I don’t know how many people are like me (I may just be crazy) but whenever I order something I like to keep a track of it via some form of tracking page. Doesn’t sound too bad so far, but things can be exponentially worse if you’ve ordered from a retailer from overseas and have to track your package across several continents.

If I’m particularly worried about the delivery date because I’ll have to book a day off work (grrr) or if I’m just excited about my package arriving in general (Mac Pro mmm) I usually have to boot up a computer, grab the tracking number from my email, and scoot on over to the relevant tracking site. Not only is this a pain in the A but it’s a waste of electricity, time and can wear out your keyboard if you’re checking every-hour-on-the-hour for several weeks (Ok, maybe that is excessive!)

Luckily, whilst browsing the net I remembered an old software widget that I used to use back in my uni days (circa 2003) to track packages that I needed to send home

(developer’s site link:http://junecloud.com/software/mac/delivery-status.html)

Delivery status is a tiny little OS X widget (FREE) from June Cloud that can track multiple items across a plethora of couriers, for a wide variety of countries. They even do Royal Mail recording which is good considering they’re a US company.

…but this involves a computer? What’s the benefit?

Well, if you’re the owner of an iPhone / iPod Touch running the latest Apple 2.0 software you can now get a tie-in program from June Cloud called Delivery Status Touch! Not bad!!

(app store link: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=290986013&mt=8)

There’s a small $1.19 fee involved, but considering the time it’ll save you (not to mention the hassle) you can now take your obsession of package-tracking to a whole new (mobile) level. Just whack in the tracking numbers, create an Alias, for example you could add a UPS delivery called “Mac Pro” to differentiate between say, a software delivery from UPS and so you don’t have to muck around memorising if 1Z716Z is the package you want, or if it’s really 1Z717G.

Apart from the bog standard “delivered” or “en route” message Delivery Status Touch can actually show up to 2 other levels of detail, each giving you more data than the initial level (the third state can take you direct to the courier’s site and show you a map if they support GPS tracking).

To top it all off, both the desktop widget and the iPhone / iPod app can be synced allowing easy management of your packages, which helps immensly considering that none of the Apple devices currently have any form of copy and paste.

If you’re the happy / unhappy user of this app let us know.. I for one think it has to be one of the better apps I’ve bought from iTunes, and will aid in future spending sprees when the courier decides to leave my stuff in the shed!!

Just found this over on the OCUK forums. Being someone who’s attempted to get into World Of Warcraft twice and failed, it made me chuckle somewhat.

Enjoy !

Read more »

I’ve never really been a fan of Apple TV.

Sure, I get it’s purpose of being the quick and easy place to buy, rent and stream media in your home but there are just too many limitations such as lack of 1080p playback, poor HD download bitrates (although in fairness I blame the UK internet infrastructure for that one) closed format support system (yeah, thanks for the H.264-only), and horrible UI (why it isn’t identical to Front Row is beyond me) for me to shell out my hard earned cash.

Ok, so you can hack it with apps like the PatchStick but then you could just as easily get better results from a bog standard Mac Mini albeit a slightly higher price (VNC, more powerful CPU etc)

Anyway.. it looks like the Cupertino-based company has added some nice features to the newest ATV update (2.2) so I’ll let you decide if it’s worth the hassle..

Apple TV owners can download the new updates from their Apple TV’s by accessing the “Update Software” menu option in their Apple TV’s settings. 

Aside from addressing some security issues, Apple has also included support for features introduced in iTunes 8.0, including Genius playlists. 

- Music Video playlists
- Genius playlists
- On-the-Go Playlists
- Standby Option
- HD TV Show Playback and Purchase

Reports from the forums across the Mac ecosystem still say that it runs hot while in standby mode, and that features added to the device pre-2.0 are still absent. Perhaps due to copyright claims? Who knows.

It would be nice if some of those with an Apple TV could convince me to buy one, but I guess I’m too lazy / tight to rip my DVDs and leave my Mac Pro on to stream the content in my house (let’s face it sync would be too much of a hassle for a large library). I’ll wait for revision 2.

UPDATE: iTunes 8.0.1 is also released for those in the mood for some hardcore get-it-while-it’s-hot updating. If you’re one of those grab it over at the usual place http://www.apple.com/itunes

First off, let me apologise for the way I have neglected the blog over the last few weeks. There’s been a lot going on around here of late, and unfortunately the blog was something I didn’t feel up to doing. I’m not going to go into the reasons for it, those who know will understand.

Aaaanyways, during the last few weeks I’ve been doing what I do best. Spending ! Recent purchases include:

The Apple TV really is something else. I went for the lower capacity simply because I’ll be streaming most of the media from my main machine. Even the top-end 160GB model wouldn’t have come close to being large enough ! I’ll be doing more on the ATV over the next few posts…

The monitor isn’t actually here yet, it should be arriving tomorrow ! I plumped for the Dell S2409W 24″ Widescreen True HD LCD Monitor in black. With a resolution of 1920×1080 it’s a bit of a beast. Really looking forward to getting my hands on that, hopefully it’ll be a nice jump from my current panel’s 1280×1024 ! Again, more info (and maybe even pictures if you ask nicely!) tomorrow.

So that’s that really. The-Blog is back, with hopefully regular updates once more.

Thanks for sticking with us !

Ubiquity is an alpha experimental idea from the guys over at Mozilla Labs

The idea itself is a little difficult to explain, but it basically takes the internet and makes it work the way you would expect, using simple language based operations. The best thing to do is spend a few minutes watching the video - it really is quite impressive when you remember this thing is very early in its development !

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Given Ubiquity a go? Let us know !

If you’re not in your mid-twenties and from the UK you won’t get any of that title, but meh.

During one of my random Youtube trawls this morning, I came across a video from Diggnation’s Kevin Rose whis is basically a short clip from one of the Diggnatition podcasts.

To cut a long story very short, some guy went on holiday to Egypt and managed to get himself arrested (perhaps camel molesting isn’t allowed?). With one post to Twitter his friends and family were on the phone to the US embassy to find out what was what. I can’t think of another medium that would have made that possible, so pretty neat all-round.

VIDEO NSFW !

So make sure you’re all following my Twitter profile so you can look after me !

I find I’m pretty much using the same applications over and over on my desktop machine. I also like to keep a fairly small Dock, which makes this little tweak very usfull for me.

The code below creates a stack right in your Dock that will contain your most recently used applications. If, like me, you’ve got all sorts of rubbish in your Applications folder, this will come in handy for finding the apps you use the most as it should always contain the applications you actually use !

Fire up Terminal and paste in the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

killall Dock

The ‘killall Dock’ should make your Dock restart, complete with the new stack.