I currently have an iPhone, and no, I’m not ashamed to admit it, though it is a little awkward that I can’t sync it with my desktop. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I love it, I really do. But as with a lot of things, I find the Apple design of the phone a little restrictive. Sure it’s polished, and it looks sleek and sexy (to some at least), but I just can’t help feeling that I’d prefer an Android phone.

I’ve been looking, albeit briefly, at what Android phones are available on the UK market. Out of the choices, I think I’d prefer a Nexus One, though as far as I’ve seen – they’re Vodafone exclusive, and I’m on an O2 contract, so it’s a no-go. I’d love to hear from some of you guys that have Android phones, and what phones they are, because I’m definitely in the market!

So with that out of the way, on with the post. I’ve just installed Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) this evening, and in the process of setting things up, I realised I’d never installed my printer on Jaunty (9.04). So I figured I’d give it a go, wondering if it would be as easy as when I installed it on all the other PC’s & my MacBook – as it’s connected to my router (the airport extreme), it’s shared using bonjour, which I happen to really like, it does mean setting up the printer is much more simple, and a lot quicker than normal.

I’ll be honest – my hopes weren’t very high, I figured that since it’s an Apple developed technology, and not open-sourced, that I would have a hell of a time trying to get it to work. I was totally wrong. I did configure it slightly differently, in that I opened http://localhost:631 in Firefox to set it all up via the CUPS web UI. I chose “Add Printer” and it scanned for connected printers locally and networked – I sat waiting for it to finish, and tell me that nothing was connected….

I’m sure you can imagine my surprise, and curiosity, when it returned my printer under “Network Printers”. I continued with the setup, expecting it to throw back an error of some variety, but no, it all installed fine. To make sure I wasn’t just daftly pointed and clicking things that looked relevant, I printed a test page…..which I now have on my desk next to me – chalk one up for Ubuntu!

Overall, having run Karmic for all over 2 hours now – I’m already very impressed, and I’m looking forward to the final release.

Dropbox is similar to Apple’s iDisk, in the respect that it is an online backup/data storage facility. The only difference is, dropbox will give you 2GB of free storage, just for signing up. There’s also an option to pay either $9.99 per month, or $99 per year, which will upgrade your storage capacity to 50GB. For me personally, I don’t (yet) need any more than the 2GB, though I may consider looking into the 50GB option in future.

What I like most about Dropbox is that it’s cross platform. For me this is fantastic, because I run Ubuntu (9.04 64 bit if you’re interested) on my desktop, and my laptop is an aluminum Macbook. Now I had the problem of somehow remembering to put things in the Dropbox directory so that they would get synced to the server and thus between my 2 machines.

Solving that problem was a lot easier than I could’ve expected. No thanks to my friend Gabby, who told me what he had done on IRC. Using

you can create soft links to the directories to/from the Dropbox directory, and any changes you make to that directory outside of the Dropbox directory, get automatically synced. Put simply, if I make any changes to something in ~/Documents, it automatically gets backed up/synced to Dropbox. Awesome!!

If you’re unsure of the syntax of

, as it is a little confusing, it’s the following:

And finally, if you want to join Dropbox because you haven’t already, following this link will (according to Dropbox) get you a little bit more space

Edit: I’ve just been informed (thanks Matteo!) that the referral links don’t seem to be giving extra space any more. This is likely because Dropbox limits the amount they give out. Please feel free to use the link at the end of the post if you want, but don’t feel obliged to if you do want to sign up. Join Dropbox

As some of you know, I recently bought a MacBook, and I realised I didn’t have a page up on my .com domain, so I decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, and had a play with iWeb ‘09. The end result isn’t bad, and moving the blog over to my VPS provider would mean 2 things:

1) I’d actually be using my VPS for something
2) I’d have a more fine grained control over my blog, because I would be hosting it myself. Currently this blog is hosted by wordpress.com

It could mean I’d need to upgrade my VPS package, because currently I only have 384 MB RAM on there. I guess it all depends on how much MySQL decides that it wants to take, though before upgrading I’d look into tweaking some MySQL settings to see if I can reduce the amount it needs.

Ultimately I’d like to do this just because of number 1 above. But also it would teach me some more about Apache, MySQL, possibly PHP. I may also look into changing the site at some point, possibly to a Drupal installation, but we’ll have to wait and see

Any thought’s on whether you think this would be a worthwhile move, or any recommendations you have on tweaking various settings on the server (it runs Ubuntu 8.04) would be fantastic!

Then, further curiosity made me connect my iPod, just to see what would happen…to be fair, I was both surprised and unsurprised at the same time…which I can confirm is a very bizarre feeling!

It synced my iPod just as it would with a normal Windows install of iTunes. So I went one further, and connected my iPhone. Same goes for that, all synced up (after a tediously long backup!!) just fine. Very impressive I must say.

That’s all for now, I need to sleep, long day tomorrow!

I found out after syncing my email with google that Ubuntu sees the iPhone as a camera, which I found interesting. It also means that I can charge my phone. When running Ubuntu, though for convenience I bought an iPhone dock

Also, I happen to be writing this from the Wordpress for iPhone application, which is actually pretty good!

I have to say that I’m pleased with how well everything’s gone with Ubuntu, everything works, I have flash & java installed, and it auto-connects to my home wireless and Uni wireless

One thing that I’m missing a lot is iTunes, as there’s no native version for Linux (but why?!?!) Apple seem friendly to open-source development, anyway I’m using Rythmbox now, which reads all my music from my Vista partition which is nice…saves me a ton of space on the hard drive

That’s all for now

£269 initial change for the phone itself, then £45 a month (for the decent contract) which is a lot of money, but I would use all the features on the phone.

Anyway, thought I’d just say that I’m sold on them, and I think they’re a brilliant gadget