After the iPhone 3G release two weeks ago the web has been flooded with articles praising this eighth wonder of the world. I’ve been using the first gen iPhone since December, and have been really happy with it. I guess my biggest issue with the phone has been the crappy camera (which sadly isn’t improved in the second gen iPhone). Since I’m running a jailbreaked phone I haven’t been able to update to 2.0, until now.

On Sunday the code wizards in the “iPhone dev-team” released the much awaited Pwnage 2.0 tool. Currently it’s only available on the Mac, but there are tutorial describing how to use a prebuilt IPSW file and jailbreak your iPhone 2.0 from a PC. I used my girlfriends Mac to upgrade to 2.0, unlock and jailbreak my phone. The only issue I had was a popup in the Pwnage tool asking if “I’m a legit iPhone user”… Well, I didn’t steal the phone, so I guess yes..? Well, turns out this question determines if your phone gets unlocked and jailbreaked, or just jailbreaked. Had to run the tool twice, and answer NO to this question to get it to work.

One of the things I’ve been missing the most after changing job and mobile last year is the Exchange support in Windows Mobile. Thankfully this is one of the big things on the iPhone 2.0. One of the things I did some time back was to consolidate all my e-mail accounts through Google Apps for your domain, and Google have been hosting the mail for follesoe.no for over a year now. With added IMAP support Gmail works great from any client application, as well as on the iPhone. I haven’t had a good way to manage contacts and calendars, but I want to use Google Apps as the master, and then sync it with both my iPhone and my PC. Unfortunately Google does not support the Exchange ActiveSync protocol natively, but there are third party services that will gateway your Google Calendar and Contacts and provide Exchange access to it. One of those services is the easy to use, free service from NuevaSync. I came across this service in a blog post titled “Using Google as a *free* Mobile Me Alternative with NuevaSync”.

After configuring NuevaSync I needed to find a way to get my contacts from Outlook 2007 and into Gmail Contact. The optimal solution would be to connect directly from Outlook 2007 to NuevaSync. I was a little bit surprised to learn that you can’t force Outlook 2007 to use the Exchange ActiveSync protocol used by mobile devices. Since NuevaSync doesn’t support the full RPC protocol used by Exchange this wasn’t an option. So my second alternative is to find a way to sync my local computer with Google Calendar and Google Contacts.

People have had mixed experiences with Google Contacts. Gmail can clutter your address book by automatically adding people you communicate with. This is now an optional feature, and you can disable automatic adding of contacts. After disabling this feature and deleting all existing online contacts I was ready to do the syncing. Problem is that I couldn’t find any good tools to do this. There is a free tool from Google that will sync your calendar, but it doesn’t support contacts. OggSync is another alternative. But the free/trail version doesn’t support contacts either, and I’m not paying until I’m sure it works nicely.

The solution to my problem turned out to be open source software. I’ve been a big fan of Firefox for a long time, and figured this might be a good time to check out Thunderbird. Setting up Thunderbird with Google IMAP is a breeze, and well documented by Google. Thunderbird also supports contact imports from Outlook 2007, so I didn’t have any problems getting my contacts into Thunderbird. To synchronize contacts between Google Contacts and Thunderbird I used the Zindus add-on. Thunderbird doesn’t come with a calendar out of the box, but with the official Mozilla Lightning extension you get both calendar and tasks support in Thunderbird. I also had to install a “Provider for Google Calendar” add-on to get Lightning to sync with Google Calendar. My current setup now looks something like this:

I have to agree that it might look a little bit messy, but it works. And it’s free! It’s just something really pleasing of being able to add a appointment on the iPhone, and seconds later see it show up both in my online Google Calendar, and in Thunderbird. Or to edit a contact in Thunderbird, and moments later have it updated both in Gmail and on my phone. I’m quite happy with the current setup. And the important part is that the “master store” is kept on my Google Apps for your domain account.

And for the other new stuff in 2.0: the app store is just AMAZING! So many great apps, really nicely integrated both on the phone and in iTunes. So far my absolute favorite app is the iTunes remote control application. I’ve used Pocket PC based remote control software, but this one is just awesome! Now the only thing missing is an equally good Vista Media Center remote control, and the iPhone just became the coolest media remote ever.

If you haven't upgraded yet, go do it!

The Gathering is one of the largest computer parties in the world, with approximately 5200 people attending (the interest is much higher, but limited tickets).  The first "The Gathering" was arranged in 1992, so this is a quite famous computer party. The later year the focus has been more on online gaming than computer demos and programming, which is sad.

If you're attending this years TG be sure to check out my fellow RD Sondre Bjellås presentations on XNA Game Studio and Visual Studio Robotic Studio. You can read more about his plans for the presentation over at his blog.

… when it comes to gadgets! Hege has been wanting a portable video device for some time. And being a gadget freak I have two (PSP and iPod video). So, I made her a deal. She'll get me a new DS Lite with New Super Mario, and she can have my PSP with all accessories and games.

So now the household have the best of both worlds. Amazing graphics and cool media features in the PSP, and some truly innovative and fun games in the DS. The "blow the mic" game play mechanics in one of the mini games blew away (literally…).

I'll promise my next post will be about code!

 

As I mentioned earlier today the Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows XP and Windows Vista is available in Norway as of today. This 199,- NOK (29.99$) device lets you connect up to four Xbox 360 wireless controllers and a racing wheel to your PC wirelessly. It's basically a small USB dongle, like the once you're used to from your wireless mouse/keyboard.

The device ships with XP drivers on the CD, but my fellow RD Scott Hanselman has Vista installation all covered in his blog.

Installation and connecting the devices was a walk in the park. To test the controllers out I installed PJ64 Nintendo 64 emulator on the Media Center computer. The emulator runs at approx 45 frames per second, which is good. I didn't get it to run in full screen, so any tip on this is appreciated. I think this is a general problem with "old" DirectX/OpenGL apps on Vista. Configuring the controllers was no problem, since they show up as "standard" game controllers in Windows. I've uploaded my controller configuration scheme, so if you have a 360 controller and PJ64 you can grab my config.

For any PC gamer this device is a great value add, specially since the "Games for Windows" branding requires gamepad support in their games (as well as some other stuff like a Vista Performance Index requirement, and launch from Media Center).

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The Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive is finally available in Norway! When I was in London in January I dropped by all the gaming stores trying to get my hands on the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive. With no luck, they where all constantly out of stock.

The drive is officially releasing in Norway tomorrow, however some online stores have had them in stock a few days already. I pre-ordered mine a few weeks ago, and it arrived today! I've all ready hooked it up to the 360, and it works PERFECTLY! The pricing in Norway is between 1799,- and 1999,- NOK. I got mine at 1699,- since I pre-ordered.

A pleasant surprise was the fact that it was up scaling my regular DVDs over component! By default the 360 is capable of up scaling your DVDs, but if you don't have the HD-DRIVE you need the VGA cable. The reason is some DVD "rules" saying that you can't upscale via analog cable. How ever, a PC is allowed to upscale over VGA, so if you have the 360 VGA cable you get 720P up scaling of your DVDs. With the HD-DVD drive you don't the VGA cable! (In general the component cable gives a better picture and better colors than the VGA cable).

I only got one HD-DVD move at the moment: The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift. I ordered the movie because of a review in Gizmodo, saying this was an excellent HD-DVD showcasing some of the new interactive features of the format. I've also ordered a few more movies on PlayX.no, which has a decent library available for 199,- NOK. Hopefully they will be arriving before the weekend.

In other news the Xbox 360 wireless USB connector is also available in Norway. This little, cheap, dongle allows you to connect all wireless 360 accessories to your computer. I'll write a post later on my impression of this device.

On December 25. Time Magazine will publish it's annual "Person of the year" edition. And guess who won? You did! You and me, as blog poster and commenter's, as Flickr! photographers, as YouTube video directors, as MySpace citizens and musicians, as Encyclopedia writers, as Digg-recommenders, as Amazon and IMDB reviewers, as video- and audio podcasters, as LastFM users, as open source software writers, we are all person of the year!

Through our contribution to the World Wide Web, by engaging in discussions about politics, software, music or what ever catches our attention, or by publishing our creative creations online we're changing the media space as we know it.

Congratulations everyone! Read more about YOU being the person of the year over at Time.com.

Oh, a quick funny thing I noticed when reading the Time article. Chrysler is running a big ad before you can read the article, stating that "you might not be person of the year, but you can drive like you are". This ad is obviously made before this years person of the year was announced. It's kinda funny how wrong they can be. The new and fancy 2007 Chrysler Sebring is definitely not for the average online Joe.

Just a quick birthday post… Today I turned 23, and it's been a great birthday! I started the day with the final exam in the "algorithms and data structures" course, which Håvard blogged about earlier this week. Out of 114 students who took the course last year only 14 passed… But, thankfully this years final examn wasn't that bad, and I expect to get a decent grade.

To night I've had some of my buddies over for chocolate cake, candy, snacks and some Wii gaming. Petter pre-ordered the Wii, so he got his copy today (on the Norwegian launch day). We've been playing all the Wii sports games, which is a ton of fun. Pictures and video says more than word, so check out these Flickr! pictures and Youtube videos!

 

During this weekend I've upgraded two of my computers to Windows Vista. I started last night with my Windows Media Center computer. All my media content is either stored on a separate partition, or on a network share, so I didn't have to back up anything.

The installation procedure took exactly the same amount of time as I used to fry some minced meet, chop some salad and make me some taco for dinner. Once I was back to the computer it was ready to walk me trough the Windows Media Center wizard, and 5 min after I had my TV up and running. Xbox 360 integration with Windows Vista was on problem neither, and the UI looks amazing both on the PC and trough the 360 extender.

I was surprised how well Vista ran on my old HTPC. The computer is from December 2003 and wasn't even a top notch computer back then. The computer is built using a Shuttle SN41G2B Barebone, with a AMD Athlon XP2600 CPU (1.9ghz), 1280mb or ram, on board video and sound, and with a Hauppage 350PVR tv-tuner.

I didn't get the "glass" UI, but the Media Center UI runs like a charm.

The Windows Experience Index turned out like this:

• Processor: 2.3
• Memory: 2.5
• Graphics: 1.9
• Gaming graphics: 1.0
• Primary hard disk: 5.3

This gave me a base score of 1.0 determined by the lowest score, gaming graphics. This was no bummer, since I don't use my HTCP for gaming. I have a 360 for that!

Today I updated my primary computer, an IBM T43p. The computer has two physical hard drives. One internal, and one in the cd-rom bay. I have a really sweet Windows XP with Office 2007 setup going on my primary internal hard drive where I have all my work stuff, so I installed Vista on the drive inside the cd-rom bay. Since I have two physical drives I didn't have to care about dual boot. I simply hit F12 when the computer boots up to select which drive to boot from.

The IBM T43p is quite beefy and is running a 2.13ghz Intel Pentum M processor, 2046MB or RAM, 145GB of hard drive space and a Mobility Fire GL V3200 graphics adapter with 128MB of video ram.

The Windows Experience Index for the IBM turned out like this:

• Procesor: 3.9
• RAM: 4.4
• Graphics: 4.0
• Gaming Graphics: 3.7
• Primary hard disk: 5.0

This game me a base score of 3.7, which is decent. I get the glass UI and everything is running super smooth!

Tomorrow I'm going to celebrate my new Vista install by cocking together a sidebar gadget or two.

What a week! Both Office 2007 RTM and Windows Vista RTM is now available on MSDN. I downloaded and installed Office 2007 Monday. The download was only 450MB or something like that, so it actually took longer time to install it than to download it. The upgrade from Office 2003 was painless, all my settings, files and content was unchanged, as expected.

Fellow RD Scott Hanselman made a post about one of his new favorite features: The new insert menu in Outlook messages, and in particular the insert calendar function. Check out his post if you're curious what it's all about.

I figured I had to write a quick post my self about my favorite features after a week of Office 2007 usage:

1. The Outlook To-Do Bar: How did we get stuff done with out this guy? This seams to be "everyone's" favorite. Basically you get a bar on the right side of Outlook displaying the three next upcoming appointments, all tasks and all items that you want to follow up on.

2. RSS in Outlook: I know there are third party solutions out there for 2003, but it's something different when it comes "out of the box", tightly integrated with the platform. If I subscribe to a feed in IE, it automatically shows up in Outlook. When I hit "send and receive" the feeds get updated.

And guess what: You can tag and add follow up flags to any item in Outlook, including RSS items. So, for instance if there is a cool blog post I want to comment on I tag it as "interesting post, need comment", and mark it for follow up this week. This will off course make the RSS item show up in the To-Do bar as an item. If I double click the item in the To-Do bar I get directly to the post.

3. Smart art: Remember how "cool" WordArt was back in 1997? Well, 10 years have passed and we have a new kid on the block: Smart art. This thing is basically about adding graphical "stuff" to your document/presentation/mail. The "stuff" can be a simple chart, a cool looking table, a "flow chart" thingy etc.

The cool thing about Smart art is the ability to add "styles" on top of Smart art making it look ultra sweet. I don't think you can make Smart art look  bad even if you try. Well, perhaps you could, but you get my point.

4. The overall user experience: Office 2007 just looks amazing. Period. To many changes to mention them all

5. OneNote 2007 with Smartphone integration: OneNote 2007 have several new features. One of the cooler is the new OneNote Mobile version. You hade some Smartphone/Pocket PC integration in 2003, but it was limited to synchronizing audio recordings into OneNote. In 2007 you have a separate mobile client which allows you to take notes, capture pictures and add voice recordings to a new OneNote note. When you connect your mobile phone all the notes, including pictures and voice, get's imported into a notebook in OneNote.

For instance, if you take a photo of a poster or business card, the text becomes searchable trough text recognition. If you use your phone to record memos the audio becomes searchable trough voice recognition.

One of the main things I use the camera on my Qtek 8310 for is taking photos of posters to concerts/events I want to remember. When I walk the hallways at the university I come across interestin stuff daily that I take a snapshot off. The problem is remembering to get these pictures onto my computer before they become outdated. Using OneNote I get all my poster pictures directly on my computer.

You can off course synchronize from your computer to your cell phone. So for instance if you're going on a holiday you could include a map as an image file, the address to the hotel, your flight reservation number etc. in a single OneNote note, and have it synchronized to your mobile phone.

Read more on what you can do with OneNote Mobile at Chris Pratley’s blog.

Anyone interested in next generation gaming should check out the excellent blog post titled "Could Microsoft Become the Marked Leader This Generation?". The post is written by Sam Kennedy, editor of 1UP. The article discuss why Sony is going to have some big trouble gaining the same marked share for their PS3 as the did for their PS2. The comment thread of the post is long, but contains several interesting points of view, and all most no trash talk. It's a good read.

This pretty much sums up the impression most people had after this years E3:

“..I've been saying this since last year's E3, but after all the flack Sony got for showing a CG rendered video of Killzone all they would need to do was show us that same demo running in realtime a year later and we would have all been convinced of the power of the PS3. Heck, that's probably all they would have needed to show us…”

 Another interesting read is 1UP editor John Davidsons post about “eating his kid’s puma’s” after stating that the PSP was going to be the biggest thing ever. The article discuesses what Sony did wrong, and why the DS is superiour in both sales and games. I’m a PSP owner my self, and i really agree that they have huge issues with few good games and too many PS2 ports. The only truly great games i currently own is Dexter and Lumines. I do have GTA, but I mostly use it to load up homebreew and SNES/NES emulator godness. I’m picking up Loco Roco, which looks really promissing, on my way to the airport later today. Going to Denmark this weekend for the Roskilde festival!

Where is SnowJoy at? I want to disown him. I am putting myself up on eBay ASAP.

This post is taken from my Xbox 360's blog. And as you can see it's not happy with me as it's owner. Well, thankfully my Xbox is once again happy after playing a couple matches of Fifa… So how can an Xbox blog you might ask? Up at 360voice.com you can enter your gamer tag and sign up to "give" your Xbox a blog. The service works by gathering and logging information about which games you play, how often you play, and which achievements you get. These log files gets parsed by 360voice.com to create blog posts that seams to be written by your Xbox. I've included a few other funny quotes from the blog:

- Well, I didn't get to game yesterday, but at least I am not sitting in a Microsoft repair shop... So that is something…

- I dream of electric sheep... ok just kidding that was Blade Runner.

- I told SnowJoy 'Don't make me hurt you!' and the threat worked. He showed up yesterday with a gamer score of 6721 in his back pocket. He played 2006 FIFA World Cup™, as well as stared off into space... thinking about the one that got away.

 

This concept of "things" blogging is called a "blogject", and fits into the predictions that the "Web 3.0" will be all about internet connected things (hell, we haven't even a clear definition of Web 2.0 and now we're talking about 3.0). This is often referred to as "the internet of things". Other "things" that might have a blog could be your car, providing information about  weather, fuel usage, travel distance etc.

If you want to learn more about things blogging and "the internet of things", look up "blogject" on Wikipedia.

Just a quick shout out to some of my (real life) friends who just started blogging:

My good friend and co-worker Gøran Hansen have finally started blogging. His first two posts are about the Microsoft Gadgets platform and how to run the sidebar on Windows XP. I share his opinion that moving Windows Presentation Foundation out of the Gadgets platform was a big setback. Now you’re basically limited to writing HTML and JavaScript gadgets… The reason for this, according to Gadgets team members on the form, is that Microsoft didn’t have the time and resources to make a solid WPF implementation in time for the first release in the Vista time frame. Another reason why they stuck with HTML and JavaScript is that this model is been used by Gadget/Widget frameworks for a long time. You can check out Gørans blog at http://goeran.greit.no/.

Another good friend from NTNU who also have started blogging is Hans Olav Norheim. His blog will for most time be about technology, focusing on .NET and SQL development. You can check out his blog at http://hansolav.net/blog.

A third blog worth checking out is Espen Fuglems blog. This one will definitely not be technology related! Judging from his first couple of posts this one is going to be hilarious. He’ll be ranting about everything from world politics, philosophy to his brand new (totally pointless) cartoon; “Pyro Pingo”. You can find Espens blog at http://vettugmannen.blogspot.com/. 

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the Xbox 360 Gamertag Creator. This is a third party site that generates themed pictures out of your gamer card information. This week I came across another similar service called MyGamerCard.net. Now, the cool thing about this one is that it logs all the data it grabs off xbox.com. So, based on this data they create leader boards based on your gamer score. The guy in lead, ST TheKing, currently have 19415 gamer points, which is a lot (considering each game gives you 1000 points at most, and there weren’t that many launch titles available).  My current gamer score is 3100, almost 400 behind my good friend Petter (GameMe). Hopefully I’ll catch up with him during the weekend.

One of the cool things about the new Xbox Live system is the gamer cards. Basically the gamer card is a small badge with your gamer tag, your online reputation, a picture, your latest played games, and last but not least; your gamer score. Your gamer score increases as you unlock achievements in different games. Each full blown title has 1000 gamer points to give out, while the Xbox Live Arcade games have 200 points. Currently I’ve only completed one game – Need for Speed Underground. I and my girl friend also completed the single player story in Kameo, but we still have 400 gamer points to fight for.

When you play against people on Xbox Live they can view your gamer card and give you feedback (preferred/non preferred player), and that will affect your reputation. You can also show off your gamer card by embedding it to your homepage. This is done by embedding an iframe on your page displaying the following URL: http://gamercard.xbox.com/SnowJoy.card

One disadvantage using iframes is that it’s not compatible on all browsers and most online forums won’t allow such html in your posts. How ever, most forums allow you to use images in your posts, so today I came across a simple service called “Gamertag Generator”. Basically this service is a bunch of custom image generators reading information from gamercard.xbox.com and rendering it out as an image, using different themes. I’ve included all the available looks for your gamer tag in the bottom of this post. This is a great idea, and I was actually thinking about writing this my self for my custom blog theme. Now I can see how the different look available on “Gamertag Creator” fits on my new design (soon to be published) before I write my own. I might actually write if anyhow as an example on how to do screen scrapping and publish the article up on msstudent.no.

MTV Overdrive is a broad band channel by MTV. You can watch it directly in your browser, or you can download a small plugin and integrate it into Windows Media Center Edition. I've been playing with it tonight, and it's just awsome. No commercials (at least not in the Media Center version), and you can browse a huge library of music videos. It supports playlists, and there is no registration to use the service! And best of all; it's free!

It’s been some time since I last updated my blog. At the moment I’m back home in Lakselv for the holidays. I left Trondheim Sunday afternoon, so I’ve been home for a couple of days already. It’s great to be home at my parents place. My two sisters are also home, so the whole family is gathered for Christmas.

So far I’ve spent the first day of my vacation playing Xbox 360 on our new 37” Dell HDTV, messing around with Live.com Gadgets and putting together a simple HTPC for my parents. Dad brought home an unused computer from work. The specs are a bit outdated, but not to bad, so I figured I’d try to build something useful out of it. The computer is a PIII 500 MHz, with 384MB ram, 3 GB hard drive and a simple graphics card. The first thing I did was replacing the hard drive with an 80 GB Samsung disk, which is really quiet. That’s one of the cool things about the computer, it’s really quiet by default, and with the new hard disk it doesn’t make a sound! I replaced one of the 128MB ram chips with a 256MB chip, so now the computer have 512MB of ram. I decided to run Windows XP home edition as the operating system and some free/cheap HTPC front end on top of that for easy access. My dad primarily wants to use the computer to display landscape/art pictures to lighten up the living room (the HDTV is wall mounted in the middle of the living room), displaying family pictures and playing music.

The first issue I ran into was finding an HTPC front end able to run on the hardware I had available. I found a forum post over at htpcnews.com titled “definitive list of front end software”, so I figured that this was the right place to start. I worked my way tough the entire list (!), testing all the free front ends. I’ve heard lots of good things about Media Portal, a front end written in C# for the .NET 2.0 Framework. How ever, the hardware requirements for Media Portal where way to high and it wouldn’t even start. Most of the other front ends where in an early development stage and where all slow and buggy.

Since I didn’t find any usable free front ends I had to check out the commercial once. Before I installed Windows Media Center Edition on my own computer I ran a front end called myHTPC. The guys behind myHTPC started a new commercial project called Meedio, and I actually ran the beta 1 before installing MCE2005. I downloaded their latest version, and man was I happily surprised. It ran perfectly on the 500 MHz computer, and the setup and configuration procedure was easy to follow. The overall impression of the software is great, it’s clean and professional. You can download and install third party themes and add-ins directly from the front end. Currently the HTPC is running picture library, music library, RSS feeds, Weather, and web radio. Best of all, Meedio has a Christmas offer giving their Meedio Essentials, which has everything but TV support, for only 19.99$!

The next problem I ran into was screen resolution. The Dell HDTV runs 720P at 1366x768, which isn’t supported by the graphics card. I tried to install Powerstrip, but the card was too old to support custom resolutions. Luckily Sead, a friend of mine who works at the local computer store, had an old Aopen MV200-R graphics card lying around. I even got for free! Best of all, the latest drivers from NVIDIA supported the 1366x768 resolution by default with out having to use Powerstrip!

I came across this link on Mage Magazine today. Some guy built an 8x8x8 feet large 3D color display. It consists of 729 voxels (3D pixels) arranged in a 9x9x9 matrix, spaced 10 inches apart from each other! The end result is amazing, be sure to check out the demo clips!