Scoot is on the mend

It's been a long overdue project. We've not really felt for it, but now it's time. I'm talking about our Scooter, nicknamed Scoot De La Scoot, or just Scoot. It's a Gilera Runner 180SP, yes, that's the 2-stroke 21bhp "super" scooter.
Quite a long time ago, we serviced it quite thoroughly, and then we used it for quite a while. Caz used to do the 70 mile round trip to work on it, partially on the motorway. I used it for my commute too. It's so fast that you'll easily overtake cars in the slow lane. It'll cream pretty much any normal car up to 60mph, very much to the boy-racer's annoyance.
Either way, one day on my way to work, the scooter just lost its drive. Engine running but no drive.
It turned out that the crank had broken. Yes. Totally. The crank was off.
It's now time to fix it, we bought a new crank off eBay a long time ago, but now it's time to use it.
We pulled the engine out tonight. It's an annoying job as there's tons of panels in the way, and a lot of hoses, cables and wires to disconnect.
During the stripping we noticed that we'll have to clean a whole lot of parts, we'll have to paint quite a few of them too. Brake calipers need some TLC, new gaskets, new bolts, new nuts, etc. Loads to do.
When it's fixed we're thinking of running the Scooter for a month or so, and then it's time to sell her on to a new home where someone will actually use her as she's meant to be used.

I want my paper bills!

Today I got a letter from O2. The later says "This will be the last bill you'll get in the post.". My bills are now online only. Here's the benefits;

• Less trees have to die.

Here are the drawbacks;

• I will no longer have a papertrail of my history with O2. Should there be some problem and some legal implications, all I have to present to the courts is my login and password. Or potentially (forged?) home-made-print-outs. I doubt the court would accept those as evidence.
• I am the one who'll have to remember yet another URL, yet another Username, yet another Password.
• If I want to have a paper trail, I will have to pay for the Printer, Ink, Paper (there goes the "less trees have to die" benefit), but also all my time. And this might still not be admissable in court.
• What happens when I want to go to some shop and buy something that requires the foolproof UK way of asking for "a recent bill". If all companies that I'm a customer of will turn to "paperless bills", I will have no way of securing another contract. I doubt they'll accept some dodgy print out..?! (Or will O2 guarantee it?!)
  
• But the big one: What happens if I should move from O2 (quite friggin likely!)?; Do I still have access to my bills on their website. Is my login still valid?

There's a reason why paper has been admissable in court for centuries. There's a reason why we sign paper contracts - not just some click on "OK" after ticking an "I agree to the terms" on some random website. Paper is physical.
If you really want to save trees, figure out a way to get rid of envelopes and print on smaller and thinner paper. I bet there's a 66% to 75% saving there.
No, the real reason why O2 are doing this, and a lot of other companies do it too, is so that they can save money. They. Not me. So, rightfully, I'm entitled to a discount for "paperless billing".
Here you have it O2;
Give me my bill back, or drop, saaaaay... £3 off my monthly bill!

Update!
I just logged in to view my online bill. If I want to print it it doesn't even say what phone number, let alone my address, name and account number. How am I supposed to present that to any 3rd party. It could be anybody's bill. FAIL!

Update II!
I forgot to mention that I've been trying to change my direct debit details forever. I can't do it in a shop, and even if there's an "update billing shizniz" button on the O2 site, I'm unable to change my details. The only way I can do it is to ring them. Which I refuse to do as I bought the device from the shop. FAIL II!

iTunes tracks residual value; BIG FAT ZERO

I find this really funny, and in fact I'm quite smug about it. I read earlier today on Twitter that a guy I'm following was wondering "...what to do with all my purchased iTunes tracks now I'm using Spotify premium...".
HAHAHAHAAH! Let me laugh for a bit here. HAHAHAHAHA. HOHOHOH!!
Right, composure...
Here's the deal; You can burn them to DVDs and/or data CDs. Even Audio CDs. Then you can stick them in a box in the loft. That's it. You can't sell them because that's illegal, even if someone would be prepared to pay for your second hand digital music.
Feel a bit f'd over...?! Well you should be, all of you iTunes customers that haven't thought about "what's next". Sure, iTunes (and other digital music download shops) are fine if all you want to do is to listen to the music. And the word listen really is crucial here.
Let's compare to that "old' format", the CD Audio disk. With a CD you can give to your friend to listen to. Yeah, you can go to the pub or café to meet your friend, hand them a CD and it's pretty sure they can listen to it at home. You can get the CD sleeve whilst listening to the CD in the player, and you can look at photos and read the stuff in there, such as lyrics. You can do this anywhere in the house, even outside. You don't need a daylight readable screen for it. And you know what. You can give this CD sleeve to your 150 year old grandmother, and she'll be pretty compatible with it.
Another cool thing is that, should you meet the artists on the CD you can get them to sign the CD (and increase the CD's value). Novel concept; Sign my MP3 files (or AAC in iTunes speak).
But here's a part you didn't think of; You can actually sell your CD onwards. The residual value of a CD might not be much (unless it's a collectible), but there definitely is a residual value. Your digital music files don't have any residual value. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Big Fat Zero.
So, now that you're aware of this, you can either keep buying your inferior digital music files, or you can start buying physical formats that, not only sound better, but are actually tangible in more than one way.
Oh, and Spotify, another "music leasing" idea that's not to my taste. I'll leave that to another caffeine fuelled morning.
PS, sorry for the quetness, been busy and boring.

iTunes 9 App organising is abysmal

I have been waiting for a way to organise my applications on the iPhone for a long time. Once you have more than 4 screens of applications things start to get either messy or very tedious. Draggig an application with your finger across 4 screens is painstaking.
I even thought of taking a set of screenshots of the application icons, then cutting them out and organising them on an A3 paper. Then return to the iPhone and painstakingly drag them around.
I've also always thought that iTunes is an abysmal application. It might have been good when it was concieved as a conduit between your local MP3 files and the proprietary communication to the iPod. After that, Apple has just piled on functionality as it has emerged. Today iTunes is a hub for too many things. Where's the logic of activating and updating your phone with a music software? Don't get me started on the interface. I'd easily say that iTunes is Apples worst UI and a catastrophy when it comes to useability.
Now iTunes 9 seeks to fix some of these UI horrors. It's got a new iTunes Music Store (which sells vidoes and ring tones and now applications) UI, and so forth. One of the improvements is the UI to organise your applications on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Let's have a look at it.
To the left you have a list of all your applications in a sortable list. With a checkbox to install/uninstall the application from the device.
In the middle you have the screen from the iPhone/iPod Touch.
To the right you have very small thumbnails of the screens, and the application icons.
Here's a question for you (and Apple). Why the hell do I need to see three icons of the same application? On top of this, why do you waste my screen real estate with icons so small that I can't be bothered to squint at them? This user interface is absolutely pointless. It's also very cumbersome. You can drag applications between the different columns and screens, but the logic is a bit cloudy. Sure it makes a bit of sense, but it doesn't have to be this confusing.
Here's what to do to fix it;
First sack the guy you hired to do this. Tell him to go back to the Windows Vista team and never ever touch a computer again.
Second of all, what's wrong with the interface on the actual iPhone and iPod Touch. This user interface is a bliss, both to view and use.
It would have been really easy for Apple to have a long horizontally scrollable "Screen" in iTunes. The fixed icons on the bottom of the screen would be fixed to the left. Then you could scroll screen by screen to the left and right. Just like on the iPhone. Having one of those icon-size-slider would allow the user to zoom in-out to view the icons as they please. Overview or details when the user wants. When zooming out far enough there could be more than one row of "screens" so you could get a really good overview.
Grabbing the bottom of the screen and dragging would change the location of that particular screen. Grabbing and dragging an icon would naturally change the location of that icon. Well, what about the applications you've bought, but don't want on your device. Well, they'd be located to the left of the home screen, say with a white background so the user would see that they're not on the device's black background. Dragging them from there would put them on the device. You could even have tabs on top of this/these screens to sort the applications.
Why they have not implemented this obvious user interface is beyond my comprehension. But then again I would never have come up with the idea of using an MP3 playing software to buy movies, download operator updates.

Right, back to squinting at those icons. Bhlergh.

MultiTouch in Snow Leopard FAIL on older trackpads

I just installed Snow Leopard on my June 2007 MacBook (a plastic one). I had my hopes up that Snow Leopard would bring MultiTouch, that's 3 and 4 finger gestures, to my old computer's Track Pad according to this Gizmodo Article - amongs many others.
Sadly the truth is that the new features are only given to MultiTouch track pads, the older Track Pads can apparently not handle more than two fingers on the surface at one time. This means that, pretty much, from the start of the MacBook Air and forward the laptops all have MultiTouch TrackPads. Mine doesn't. Read the "Multi-touch coming to older MacBooks? Not so fast."-article on Tuaw for a better and more precise explanation of the innards of this.
Bhlergh - still only letdown in Snow Leopard so far. It's still very cool! :)