More or Less the same

Well as the mornings brighten up almost enough to drive to work without headlights what's been happening?

Since we last spoke I took my last trip of the season down to my caravan just to make sure it was all OK. The site is only closed in February so we like to get down around the end of January to check that it's survived the worst ravages of winter and will be ready when the site opens again in March. Why do they shut at all? Well it's to do with tax. Basically it proves that it is a leisure home and not a main residence.

Car

Anyway I was beginning to wonder if there was some sort of mysterious fate trying to keep us away from the van. As you read in January's blog we had a mystery breakdown half way down when we went to go at New Year. This time I wasn't even at the end of my street when I drove over a nail and lost the back tyre. I put on the spare however and continued with the rest of the journey. Of course this meant no spare at a time when the roads have so many pot holes that they look like they've been bombed after Decembers heavy snow. In the last blog on tyres I used C Tyres at 73.50per tyre saving me about £40 per tyre on the next cheapest quote. This time I used Camskill. The tyre cost £60 and there was a £10 charge for fitting so just a further three pound saving. In order to keep track overall of savings since I started this quest though I've got to count it.

Saving on one new Tyre against the next cheapest at £113 is £43.00

Whilst we're on that as well I got the tyre fitter to take the one remaining rear tyre that hadn't been replaced so far and fit it to the spare using the spare on the rear wheel. That's another saving of at least £113.

Using spare tyre on rear wheel and old tyre on spare. Saving at least £113.00

I also discovered at the end of that weekend (when my car wouldn't start) that I had a dry cell in my battery. I love my car. It has so many ways to cost me I lose track. Now surprisingly here I'm not going to list a saving. I found plenty of decently priced batteries on the Internet but all had high delivery costs. It ended up that a shop just across the road had a battery around £10 dearer than the Internet price but it worked out the same without the delivery. In fact it worked out a lot better because the first battery was millimeters to big for the tray, although by measurement it shouldn't have been. so we went back and got it changed for another type. I also now know how to change a car battery. So I can change a wheel, a battery and a headlight. Mummy I'm a mechanic now don't you know.

Computer

OK so regular readers probably haven't been by as much as they used to be. Why? Well because I haven't been updating with any regularity so it gets a bit dull reading the old blog pages all the time.

Part of the reason for not updating has been that I'm lazy and living the quiet life hasn't given me a whole load of stuff to write about. Partly it's been because, much as I love my little net book and have had it hooked up to my 32 inch screen, I hate the blurry poor quality display I've been getting from my net book since the computer died. Now a few times I've looked online at bargain basement PC options and it has to be said that you could do reasonably OK for as little as £100 (although you're getting a low spec old system with no guarantees that it will survive any upgrades you do to it). The problem has been that I don't have £100. Also the reason that the net books graphics transfer so poorly to my flat screen is that I bought one that doesn't have a socket for the PC. You can only transfer your display via HD or via the old analogue video cable. HD is great but cheap PCs and laptops haven't got that far yet. Almost half the price of my dead PC went on a graphics card with it's own memory and an HD output and it was this that I hoped I could save and use in a newer cheap model.

Completely unconnected to my computer woes my brother came round to ask me if I could help him figure out how to use his new HTC phone (I'm so jealous, on first impressions it seemed so much better than the dreadful iPhone). Anyway I think he was just showing off because it seemed that he had the damned thing working perfectly. It's not called the desire for nothing. Thing is when he came round (my wife was away for a few days, more on that in a mo) and I was surfing amazon looking at cheap shit PCs and wondering whether they would handle my graphics card. Turns out that my brother has a broken PC of his own that he's consigned to a cupboard. I asked if I could have a go at creating a hybrid between mine and his.

First thing is that I took his, connected it to a projector as I don't have a standard monitor and... It worked straight away. I found myself staring at wallpaper of an F15 fighter launching from an aircraft carrier. After a few minutes wrestling with my conscience I texted him to say his PC worked and that he could have it back if he wanted. I seriously considered claiming dishonestly that it was some magic that I had performed and that he hadn't just given me a working PC. I'm glad I was honest though because he told me to do what I could with it and, if it worked it was mine.

So, I took a working PC and set about breaking it in the pursuit of better graphics, memory etc. I opened the box intent on installing my hard drive only to discover that it was a SATA model and all of my peripherals were ATA. Boo. I installed my graphics card and sound card. I hooked it up to the 32" TV and... It still worked. I spent most of that night and the following night installing and uninstalling programmes in order to truly make it my own. After several hours it looked and behaved not unlike my beloved dead PC. The wallpaper was mine, my photos, my music and a host of software that I like. Unfortunately it started to behave a bit too much like the old PC. After two days it crashed completely. Because the first thing to go was the sound I removed my sound card and reverted to the motherboards inbuilt sound. This seemed to work. The free virus checker that I've been using for nearly ten years, AVG, was using masses of system resource so I uninstalled it and tried another Avira. This made a big difference and the thing seemed to start to act like a stable PC. My old PC also turned out to have a card in it that seemed to extend the motherboards capacity for hard drives, DVDs etc. I reasoned that, although this was ATA technology, it was attached to a PCI slot so might work in a SATA PC. I now have a second drive in the PC and an external drive attached to a USB. It seems good. A little further research has shown that I can buy a SATA/ATA converter that may allow me to use my old DVD drive and even my old floppy drive. Yep I seem to have a working desktop PC again. This is great has almost certainly saved me about £100.

Building a PC out of two broken models. Total saving approx £100

Smoking

I mentioned that my wife was away for a week didn't I? Well I'm ashamed to admit that whilst she was gone I bought a packet of Cafe Creme cigars (small ten pack cigars) and smoked the lot. I thoroughly enjoyed them too. I'm ashamed to admit this when I'm also at a point where I've completed one full year as a non-smoker. It's even more shameful when I know that at least one follower of this blog has recently been re-reading the story of my triumph against smoking using Champix. In fairness though it was only for a week, it was only ten cigars and I haven't slipped any since or, surprisingly enough, even wanted to.

Finally can I also say a big hello to Jo.Kennedy who has joined the merry band of supporters on the site. I know a Jo Kennedy although that's actual Joe Kennedy so probably unconnected but a big welcome anyway.

So I think that brings you about up to date.

Hopefully more savings to come next month.

Till next time

T

Another year older but no further in debt

Happy new year folks

It almost makes me smile to think about those who will be struggling with their new years resolution to either give up smoking or cut down on drinking. I'm almost a full year ahead on both.

Have I smoked? Yes, there have been slip ups but I'm almost through the first year. My weakness has been the occasional, irrational cigar. Even one makes me dizzy enough to fall over but, every so often I have caved. The good news is that I have also been able to return to the world of non smoking without pain or cravings. As for the drink....

Lack of hard cash has meant that drinking has been reduced to one or two bottles of wine over a weekend. It's been a forced abstinence rather than voluntary and I did love the brief respite of Christmas when I drunk almost like the old days but, by and large, drink has been an area of my life where I've been able to save a fair bit and felt a lot better for it. If money ever returns to normal I think I'll still go without during the week.

Without smoking or drinking to torment me you may be worried that the blog will go all iPhone on you. Not so. I've fallen completely out of love with that device. It basically looked great and had a myriad of functions that should have made it the greatest phone on earth. The problem was that it didn't perform any single function well and sometimes didn't perform at all. I reset it to its factory settings back in November. It works as a phone and does some things well but is nowhere near the phone that it claims to be and from my point of view never will be.

Nope, this years blog will be about saving or earning money. I intend to share my fight to maintain a quality of life despite this painful recession. I'm considering renaming the blog to 'Make dough and mend'. What do you think?

I've already managed to earn £80 by changing my electricity supplier whilst the new supplier gave me a bonus of £100 for switching and promises savings of around £200 over the course of the next year. It has to be said that I haven't seen this money yet but I live in hope. As well as this I have saved on car tyres managing to replace two tyres for less than the cost of having one fitted by the dealer.

This month has been no different and I have a couple of ideas to share to help the savings mount. Back about September/October our dishwasher kicked the bucket. God she was sorely missed. My wife is a great cook and I'm lucky to eat fantastic food but..She likes to use every dish and pot in the kitchen to do so. For months I have been fighting a mountain of dishes that just doesn't seem to ever go down. She's accused me of having OCD because I go into a deep depression when I can't keep on top of the never ending pile of washing. Anyway Yahoo have site that is simply fantastic for such an emergency. Freecycle. Google it and you will be amazed. Based on your postcode or zip code you will find a freecycle community in your neighbourhood. The idea is simple. Got stuff you don't want? Give it away to someone that does. The person taking said goods doesn't pay anything but has to arrange collection and removal at their own expense. In the past we have given away items as diverse as gym equipment and feather cushions. I know of one woman who wanted the stone chips removed from her drive so she could re-surface it. She offered the chips to anyone who could remove them on a set date. The drive was cleared free of charge.

Anyway, once you have donated stuff to freecycle you can then ask for stuff. So we asked for a dishwasher. A guy about three miles away had just had a new kitchen fitted and wanted the old appliances taken away. We took the dishwasher. If it hadn't worked we could just have binned it but, no, it was a working dishwasher. I am delighted. The dishwasher is installed and working and it cost precisely nothing. It doesn't get better than that.

So how do I calculate the saving on this one? Well a new dishwasher would be £200+ but it's not a new dishwasher so it wouldn't be realistic to count that as a saving. A second hand dishwasher I imagine would be about £50 so that's what I'm adding this in as.

Total Saving on Dishwasher £50
Time delay: N/A

The next saving exposed a flaw in a previous saving that I thought I was making. My bank account comes with free breakdown cover amongst other things. It's not unusual now for banks to offer these types of benefit as there seems precious little else to recommend them. I've always seen breakdown cover as being essential as my first car was a banger and needed recovered more than once and my wife has a classic old car that really shouldn't still be roadworthy but is. So, despite hating the bank, one of the reasons I stuck with them was that I perceived this breakdown cover to be worth about £60 per year. I drive a newish car however and don't expect to break down.

Expect the unexpected. Between Christmas and new year we suddenly lost power and found ourselves stranded in quite a dangerous position at the side of a very busy country road. We phoned our breakdown cover. It turns out that all we had cover for was if we could get fixed at the roadside. Had the car needed towed it would have been taken to the nearest garage and we would have had to look out for ourselves over 100 miles from home. Fortunately it was started at the roadside and we got home without incident. My first thought however was to arrange a recovery service. Should this ever happen again I want the security of knowing that I will get towed home if needs be or to my forward destination.

I did a load of price comparisons and found someone at less than half the price of the big guys. I checked all their literature and read some reviews on them as there is no point them being cheep if they can't do the job. It's all good. They basically have links with loads of local recovery firms so will organise recovery with someone local to your breakdown. They will recover me home as well. If you are in the UK try Rescuemycar.com

Despite this I wanted a little more. You see no-one has been able to figure out why I broke down in the first place. The in car computer shows no faults, the battery is working and the engine has run like a dream before and since. This is good but is also a form of torture because I can't guarantee that the problem won't reoccur. For this reason I also wanted home start. This means that they will also come to your home and try to get you going, or tow you to garage if there is a problem. There are two main motoring organisations in the UK and both want over £100 to offer, repair, recovery and home start. I now have the lot plus piece of mind for £32. What's more I purchased this option via quidco so will get about £6 cash back. All in the a cost of £26 against £100. Cool or what?

Vehicle recovery. Total saving £80 approx
Time saving N/a

So I'm already doing pretty well with the savings. Tyres, plumbing, dishwasher, recovery it all adds up. The other angle of this site however also has to include making money. There will be caravan fees this year at approx £1200 and I have no clue as to where these will come from. We're both hard workers and will meet some of this cost through our wage rises however these are likely to be a lot lower than in previous years. I can feel some sort of part time work coming on. Watch this space....

T

8 hours is not enough

Hi folks from snowy Scotland

Computer
It was a sad day last Sunday when I finally had to admit that, in its present condition my faithful old desktop has had to retire. The fact is that the glitches that it's reporting such as missing registry files and blue stop screens are just symptoms of a hardware problem that I just can't get past.

I spent about two and a half hours on Sunday trying to fix it and then had to admit defeat. As any good geek will testify, a computer is a conglomeration of many parts so all is not lost. The graphics card and sound card will probably make it on to a new 'basic spec' machine when I can afford one. The good news is that the hard drive is intact and runs using an external USB caddy so I shouldn't be too down. What I miss most is the graphics though and its not just me being fussy.

We probably watch more TV online over the net than what we get through the box. I have a 32" flat screen that has served as my pc monitor and display for online on demand television for about three or four years. The thing is I managed to purchase the only flat screen ever made that didn't have a VGA input for the PC. With my trusty desktop the graphics card had a HDMI output which was fine but the laptop only has SVID which is OKish for TV but dreadfully blurry for text like my blog. I did have to treat myself to a USB keyboard however as the laptop one just doesn't cut the mustard for any kind of typing. So for the moment the laptop will have to step up as the main PC because there are no funds for a new desktop, just now or, any time soon.

Credit Crunch
That brings me to the tale behind the title of my blog. 2010 has just been too tough and I'll not weep to see its passing. Although I don't want to wish my life away. I shouldn't complain as I have been able to pay my bills (most of them at least) and I have a decent job but it's the complete lack of even a spare penny as a contingency that's getting me down. I took my car to the dealer for new wheels. Yep I'm still screwing the dealer for every penny after my failed MOT earlier this year. Anyway they couldn't do two of the wheels because I need new tyres. That meant shopping around for tyres and yet more money. Then there will be next years caravan fees before you know it. I already can't afford Christmas so god knows what will happen if something unexpected crops up. So I am going to commit now to earning more in 2011. I don't do new years resolutions, it's not that, but I'm not spending another year of all work and no play. So here's the plan...

Between now and January I'm going to research ways of earning more and spending less. The blog has lacked focus since I gave up smoking but, from January I'm going to start monitoring what ways I come up with to earn Money. I'll also try to measure what I can manage to save by either using less or by learning to do things myself. Yep, this blog is going to be about thrift. I'm going to share whatever advice I come up with on beating the recession and living life. Any tips you guys have will also be included.

Iphone
This weekend saw new iPhone software released on the world iOS4.2. So why hasn't there been a blog about how to jailbreak? Well I haven't even upgraded yet. I'm waiting. I'm actually considering upgrading but then not jailbreaking. To any jailbreaker that must sound strange. Well the truth is that I want to see if I can improve the performance of the phone. I have already gone back to my HTC for satnav because the iphone is so poor. But it seems to be poor at everything so I'm wondering if it might perform better without the customisation. Watch this space for results.

Smoking

This weekend my wife was away with relatives. As I wasn't there I decided to have a wee weekend to myself. I bought a 24 pack of beer and settled in for some serious guy time. I even looked out some old vinyl 45rpm singles. Anyone out there remember the Stranglers, the Clash, The damned? What about some 80s stuff like the cure or the fall. I've even got older stuff inherited gradually from relatives so have some great stuff from the stones and Rod Stewart. What does this have to do with smoking? Well there's been a cigar kicking about my office since long before I quit. I've mentioned it more than once in the blog. I always enjoyed a cigar back when I smoked but this one survived intact. Until now. Yep, late on Friday night I nipped down to the cellar and smoked it outside the back door. Now anyone who follows the blog will know that there have been the occasional cigs.(The last one was back in July) To be honest the cigs haven't done anything for me and they are just one of those things where you try one once in a while to see if your missing something and then realise that you aren't. The cigar however was different. I loved it. So much so that I can't have another one because I would quickly become a smoker again. Maybe on Christmas day or boxing day I might have another but otherwise it's a no no. I've been quit since February and I aint going through that again.

Car

Finally. It's snowing heavily here. Yep winter isn't just around the corner, it's here. This could last till February. I've just spent two hours clearing the path. This means that the wife and I will have to share the car. To all those who scoffed at my 4x4, who's laughing now? Can't wait till after Wednesday when the new tyres get fitted but to be honest I'd rather be in my car with bald tyres in this weather than most of the other cars I see sliding around the road. Last year mine had a hiccup on black ice but apart from that it's the only way to handle this weather.

Hope everyone is well. Enjoy the snow. Give me ideas to make or save money or to do things myself without paying. I'll update again next week.

Cheers

T

Sn0w storm comming, Frosty reception for Sn0wbreeze 2.02

Well last Wednesday night I must have been one of the first to download the brand new Sn0wbreeze jailbreak. It was due for 2am but I had it on my PC the moment it came out about 1.10

But I didn't have it on my phone. My phone has worked very well since my screw up last week and as a result I've not been quite so desperate to screw it up again. Also I was away for the weekend so I didn't want to risk my phone not working. As a result I did not install the new jailbreak.

By the time I got home today the jailbreak has gone through another two incarnations. That means it wasn't right at the start. I've now downloaded the latest and am just trying it. I have my doubts but, I'm off tomorrow so if the worst happens I have a day to fix it.

I have an iPhone 3g. I'm attempting to break it with sn0wbreeze version 2.02. I've 'cooked' the ipsw and am now running a restore. I've already had one error and am now getting that sinking feeling again. This doesn't look hopeful. I followed the instructions at Redmond pie but I'm getting a 1604 error. I'm using Tiny umbrella to kick my device out of recovery as it seems to be locked at the moment.

Fortunately I don't appear to have done any damage but I've not upgraded either. I'm a bit surprised. I genuinely thought this would work. I'll try again but it looks like we may have to wait for greenpois0n after all.

Try 2. This time I made sure the phone was in recovery mode before selecting restore. This is achieved by holding the home and on/off buttons simultaneously till the screen goes blank (ignore the 'switch off message) then letting go of the on/off whilst continuing to hold the home button until iTunes says that it recognises a phone i recovery mode. I then held down shift and clicked the 'restore' button in itunes and browsed to desktop and the new ipsw. I'm watching itunes just now but it ain't doing much.

Oops. This time it really doesn't look good. iTunes has just kicked the phone out and it wont switch on or anything. I unplugged then plugged back in and it said it recognised a phone in recovery mode so I browsed to the ipsw again. Fingers crossed... Nope. I've had error 1601 and now error 21 after running something called iReb. The good news is that when I come out of recovery mode using Tiny Umbrella my phone is undamaged. Just not upgraded. This is not the end of the world. To date: I can't use PWNAGE because I don't have a mac. The old version of Redsn0w (my preferred option) doesn't work and the new version is Mac only at the moment. Sn0wbreeze looks like working (it creates a new ipsw file) but wont restore to 4.1 so I'm still jailbroken on 4.02 with the 4.1 bootrom. The phone works better than ever but doesn't seem keen to upgrade to 4.1. Looks like I'm still waiting for greenpois0n.

Watch this space...
T

Meanwhile back at the ranch...

OK so it doesn't look like the iPhone blogs going to get the update I'm waiting for any time soon. For some reason I thought it would be Saturday but, no such luck.

Back in the real world however life goes on.

Since moving out a year ago our neighbour has resolutely failed to sell their half of the house. This has been absolutely lovely for us because it's left us feeling like we owned the whole house and all the land which of course we don't. In our defence it's also left us with all the maintenance of the garden as well which is not insubstantial. We could just have let stuff go at that side but the grounds are shared and it would have made our house look like crap. So we've put flower pots right down the drive on his side, some small trees up to screen it from the road, pots all along the front of the whole house and either side of the door whilst I've been keeping the weeds down and fixing the pot holes in the tarmac after last years snow. Whilst picking up his van (which he still parked in our drive) the neighbour actually offered us money for keeping the garden so lovely. If it didn't sell it certainly wasn't because of the state of the grounds he said.

Well it hasn't sold so he's been forced to let and last week a new wagon pulled up at the ranch. When I say ranch I do of course mean house. When I say wagon...Unfortunately I do mean wagon or long wheelbase, high roof Mercedes van to be precise. Now the drive is a decent size. The house is basically like an island with drive all the way round and a tiny patch of grass but there is a limit. The owner on the other side has a van and double length trailer and we have two cars. The problem with what is basically a single lane road around the house is that you block it when you stop. This means that you actually have to organise how you park or everyone gets stuck. I park tight to the back garden fence which leaves enough room in front to get a vehicle past. My wife parks flat against the basement door which again keeps the path free and the owner of next door blocks one side of the drive with his van and trailer but it's not a problem because the other side is free.

The new neighbour however was parked in front of the house. This was not only unsightly but, given the size of the van completely blocked our view of the garden. Rather than annoy the new neighbours and get off to a bad start I phoned the owner. I asked the owner to take his van away so that the new neighbours could have his space and the status quo would return.

It was a tense moment. The problem with shared land is...it's shared. As long as he owns his property then he can park whatever he wants in the drive (as can we) and it would be an expensive legal battle to do anything about it. Fortunately he was quite OK about. I think it had already occurred to him and he'd decided to play fair. Unfortunately rather than tell the neighbours that he was moving out so they can have his space. He told them that we had complained about them so hew was moving out so they could take his space. Can't have it all I suppose. We have no plans of being bad neighbours so it would soon pass.

So that was the parking sorted. Nope. The owner upheld his end of the bargain but the big double van of the new neighbours was still at the front. I was out tidying in the garden and the husband came out for something. Whilst chatting I mentioned that his landlord had now taken his van away to allow them to park. Yep he replied and said that he'd park his van away from the front tomorrow night. He gestured to say he'd put it where I park my car but I corrected him to put it where the landlord kept his van. Persistence is key. You don't have to fall out over this stuff.

Sorted? Nope. Again the van gets parked at the front. I'm furious this time. However I am wondering if maybe the tightness of the bend where I've asked him to park is what's putting him off. I find it tight in my estate car but I put that down to me being a poor driver. These van guys can usually put their lorries in very tight spaces. But if that is the reason why didn't he just say so? I contact the landlord again. This time I want him to make it clear that parking at the front is unacceptable and I don't care if he says it's me that's complaining. In case the bend is the problem I've offered to trade my space for his.

He hasn't had the van for the past couple of days and has, in separate conversations with both myself and my wife, mentioned that he will park down at my space. He gets the van back tomorrow I believe. There will be trouble if it's parked at the front.

Next, the guy wants to tell me that an extension on my house is falling down. He works for a company of concrete specialists (as a driver and labourer) and has decided that a crack above the lintel on my extension is actually the extension coming down. It isn't. We know this. It was surveyed two years ago crack and all and was fine and has all the necessary building warrants. There is no other sign of movement inside or outside beyond a crack that frames the lintel (proves that there is a lintel I suppose). It just wasn't finished very well and the render has cracked at some point in the past. He pointed this out to me like some sort of icebreaker in our very first conversation. What's wrong with talking about the weather or asking for a bowl of sugar? But he doesn't just want to point it out, he wants to get a team from his work to come round, knock it out, and sort it. This is either massive and completely unwarranted kindness or, as I suspect, an indication that the guy isn't really the full shilling and has only half an idea what he's talking about. It may have seemed a bit ungracious but this was one of those occasions when I had to say no in a way that left absolutely no doubt. I didn't want it to be like the van where, 'could you park round the side' somehow came across as 'the front will be fine'.

My extension remained untouched I'm pleased to say. But the story doesn't end there. I come home on Friday (they've been there exactly a week) and there's a couple of weird and worrying signs in the garden. There's a decent (fist sized) lump of concrete lying in the drive that's been chipped of one of the kerbing stones. There's another similar bit on the grass where I park the car. A loose bit of wall from a stair at the outside of the house has been removed from it's seat and... There's a piece of slate jammed in to the crack at the back of the extension. The neighbour, who was off that day and at home all day never saw any of it happen and has no idea how it could have happened.

So on Saturday I get some cement and fill in the crack on the extension. It needed done anyway. By doing so there's no way for foreign objects to get jammed in it. I've put the bit of wall back and am accepting that the lumps of concrete were just somehow loose (no evidence of that in the past two years).

This time when I'm filling in the crack the guy comes out and says to 'leave it till Monday and he'll get some stuff from work to re-render the whole thing'. Again I've had to be pretty blunt and to the point in saying 'No'. I'm worried that I'm going to come home and find that this freak has taken my house down. Maybe I'm just reading too much in to it because he angered me with the van. Maybe he genuinely is trying to be helpful. I'm not convinced so I'll be watching like a hawk.

This week I've also got to go down south to pilot a new training course. The place I'm going to is somewhere I haven't been since February. Yep the last time I was there was day 4 of Champix and I hadn't even stopped smoking at that stage. Read days 4-6. To think what I was going through at that stage and then think that, just over a week later, I had completely stopped smoking and am still stopped more than six months on is nothing short of incredible. On day 6 back in February I actually purchased what turned out to be my last pack of tobacco ever. It's still sitting in a drawer in my office. Back around that time I went through two 50g packs per week. I do sometimes miss smoking if I'm honest but I never miss coughing or having to find money for tobacco or being prepared to walk to the ends of the earth if that's what it took to get a pack when I'd ran out. I occasionally miss the companionship but I don't miss standing out in the cold.

Finally on Friday next week I take the car in to have the wheels photographed prior to getting them changed. For the moment that brings us closer to the end of the car saga. Although I could do without the expense of changing the wheel at the moment but it's silly to lose the chance of half price.

So I've no idea what the blog will be about next week. Hopefully there will be a jailbreak for the iPhone. God knows what my neighbour might do to the house and who knows what will happen down south.

Watch this space....

T

iOS 4.1 Jailbreak for iPhone UPDATE

Wed 08/09/10

Until I have a packaged jailbreak I'm going to just update this single post with news of progress. When the jailbreak arrives I'll do a proper new post.

I checked this morning before leaving for work and iTunes said that iOS 4.02 was the latest software. The same tonight about 5pm when I got home. At 7ish however it was available for download. iOS 4.1 has landed.

Before downloading 4.1 I copied 4.02 to a folder on my PC. When you download a new version iTunes auto deletes the old version. In the case of 4.01 and 4.02 you have needed to have a copy of the older version 4.0 in order to jailbreak (for those of us that could) or downgrade (for those that tried but couldn't). So I'll now keep copies of each version of iOS 4 until iOS 5 comes out.

Around 9 I read on Redmond Pie that a jailbreak has been tested and works. There's no date of release yet but I'd imagine it will be within the week. To be honest I think that Redsn0w would probably still work for my 3G and some of the older 3GS's but I don't want to try it.

The good news on the new jailbreak is that it's what's known as a hardware exploit. Not quite as easy to install as Spirit or Jailbreak me were but, because they've found a way round the hardware it should continue to work on all devices already produced or in production regardless of new launches like 4.2 coming in November. The result is that if you already own an iphone you should be able to continue jail breaking it until the hardware becomes so dated that it cant handle new software. That's why 3G owners were able to Jailbreak iOS 4.02 when no-one else could.

The bad news is that Apple will act quickly to alter the hardware and close this loop hole. When they do the owners of new phones and iPads will have to wait a while for the jail breakers to find another solution. For those that can afford the latest kit that's an issue because Apple upgrade and re-spec their kit regularly and most of it is pretty desirable.

One last bit of advice for tonight. It's entirely possible that by the time I wake up tomorrow the jailbreak will be out there. You can probably tell that I'm eager to upgrade. If like me your watching websites awaiting news then... try not to be the first. When the headline says Released, Tested and Working take a breath. Read the comments. Is it working? Are folk having problems or reporting crashes and conflicts? When I upgraded to 4.02 it worked OK but even basics like Installous weren't working and most of the Repos were missing so it was two days later before my phone was back to normal.

09/09/2010

It's widely reported that the new jailbreak has been tested and seems to work on iPhones, Ipads and iPod touches but still no news of a release date or even any decent speculation.

There's also been nothing to say that Redsn0w would work to allow 3g users to get ahead of the game. To be fair though I haven't really found anything from any 3g users to say whether it has speeded up their phones so maybe we're not missing too much.

I'll be posting my normal weekly blog over the weekend but will continue to update this post until some news comes up.

10/09/2010

Still no news although there is an unofficial jailbreak that is working for the 3GS (old Bootrom). Try the Redmond Pie link on this page for full instructions. Anyway in my search I found this clip. Who says there's an app for everything?

11/09/2010

Rumours are surfacing that, as suspected, the original Redsn0w 9.5b5 is working to jailbreak iphone 3g and, i believe iPod touch 2g. I'm reluctant to try it yet as users are reporting issues with the phone icon disappearing (quite essential to have a phone icon on a phone I would think) and also some wifi problems. Having said that, both the sites that I came across offering instructions on how to go about this jailbreak got it wrong and subsequently this may be the reason why it didn't work properly.

I've posted new instructions on both sites via the comments section and asked someone to post if they work. My idea is that one of the guys who has already lost their jaibreak would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying my method and, if it works, then I could try. The sites involved are: coveringweb.com and spiritjb.org

I also emailed admin at Redmond Pie to make them aware of this potential jailbreak because, in my experience, they will test it on their own phones before putting it out.

Update

Looks like covering web have taken their post down without any apology or explanation to those that they misled. Poor show I say.

16/09/2010

An answer to the continual question of 'when will there be an official Jailbreak for 4.1?' was posted by @pod2g today saying that the SHAtter exploit which uses a Jailbreak called greenpois0n (http://www.greenpois0n.com/) will go live tomorrow. It could be someone masquerading as a member of the Chronic dev-team or it could finally be time. We'll know tomorrow.

My 3g is just not reliable enough running 4.02. When it works it's good but there is just no rhyme or reason to whether it is going to work or not. If the Jailbreak comes out tomorrow I'll try it tomorrow. If not then I'll take a chance and run redsn0w on Saturday. If it works great but, if not, the sim is going to go back into my HTC touch diamond. It may be two years older and possibly lacks some of the bows and bells that iPhone has but, all of the functionality that it did have worked. Can't say that for the iphone. This bad boy could find itself in a drawer soon. Jobs insists that he's creating the perfect device and that is why he doesn't want it hacked. The problem is that most of us have older versions. Each time a new version of the iPhone comes out he forgets all about the millions stuck with the older kit. It's well documented that my issues aren't the result of my jailbreak. The 3g just doesn't work on os4.

17/09/2010

I thought we'd have a jailbreak today but it appears not. Chronic dev-team created this update which was accessed from their comments page but was a new blog item. (Love the work these guys do but they really are a bit guilty of high drama. What's wrong with a regular update on the regular blog page every Friday or whatever? Anyhow)

'Many people in the comments are asking for a progress update. Any kind of update that we could actually give would be too technical for anyone to understand anyway, not to mention potentially reveal the exploit. Just know that things are going swimmingly and we are working as hard as we can. Any demos, screenshots, or *cough* download links will be posted to this blog before anywhere else, so keep an eye out!' The blog can be found here Chronic-Dev.org
Keep watching

Prepare to Jailbreak iOS 4.1 for iPhone 3G Part 1

It's the jailbreak blogs turn tonight folks so if iPhones mean nothing to you or your iPhone means more than life itself you may want to skip this one.

At some point tomorrow Apple will release iOS 4.1 for all variants of iPhone and some ipod touches. The new software offers a few new features, Ping (a kind of face book of music that I don't really see the point of but that will no doubt become something you can't live without), Game Center which offers online gaming and high def video for the iPhone 4. All good stuff but given the hassle of re-jail breaking and then restoring all my apps and all my settings probably I could bear to live without these changes. However.....

There will also be a camera improvement called HSD. It's not available for the 3g but I've already read that, a bit like multitasking, jail broken 3gs will have an app that allows them to use it. Given how shit my phones camera is any software that improves the resolution and quality of a shot is a must. In addition to this Mr Jobs has said that it will allow the operating system to run faster on a 3g. Thank you thank you thank you.

iOS 4.0 did bring some functionality and gimmicks that made it worth upgrading but god has it slowed the 3g down. I know that that's probably not helped by jail breaking the phone to over perform but it was seriously faster and less buggy, jail broken or not, before 4 came along. There are You Tube videos showing how slow the three has become (jail broken or not).

So I want to upgrade to 4.1 as quickly as possible but, as always, there's a problem. Someone has to jailbreak it before I upgrade or I'd lose loads of functionality. My phone is themed to within an inch of its life. It doesn't look anything like an iphone. I'd lose that. My 3g reception goes to sleep with my phone saving battery life. I'd lose that. If I find something in google maps I've got a button that allows me to navigate there using tomtom. I'd lose the button and the tomtom. I've got an app that makes my Internet think that 3g is wifi and so allows live streaming. I'd lose that. Multi tasking. Yep that too. Forget one or two stolen apps it's the functionality I'd miss.

I suspect that the dev-team are pretty much good to go with some jailbreaks for this one. They may even be ready already and I'm hoping that some version of Redsn0w is pretty much ready to launch with a version of jailbreak me following within the first fortnight. But even with this it can still be a hassle so I've taken some steps to prepare in advance. Watch this space and I'll let you know how they go.

I use a winterboard theme called iEllegance. However I wasn't 100% on the out of the packet theme so I replaced the clock with a natty HTC flip clock, I've created Icons for my specific app set and I've changed the wallpaper and lock screen. In addition I've fixed some glitches so I've removed the themes dock and restored the original and I've taken the shadows off buttons because they were offset. As a newbie that has taken bloody ages. When you re-jailbreak you start again. In other words download the default theme, download the clock,, find icons and make others etc... To avoid this I have copied the theme folder completely from my phone using a free software called WinSCP. (think it's this they are talking about when they mention SSHing something to your phone. It shows you the contents of the phone as a windows style file system and you just copy and paste files once you figure out your way around) Hopefully after jail breaking all I need to do is get winterboard running and then paste my theme back into the library where it's supposed to go.

On that note, I've also copied the winterboard application along with a few others. What's the chances that I can paste them straight back in without having to download again?

Until I try I've no idea if any or all of this will work. Without a jailbreak it's a waste of effort. Provided I can view and change the file structure of my phone then I stand a chance of making this work. So even if all the jailbreakers could achieve was to get OpenSSH running on the phone then we'd be good to go.

If all this did work then, who knows, I could be one step closer to understanding what all those dudes at the dev team are up to to jailbreak the phone in the first place.

It goes without saying that you should back your phone up on iTunes before upgrading to 4.1 or even considering jailbreaking. but even here there may be a slight problem:

I think Apple might be up to something a bit sneaky but I could just be being paranoid. When I turned iTunes on today it ceashed for the very first time with an error. Synchost had stopped responding tell microsoft about this prob. I thought nothing of it, as most people probably wouldn't, shut iTunes down and restarted. Now when I sync I get 'ITunes was unable to load provider data from sync services. Reconnect or ty again later'. The paranoid side of me thinks that this is some sort of software change aimed at either preventing jailbreaking or, more likely, unlocking. Of course it could just be that my software is nuts but there was no event leading up to this. After some experiments I did find that if I shut down MY3G, enabled 3g reception through SBSettings and then let the phone lock itself before connecting to iTunes then everything seemed to work but I've no idea why.

As soon as I've got any news on a jailbreak I'll be doing another iBlog. Hope that means that we will speak soon.

Interesting times.

TQ

TQs' Theory of iVolution

Welcome to the weekly(ish)iPhone blog/update. Some regular readers will not be too surprised to see that I have now become obsessed with the iPhone. Not that I'm an addictive personality type in any way (fags, booze) but this whole iPhone thing has me hooked. I thought I loved my HTC but it wasn't true love. The problem with the HTC (mine is a Touch Diamond with windows mobile version 6)is that it's windows based so works intuitively, syncs with my PC and basically does what I want to do when I want to do it. What fun is that?

Apple have created a phone that is entirely designed around controlling what you can do and when. Not only controlling you but even controlling the developers. That's where the fun starts. Someone bought one of these iPhones but didn't like being stuck with a single network provider. Realising that the phone was just a small PC they found a way to view the file structure of the phone and remove the network provider restriction. Opening the file structure became known as jail breaking, whilst altering the default provider is known as unlocking.

Once you can see the file structure (jail breaking) it's a relatively simple matter to start changing things and adding things. It's no more or less complicated than changing the wall paper on your PC. What's more if you get stuck there are a million forums that will help. (remind me to get back to that) If you get really stuck you can just restore your phone to its un-jail broken state and start again.

The changes that you make to a jail broken phone will be completely lost whenever iPhone upgrade the software which, in my experience, is about every six - eight weeks for minor tweaks and every six months for major operating system type overhauls. The tweaks aren't that big a problem as they are mostly attempts to fix or speed up a process and the Dev-Team as the jail breakers call themselves tend to be ahead of apple on this constantly. The result, a jail broken phone on OS4 is just as, if not more, up to date as an non jail broken phone using OS 4.02 so there is no real need to upgrade. Jail breakers however can't take advantage of an update until the Dev-Team have checked it out and worked out how to obtain the file structure again. For owners of the new iPhone four this is developing into quite an issue. For owners of older cheaper phones like my iPhone 3g with 8gb memory this is no problem at all and an up to date break is usually available within the first 24 hours of an update.

When you upgrade you have to redo the jail break. That involves several things. You need to run software to jailbreak. You need to install software providers known as 'repos' (I need three of these) and then you need re-install the apps that those programs provide. I use Appulous which allows you to install apps without using iTunes (perhaps apps that cost money that you might like to try before purchasing), my3g which makes my phone treat 3g reception as wifi so that I can watch TV on my phone even without wifi, iAddkiller which beats off pop up advertising that you should be forced to suffer according to apple, Finally you need Appsync. What Appsync does is allows you to view your iPhones file structure in the same way that you would view the C drive on your PC with folders, subfolders and files. After this is done you can also re-install your, perhaps, unpaid for apps which will still show against your phone but wont work until the jailbreak process is complete.

The final app I install after a jailbreak is known as winterboard. It's basically a skinning or theme app. Google it and you'll quickly discover that you don't need to be some sort of iClone. You can pretty much change the appearance of everything to suit yourself. There are off the shelf packages that will make loads of changes for you or, once you figure out how it's done, you can make changes yourself. The pic on the right in the ivolution image above is my phone as it presently looks. I downloaded a theme known as iElegance which gave me the background and changed some of my icons to the new look that you see. This theme had a clock and date function that I didn't like it so downloaded another theme called HTC springboard. I copied the files from the second theme and pasted them over the clock files from the first. I then searched google for iElegance type icons. There were loads of them and someone had even made a down loadable zip file so I downloaded this and set about altering my remaining icons. I removed the new folder icons by changing their file extensions and replaced them with new ones that matched my theme. Learning and doing took about three days.

The result shown above is exactly what I wanted. To be clear. If you had just wanted to transform your iPhone to look like an HTC there's a winterboard theme that will do that with weather and calender etc. What I wanted was the appearance of an HTC with the functionality of an iPhone. Thanks to jail breaking, Winterboard, theme developers and the dev-team that's exactly what I've got. If Apple allowed HTC to create an OS for their phone I doubt that it would look to much different. I prefer apples Icons and folders to HTCs menu bars but I prefer the HTC look. I've got it and it works.

In around two weeks there will be another apple update rumoured to be called 4.1. The upgrade will fix an issue with 3g reception. Will I upgrade? Yep. What I have done differently this time is that I have copied folders such as themes and jailbreak apps directly to my computer. My hope is that I can restore my jailbreak fully within 3 hours of an upgrade. If I can then it will be worth it.

Finally, for the most part the jailbreak community are pretty helpful. Loads of how to guides, loads of sites to help you keep up to date. I was surprised therefor with Modmyi.com. I posted three posts there as a newbie and did not get a single response. There was lots of help on the site but I think us newbies with our specific questions may be a bit simpleton for them.

Normal blog to follow and more of the 'iTry' next week.

Cheers
T

Jail break IOS 4.02 withRedsn0w

For the second time in just a few weeks really I am putting up a quick blog to the jail breaking community for iPhones before my normal weekly blog. Apologies to those with no interest in the phone.


This week I did a stupid thing. Fortunately for me on this occasion I got away with it.

As I was reading on Redmond Pie that a new version of iPhone software was coming on to the market I was also being asked by iTunes if I wanted to downoad only or download and install. I selected download only but, as I did so, Redmond Pie confirmed that for iPhone 3g the original Redsn0w jailbreak would still work. Given that it worked so well when ios4.01 turned up hot on the heals of ios 4 I took them at their word.

Don't update

How many times in life do I need to be told, never buy the newest thing until you know that it works? Is that the first generation of a car that your driving? Does it have any problems that have been sorted out on newer models? Did you really pay £400 for that camera just before SLRs became the rage? Does windows mobile really beat iPhone?

I felt quite smug as the jailbreak was applied. I may have the old iPhone but mine would be up to date and jail broken. If the iPhone 4 brigade (who have waited months only to get a jailbreak and then have it shut down)think they are cool. Who's cool now with their 3g? The jailbreak worked. As I understand it it will work with 3g and below and iPod touch 2gs and below but for god sake check that info before you do it. The jailbreak did work but, because I was so far ahead of the game on this one Cydia etc weren't up to date. In other words I was jail broken but had very few of the real advantages. It's taken three days for everything to get caught up but now my phone is comfortably back to where it was.


The official line from all the jail breaking communities is hold your fire. ios4.02 Is simply an update that prevents nasty folk from hacking your iPhone using an exploit that was discovered by the jail breakers. The jail breakers needed a way to load software onto the phone and found one. In doing so it exposed the fact that there was a way that nasty people could do the same but for bad reasons. Given that iPhone hold bank details etc this was not good. Believe it or not the jailbreak community, realising the potential problem, had a fix out at the start of the week and have upgraded that to a proper patch for all phone variants before apple got to market with their solution.

So why did I update and why are so many people hopping from foot to foot waiting to hear when they can update? Simple, you can't fall behind with this stuff. Even as you read this there's software being created that will only work on ios4.02. Apple probably have a team working on a release for ios 4.03 whilst another team will be designing some major changes that will be called ios5. You need to be up to date.


Testers Required


To some extent it's really the jailbreak communities own fault. Apple should be paying these guys. The dev-team (jail breakers) are way ahead of apple in what they want their phones to do. The dev-team create apps that push the functionality of the phone to the limits. Sometimes they push beyond the limits and phones slow down or batteries drain too fast but none of us complain. If a development isn't what it should be delete it. IOS4 delivered folders. Jail breakers already had those. IOS 4 delivered multitasking. Jail broken phones had been doing that with varying success for at least a year. As before Jail broken phones had customisable lock screens and wallpaper. 3g and lower had already had video and camera zoom was taken for granted. All of these things had been available and were working with the jail breakers long before apple caught up. A suspicious person might think Apple monitored this activity with a keen eye to see what would be the popularity and impact on performance before packging them up into ios4.

A genius in the community known as Comex has pretty much launched a working flash application. IPhone has been stongly criticised for not having this and was even taken to court over an advert because of this. Apple was told to stop saying it's phones could access 'all of the internet, because without flash it could only access parts. You need it for a lot of movie and animation formats.

What Comex has launched is not yet perfect and he or she will probably work tirelessly until they get it perfect. Within 3-6 months of the the jail breakers launching Apple will probably package it and launch to the world. The jail breakers seem to be apples own research and development lab. And folk like me have no objection to being the lab rats. My 3g is almost equal to an iPhone 4 with the exception of memory. In terms of hardware it will fall behind but for the moment it's doing pretty well.


Jailbreaking also gives users applications that neither apple or the phone providers want you to have. I may not be able to use Frash on my 3g but one thing that I do use is MY3G. A fantastic little piece of software that can only be used on a jailbroken phone. What it does is makes your phone believe it has a wifi connection when it actually only has 3g. As a result your phone will attempt to do things like stream live tv when normally it would say that this could only be done through wifi. It doesn't actually increase the 3g signal but sometimes the signal is strong enough and the phone is just refusing because of data capacities.

DIY

Don't update
Given that I got my phone in May and have now jail broken it for about the fourth time I'm getting a bit pissed off. It's not difficult to jailbreak but jail breaking and then reapplying all your settings takes time and is annoying. For this reason I'm thinking about researching my own jailbreak. At the moment I'm not too sure what that means but I'm planning to find out. I'm not a programmer so I'm not talking about creating a jailbreak like the guys do with new functions and everything. I'm thinking much more simple. Is there a quick, button click, way of upgrading your phone and keeping all the programs and settings that you got from your jailbreak? A way of being on the newest version but maintaining functionality until the real geniuses at the dev-team work their magic.

The dev-team solution would always be better but this would offer a fix that would give them the breathing space to do their stuff. I know people would use that. Can I figure out how to do it? At the moment certainly not. If I do do it will anyone be interested? Maybe. Problem is I'll then need folk to test it as well because I'm stuck with my 3g till 2012.

This could become extreme jail breaking....

Stay hooked

T

Back to reality

Well, that's me back in the real world once again. Today is the last official day of holiday and then it's back to work on Monday.



After joking about the Scottish Weather, apart from a gray Sunday/Monday at the start, the weather was pretty good and, despite my wife's efforts to get me to wear suncream strong enough to protect vampires in daylight, I even have a hint of a tan. It's funny because we've been going up and down to the same region every year for the last seven years and yet we still discovered a forest trail that took us to a bit of deserted beach that we hadn't been to before. (The flies and insects in Forrest particularly loved my suncream and I ended up like that character out of Peanuts, Linus I think, that had a permanent cloud of bugs around their head). Also although we didn't get out fishing quite a few folk did so we had mackerel for tea on several occasions (note to self: look up mackerel recipes online because we're needing to get inventive if we're having it every second or third day). For some reasons the locals in the local town have now decided that we aren't caravaners anymore but are actually locals ourselves. It's very flattering but hopefully it doesn't get too obtrusive as we quite like our privacy. So all in all the holiday did exactly what holidays should do...we relaxed a lot. We stayed for nine days and then had a few days back at home at a slow pace to catch up so all good.

When I got back I checked the blog. The traffic slowed a bit without updates but still gained some visitors from some far flung places. Outside of the UK the USA now sends more visitors than Canada (need to get your friends involved Poet, Hi to Wisconsin, California, Ohio and Florida) with Australia (The Gold Coast has been loyal for a long time but is now joined by Sydney and Adelaide) out in front of the republic of Ireland (think Zoe has lost interest but Peter might still be keeping the side up).
There's also been some welcome but unexpected additions such as Iran, Romania, Singapore and Malaysia to mention just a few. Since I started monitoring in April there have been over 100O hits from 23 separate countries with the average hit spending 4 minutes on the site and viewing 3 pages per visit. OK so some sites get more hits than that per hour but I'm pretty impressed, not to mention grateful, that so many folk have taken an interest in my decisions to; give up smoking, attack a car company and switch to an IPhone.

So, without further ado, what about smoking, the car and the iPhone?

Well I still don't smoke so that's good. I'm not saying when but I did have a drag within the last eight weeks and it damn nearly blew the top of my head off so I think we're officially safe on that front. I don't remember it being anything like that back when I started smoking because, this time, I couldn't even contemplate a second drag. Didn't want to say at the time because I felt guilty but there you go.

I've heard nothing from the car garage. I'm quite surprised because I thought that going via the directors would have got me some response, even if it was just to tell me to shut up. Watch this space though because I will be following it up. I am a member of a forum for my particular brand of car (there is only one major forum for this car). When I got back from holiday I had a 'Friend request' from the forum from someone else in Scotland (my area too). It's only polite to accept such requests, so I did, and then sent him an email detailing exactly what I thought of the dealership. I explained, in reasoned terms, why I wont use the dealer for servicing and even suggested a garage that could do this for him with an average saving of £100 per time. Haven't heard back yet but here's hoping he takes my advice. Through the forum he may befriend other owners and before you know it there shoddy attitude and disgusting policies will be the stuff of Internet legend. I will of course keep you updated on this site but would rather not use this blog to do the actual campaigning.

Bad Apple just a barrel of Laughs

Before I left I also mentioned that Apple were going to address the reception problems of their new iPhone 4. Well they did. They offered every iPhone 4 customer a free Bumper (sort of rubber band that frames the phone) or case (not sure what quality). That's fine I suppose. I would have purchased a case at the same time as the phone anyway because it's a big screen that scratches easily. Despite not ordering a recall they did say that people could take the phone back if they were dissatisfied. In addition to this they issued a software update; IOS 4.01.

Software updates are a pain in the arse for those of us who choose to jailbreak the phone because you have to re-jailbreak and re-install your apps every time it happens. Did this using Redsn0w. Maybe because it wasn't a major upgrade this was easier than last time. It would seem that a major reason for the upgrade was to address the reception issue with the iPhone 4. Apparently it mis-reported reception making it appear that users were getting a better reception than they actually were. To my knowledge this only affected the iPhone 4. After the upgrade however my iPhone 3g shows poorer reception than it previously had. I have to say that this has little or no impact on my ability to make calls it just makes it look like the phone is getting poor reception. If you forget the fact that it works perfectly and gets 3g reception and everything and just go by the bars displayed after the upgrade...It would seem that I'd do better switching back to my HTC touch because it showed more bars. Well done Apple. On the plus side the advertisers have had a field day.
At Motorola, we believe a customer shouldn’t have to dress up their phone for it to work properly. That’s why the DROID X comes with a dual antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like to make crystal clear calls without a bulky phone jacket. For us it’s just one of those things that comes as a given when you’ve been making mobile phones for over 30 years.

Note the reception bars in samsungs 'Hello'

I'll update again before Sunday but that's enough for now

Quick Update

OK so I'm off on holiday in a couple of hours for the best part of two weeks. You can tell that it's proper holiday time hear in Scotland by the marbled grey sky, smattering of rain and the 45 degree angle of the trees trying to fight the wind. For most people it would be time to rush in doors but, for this hardy Scot at least, it's time to head for a caravan at the seaside. Time to give up bricks and mortar for tin and....well more tin really. Hopefully by the time I return I'll have loads to update you on.

I've just finished writing a letter addressed to 'The Directors PA' of the company that I bought my car from. I've finished the letter by pointing out that, whilst the service manager may be feeling pleased about having saved his company half the price of a new wheel, their company will lose more than this in the first year with just the loss of my humble business. I'll wait to see what the response is before I launch an attack via the official forum sites that I'm a member of. All I want is a wheel but it'll cost them more than the price of a brand new car by the time I'm finished with them if they don't sort things out. I wont be content until I feel that they regret selling me the car every bit as much as I regret buying it.

Apple are also supposed to be holding a press conference today to explain what they intend to do about the new IPhone 4. They aren't expected to do a recall but they will have to do something. Ask Microsoft. They still suffer from the catastrophe that was Vista. Even now that windows seven apparently sorts the issues out most of us have decided that it's just safer and more sensible to stick with good old XP. Mr Jobs could learn from the vista example. The first frustration most of us had wit VISTA was that the security settings prevented us from doing what we wanted to do in the way we wanted to do it. Sound familiar Mr Jobs?

iOS 4 is a really good jump in the right direction. It has Windows 3.1 like folders to keep your icons in. It does almost all the things that those who had jail broken their phones were already doing. MY 3G can multi task, record video and display screen backgrounds even though it is clearly stated that it can't. What's more I believe it performs better in terms of signal etc than the ill fated iPhone 4. Yep I'm looking forward to commenting on how today's activities play out.

Hard to believe that we'll be nearly into august when I get back. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was sitting in my office in January worrying about whether it would be Champix or not smoking that would drive me out of mind. Turns out I was already there.

Hope you guys hang around till I get back.

Speak soon

T