Month: August 2010

After my thoughts floating around my head post earlier in the week, I got loads of great feedback, asking for more posts like this. So I decided I am going to try and do 1 or 2 a week to keep up with these crazy thoughts. I have decided to give these posts a name as well, On The Marc :)

• I finally got my new iPhone 3Gs. Yay ! Big up to Santam who came to the party after I jumped up and down. I feel like my 3rd arm has been restored. Also a big thanks to the T4A organisers who sent out a tweet offering a reward for my lost phone. No such luck though. *sigh*

• I often get asked why there aren’t any Games on the South African iTunes store. The reason is pretty simple. It is called the Film & Publications act. The act requires that every single DVD & computer games need to be reviwed and classified to ensure they are not harmful to children. This amendment to the law was passed in 1996 and published in the goverment gazette. Even more of a reason to get yourself a US iTunes Account

• Check out this cool site I came across. It is called OneDayOnly, and offers you 1 product a day at a hugely reduced price. So yesterday they had a pair of Glider Sunglasses which were R430 and you could get them for a measly R149. Check it out and add it to your favorites.

• The #FailWhale has finally been removed from Ballito beach. Yay. No more smell. But get this. The only way it could be done was for a dredging machine (pic) that came onto the beach and then “broke” the whale into pieces and dumped it on the beach. Then a TLB (pic) came along, and picked up the blubber, and dumped it into big skips, which were then taken away and presumably going to be burnt or buried. A mate of mine from Germany, who was here on holiday, took a video. Will def get it and upload it. On Monday when I went down there, there were guys cutting pieces of meat off the whale, which apparently is being used by the sangomas. I really hope they didn’t go home for a toasted Whale & cheese. Somebody would have been very very sick. :)Check out the gallery of pictures on News24.
  
  

• Another question I often get asked by iPhone fans is how to get the pics from your iPhone onto your Computer. If you use a Mac, follow this very simple step by step guide. If you use Windows, sorry for you, you should get a prompt that allows you to explore the pictures in file explorer and copy them from the iPhone, when you plug the iPhone into your computer.

• During Tech4Africa, one of the talks I attended was one by Joe Stump, who is the CTO of SimpleGeo. One of the iPhone apps he mentioned in his talk was called MyTown (iTunes Link). MyTown apparently gets more checkins per day than Foursquare, and is hugely popular overseas. The app is a geo location game, and is a cross between Foursquare/Gowalla & Monopoly. Basically once you “checkin” to a place, you can put it, and earn income and rent from it. I downloaded it ysterday, and it is loads of fun. Def adds a fun factor to checking in.

• Check out this very kiff new site from some of the Geeky Girls up in Jozi – http://www.girlguides.co.za. Need to send my wifee the link :) The site is a whole bunch of the geeky girls who review all the latest and greatest gadgets. Nice one ladies (and @za5)

• This strike thing is pissing me off. Yesterday we got an SMS from our daughters school to say we need to fetch them immediately. The school is a private school and the striking workers, from other public schools in the area,  were protesting and intimidating the private school teachers. WTF !!! I honestly do not understand the mentality of some people.

• Oh ja, if you haven’t already. Do yourself a favour and tune into 2Oceansvibe Radio. It is awesome. I listen on my iPhone at work, and its crystal clear. The music they play is also really cool. Do it !

And that’s a wrap. Have a lakka weekend. I know mine is going to be resting and maybe a beer or 2 at Luyt Brewery in Ballito

There are so many posts that I have wanted to put up in the last couple of days. But, I honestly haven’t had time (or the inclination) to do it. So I thought I would do a roundup post of things that have been buzzing around my head for the last couple of days.

• Tech4Africa – Loads of great talks, and some really cool & inspiring talks. Highlights for me the Leila Chirayath Janah keynote. Her talk was really inspiring and I love hearing inspiring stories like this. The social media panel included Andy Hadfield, Mike Stopforth & Walter Pike (who I would class as my online mentors in SA)  amongst others was also superb. The crowd interaction was fantastic. Andy posted a twitpic of some of the crowdsourced best practices about social media in South Africa.The panel of the team that “redesigned” the Payfine.co.za site was also really cool. Check out Rian from Yola’s . The one panel I was most disappointed with was Jonathon Snook’s iPhone and Android talk. I expected a lot more given all the possibilities with these 2 OS’s, but all we got to see was how to design a web app. Not really what most of the people had in mind though. I also really enjoyed the tech Q&A panel with the international speakers.Here are see some of the notes I took in a few of the panels. They are very very rough, and haven’t been edited at all.
  • “Ignoring User experience at your peril” with Andy Budd
  • Social media – there is an elephant in the room
  • Rocking iPhone and android development
  • Joe stump – every cloud has a silver lining
  • Steve song – 3 pieces of kit for a Neighbourhood network
• If you follow me on FaceTweet, you would have seen that I had a bittersweet ending to the conference. Just after the Clay Shirky keynote, I must have misplaced/dropped my iPhone. I only realised as I walked into the next session, and when I went back to look for it, it was gone. I searched high and low, and the conference MC also announced it with no luck. I was totally bummed :( Luckily I have insurance on the Phone, so it is not the END of the world. Yes, yes, I know. I should have MobileMe, but I didn’t. To be totally honest, I am really not sure how that would have helped. Anyways. I honestly felt like my arm had been sawn off, but to be honest, it’s not THAT bad :) I am coping. (barely). Hopefully I should have a replacement this week. I had to go with the 3GS again, as the iPhone 4 hasn’t been launched yet, and I doubt the insurance will pay me in $$ :)

• Came across this really cool little hack on how to Get 5FM on your DSTV. Very neat little trick.

• The dudes from VirtualAfrica that created the Gigapixel of the Bulls/Stormers Super 14 Final are creating another Super Gigapixel this Saturday for the Boks vs All Blacks Tri Nations Game. I can’t wait to see this one !!! Stay tuned to this blog for a sneaky peak early sometime next week.
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• If you haven’t already, I suggest you check out my china Shaun Trennery’s new site called locl. It is a really clever site that shows you the news you WANT to see. See, another clever Durban startup.

• Thanks to the very clever SheBeeGee, my brother & I got to go to the A-Team premiere at Montecasino in Jozi last Thursday eve. The event was super cool, and the cinema is HUGE MASSIVE. The movie itself is pretty cool, and def bought back a couple of childhood memories. After the movie there was a quick opportunity to take a pic with the 2 actors who were out here to promote the movie. Sharlto Copley was a firm crowd favoritie and even put on his Wikus voice. He is a legend. The other dude, Rampage Jackson is a UFC fighter. When I took my pic with him he shrugged my arm off his shoulder, and said “No man” (in his BA voice) to which I later found out he has a bit of a phobia with guys touching him. Makes a lot of sense for a UFC fighter hey ? :P
  
  

• Pieter Uys, the Vodacom CEO, gave us a little heads up that we should see the iPhone 4 coming at the end of September with a tweet earlier today. I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.[blackbirdpie id=”21394634446″]

• If you have a couple of minutes to spare, check out http://www.dripbook.com/. AMAZING !!

• If you have the Camera+ iPhone app, you may have noticed that it has been pulled from the App store. This is becuase the developers were sneaky sneaky and added in a cool little hack, which allows you to use your volume button to take the picture, which is of course totally against LeApple’s T&C’s. To enable the hack just type the following into your Safari browser on the phone camplus://enablevolumesnap
  

• Yesterday my Streetview site traffic went through THE roof. No idea why, I suspect it was spoken about on a Gauteng radio station

• Talking about Gauteng, I took the Gautrain last week when I was up in Jozi. WOW WOW WOW. That is 1 seriously cool little loco. It is really cool to see SA catching up to the world in terms of public transport, and I can’t wait to see how it will change lives when the whole route is open. Amazing !!

• Remember that CellC rant I did the other day ? The response to it was amazing. I got loads of pingbacks to the post which I was pretty stoked about ;) But my clever friend & funnyman @DonPackett has now set up TellDon.co.za, which just rips poor Trevor to shreds. Shame. Check it out !

• SARS are a bunch of tossers. That is all. I have been fighting for 2 years for the same frikkin thing, and they are just not getting the issue. *sigh* Even after a sit down appointment with them yesterday, no such luck.

• Hooters Fourways. Don’t. It is a balls up of note. We went there on Friday eve, and it was packed to the brim with (18-23 year olds), so much so, they honestly couldn’t cope. They ran out of glasses for beer, and apparently had no fries. Until asked the manager. Useless, useless place. I would recommend giving it a skip. Really

• The #FailWhale I wrote about earlier in the week is still stinking Ballito out, and from what I hear will be dragged onto the beach this week and will be chopped up. I went down again the day before yesterday and that thing is MASSIVE

• Santam is taking their sweet time to payout for the iPhone. Really making me mental. I’m gonna be “that irritating client” over the next couple of days and just keep phoning to get my payout.

Holy Moly. That’s a lot of thinking. But I enjoyed that format, so maybe expect a few more of those in the future.