.. I play minesweeper. I have tried a few min sweeper apps in the past, but all were too gimicky. They put silly graphics or weird game modes in when all I wanted was normal minesweeper. This app is exactly that, it is the minesweeper that we all know and love. Use beginner mode if you want to waste a minute (or in my case 24 seconds) or play intermediate if you want to waste a bit more! This game is staying on my iPhone forever :D
PAC-MAN Lite – Free
Allthough this app is a little annoying, it has adverts and asks you if you want to buy the full version over and over and over etc etc etc I can grit my teeth and bare it because hell its pacman! Every now and again we all get the craving for a bit of old school retro arcade…. fun, plus whenever I play I get to go “wagwagawagawaga” and “woooowooowooowoo”. I recommend using the swipe controls where you swipe up down left right to change pacman’s direction. Sadly it doesn’t keep track of your highscore, but never mind as that means every time you play YOU WIN!
Texas Hold’em – £2.99
This is an Apple in-house game and it is pretty damn cool, it costs less than 3p per MB now thats a good deal. This is (in case you didn’t guess) a poker app, the single player is damn good at you get to progress through different Texas Hold’em games in different locations, each one with higher stakes, sadly I haven’t had much luck getting past the first few levels. One cool thing about this app is that if you hold the iPhone sideways you play like your usual virtual poker game with a top down view of the table however if you hold the iPhone virtually you get a realistic view of the game including seeing each of your opponents as they play, this is a good idea as each of the AI players have their own personalities and their own tells to watch out for. The controls are brilliant, you can tap the table to check or chuck your cards away to fold and even drag all your chips into the pot to go “all in”. This app even features a multiplayer mode but it only works with people on the same network (wifi) as you and to be honest if you are that close to each other why not play poker for real?
This is easily the best looking mobile poker game I have seen, but because of all them uber graphical pixelz it does sap the battery pretty quick, but that’s a minor issue overall it is a superb game to own for any poker fan!
Crash Landing – Free
Very simple game that was original a test of the iPhone physics shaky ummm stuff ^_^O It is very very basic, all you have to do is try to land the spaceship on the landing pad. You tilt the iphone forward/backwards to control the main engine and then tilt it left/right to control the directional thrusters. Be careful though there is a very limited about of fuel! It is a surprisingly tricky game but quite satisfying once you master it. I generally keep it around for a quick distraction every now and again or to give to people to play if they haven’t used an iPhone before (which I suppose now is few and far between).
Dizzy Bee – £1.79
Bzzz Bzzz pop! Aaah I love this game so very very much. The sound effects and nice cartoon graphics make this game what it is (the fun & interesting gameplay helps too!). The premise of this game is simple enough, just tilt your iphone to control the bee (he basically falls down!) and try to collect all of your fruit friends and take them to saftey before they get squished by the nasty baddies. While your doing this you can try to collect floating flowers for extra points (and we know what points mean!).
Update: Oooh there is a Dizzy Bee 2!
Labyrinth LE – Free (There is a pay version for £1.79)
Now this is probably the first app I used to show to people when showing off my new shiny iPhone. This is a virtual version of the old labyrtinth game you used to play with a little marble on a wooden maze (trying to get to the end without falling through any of the holes). You play it as you expect, tilting the iPhone to guide the marble through the maze, with the brilliant sounds and 3D walls this game is always fun and always gets a little gasp out of people who haven’t been introduced to the joy of the iPhone before. There is a paid version and although I wouldn’t want to discourage you from giving money to an obviously well deserving developer I do think that the light edition has plenty enough mazes in it to keep you satisfied as a fun little time waster.
Wurdle – £1.19
This game actually prompted Leanne to buy and iPhone. This a a straight forward word search game very similar to Boggle. You get a bunch of shuffled letters and you drag your finger across them to try to find as many words as you can within the time limit. If you get totally stuck then you can give your iPhone a shake to reshuffle the letters (but you will take a score hit!). It is very well designed and is customizable, allowing you to alter the look of the letter tiles and background colour as well as setting your game settings just as you like it. Of course it also keeps track of your best scores on all the different game modes and the longest words found etc etc etc. Once you finish a game you can see a list of all the possible words (Although sometimes thats a bit like a kick in the teeth when you see how many you missed!).
Flight Control
Even Mal Renoylds Caleb Captain Hammer Some guy in Halo 3 that I might have ran over with a warthog (sorry) Nathan Fillion loves this game so who are you to argue?
This game hits the Simple to learn, Difficult to master nail on the head. You simply have to guide planes (and the odd helicopter) to their landing strip/pad. Nice and easy to begin with but before you know it your trying to juggle a “fuckload” of planes & helicopters all wanting to land, it’s not long before you make a mistake and CRASH. Oopps! Oh well better luck next time.
The speeds of the aircraft differ depending on type (big red = very fast, small red = fast, small yellow = slow, small blue= painfully slow). It is really the brill controls that make this game so addictive, all you need to do is drag a flightplan out from the aircraft to the runway/pad. it’s easy to make quickly redo a path to try to avoid a collision however when you have lots in the air it gets very tricky very quickly.
In the newest update you also get an online profile that tracks your score as and shows how you compare to those around you (yay for gps) and it even joins in on the twittering craze (which of course I am a part of) and lets you link your profile to twitter so if you beat your highscore it will automatically tweet it for you.
————
Whew! So that’s all the apps on my phone that I thought were worth a few good words (or nearly four thousand words!) I was going to add screenshots and icons etc but if I don’t post this soon Frosty may hunt me down and kill me so here you go!
Well as Jess is reading till the end of the chapter of her book (Company of Liars) I thought it would be a good chance for me to get started on a blog post and as both Nick & Kat have both recently posted blogs from their respective phones I thought that I should jump on that band waggon (plus my macbook is in the living room and I am already in my pajamas).
So as you may (or may not) have noticed since I failed the Blog-A-Week challenge I have been quite lax in my posting (in that I haven’t posted at all!) Which is pretty bad considering I said I would try to continue to post at least once a week even though I lost the challenge. Oh well I’m postig now and I guess that’s all that matters :-)
So what has happens this month? Well we bought a dryer
*******************
well today is annother day, (I stopped typing and went to sleep sorry!) I may as well Continue on anyways:
So yes we bought a dryer and have now finally cleared the backlog of clothes, bed sheets towels etc that was building up as with only one radiator to dry things on we could keep up! So now the flat is looking a bit tidyer which is definitely a good thing. Did we so anything over the last month that was more interesting than buying a dryer? Well we set a date & place for our wedding! 6th November 2010 at Canada Lodge (keep that date free!) that’s exciting isn’t it :-) chek out the photos of the lodge ok their website it’s v pretty at night with the lights lighting up the lake. So the first big wedding hurdle has been umm jumped? Passed? Completed? Whatever the correct terminology is :-)
More recently (as in today) I went geocaching with rich. We managed I get 4 in mumbles, it was a brill trip we go to climb up hills and carefully traverse tretrious(sp?) cliff paths and see some fantastic views. Sadly looking back at the geocache map it turned out there was annother cache right by us that we didn’t notice! We will have to go back and get it annother weekend.
Check out photos on flickr
Well as the clocks go forward in about 1/2 hour it’s probably best that I go to sleep!
(thank you iPhone for being kind enough to let me post this post with you!)
March 29th, 2009 in
Misc | tags:
Geocaching,
iPhone,
Photos |
1 Comment
Sorry for the delay in bringing out this update, I blame it on a mixture of busy work and busy life…. but it’s really due to laziness. Anyways, here it is!
UrbanDeadApp Version 1.1
This simply adds email notification support to the app (great if you get your emails on your phone!) you can choose what you changes you want to be notified (e.g. you might not care about the number of survivors in the room so don’t want to get an email every time that changes!)
If you are a Gmail user (like me) then it is easy as pie to set up, simply put in your normal gmail account details and then put in smtp.gmail.com as the server address and 587 as the port number.
Oh and don’t forget that you can run multiple instances of the app at the same time so you can keep an eye on more than one character (but please remember the fact that there is a limit to the number of times you can hit urbandead.com in a day)
If anyone has any ideas about features, or finds any bugs that needs fixing please leave a comment (or email me: urbandeadapp [at] gmail [dot] com)
