Trust Tommy

This week’s MusicSunday — Passing Afternoon by Iron & Wine

It’s a very easy song to listen to, and one which currently sits at number 7 of my 25 Top Played Songs in iTunes.

On Thursday, I was up in Dublin at physio. As always, I took my phone with me and listened to music, read Twitter and caught up on RSS on the journey.

However, when I sitting into the car to go home, I got the ‘warning: less than 20% battery remaining” message.

Ok, I was listening to music for the best part of 2.5 hours, and the screen’s brightness was up at the top but there’s no getting around the fact that 3 hours of battery isn’t wonderful. It’s certainly much less than Apple’s website boasts it is.

Then again, if we add up the amount of time I’ve had my iPhone (11 months) and how old it was according to the eBay seller I bought it off (3 months), it’s nearing the time when one would be beginning to see battery deterioration in electronic goods.

I decided to rectify my battery problems by buying a battery pack from CompuB. I’d have liked one that fitted just like a case around your iPhone but things like that for the 2G iPhone are notoriously hard to come by – the problem when your iPhone’s 2 years out of date.

However, CompuB did have something for me, so future trips to Dublin won’t be met with similar battery woes. It’s handy actually, iPhones aren’t the only thing it charges — anything that connects via USB, so cameras and such are charge-able too. All for €19.99

I haven’t used it fully yet, so I can’t tell if their boasts of ‘2 hours extra battery’ are accurate. Full report coming soon!

Coming up next — MusicSunday!

Recently, I’ve noticed that my old cane (picture) had been getting a wee bit small for me — to be expected; I’m in that age of rapid growth and the cane was fitted for me in June 2009.

So I went ahead and ordered a new cane from my cane website earlier this week. Thus followed the usual XKCD-style package tracking madness.

I decided not to order the same cane again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I wanted something different, simple as. Secondly, there are times when a cane with flames on it is unsuitable, and something more reserved is called for. Finally, experience played a part — the flamey-cane scratched a lot when it fell or brushed against a wall, so I wanted to go for something that wouldn’t mark so easily.

From the brief bit of walking that I did today, I can tell that I was pretty on-the-mark with the height (from your wrist joint to the floor — mine’s 35 inches) of this cane, and that the sturdier material (wood versus carbon fibre) will be a bonus. The website tells me that the wooden cane is .2 of a pound heavier than my old cane — though it feels more.

All in all, a great success :)

Music is a huge part of my life — as much as computers, without a doubt.

It began in or around 2003 – John had an MP3 player that would, in fairness, be scorned at. It had a memory of 320 MBs (if memory (no pun intended) serves me right), which, in comparison to the 120 GBs (that’s 327,680 MBs) iPods that they have today.

He was selling it so that he could purchase an iPod Nano (which was chubby in those days! and the screen was in black & white!). He set down a cool €100 asking price which I agreed to. Upon asking Dad, he gave me the money but suggested I try haggling. So I did.

9 year old me: How about €90?
John: Nah. €100 or nothing.
9 year old me: Ok so.

As you can see, 9 year old me was one cool customer, and a force not to be reckoned with…

But there it was — my first MP3 player, and I was in awe. Powered by an AA battery, its little pixelated ticker-tape display proudly showed what song you were playing. You controlled it by a little cog wheel and with the volume keys.

Not having a computer (or music tastes) of my own, I promptly handed it back over to him to put some music on it. I only vagually remember what it was he put on – I know some Red Hot Chili Peppers were on it.

Over the next few years, I moved onto an iPod Shuffle (which I bought from Patrick for the slightly-less extortionate price of €30), an iPod Nano (a leaner cousin of John’s one, but not as wafer-thin as the current model) and finally onto the iPhone I have today.

Were your MP3 player beginnings Apple dreams or were they AA powered machines?

Christina, a friend of Patrick’s from America, is creating a book on Happiness. To do this, she’s using the people who have made me happiest in life, and the people who have made you happiest in yours.

So why not go help out? Head over to happymem.com and submit your story.

An instance you always look back on that makes you smile or laugh. A time in your life that you thought was miserable but, looking back, was magical. You can be brief or prolific, silly or profound. You can give background details or you can leave them out. You can focus on the minute, the hour, the weekend, the year. Spend a little while thinking (it’ll be fun, I promise) and then start typing. If you’d like to submit anonymously, feel free.

Here was mine:

I climbed the last of the subway steps and looked around, watching my breath rise in bursts in front of me. “Look for the grandiose buildings”. I recited John’s instructions to myself. As I gauged the lofty stone buildings in front of me, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and turned on my heel to push the button for the pedestrian crossing to continue my journey, which had begun at 7am Irish time earlier — much earlier — that day. John had also warned me that Boston drivers were unforgiving and sure enough, those Chrysler bumpers looked like they could make short work of me. While I was waiting, I extracted my (well, John’s, technically) small video camera from my jacket pocket.

“Pan across Boston at night” I narrated, swiveling around to take in as much of the city as possible in my short video. “It’s been a long day but it shouldn’t be too long more to the café. Like Patrick said -”

My voice-over was cut off by the low bleeping of the traffic light as the little green man made his much-anticipated appearance. Hastily stowing the camera back in my pocket, I crossed the road.

Crema Café, it aspired, was hidden away in a corner of Brattle Street, between a restaurant and what appeared to be a mountaineering store. I stepped in and was immediately greeted with the low babble of talk and the smell of coffee and cinnamon. The place was busy, but not crowded so full that movement or discussion was restricted. No tables were free downstairs so I climbed up the stairs at the back to the balcony of sorts. It was less full — perhaps thanks to the friendly chalkboard message requesting that patrons limit their time at the tables to one hour. Shrugging off my jacket and scarf, I retrieved my book — The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown — from the depths of my bag, trying not to let the contents of my over-packed bag spill out onto the floor. Then, I settled down to wait for one of my brothers to show up, and thus, a great weekend was preordained.

Go on, click here to submit

Two quick videos from the Exhibition – the first is with Adrian Weckler (of the Sunday Business Post) and the second is with Donna McCabe and Science.ie.

Sleep Cycle is an app for the iPhone & iPod Touch which has been getting a good bit of media attention recently. Then again, it’s not exactly your everyday game or list application — it measures how deep you sleep is throughout the night and wakes you up when it senses that you’re in your lightest phase of sleep.

How?

It’s quite simple — almost deceptively so, and this is where the rumours/accusations of it being fake stem from — using your iPhone’s accelerometer (the thing that detects if you’re holding the phone in landscape versus portrait mode) to measure how much you move throughout the night, it places your sleeping habits in one of three categories: Deep Sleep, Dreaming and Awake.

That’s all it is. You place it beside your pillow (behind your head) when you’re going to sleep and it does the rest. Those afraid of being woken by calls can solve this by putting their phone on airplane mode.

The second feature is that it wakes you up. “Oh.. great!” I hear you say. Aha, but, does your alarm clock wake you up at a set time, and you virtually always feel crappy because you were in a really deep sleep?

I thought so. Nevermore, thanks to this app. Because it knows how deeply you’re asleep, you give it a window of time in which to wake you up (for example: no earlier than 7am, but not later than 7.30am) and it chooses a spot where you’re very lightly asleep — and thus you don’t feel like crap getting out of bed. It also wakes you up gently – gently lilting noise which gets increasingly louder.

You can see screenshots of the graphs in the posts – my first two nights using it. I slept soundly the first night (I was even comatose (as I call it) from 5am-7am) but the second night was a pretty crummy sleep. My iPhone’s currently in Irish, if you’re wondering why it’s not English.

The app is currently only 79c on the App Store. Click here to buy it while it’s on sale. (iTunes App Store link)

I’m not involved with the developers of this app; they didn’t ask me to review it

Yesterday, myself and Dad went boating with friends of ours. Here’s some photos from that escapade:

By order of Orla, this photo was to go first.

This was a shot of some birds by the water. With 12x zoom, the old stereotype of nature photographers having to be this close to animals to get photos of them are gone — I was 50 paces away taking this.

Bridge/boat shot.

The bad weather and cold did little to dampen the spirits of the five of us. Just as well — it was very cold.

A view from the very front of the boat.

Lough Derg gives lovely views of the surrounding country-side. To do: boat my way down the Shannon. I’d say that during the summer it’s a grand old journey.

Page 22 of the Sunday Business Post.

Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap, recommended by Olivia.

Those are some pretty sweet drums. I think I’ll go learn them — next drumming video, anyone? :)