Archive for September, 2008
A week with the iPhone 3G
I’ve long been a big fan of the iPhone, which I’m sure needs no introduction: this device is a mobile phone at heart but can also browse the web in the same way a desktop does, pinpoint you on a map using GPS and give routes and directions, use instant messenging (MSN, YIM, AIM, Google Talk etc.), act as a scientific calculator and a great deal more all in a neat little device. Last Tuesday it came out on Pay as you Go, and I decided to go for it, the main reason being the Internet access available anywhere with a mobile signal, and secondarily for the phone side. Given that I don’t use my mobile phone much PAYG is ideal for sending the odd text and receiving (but never making) calls. I won’t go into the dull story of actually getting hold of the thing here, *mumble* silly debit cards. Porting my old phone number between networks also wasn’t much fun, but I managed.
Despite the hardened geeks of freenode staff heckling me as an Apple fanboy who was buying a locked down device for a ridiculous amount of money, my experience so far has been extremely positive. The iPhone may be missing a lot of features (its camera is of low quality compared to other phones and has no flash, it can’t forward text messages, it can’t send multimedia messages, it can’t bluetooth files around etc.) but what it does do it does so very well, and software features can be added later. In hardware terms it’s fantastic: a below-par camera doesn’t bother me as if I want to take photos properly I would use, er, an actual camera. So while there are things that I would change, things that can be changed in software updates I do hope Apple will roll out (which is likely given that now Google’s Android platform has arrived there is finally some smartphone competition to force Apple into improvements), I have in my pocket a fantastic little device. It is my web browser, SMSer, e-mail reader, music player, direction finder, IRC and SSH client, emergency torch (we had a power cut tonight so this was handy), Twitter client, notepad (although I still like having my trusty ‘collected notes’ commenplace book), clock/alarm/stopwatch/countdown, ping/whois utility, light distraction (simple games), eBook reader (not yet, I intend to look into this), RSS reader (this is one of the main reasons I got it, to try and keep up with blogs and things, and of course once you have the web a world of opportunity is opened. Having all this with me all the time is great.
I could blah for ages about all of the things I’ve just listed but I’ll try and keep to the more notable pros and cons. Firstly, what stands out? The touch-screen interface is very effective. Only very occasionally do I find the phone not doing what I want it to do and this is usually because I have my other hand touching the phone and pressing buttons without me realising. Everything flows together nicely and I am getting pretty fast with the on-screen keyboard. Even if it takes up half the screen during use, and is very easy to hit the wrong keys on, the auto-correct means I don’t go wrong very often, and it is learning things that I type frequently already, such as ‘fn’ for freenode which it would probably thechange to an actual two letter word for any other users. The IRC client that I have been using turns off auto-correct and the amount I rely on it very quickly becomes apparent: my messages to the SilentFlame channel last night were often extremely garbled. The lack of copy-and-paste abikity is a pain but software problems can be fixed, and with the ability to e-mail URLs and the like it’s not that bad. As shown in the picture attached to this paragraph, texting is done very well. Messages are sorted into a conversation view with whomever you have messaged. For me this is fantastic. Not only does it mean I no longer fail to understand replies to my messages sent after I have forgotten entirely what I wrote, but as a user of Gmail since 2004 I am obsessed with keeping archives of all messages so this makes me happy.
Since I’ve had the phone for over a week I have certainly experienced some less pleasant aspects, but as noted above these are mainly software related. The phone has crashed several times: hard reboots don’t always get all the downloaded applications working again, although they often do. Updating a particular app often fixes all the rest. In general the phone can be quite temperamental and slows down a lot at times for no visible reason. There are no background processes, meaning that I can’t stay connected to, say, Google Talk, and go and do something else as nothing can run unless it is actually on the screen. The built in e-mail client is rubbish (thankfully Google’s iPhone-adapted Gmail web-based app is brilliant (as shown next to this paragraph) so I can use that, but that is of course slower than a local program) as it doesn’t support threading at all so is utterly unusable for me as I have mailing lists clogging up my inbox (which is out of control right now, so sorry if an e-mail of yours still hasn’t been answered). Many people have complained about the e-mail client and it could definitely do with improving. The battery life of the phone is appalling when the web is used over WiFi or 3G as these both drain battery, but this is because battery technology just hasn’t caught up with transmission yet. In terms of off-phone issues, 3G coverage really isn’t fantastic so I am often reduced to dial-up Internet speeds. This is fine in my view for reading e-mail and RSS feeds, but it is a shame O2 don’t have better coverage. Being as the iPhone is Apple, I am forced into using iTunes to both activate, upgrade and backup the phone, and to download music onto it. iTunes is in my view a terrible piece of software that I personally find very hard to use, so I’m annoyed I have to use it, but I know a lot of people love it.
While the iPhone may be a great device, I’m obviously not keen at all on the locked down nature of it. As soon as people heard I was getting it, most of the school seemed to commence shouting me down as a consumerist and a capitalist, with my feeble defence of wanting it for a very specific purpose of web browsing not bearing much weight. Philosophically it is very unsound. It’s using a corporate operating system with Apple vetting all applications that can be installed on it. But while I would never choose this over a free alternative, these is not in this case an alternative. I run my computer on Ubuntu because it’s great both functionally and philosophically, but I have Windows installed because I have to in order to play games. I have the iPhone as it is the best choice if I want a phone that does all of the above. So I think I’m in a reasonable position, given the world I’m in.
Overall then, I think my £350 has been spent wisely as I have a great device that does what I expected and does it well, giving me something very useful to have around. Given that I spend my money on little else, I decided to go for it, and am pleased I did. I heartily recommend this to people who would make use of the web to the extent I do. If not, it’s not worth it, as it’s then just a fancy phone with a nice MP3 player.
Old Bear Stories
World-weary sophisticates of 14 or so are quite capable of coming over all soppy at the sound of the Old Bear signature tune. ~ Daily Mail, August 1995
I just found this and have been listening over and over again, which is generally what I do with music. I’m a bit rubbish: I get obsessed with certain pieces and play them continuously and then get bored of them and hence don’t seem as good, so really what I should do is not play the same thing so much. Still, this theme tune is particularly good. It brings back many memories of enjoying the Old Bear TV show and the books, with their characters and tales. It gives me a feeling of goodness and contentment, as though little else matters beyond Old Bear’s stories. That happy little world in which they lived was so simple and fulfilled, and I lived in it too.
In this country, raised by ‘good’ parents who are able to provide, most people have very fond childhood memories such as those evoked by this theme tune. And yet very few would choose to go back to those days if they could, to live a life entirely constituted of them. Why is this? Is it because we accept that we grow towards extremes of both responsibility and fulfilment as we grow up – by this I mean we gain new and exciting things to do that surpass the likes of Old Bear but we also gain responsibilities for things we would rather not do and didn’t have to do as a young child.
A more philosophical look at this might be to argue that no stage of life is ideal and they all have different things to learn from them. But then we die and it all comes to so very little. For now then I’ll just enjoy this theme tune.
Society’s progression
I’ve railed against utilitarianism before now: speaking as a philosopher who’s trying to build things up from little, I’m against basing the entirety of morality on happiness primarily because this means the ends always justify the means if the end result maximises happiness for the maximum number of people. However, in having a discussion over the ideal society the other day, I realised that I don’t seem to follow this. In fact, I’m actually far from it: I often seem to be arguing for a society where there is as little suffering as possible. In said discussion, I was trying to make the point that I’d rather see a world where no-one was in poverty or suffered a poor standard of living, even if there were members of that society not pulling their weight, by not working when they could do so. My opposition said that they would rather see what they called a fair world, where everyone had the opportunity to take part in society and those who didn’t would rightly face the consequences of poverty. I’m talking about those who can work but choose not to: not those who can’t due to disability etc. My opponent asserted that the UK right now is pretty good at providing such opportunities even though there are improvements to be made. My first thought is that this is unrealistic, but I don’t really know about, so I shall leave such empirical arguments behind.
So I was arguing for a society where people were individually better off even if they didn’t deserve it in the standards of many other members of said society. Why? Because they would be happier, and because I don’t see the rest of that society as having any right to take such basic rights of a decent standard of living away, because we’ve had too much poverty and suffering in the human race already. But this is effectively utilitarianism: I’m arguing that the duty of contributing to one’s society is less important than the outcome of happiness for all. However, I believe I can reconcile this apparent hole. The reason I want to allow everyone to have basic rights at all costs is one of liberty: people must be in a position where they can be individuals if we are to be in a position where society is exposed to as many possible variations of humanity as possible, because this is the only way we can hope to achieve a better society on whatever scale of betterment you choose to use. Many would use happiness, I’m not sure yet.
I am having other general problems with my arguments for morality. One thing I particularly hold to is the importance of intentions. To me, given that the only thing people have control over is what they aim to do, this is the only thing that can possibly be used to judge them. It’s not reasonable to punish someone for causing great misery when they didn’t intend to because there’s no point: it’ll just make them suffer when they can’t do anything about it. This suggests that now is very important. It’s not what happens in the future, it’s what we do now that defines us, what we choose to do or not do. But we make choices about what to (try and) do now based on what we are aiming for in the future, so I’m not actually making any kind of progress on things. I attack consequentialism for aiming at future ends rather than worrying about the means needed to achieve them for always looking into a future and never ‘landing’ somewhere. But actually, I end up in the same problem myself.
This isn’t flowing properly today so I’ll leave it there.
Scribblings migrated to WordPress
I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my blog to WordPress for ages now, and I finally have, mainly due to my discovery of the rather nice new theme I’m using. Google’s Blogger and I have been in a happy relationship since I started this blog back in April 2005 (that’s not actually very impressive as it was so skittish and irregular back then) but there are various reasons why staying with Blogger isn’t ideal. Blogger has some nuances such as, by default, setting the date and time of your posts as the time you started to write them, not the time you finished them, causing me to have to edit it every time I published a post. WordPress however does things more intelligently: you hit publish, and the time that would make sense is put on the post. This is good. WordPress also has categories as well as tags, which means I can split this blog neatly into the fact it does so many things. So after I’ve spent time categorising all my old posts, this blog will have a seperate soapbox section, and a diary section, and things like that. The move is almost seamless. Pretty much everything is at the same address as it was before, but some of my permanent links have changed because of annoying Blogger behaviour of shortening then where WordPress doesn’t. Sorry about that.
I’ve also renamed my blog again, back to ‘Intellectual scribblings’ (it was once ‘XyrWeblog | Intellectual scribblings’ – gargh how horrible). This is not an expression of arrogance. It’s just a nice little phrase that I rather like and I think it at least reflects the aim of this blog, even if it doesn’t reflect the reality. This is a lot nicer than simply ‘Sean’s blog’ which doesn’t really hold any meaning at all. There are a few issues with this new theme that are worth pointing out: the artistic scribbled labels aren’t always visible and obvious (try posting a comment and you will see what I mean) and the text is a tad small. But I really like the notebook idea since I have taken to using a notebook regularly of late, and so I think I’ll stick with this for a while. Now let’s try actually writing some decent content – after I’ve fiddled with things like the link list and post categories and the like…
A few thanks are first in order. Thanks Google for running my blog for ages, thanks the WordPress team for the free software, and thanks Evan Eckard for the beautiful theme.