Ever since the iphone got released one of the apps that i really wanted was some kind of messenger that had windows live messenger in it and not something else like aim or yahoo messenger. A while ago on the trillian astra site there is a picture of astra being on the iphone when it becomes available although i believe that’s in the alpha stage at the moment. The next best thing was google talk and thanks to a blog post by matt i seen that google talk was now available on the iphone. I liked what google had done with this as it was really easy to use and there were no problems at all when using it and sending messages but it still wasn’t the messenger i wanted as it wasn’t windows live messenger.

After browsing around on another site that was talking about iphone applications i came across one they mentioned called agile messenger and the screenshot they had was a picture showing you what messenger you wanted to log into and thankfully it had a live messenger option. After seeing this i went and downloaded it right away (yes this is for jailbroken iphones only) and i love this app a lot. It has a very nice looking interface and very easy to use, the navigation is simple and you can do almost everything a normal messenger could do. If you are wondering what messenger services it has well i’d say all of them:

ICQ

MSN

AOL

Yahoo

Jabber

and finally Google Talk

You can log onto all those messengers at the same time and there is nothing hard about doing it, i haven’t come across any trouble yet apart from editing my groups as i’m just not able to arrange them at all which is annoying as some of them are wrong but that’s only in the google talk messenger. So if you have a jailbroken iphone and want a good messenger service then go for this definitely and for more information then head over to agile mobile and i hope you enjoy it as much as i do.

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

I was doing my usual thing of browsing the Internet and reading up on information sites and came across something that was advertising a application for leopard called superdocker. Obviously the title gave it away that it was to do with the dock in leopard so i just thought i’d take a look at what it can do and i found out that it’s a great program that lets you completely customize the dock in leopard. Not only does it let you customize the dock you are also able to enable and edit other features on different programs you have installed in leopard, here is the list that tells you what you can do with the program:

• Display a 2D/3D Dock
• Use transparency on hidden applications icons
• Add separation in the Dock
• Modify the display of the Docks
• Add stacks in recent elements
• Display a border cadre around applications
• Modify the effect of window minimisation in Finder
• Modify the switching time between 2 spaces under Space
• Modify the drawing time of dialog boxes
• Display the complete path in the title bar
• Display the hidden files
• AForce new windows to open in tabs
• Display the Debug menu in Safari
• Display WebInspector in Safari
• Choose to display or not a message after each new disk detection in Time Machine
• Display the iCal debug menu
• Activate the Data Detectors mod for iChat
• Activate the Dashboards Developper mode
• Modify the display of the menubar
• Modify the capture format
• Modify the print dialog boxes format
• Modify the Mac OS X bootsplash
• And more…

After reading that i decided to download it and give it a try, so far i have only worked on the customization of the dock and it’s really easy to use so no worries of accidentally messing up on something. Superdocker also has a handy restoration feature so you can restore the default settings on anything you have changed within the program. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the dock in leopard and how it doesn’t look nice so if you are one of those people then download superdocker from here .

If you are a windows user and you’d like a dock on your desktop then you can download rocket dock, it has a lot of customization tools for you to take advantage of just like superdocker does.

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

If you’re a player of guitar hero 3 and have completed the games on all difficulties then you’re probably bored of it by now well unless you’re playing online all the time then good for you but then there are people who just want new songs to play well then feel free to download them. If you are signed up to the playstation network then you will notice all the song packs that are getting released, packs that include songs by artist such as coldplay, motorhead and def leopard. Sadly these packs come at a price but not a high one thankfully but then there are also the free song downloads such as one that got released today which is the top gun theme just played on guitar by someone else, other free songs are the world of warcraft song, the boss track pack, the pain theme and the god of war 2 theme.

If you’re not on the playstation network because you have something like an xbox 360 then you still get access to those songs apart from some, xbox 360 owners got to have the halo 3 theme tune as a song as an exclusive and ps3 got to have the god of war 2 theme and pain theme as an exclusive (i think). If you are a player of guitar hero on the pc then why not look up on google how to add your own custom songs just like people were able to with a guitar hero 2 and a modded ps2. So with all these new songs getting released then i’m sure you’ll never get bored of guitar hero 3 well until guitar hero world tour gets released with the new drum set and probably a bigger playlist of songs for us…

E-mail:ss3luke@googlemail.com

Mine was until i was basically forced to use it as an internal one. If you’re currently using a external hard drive and it decides to not work anymore then don’t just go and get angry that you lost everything because there is a high chance that you haven’t just as i found out earlier this week.

A while ago i was having troubles with my external hdd as it wasn’t being detected in windows, i tired it on my macbook pro and it wasn’t being picked up there either so finally i tried it on my virtual windows xp machine and nothing again. A friend told me i should look in the storage of the computer management area and it was there thankfully until i turned it off and then it was never seen again, so i thought i had lost everything (everything being about 240gb worth of files and information), the first thing i did was open it up and see if the connections were all ok and they were all fine. Next thing i did was browse on ebay for a ide to sata converter as my motherboard only has one ide slot and that is being used for my dvd drive, when i got the converter it still wasn’t being detected, not in my computer or in the BIOS so i was thinking that the hard drive itself had died on me.

After trying another hard drive with the converter well that one wasn’t being detected either so obviously the converter wasn’t working (yay wasted money!!!) so the last thing i tried was hooking my external drive up to the second ide slot on the ide cable itself to see if it would get detected and yes!!!! My external hard drive is now an internal one and the reason why it got broken is because well the case. The case that was on the drive just somehow stopped working but the drive itself is all fine and i still have all my files so i’m happy.

So if your external just stops working well try it as an internal drive and not just chuck it away cause then you really could have lost everything you had backed up. Just thought i’d give a little tip that also come with a story of mine…

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

As i have been reading up in the news for the upcoming release of the 2.0 firmware i have been hoping that there is a quick solution to jailbreaking this firmware yet and it has already been jailbroken just in a very complicated way. Some people have been saying how you need a beta version of a new iTunes just to be able to get access to the many apps that you can download from installer and if you don’t use the beta then you just won’t have the installer app at all. Just in case nobody knows, installer is basically the jailbroken version of what Apple are making (the app store), installer is basically open source though as everything is free although some things do come as a trial.

Even though i have the installer i was really looking forward to the release of the app store as it was going to have apps that i would really love to have used such as some of the games and the eBay app. One thing i have mentioned in the past before is that when a jailbroken iPhone gets updated the latest firmware then their whole phone gets erased and you basically have to do everything again such as setting up e-mails and adding contacts so i was wondering that if someone purchased a app from the app store on a jailbroken iPhone and then updated the latest firmware which would erase their phone then how would they get the app back? Surely you can’t ask apple to give it back to you every time you upgrade to the latest firmware as they just wouldn’t allow it like music from iTunes, if you want to put it on a different computer then you have to enter your details to be able to play it and you’re limited to only five computers.

Even though the 2.0 firmware was jailbroken in it’s beta version ages ago it’s looking like that this update might be a hard one for the people who have unlocked iPhones, maybe going out and purchasing a 3G iPhone would be easier… I’m sure it will be fully jailbroken in time but i still don’t like the idea of seeing a app on the app store and then updating the jailbroken iPhone only to lose what you purchased. Oh well i guess Apple are finding ways to stop the hackers after all.

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

I downloaded desktoptopia on my macbook pro a while ago and was enjoying but then i got a little bit annoyed with it as it kept changing every time i logged into my account even though i unticked it to start running when i log in. I got the idea of just completely uninstalling it as i was having more problems such as i wasn’t able to rate the wallpapers or see what they were called when i clicked on the tray icon so it was just getting worse. I went to uninstall it one afternoon and when i logged on later that day it was somehow still there, i followed the exact directions that desktoptopia had on their website for uninstalling it and yet it’s still there.

Every time i log in i see the little tray icon and when i try to access the preferences it does nothing as technically it’s not installed so my question is why is it still there? If anybody can help me on this then please comment in this post or send me an e-mail, any help is appreciated.

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

In my last post i in some ways bashed the psp slim but in the end i did purchase one myself as i am selling my old original one and yes i did get the final fantasy 7 special edition one and it arrived today!!! After unboxing it and being excited about everything i thought i better update the firmware before i do anything else so i downloaded the firmware through the psp wifi, i tried this twice for the psp to only tell me that it was corrupted which i thought this shouldn’t be happening. After those two attempts i decided to download it through my pc and then transfer it on my psp through the usb and thankfully it didn’t say that it was corrupted in fact something worse happened!!!

After i got to the update menu i got a warning message saying that my memory card could not be read properly which i didn’t understand as this card is basically new and it was formatted a while ago so nothing dangerous is saved on there. After retrying this about four times i got another error saying that the update failed and my psp froze. Now in the previous warning messages it said don’t turn off the psp during the update or remove the umd if you are updating the psp via the umd that the update is on, no since my psp had just frozen i couldn’t do anything at all and the power wouldn’t even turn off so i was just sitting there looking at a frozen psp with a error message on the screen

I thought to myself that well the update didn’t even start so what harm would it do if i (you may think that this is stupid) pulled the battery out but when you think about it well the battery would die anyway due to having no power so it would have shut down eventually and like i said it didn’t even start so what danger was there in powering it down? After i pulled the battery out and put it back in i tried turning it back on only to find that it wouldn’t turn back on at all, it would display the green power light when i turned it on but the screen would just stay black and nothing would happen, after a while the power light would just go off. After doing this a few times i realised that i had a bricked psp slim…

All this happened within an hour of me unwrapping it, i don’t see what the problem was as there was nothing wrong with the memory stick i used, the update didn’t even start so how could it effect my psp? A few minutes later i called Sony only for them to say return it to the place i got it from which didn’t surprise me although i thought Sony would tell me to send it to them and then they would send me a new one but since i’ve only had it for less that 24 hours then i am able to say to the shop IT’S BROKE!!!!! and get a new one or have my money back. I will be choosing to have a new console and hopefully this will not happen again when i get the new one, so within an hour i got a new limited edition psp with game and then had the psp get destroyed and i didn’t even get to play the game so all in all i had a lovely day

Another rant over and done with, thanks for reading.

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

Yesterday my girl friend got the final fantasy 7 psp bundle containing the game (final fantasy 7 crisis core) and the limited edition final fantasy psp, a few months ago in japan they done the same thing for the anniversary but the ones in japan are worth a lot more than the bundle that sony are offering for other countries. I plan on selling my original psp soon and was thinking of purchasing a slim and lite one but wasn’t sure if i should so yesterday when her new psp arrived i thought i can get a hands on review of it.

My first impression was definitely the weight difference, if i’m honest then i thought the slim psp felt so “lite” that it made me think that it was a very cheap piece of plastic and it was really disappointing that something like that felt so weak. After putting the battery in there was not a lot of difference either and then placing the UMD disk in still didn’t make much of a difference, it’s a god concept that it’s lighter and slimmer (when i say slimmer i never actually noticed anything different in that) but i think that i shouldn’t be getting the impression that it’s like a cheap rip off copy of the original. The feel of it is better than the original as i feels slightly more “stylish”.

After i started to play the game i did lose the impression of the cheap feeling and really got into playing it and it felt really nice to use and handle, as for the package and the contents i feel as though that sony have really ripped customers off. When you do a firmware update on the psp you need (no choice, you are forced to have one) a memory stick and sony do not supply this at all which can be really annoying if you don’t know this because then you can’t save your games. Another great feature of the psp is that you can charge it through a usb connection (while you have it in usb mode) and i found that great but it’s just too bad that sony doesn’t include a usb cable…

Also there is no protective case in this bundle and no earphones either, these are all things that i got in an original value pack bundle so i am surprised that sony have not included in a limited edition psp bundle. As good as it is i find some things could be improved with the contents and that’s as far as i am going with this review. If you’ve never owned the original psp then yeah go for the slim but if you are a owner of the original then to be honest i’d stick with it. Only reason i am selling mine is because i don’t use it and it’s a victim of the famous psp dead pixels which seemed to have happened to a lot of people.

Thanks for reading anyway.

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

A friend at college told me the other day that windows 7 is now being leaked and is available for (lets just say) illegal download (not that the mention of the word illegal would stop you anyway). Obviously i am not going to post any links as to where you can get this from as i’m not in the mood for getting in trouble myself…

As for you well i’m sure you know how to use google by now and if you know what to type then i’m sure you’ll be able to find it pretty fast. Obviously it’s not something that’s going to be completely stable and i wouldn’t recommend downloading it unless you would do something like install it on a virtual machine which is what i would do. As for myself i have not downloaded or installed or played around or done anything with windows 7 as i know it’s probably gonna be either as bad as vista or worse in it’s current state, if anything i’d recommend waiting for a beta to come out but i’m sure that’s not going to be for quite a while.

Just thought i’d inform you of something that i discovered, hope you enjoy (whatever you plan on doing).

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com

I was searching around the other day for some software that will rip my legit dvds into a good format to be played onto the iphone, that’s when i came across handbrake. It’s opensource and works on all platforms (that being windows, mac and linux), when i first opened it i noticed all the types it can convert to as there is a list on the side. The list includes such formats as the iphone, ipod, apple TV, ps3, psp and many more. That’s one thing i loved about it is that it has all those formats for you to be able to select, for dvd ripping i used to use total video convertor but this isn’t the best of things especially when it comes to ripping dvds as sometimes i had no sound to go with the video.

My first attempt at ripping a dvd on here is well not the best of attempts that’s for sure, it was going really really slow and it said that it could take up to 4 hours so this was disappointing for sure. I haven’t tried anything else yet but i will be sticking to it a you are given other options to play around with as well such as the dimensions of the video which is something i’ll never use myself but see a very handy tool.I plan on trying a dvd that has a film that doesn’t go on for as long as the one i tried the first time and maybe it will go faster (hopefully it will). So if you’re in need of something that will rip your dvds in a good format for other devices then go for handbrake which can be found here

Thanks for reading

E-mail: ss3luke@googlemail.com