NIMUG

According to Larry Dignan on ZDNet:

• Hard drives are the “hot” PC accessory this holiday season.
  Of course with Leopard and Time Machine we can see that an external drive quickly becomes a must-have for anyone wanting to retain their data. It really takes the pain out of maintaining backups.
• Notebook demand remains strong.
  Anyone could have told you this. With AOL giving low-end laptops away and MacBook demand going through the roof, people are keen on having computing where they want it rather than having to place the computer in the spare room. And nothing beats using your laptop to answer those questions that strike in the middle of the night. Or is that just me?
• Anything Apple.
  No surprise here either. A recent report said that 1 iPhone and 13 iPods are being sold an hour currently in any one of the Apple Retail Stores. Like last year, this is going to increase as Christmas approaches.
• Printers are an afterthought
  I’d not really noticed but I don’t have a working printer at home currently. I’ve just not needed it. Having the iPhone makes a difference for sure because I tend to keep stuff in my email and of course, iPhone is really good for email. I never need to print anything.
• Smartphone discounts abound, but not for long.
  These discounts were in direct competition with the iPhone but they were simply not sustainable. Of course there’s a palpable difference between having a smartphone and a smart phone. Hey, it’s the same phone as Chris Moyles and Jeremy Clarkson.

Friday nights are not probably the best for everyone so we’ll have a poll.

Use the comments field for adding extra options if you like. We’re talking about a 2 hour meeting, in the evening, at the Lawn Tennis Club (due entirely to availability and therefore in Belfast for the foreseeable future).

Let’s hear your voice!

BE THERE.

The UK and Irish MUGs have organised another photography competition for this year.

Closing date is the 20th January 08.
Here is the entry form.

We can’t buy ringtones for the iPhone yet, Apple hasn’t added it to the iTunes music store. But then if you’re like me you’ll be balking at the idea of paying another 79p for a 20 second snippet of a track you already own. Especially as their service only works with tracks you download from iTunes and not with tracks you’ve imported from your legally owned CDs!

Never fear!

Making Ringtones for the iPhone is not a complicated and difficult proposition.

Ringtones are just sounds which are in the m4r format. What is that format? Well. it’s the same as the m4a format (which is more commonly known as the AAC format) but with the file renamed from m4a to m4r.

Last night I did the following:

• I have a sound file in my iTunes I’d like to use as a ringtone. It’s the 20 second intro to Roobarb which was a childrens cartoon dating from about 1974.
• The sound file is in .WAV format which is one of the default PC sound types commonly round on the Internet. The file name is therefore roobarb.wav
• Within iTunes, I select “Convert selection to AAC” from one of the menus. If it says something different, like “Convert to MP3″ then you need to redefine your import preferences in iTunes to the AAC encoder.
• Once converted, locate the file (using Show file in the iTunes contextual menu).
• Drag it to the desktop and rename it from roobarb.m4a to roobar.m4r
• Go back into iTunes and delete the listing for the AAC version.
• Drag the newly renamed m4r file into iTunes.
• Sync your iPhone
• Bud-da-bing, you have a new Ringtone

Too hard?

You have another choices.

iToner from Ambrosia Software will do exactly the same thing with a pretty interface for about £7.50 and doesn’t require hacking your iPhone. That’s because it’s just automating what I described above.

You’re also not limited to 20 second snippets (though some of the sound effects that come with iMovie and Garageband would be great for use as Ringtones) and you can make your own by chopping up an existing song using something like Cacophony, Quicktime Pro, Sound Studio or even Garageband and iMovie! If you like we’ll demo some of this at the NiMUG meeting next Friday!

(Finally a use for googling items like “Best Guitar Riff Ever”)

From Electronista:

“Simply put, Apple is no longer the leader in the realm of hard drive-based players,” says PC Magazine reviewer Tim Gideon. “While the Zune 80GB and the iPod classic are both outstanding devices, the Zune has more features–and it’s more fun.”

Sounds ominous. The Zune beating the iPod in a fair review? Surely there must be some mistake???

The iPod classic is widely believed to be a form of stopgap measure for Apple, which is gradually transitioning to an all-flash lineup headlined by the iPod touch but feels obligated to maintain a hard drive-based player to address the wide gap in capacity between the differing storage formats.

That explains it.

Microsofts latest unreleased Zune model competes well (on features, if not compatibility or battery life) compared to the previous models of Apple’s iPod line, a line that they’re slowly killing off in order to embrace the iPod touch and iPhone.

That must be pretty depressing. The latest and greatest from Redmond just about beats the hard disk based ‘Video’ iPod which Apple released two years ago yesterday. The updated models since then have just really increased the capacity of the micro-hard drives.

They used to say: Windows 95: Macintosh ‘89 but it’s beginning to look like Microsoft is closing that gap.

Look out Steve - they’re only two years behind now!!!!!!!

We’ve upgraded the discussions forum from the crufty old YaBB install complete with about 8000 spammers, to a new Wordpress-based forum. We’re going to be able to spot spammers a mile off with the new software and we’ve got much better controls over moderation and the code we can use. I know - who cares eh?

Go look at the new NiMUG Forums!

Here’s the old forums which we’ll keep online for a bit longer and then slowly close them down.

There’s heaps of broadband speed tests out there. This one is listed as a speed test application for the iPhone.

http://www.inetworktest.com

When run at my desk, it reports

Results: 997.5 kbps
Not an iPhone

That’s just under 1 Megabit per second (about 220Kbytes per second)

When I ran it on my O2 EDGE connection, it reported:

Results: 324.4 kbps

That’s slightly slower than low end domestic broadband (about 40Kbytes per second)

Anyone else fancy reporting the speeds they get from their provider?

Meeting details at the link below:

http://www.nimug.org/2007/11/07/meeting-friday-23rd-november/”

Paul sent in this image which he spotted in Belfast City Centre:

Considering that iPhone update 1.1.2 was released today, we’d reckon that it would be dangerous for anyone to consider this kind of unlock due to the possibility of creating an iBrick out of a new iPhone. They’ll unlock it but by doing so they’re voiding the warranty on the device so do you go back to them or back to Apple if there’s a fault?

They’re basing their pricing on £269 + 18 months of £35. (£269 + £630 = £899). Nomatter what you do with it you’re going to have to sign up with some phone provider so part of their argument is invalid anyway.

My advice: Don’t risk it.