It's widely known that I enjoy mobile blogging, and for the iPhone, there's one of two options; the official WordPress app for iPhone, or blogging via email with a service like Posterous and it's "Post Everywhere" integration.

While the WordPress app is unbeatable for purely text posts, I'm not a huge fan of the way it handles pictures, placing them at the bottom of the post, right after all the text commentary. That would be okay if there was an option to edit how the final post will look, but as far as I can tell, there isn't.

Sometimes though, the app itself does weird things - as you can see in the screenshot above. I'm not sure whether the error describes an issue with the app, or the data connection (not dissimilar to Tweetie's "secure connection failed" messages [which could also be attributed to Twitter itself, but that's another story]).

There's also another interesting story regarding the error itself - but I'll save that for another time.

Counting down the days before we run out of IPv4 address space? Yes, there's an app for that.

The app itself isn't ver impressive - while it continually updates the numbers you see above, I *highly* doubt it's in real time, and I'm also a little suspiscious of it's accuracy.

If this app is to be believed, the end of IPv4 address space really is nigh...

Cleaned out my room a month or so ago, and up against the window-sill I had a stack of PC User magazines (heresy, I know).

They must have been there a while, because as soon as I removed them I noticed a clear and distinct line of dust where the edge of the magazines once sat.

Scary stuff - needless to say, my room is now pretty clean. Actually, scratch that; a set of 4.1 Logitech speakers (no I didnt lose a speaker, they're branded as 4.1), and a gigabit PCI network card that I bought of PC Case Gear because I thought the gigabit ports on my motherboard were stuffed. Turns out they weren't - some residual power issue was running rampant, and leaving my PC unplugged for a while seems to have fixed the issue. /shrugs.

First things first - Tweetie 2 for iPhone is a Twitter client. Twitter has these things called trending topics, which can be supplemented by hashtags. Usually trending topics give a (fairly) good indication about "what's hot" on Twitter at the moment.

I say fairly, because sometimes it's possible to manipulate the trending topics list - and, if you're unlucky enough, you'll get your hashtag blocked from appearing in the trending topics list, as happened to the #hottest100 hashtag.

I don't really care for trending topics on Twitter, mainly because they're mostly spam-fests, and somewhat dominated by African Americans (who seem to tweet mostly crap, if I do say so myself).

Anyway, Tweetie 2 for iPhone has a feature where it will define trending topics for you. I'm not sure where it gets it's info from, but it's almost comparable to Brizzly's trending topic definitions. Actually, it's not. Brizzly's definition service for trending topics is excellent.

The point is, somewhere along the line someone stuffed up - and, for want of a real definition, #witchaweakass doesn't have a definition.

Yay! I love it when people send me awesome stuff, especially after they've read something on my blog, or been intrigued by one of my shared items in Google Reader.

The above screenshot was sent in by @wmyeoh, and depicts, as far ad I can tell, a strange bug where the iPhone's keyboard has somehow managed to completely bugger itself while switching from landscape to portrait view. Such an error (keyboard glitches and/or UI issues after switching from portrait to landscape or vice versa) certainly isn't unheard of, and just goes to show that no matter how awesome we think Apple is, they're still human :)

Well, maybe not you-and-I human, but human nonetheless :p

Oh - and by the way, if you're looking for a GTD client for the iPhone, I highly recommend Things by Cultured Code. It's certainly one of the most polished and dare I say, overhyped GTD app - but it deserves all the credit it gets, it's that good. While I've played with 2Do on a short term basis (read: not in everyday use), it seemed a little complex for what I wanted. Then again, maybe complex is good, especially when compared to an app like Put Things Off, which is still good, but maybe a little too simplistic in areas...

Ah yes, diagnosing machines in the service centre...

One helpful colleague decided a hilarious thing to do would be to put 4 keys from a keyboard on the machine that I was working on, 4 letters that spelled the word "tool".

Yes. Indeed.

Byline is an RSS reader for iPhone that ties into Google Reader for that awesome syncing goodness we all know and love. While it's pretty good, there's probably one other app that blows it out of the water (namely, Reeder).

Not quite sure what went wrong in the above pic, but at least it's good that the developers actually coded in support for when things don't go as planned - lesser apps would stop responding, freeze, or even worse, just crash.

Sure, it would have been better had it given an actual error code/ message, but it's particularly impressive that they've managed to build in some sort of reporting tool to send reports off.

Kudos to all the iPhone developers out there who do the same - I may not have come across the same thing in your app, but that's probably a good thing :)

There's a feature on the iPhone that allows it to identify numbers that can be dialled, added to existing contacts, created with a new contact, and so on. The official term in OSX is "data detectors", which allow applications such as Mail/iCal/Address Book to, like the namesake suggests, detect data and work with it as appropriate.

Anyway, I mainly lurk on the OverClockers AUstralia forums, or OCAU. There's a trading section on there, and this one particular chap was selling a 430W OEM PSU. I'm not entirely sure why I was looking at this particular item as I already have a 460W PSU, but I was, and I found it nothing short of hilarious that my iPhone detected that the part description as an actual phone number, where the letters combine to form numbers.

This whole thing might have had something to do with the fact that I had to patch support for the 4-3-3 grouping of mobile numbers into the phone itself, as a previous iPhone OS version tempoarily broke such functionality - area codes especially would break the Phone display of such numbers. No matter, though - recent iPhone OS versions have thoroughly restored functionality to the number groupings of both landline and mobile numbers.

And that's that.

...and I didn't tell Tweetie about it.

What resulted was the screenshot above - Tweetie said it couldn't find my profile, which was fair enough.

I updated my account details in Tweetie, refreshed, and that was that.

Not quite sure why I took a screenshot of it, though.

Not surprisingly, this was on a ladies toilet door in the IT building.

There are two possibilities why it's there: a, for the international students who maybe done recognise what the female sign is, or b, for the dull-witted IT students who have stayed up all night doing their assignments, or have crammed for exams.

Either way, it's pretty hilarious, no?