Raver

Our emotional state of choice is Ecstasy. Our nourishment of choice is Love. Our addiction of choice is technology. Our religion of choice is music. Our currency of choice is knowledge. Our politics of choice is none. Our society of choice is utopian though we know it will never be. You may hate us. You may dismiss us. You may misunderstand us. You may be unaware of our existence. We can only hope you do not care to judge us, because we would never judge you. We are not criminals. We are not disillusioned. We are not drug addicts. We are not naive children... We are one massive, global, tribal village that transcends man-made law, physical geography, and time itself. We are The Massive. One Massive. We were first drawn by the sound. From far away, the thunderous, muffled, echoing beat was comparable to a mother's heart soothing a child in her womb of concrete, steel, and electrical wiring. We were drawn back into this womb, and there, in the heat, dampness, and darkness of it, We came to accept that we are all equal. Not only to the darkness, and to ourselves, but to the very music slamming into us and passing through our souls: we are all equal. And somewhere around 35 Hz we could feel the hand of God at our backs, pushing us forward, pushing us to push ourselves to strengthen our minds, our bodies, and our spirits., Pushing us to turn to the person beside us to join hands and uplift them by sharing the uncontrollable joy we felt from creating this magical bubble that can, for one evening, protect us from the horrors, atrocities, and pollution of the outside world. It is in that very instant, with these initial realizations that each of us was truly born. We continue to pack our bodies into clubs, or warehouses, or buildings you've abandoned and left for naught, and we bring life to them for one night. Strong, throbbing, vibrant life in it's purest, most intense, most hedonistic form. In these makeshift spaces, we seek to shed ourselves of the burden of uncertainty for a future you have been unable to stabilize and secure for us. We seek to relinquish our inhibitions, and free ourselves from the shackle's and restraints you've put on us for your own peace of mind. We seek to re-write the programming that you have tried to indoctrinate us with since the moment we were born. Programming that tells us to hate, that tells us to judge, that tells us to stuff ourselves into the nearest and most convenient pigeon hole possible. Programming that even tells us to climb ladders for you, jump through hoops, and run through mazes and on hamster wheels. Programming that tells us to eat from the shiny silver spoon you are trying to feed us with, instead of nourish ourselves with our own capable hands. Programming that tells us to close our minds, instead of open them. Until the sun rises to burn our eyes by revealing the dis-utopian reality of a world you've created for us, we dance fiercely with our brothers and sisters in celebration of our life, of our culture, and of the values we believe in: Peace, Love, Freedom, Tolerance, Unity, Harmony, Expression, Responsibility and Respect. Our enemy of choice is ignorance. Our weapon of choice is information. Our crime of choice is breaking and challenging whatever laws you feel you need to put in place to stop us from celebrating our existence. But know that while you may shut down any given party, on any given night, in any given city, in any given country or continent on this beautiful planet, you can never shut down the entire party. You don't have access to that switch, no matter what you may think. The music will never stop. The heartbeat will never fade. The party will never end.
I am a raver, and this is my manifesto.

T-Mobile G1 Review

This is a review of the so called Google Phone by T-Mobile G1 made by HTC, this is the first phone to run the Android OS which was designed by Google. 

I m going to split this article into two parts, first a review of the actual hardware and second is the software itself.

Hardware:- 

Although this is the "Google Phone" but it is actually built by HTC, after more than a week of using it i have found a few things regarding the hardware itself and i will be giving a brief tour in this section. 

The G1 comes in two colors either in black or white (my review is based on the black), it has a slide form factor where the screen slides out and a full qwerty keyboard is hidden under it. I find the slide mechanism to be quite unique as you push the screen it will swing out slightly to the left before it gets into position. Overall the motion is very smooth and feels pretty solid. 

The phone sports a 3.2inch capacitive touchscreen just like the one on the iphone and in fact it feels very good too, i would say it is very close to being as good as the iphone touch screen. It is also a quadband 3g phone with wifi and GPS and at the back there is a 3 mega pixel camera. 

On the front of the phone you will see five physical buttons. They are the menu button, the answer and end call button plus the home and back button. In between the home and back button there is a trackball which allows you to navigate instead of using the touch screen. I find this very helpful as it allows me more control of the phone, it is especially useful when you are surfing and trying to hit a very small link with the trackball you are less likely to mishit. Overall the track ball feels very good and very similar to the blackberry ones. 

One feature it does lack is it does not have a font mount camera so there is no ability to do video calling.  

On the left hand side of the phone there is a volume button and a SD card slot, on the right hand side there is a dedicated camera button. On the back there is the 3 mega pixel camera, but as with all smart phones the camera is poor to say the least and suffers extremely badly under low light conditions. A mini usb port is also located on bottom of the phone.

The overall feel of the G1 is pretty solid and it sits comfortable on your hands, the sliding keyboard mechanism is very smooth but you can hear some squeaks when you press slightly hard on the screen. The 3.2inch touch screen is very bright and sharp and volume of the loud speaker is very good perfect for listening to music. 

The full qwerty keyboard is very solid too, its gives you a pretty good tactile feel while you are typing on it. But one major downside is its poor battery life quoted at 300mins talk time, while using it for the good week now i find myself having to charge the phone every night. 

Software:-

The major hype about the G1 is always going to be the Android OS, after all this is the first mobile OS developed by Google. And personally i think Google has made it on the market and it is as good as the OS X mobile too.

Android is very different from other OS as it is totally open source and the possibility for developers is infinite. The OS itself is very smooth in fact try not to think of it as a phone but a mini computer running a little modified version of ubuntu. 

Out of the box you get your google apps such as gmail, google maps, google IM client, google contacts, google calender and a browser and the first thing you do is to log in with your gmail account and it will automatically sync the information to your phone. 

There are 3 home screens where you can put your short cut for apps on it too, and jumping between the 3 home screen works just like how you would on an iphone by flicking left and right to access different screens. The flicking motion is very smooth just like it on the iphone. 

On the bottom of the home screen you can see a tab, as you flick it up it opens a window where all you applications are installed. 

There is a dedicated youtube app, there is really nothing to say about it. It just works.

One cool feature about the Android OS is the Market, this is like the Apple App store. You can download many useful apps to games either paid or free. Because Android is open source there is a very large community of software designers writing apps for it and i can only see this to grow bigger in time. There are also some google widgets such as the google search bar and the clock, i believe there will be more to come in the near future. (you can freely move these widgets to anywhere on your home screen).

This is no video player out of the box but because of the nature of the Market there are already video player apps out there for download and it is free too. There is also a music player which supports playlist and syncs with Windows Media Player too. But because there is no 3.5mm jack you will have to use the mini usb headphone provided which can be a downer for some. 

The main feature of this phone is the service provided by google, over the cloud computing has starting to become mainstream. As mentioned before when you start using the phone for the first time you must sign in with your gmail account. This allows the phone to synchronize all your emails, calender appointments and contacts straight to your phone. And if you edit anything on your calender it will automatically be sync with the google server too. Emails are also directly pushed from your gmail account to your phone. 

As of today, google maps in the UK also supports street view this is a very welcomed addition to all UK users. 

My overall impressions are very good, Android OS is very clean and easy to use. The ability to customize theme is fun, GPS works very well with google maps and locates your position very quickly and emails gets pushed flawlessly. As mentioned before using the OS is more like using a computer then a phone which is very unique. 

Although there are many good points but the abbismal battery life and no MS exchange support is a major let down for business users. But as a first attempt by google this is a major step forward in the mobile OS world and it does make me wonder where will Windows Mobile go in the future. 

I can only see Android will become a market leader in the near future due to the nature of open source i expect it to grow very rapidly soon, it will be very interesting to see what will be ahead of us. 

Review By 

Andy C 

19th March 2009

ipod touch 2g jail break GUI for windows.

This is a ipod touch 2g jailbreak program for windows, personally i did not use windows or this method to jailbreak my ipod touch but according to ipod touch fan forum this works and this program is also taken from the forum so i do have have any credit over this program. Thank You so much for the creator who has kindly enough to spend his time to write up a GUI for novice users.

The program you need is called QuickFreedom Version 1.1.1 you can download here: http://quickfreedom.com/

The features are:

Easy to use 5-step process to Jailbreak your 2.2.1 firmware iPod
Support to use your own Custom Boot Logo (or use included 8)
Support to install Installer optionally (Cydia will always be installed)
Full DFU instructions for Pre-Jailbreak
iPod recognition of current connection state

Follow instructions carefully and you may need to download pervious firmwares. I personally do not take any responsibility for anything you do to your ipod, try it at your own risk.

You may require 2.2.1 and 2.1.1 official firmware, if you have any questions regarding how to jailbreak or obtaining these listed firmware please leave comments and i will direct and assist you.

ipod touch 2g fully jail broken....

This is a guide to perform an untethered jailbreak on your ipod touch 2g with out losing any other your data. Only perform this if your ipod touch 2g is either at tethered or semi-tethered state. Doing this will also void your ipod touch 2g warrenty and i hold no responsibility if anything went wrong during the process. Perform at your own risk!!!!

And thank you for the DEV team and guys at ipodtouchfans forum for producing this guide.

Here is guide :- 

29MB untethered NOR firmware
http://www.mediafire.com/?odtznnmnz2k

01) Attach powered on ipod 2g (previously tethered)

02) Click Restore in Itunes

03) Click Do Not Backup

04) Click Restore and let it finish extracting

05) Once shows "Preparing iPod for Restore" is in process click Apple icon | Force Quit | choose Itunes

06) Enter DFU mode (hold home/power 10 secs then release power while still holding home 7 more seconds)

07) Reboot it with Boot Automater Script or manually like you have been being tethered.

08) Once rebooted open iTunes and you should see "iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode"
if you don't see this message then start entire process all over again till you see it.

09) In iTunes click option-restore and chose the NOR only 29MB firmware you downloaded.

10) Takes about 1 minute to recover and now boots untethered and saves all games and game saves as your data is untouched.

As of today the ipod touch 2g has been officially branded " pwned for life", this mean that the ipod touch will finally have a untethered jailbreak. This is great news as at this moment i m still on the tethered jailbreak where i can not power off my ipod touch other wise i will have to reapply the patch again. ( This is a long and annoying process )

We are still waiting for quickpwn to release a GUI method to jailbreak your ipod touch 2g so stay tuned, i will post up on methods in doing so as soon as i have successfully jailbroken it. 

itunes 8.1 is out.

Yes another big update again from apple and this time it's itunes turn, have you updated to itunes 8.1 yet?

According to Apple this new update will make itunes run faster and more responsive, such as loading app store, working with big music libraries and even syncing with your iphone/ipod. 

Apart from the the speed difference in the update here are some of the bug fixes:- 

• Supports syncing with ipod shuffle ( 3rd generation )
• Friends to request songs for itune DJ
• Adds genius sidebar for you movies and tv shows
• improves performance when downloading itunes plus songs
• provides autofill for manually managed ipods
• includes many accessibility improvements 
• allws itunes u and the itunes sotre to be disabled separately using parental controls

Conclusion - major benefit i can see from the update is the reduced syncing time for iphone/ipod. 

Invader must die Overview

Hi this is my first overview in this blog and i will start off with an nice and easy one. 

Today i will be reviewing The Prodigy's latest album called Invaders Must Die. 

The album was released on the 23rd of Feb 2009 in the UK, and it has been a while since prodigy has released a studio album in fact as some of you will know there last studio album was Always outnumbered, Never Gunned which was released way back in 2004.

The track listing for the standard edition are as followed :- 

1.  Invaders Must Die
   
2.  Omen
3.  Thunder
4.  Colours
5.  Take Me to the Hospital
6.  Warrior's Dance
7.  Run with the Wolves
8.  Omen Reprise
9.  World's on Fire
10.  Piranha
11.  Stand Up

The whole sound of the album is very familiar, back to the old Prodigy we are used to with the old school rave sound with classic synths and hard thumping bass. 

They appear to have taken the good elements from Experience and Music for the jilted Generation and modified it with a blend of modern techie sound and the result is even more raw sounding with harder beats, the synth seems to be much more dirtier too. 

It seems like Prodigy are trying to tell us they are back, in fact the first sound that you will hear will be from the album is "We are the Prodigy" from the track Invader must die. 

This album is a must listen for the old school Prodigy fan and i m sure you won't be disappointed. 

 

Hi to every one...

Hi everybody, welcome to my newly formed blog. 

This space will be where i perform reviews on gadgets and technological goodies rangers from mobile phones, PMP, Computers, games consoles and many more. 

The reason i have decided to write this blog is to show my enthusiasm with todays technology and let you fellow readers keep up with what's new and what's happening in the ever changing sector. 

I realise that on the internet there are really not many non-bias yet informative tech reviewers, so my mission is in this blog to give a very non bias and informative review as to my personal opinion. But i will also include some sort of reviews on movies and music that might interest other readers and hopefully widen the spectrum. 

Hope you enjoy reading and come back.....