Well, well, well. What have we here?

Hey, everyone. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Yeah, it has. I’m ashamed to say that my brilliant plan for my timetable completely and utterly failed, so I have had to create a new strategy. No, I’m not going to say what it is. Needless to say I’ll be ‘trying’ (trying being the key word) to update at random intervals where my week isn’t so disorganized, so just subscribe and turn on them email push notifications! Anyhoozles, I was thinking of creating a joint Alex/George blog, pretty neat, huh? Yeah, I think so too, and I’m glad you do. I don’t really have much to say about that, since the blog is a top-secret, awesomeness-only project…*cough*. Moving on, my week has been pretty drab, first off, iOS 5.0.1 heralded no Siri, which I was pretty miffed off about. Secondly, George has managed to get himself cut off from the online world yet again, so I have been unable to record another ‘Let’s Play’ episode with him. Thus our brand new microphones have been rendered useless until he can be motivated to get off Pokemon, Zelda, and all the other petty games he plays and ‘man up’ and get his internet back online. other than that it’s just been a pretty normal week. Forgetting stuff, forgetting more stuff, forgetting to post on my blog, wasting precious time, burning hours of the day, progressing in school work, and virtually doing nothing…I really don’t know where my days go to. So, now that you’ve seen into my week, you’ll be glad to know that this short post is over. Remember those push notifications!

Bless your face. If you coughed or sneezed during the reading of this article then bless you. Peace off, and may your toes stay clean.

Alex/Stairhopper Out.

Follow me on Twitter! @_TheRealAlex_ and/or @Stairhopper

Guess Who’s Back?

You know, I’m not even going to lie…

I find it really hard to keep the updates in this damn blog consistent…really hard. It just seems that I never get time on the computer anymore. I used to be able to post pictures and videos of the day, as you well know, and even that seems to be an impossibility, in the situation I’m in at the moment. My time management needs working, I’ll agree, but there are only so many hours in a day, and it seems that most of those hours are spent doing things against my will that really aren’t necessary.

With every day that passes I get more and more depressed on the progress I’ve made in all my endeavours, since I have no time. My creative block has been in the way of any of my personal projects for months, my stories have all been postponed untilI can finally get time to write them, and, as you can tell, my blog has been suffering the worst of all.

Now you’re probably wondering why I’m ranting on and on and expecting you to listen. Well, truth be told, I’m kind of ranting to myself to get it all out, so you can head on down to the end of the post. I joke, stay here and read, sucker. Anyway, I finally decided to talk (type) it all out so I could move on and finally get my life and in order, if it helps you understand.

Now, I can’t promise I’ll be updating every day, since that’s where I went wrong in the first place. I was trying to get all of my stuff done every day. Work, Pathfinders, Blog, Keyboard, you name it. I was trying to cram a little of everything into one day and do it every day. It, as you can tell, didn’t work out. So I’ve decided to pan out all my activities over the week and follow a weekly plan instead. I know sometimes things’ll pop up but hey, we’ve all gotta be flexible in life. I guess what I’m really saying is that I’m kind of sorry for abandoning you guys and I hope I’ll actually be able to stick to my promises this time. If you were wondering, my promise is this: I’ll update when possible. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing, whilst on my old timetable. Now I’ve constructed a new one, it should flow much better.

Now then, onto recent events. Family Jewels by ‘Marina and The Diamonds’ (or Marina Lambrini Diamandis) is definitely one of the best albums I have ever heard. £5.49 on iTunes if you’re going for the price I got it for. It’s quite diverse and differs from most popular music. It doesn’t seem to fit into any of the major genres, so it seems to found it’s place in the ‘alternative’ section. Marina’s vocals seem to bring out the best in the songs even though some of the lyrics may not make perfect sense, and I have a feeling she could go a long way. I look forward to her new album ‘Electra Heart’ since hearing her ‘Radioactive’ Single, and I suggest you listen to it, if you haven’t already. Obsessions, Mowgli’s Road, I Am Not A Robot, The Family Jewels, and Are You Satisfied? are arguably the best songs out of the 2010 album…but I’ll leave the decision up to you. I also got quite a few other albums, some of which aren’t worth mentioning…which is why I didn’t pay for them…but don’t worry, I deleted them after I’d sampled them.

Now that iOS 5 has been released, most BlackBerry owners have decided to make the switch to the iPhone 4. Those who get the new system, however, don’t usually use it to its full potential. To do that, you’d need the ‘iCloud Control Panel For Windows’ or the built in OS X Lion client, and the iWork for iOS applications. With all these, and all iCloud settings enabled, you can successfully synchronise all documents, photos, contacts, and bookmarks across all your devices and computers. I, for one, find this very useful.

Hey, wouldn’t you know! You’ve reached the end of the post! Congratulations! I’m surprised you made it! Of course most of you ‘readers’ just scrolled down but thanks for visiting anyway. Oh, and if you haven’t noticed, I’ve used an excessive amount of ‘now’s in this post. Don’t trouble your little minds. It was totally planned…

Bless your face. If you coughed or sneezed during the reading of this article then bless you. Peace off, and may your toes stay clean.

Alex out.

iOS 5 & Site Changes

After being housebound for the entire day due to sickness (blame the weather) I decied to give my blog the once-over and finally finish updating my iPod to iOS 5 with a tethered Jailbreak.

First of all, the blog. I know many of you won’t be able to utilise the changes made but I decided to enable the ‘onswipe’ feature and create a iPad friendly app-like safari alternative to the original site. If you do have an iPad you should be viewing it right now. Secondly, I decided to use my logo instead of an ‘S’ as the website icon so you may notice that change since that goes for all users. Those are the only changes I’ve made so far today and hopefully there won’t be any more.

Now then, iOS 5. It took me a while to decide between a tethered Jailbreak and no battery percentage and a fully working iOS 4.3.3 with no notification center and addons…the choice was pretty clear. After around 4 hours of backing up, upgrading, jailbreaking, restoring, tweaking settings and finalising I have finally got my fuly functional iPod back and I have to say I am mightily impressed. Let me just go through some of the features:

1. iMessage – BlackBerry Messenger Rival (Finally I have something to knock down BBM and be proud of)

2. Wireless Sync – Does what it says on the tin, wirelessly sync with iTunes

3. None-Lockout Sync – You can still use your iPhone, iPod & iPad whilst sync

4. Reminders – A simple To-Do list app built in

5. Twitter Intergration – Does what it says, you can Tweet from Safari, Photos & and any other native Apple application (developer API’s coming soon to build into other apps)

6. Newsstand  – Save the forests! Get your magazines delivered straight to your News folder.

7. Game center – A bunch of improvements, including profile pictures.

8. Photos – You can delete and create photo albums on the device itself

9. Music – You can delete music on the device

10. Wireless Activation – Instead of the ‘Plug Into iTunes’ screen you get a friendly ‘Slide To Set Up’ prompt to activate your iDevice. Steve included this feature as part of the Post-PC era (no more standard computers)

11. FaceTime – Now over 3G networks

12. Notification Center – Finally! No more blue popups! The noticifations silently appear on the top of the screen and wil dissapear unless you click them. If you dont, they remain in the notification center so you know which ones you haven’t checked. The center can be acessed by swiping down from the top of the screen (it also includes weather and stock widgets). Also, the notifications you get whilst you device is off the put on the lock screen and can be chacked by swiping the icon on the lockscreen to the right.

13. iCloud! MobileMe is dead, according to Steve Jobs and I’m glad it is! With iClud you can get 5GB of free storage, backup (for non iTunes users who still want to backup their devices), a free @me.com account, photo storage, document storage, settings storage, contacts and calander. There are pictures below that will show you some of the features graphically.

14. Camera – How many times have you missed that moment because you had yo put in your passcode? Well no longer! When you double tap the home button on the lock screen the ‘Slide To Unlock’ bar shoretens and reveals a camera button that you can use to quickly take pictures. The volume-up button can now be used also for taking photos instead of touch-only.

There are over 200+ new features in the software (suprisingly it’s only an extra 52mb for the iDevice) so I won’t go indepth but, to all those non-apple users out there, it may be a good time to get yourselves into your local store! For all who want to contact me I would request that you use my new email for test purposes on: alexholyoake@me.com 

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