alex.mullr.net/blog

I’ve been in South Africa for two weeks, and am here for one more. There are so many fascinating things about this place, but for a geek the obvious place to start is comparing the technology here with back home.

First: everything’s mobile here. ADSL is a fairly new thing (MWEB have just announced their first uncapped package) and fibre is in the process of being laid (come on BT, they’re catching up), so using a 3G data modem to connect to the Internet is pretty popular. This makes it a great place for somebody arriving with an unlocked iPhone; we popped down to a Vodacom (South African Vodafone) store and bought a prepaid SIM card for R3 (27p) and 1GB of data for R289 (about £26).

Looking at costs for their mobile data, they charge anywhere from R2 (18p) down to 19c (1.7p) per megabyte, depending on your bundle size. Their top option is a massive 20GB for R3899 (£350), so you can get a sense of how heavily people must rely on it. With my gigabyte of data, I was paying 28c/MB (or 2.5p/MB). Compare that to O2, who wanted to charge me £6 per megabyte, and I’m left wondering why anybody would ever pay roaming data charges again. I enjoyed the “awww, see you soon” SMS that O2 sent me:

Please be aware it’s expensive using data on your iPhone abroad. […]

Oh nope. Using the data isn’t the expensive part, is it O2?

If I’d left my O2 SIM in my phone, with exactly the same usage, I would’ve been left with a bill for £6,144. Not the £26 I actually paid. 236× the cost. I want to stop writing the same thing over and over again, but just can’t get my head around it.

The curse of the APN

I’ve always hated dealing with phone network settings, mostly because it’s never worked. After some searching, I found that you need to change the Cellular Data APN on the iPhone to internet. After a quick call—and 24 hour wait—to the people who deal with Vodacom data on 082155 (asking them to enable the iPhone APN and tethering), you can change the Cellular Data APN back to iphone.vodacom.za (and as a bonus, you’ll then be able to tether).

Sorry

I didn’t mean this to turn into a rant about the extortion racket that is my mobile phone provider, but that seems to be the way it turned out. I’d like to thank Vodacom for being so great, and wish O2 a slow, painful death. Hopefully, I’ll post more about being here some time soon.

Dear Apple,

I’ve had my iPhone almost a year now. It’s been out for a little over twenty-four months, if I can add up right. Is there a decent reason that I have still have to jump through hoops to add music I play to Last.fm? Sure, Last.fm is a comparatively small site¹ – but you’re touting Facebook and Flickr exporting features as a pretty major upgrade to iPhoto. Plus, I can’t imagine that something like this would be particularly difficult for you guys to code.

It’s not like scrobbling is really data-intensive, either. Basically, I just don’t see why you haven’t done it yet.

Cheers,

Alex

Click the images for bigger versions. No, you get no points for realising I did them in Photoshop; it’s not tough.

Here’s a feature I haven’t seen reported anywhere yet. The new version of Facebook has a “Shake to reload” option. Gimmicky? Yes. Awesome? Yes.

No matter how much negative press the App Store is getting at the moment, I’m continually surprised by the availability (and quality) of the software you can get without spending anything at all. Trailguru is a MediaWiki (think software that runs Wikipedia) based site for tracking your running, hiking and snowboarding using GPS.

Sign up for an account on the site, install the application onto the latest generation iPhone (it does work with other devices) and hit “Start”. Location services in the phone grab your position every couple of seconds and record it along with the time you were there. When you’re done, the phone can post the trip directly to the Trailguru site, giving you a map like this. Everything on that page is automatically generated, including the very specific location information in the title.

Of course, it wouldn’t appeal nearly as much to me if there weren’t some nice stats features built in… something a little like my reports page. There’s an argument for not wanting to make this stuff so public, but it doesn’t bother me – getting all this for free means that sharing the data is worth it, in my opinion.