The Daily Burn

My current obsession, apart from the iPhone, is with loosing some weight (and gaining muscle) in time for our wedding next year and a great web service is helping me do it.  DailyBurn.com is a fantastic (and mainly free) site for tracking your weight and other body measurements, your food intake and how much exercise you do to burn it all off.  It’s amazing how focused tracking  everything makes me and it’s such great motivation.  Explore the site for yourself, sign up and it’ll help you with your goals.

I found the Daily Burn from the author Tim Ferris and it has an iGoogle gadget and an iPhone app that make it really easy to keep it up to date.

iPhone armour

These little iPhones  look beautiful and no one wants to have a device that’s covered in scuffs and scrapes, me included. So as soon as I got it…no wait before it arrived, I started doing research into screen protection for it and it wasn’t long before I realised back protection was also a must. The research led me to the products of Case-Mate, a great company that specialise in phone protection. At the time I was looking for a silicone skin to sit around the device but I soon came across the Stealth, an adhesive protection for both front and rear that doesn’t increase the size of the device, nice I thought.

I didn’t go for it though. One of the super-cool features of the Case-Mate site is their extensive use of their own, and customer created, YouTube videos. For lots of the products they have instructional videos for applying the product. Wait. How good is that? Half the time that’s the big problem with installing these things, and these guys have cracked it! It was on examination of these that I found ClearArmour. What makes Clear Armour stand out is that it’s applied “wet” just like you put wallpaper on the wall. The video showed just how easy the spray on formula was to apply and how good the results are and it showes the magick tip to get the corners to stick. I bought one immediatley.

When it arrived the postman had crushed it to get it into the letterbox, but I opened it up and got the video playing for a refresher. The installation experience was absutley as advertised, it applied perfectly.   Spray the films, spray your hands, put it in place (moving it easily if necessary) then use the supplied bit of board to remove any bubbles and leave to dry.   Overnight it dried and looked great, but with two bubbles on the back, 24 more hours later and they’d gone too.   Superb my iPhone was now protected. That’s how it’s stayed too, but there is one issue.  A couple of the corners have stared to pick up a little dust, but that will probably stop as soon as those ares loose some stick. However there are actually two comple armours supplied so I might use the other to get a better application, I could use some more spray though.

I’ve been mega impressed by Case-Mate and they answered my Twitter questions quickly. Put simply their customer service rocks so much that I want to try more of their stuff. I’m gonna get a silicone case from then still as I want some impact protection.

Geeky T-shirts

I do like geeky things and that extends as far as my attire under some circumstances, especially so in summer. So it was with sheer glee that I purchased this t-shirt from play.com last week as it matches my other number one criteria…bargins! The geekyness is doubled by its inclusion of not only Starwars but also of Lego, and all for just £4.99 delivered. It’s a Fruit of the loom tee too so the quality is good, in fact I remember printing the same in my fathers factory as a nipper.

Dock it

The number one reason I chose the iPhone is the innovative Eco system that’s built up around it, not only in terms of the great apps that are available but also the hardware. Apple make a beautiful, minimalist doc that looks super but it really cost some cash, not only for the dock but also for the cable that’s required. Combined the cost is about £40. A quick scout on eBay turns up lots of lower cost alternatives, the best value of which I found was the Belkin TuneSync. Available for about £10 delivered it offers the same charging and sync benefits of the Apple dock but with the very useful addition of a 5 port USB hub.

It’s a great device and works superbly, clearing away some of the clutter from the desk. It’s more functional than the Apple dock and a quarter of the price. The only minor flaw is that it’s lacking in weight so when the iPhone isn’t docked the weight of the USB cables tips it up by a quarter inch.

Broken down and got an iphone

Well it had to happen I suppose. It took a while too but eventually I had to get one. I’ve been a winmo fan for years and this really pains me but I’ve got it for the developers. WiMo has some of the best devs out there but they are stuck with a creativity sapping 10 year old OS and iPhone is where all the exciting apps are at. Sure there will be more soon but here’s a snap of my home screen to mark the moment.