All my blogs and sites now run Wordpress on them somewhere… it rocks.

Well they were wrong. Saturday saw the start of the Outlook authentication battle… and it’s continued in to today. Having now rung 1and1 to find out what the heck is going on, they replied that they have replicated the error and are looking in to it. I will be updated as to the status of the case by email!!! Bizzare.

Essential guitar utility, including an amazingly flexible tuner and library of over 1600 chord variations, all on your iPhone.

Well the screen shots look pretty good and the functionality for the price seems good value. So last week I plumped for it.

It’s super. In particular the guitar tuner is amazingly accurate and flexible. It can decern the tone of the string being played and in real time display the corrections you need to make, down to less than 10Deg turn on the machine head on my Ibanez. It can also account for several unusual tunings, and will set its tone recognition to account for most background noise. And if you want to do it the old fashioned way, there is a set of virtual strings you can pluck which play though the loud speaker to tune-by-ear.

Another function contained in the toolkit is a metronome. You can slide the metronome to a bespoke frequency, and set the time tiganture to 2/4,3/4 or 4/4. You can have it just flash the tick, and/or tick using the in-built speaker.

Finally the chord libary, which is extensive. It gives several options for each chord and variants, each is displayed graphically in a TAB-like format. It is really easy to locate chords and to select their variations, simply using the touch scroll interface.

I am really very pleased with my purchase. For me to have bought hardware to fulfil the functions of this app, I’d be looking at close to £50, if not more. This simple app, available from the iTunes App store, is a fantastic addition to a growing list of quality apps for the iPhone.

As of 11pm last night (9th September) my iPhone stopped authenticating with my exchange server. It now simply prompts me for a password. This has now dumped the previous sync data, and left me contact/calandar/email-less. ;( It’s a really sorry state of affairs. Only last month we had an outage of about a week where only the iPhone could sync. Now the iPhone is failing to talk…

I’ve sent a support request to 1and1 and will update this page once I get a reply.

Update (11 Sept 08)

I did get a reply from 1and1 support… but it wasn’t of much value really:

We are currently aware of the issue that you have on your iPhone. We are working diligently to resolve remaining outages and issues. We also understand the frustration you might be feeling right now about this whole issue and how anxious you are to have it fixed. We don’t have a timeframe however we are putting extra measures in fixing this issue as soon as possible. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused, and assure you, we will take steps to prevent this type of outage in the future.

My iPhone is now syncing with the Exchange server correctly as of evening 10 Sept 08.

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychonaut, futurologist and libertarian.

So my PS3 has bitten the dust. Given up the ghost. Kicked the bucket. Never to delight my sences again.

My impression is that one of the PS3 Updates killed it. Eversince we updated it back early August, it’s had intermittent issues regarding booting. I tried to turn it on for the girls yesterday, and it simply died. Black screen on all A/V outs. HDMI was picking up a 625p signal, but was showing nuttin’. The component outs were also showing a signal, but just showing black.

1 brief call to the PS3 helpline… and they’re sending me a new machine… express delivery. I must have been on the phone for 5 minutes, and they were offering a replacement. No question about the warranty (i.e. purchase date etc), they will come on Wednesday with a new machine, no quibs or quarms. They even ummed and ahhed over whether they were going to take away the old one or not. Bizzare! Cool, but bizzare!

Roll on Wednesday.

The only drawback is I’ll have lost all my saved games, and the games I’ve bought will have to be re-downloaded, which kinda sucks. I’ll live with it tho

I have been using www.OneAndOne.co.ukfor all my web and email provision for quite some time now. I plumped for an exchange server about 3 years ago to synchronize my email, contacts and calendar across the several PCs/Laptops/interfaces I have laying around. I have to say it too has been a very pleasurable and simple transition and one I continue to reap the benefits from.

Now with the new 2.0 firmware for the iPhone we can sync the iPhone with Exchange server using Push technology. Yay! Well I have been suffering. It took me bloody ages to sort out how to get the exchange server (hosted with www.1and1.co.uk) to validate the connection with my iPhone. The solution I used when I got my iPhone was as follows:

server: exchange.1and1.co.uk
username: e12345678
password: <hehehehe>
use SSL: On

These settings worked great up until yesterday, when it began to flail around, and finally dropped out with a recurring “Password Incorrect” prompt to re-enter the password. Knowing my password was correct, and that all other iterations of the username with domain, and server addresses failed, I thought the problem was with 1and1… well yes and no. Turns out 1and1 fudged part of the authentication system, and have now corrected it, so that it now includes the domain name in the username path. So the new settings as of the 8th August 2008 are:

server: exchange.1and1.co.uk
username: exchange\e12345678 (caution: check the direction of the slash ie ‘\’ is not the same as ‘/’)
password: <hehehehe>
use SSL: On

My iPhone 3G is now a happy object, and continues to provide joy and glee with a slight sting of pride. I hope this short article helps out other iand1 exchange iPhone users round the UK.