Ian McDiarmid (who played darth sidious / Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars) lives around the corner from me in Leith. My boss and I were discussing him the other day after she’d watched New Hope; had recognised him previously from Morse and thought nothing of seeing him hanging about Leith Walk… but the man is an utter (and I don’t normally use such slack-phrases) utter legend. “great disturbance in the force” and all that. If I see him in the street I will gush.

check out Enso. Its a dressed-up app and script launcher with transparent windows (and a lot of heart!). Watch the demo video for the product, its very pretty – but I know most of the commands or mouse clicks to do pull-off of the “wow” items (definition, add map, search google, calculator, translate) in my un-tampered OS X –and I’ve got them down to instantaneous motions, no interrupting of my ‘flow’. *cough* disclaimer: this website is no showcase of any ‘flow’ i might have. Anyway, just wanted to say- OS X (hodge, Leopard is released on Oct. 26th rawr!) has a all of great app launching, calculating, translating AND transparency goodness you need… why add something big green and up-its-own-arse on top of an already up-its-arse OS? I get the feeling the creators should stick to the web design, as that’s one slick site, and leave off the ‘world-changing’ for now.

today i was a little let-down, to pull off a vista-crushing ‘next generation OS’, for my money Apple’s new OS ‘Leopard’-s launch date (announced earlier today) should have been followed by some blow-you-away extras that haven’t been announced yet. why isn’t iLife part of the OS, still no “screen sharing” out-of-the-box (it does exist: you need a pricey .Mac account to utilize the technology), there’s no built in iPhone to iChat voice link-up (something a bit skype-y y’know), there’s no iChat SMS service, there’s no support for NTFS hard disks, there’s no Virtualisation of Windows (still boot windows or mac). what a rip-off for you students too- apple has raised the education price of OS 10.5. ouch. can’t blame AT&T for that. I suppose the box is very pretty.

has anyone seen my black coat, last seen in March 2006. i have a funny feeling i left it somewhere and said I’d be back for it…

now i’m back for it. its from the 2002 Autumn / Winter range from next, and I can’t find anything like it in edinburgh today. reward for any information.

Yes, David Cameron telling Prime Minister Brown to ‘bring it on’ as it were today reminded me of the old tale of the castle that sustained a fortnight’s siege back in the day. The attacking army gave one last chance to the villagers inside- their resources must have been low- come out now and we won’t bombard you with another final bloody onslaught.

The villagers retorted by throwing the last measly stock of grain and meat at the attacking army. “We’ve got so much food and supplies we don’t care! hah!” and thus was born the french taunters. Oh, it worked too – the attacking army just went home. Or something.

Yoooooooou don’t frighten us English Kinnnnggggg! Go and boil your bottom sons of a silly person… Knnnnnni-g-h-ts. etc.

I’ve unlocked my iPhone. It works great on Orange and O2 in the UK. Below are the only links you’ll need to do it, if you’d like to give this a shot. Very simple, around 2 hours to complete. Do not upgrade to firmware 1.1.1 once you’ve completed the process.

Update: You can use a new guide (see my post) to unlock any 1.1.1 iPhone, furthermore you can downgrade an O2 / UK 1.1.2 iPhone to 1.1.1… see this page.

1. The Unlocking Guide from ModMyiPhone.com.
tips: you’ll need to register to download the apps, if iNdependance doesn’t work at first- try again and hit ‘unlock’ as soon as the app launches, the Install.app that you install to the iPhone contains a registry of downloads [you'll find Community Sources DNS Tools, BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH under the "Install" tab, take your damn time.]

2. Reconfigure iPhone Voicemail
tip: O2 is 901- press the * to access the options. doesn’t support visual voicemail yet

3. Working WAP / EDGE codes can be found on Google for your carrier… for O2 the codes are:
APN: mobile.o2.co.uk
Username: mobileweb
Password: password