“Great” I thought “it recognises it”. However, my world soon fell apart as this message appeared:

Although this has happened to me in the past with other devices, I’ve always been able to charge them, however, with the iPhone it won’t charge. So…out has come the MacBook…the most expensive iPhone charger ever!

Leaving the house at 6:45, we had a clear run down the motorway. Whilst I drove, Elaine amused herself by following Google Map’s blue dot on my iPhone - using the GPS feature of the 3G, the dot was appeared to be following us along the M62 - although we entered a black hole somewhere near Warrington and lost 3G, Edge and O2 altogether.

A crafty game of Monkey Ball by my passenger ensured that by the time we got home at 6:00 my battery life was heading south!

We arrived in Liverpool at 7:30, parked up in the new underground Q-Park car park and headed for the Apple Store. There were already about 10 people in front of us including Mark Johnson from the North West Mac User Group.

We kept ourselves amused by Twittering, keeping our fellow followers (try saying that after a couple of pints) updated with the latest news from the queue. In fact we weren’t the only twitterers - the guy in front of me, following Tweets from the Apple Store queue said to his son “I wonder who Mike Thomas is”. Of course, I replied that it was me!

By 8:30, the queue had stretched to over 100 people and included some other friends from the Mac Club - Tom and Bob. Also present was Don MacAllister from ScreencastsOnline, who, it turned out, had never seen a white iPhone “in the flesh”.

At 8:50, the Apple Store staff came out to do the traditional high-fives - although this was really just to get us in the mood (or whip up a frenzy of excitement) and at 9:00 sharp the door opened to the sound of the staff counting down…10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1

We’re in…wooo hooo…T-shirt…high fives…more woo hoo…more high fives (I wonder what the builders working on the construction site opposite thought - I mean I don’t think any other shop opening saw this kind of behaviour - though of course this is how Apple Store launches are celebrated all over the world

Compared to other Apple Stores, the Liverpool Store is relatively small in both depth and width. The store is on 2 levels with the Genius bar and all the checkouts are upstairs, although there is plenty of hardware on display on the lower floor (iPhones, iMacs, MacBooks etc).

We spent an hour or so upstairs chatting to a few people - Bob from the Mac Club, Mike from the Apple Store (who recently transferred from The Trafford Centre branch to the Liverpool branch) and Damian - one of our MacBites listeners (well, wearing a MacBites T-Shirt did kind of give it away when he said “Are you Elaine and Mike from MacBites?”). Great to meet you by the way Damian.

Well done to Apple - this was by far the best organised and “whooped up” store opening that I’ve attended.

Photos and videos can be found on the MacBites Flickr page

Thanks to Elaine for mocking up this photo of my Liverpool One Apple Store T-shirt

Then why not do as I did and treat yourself to an Elgato Turbo 264 Video Encoder. This little USB device (not much bigger than a pen drive) converts videos for playing on iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and Sony PSP. While a Mac’s CPU is a great general purpose number cruncher, the chip on the Turbo 264 was designed to do nothing but churn out H.264 video. Videos can take a long time to encode to the H.264 format - sometimes longer than the actual playing time. What’s more, H.264 video encoding can demand a sizeable chunk of system resources.

Elgato Turbo H264

My primary reason for purchasing the Turbo 264 is to convert .eyetv files (generated by Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid Digital TV Tuner) into video that I can play on my iPod or iPhone (of course watching these videos would be done whilst walking the dog or lying in bed - certainly not whilst driving to work!!)

The Turbo 264 accelerates video encoding up to four times faster on Macs with Intel Core processors. On an older Mac like a PowerPC G4 or PowerPC G5, the acceleration is exponentially faster - some users report up to 10 and 15 times faster. I converted a 1-hour episode of The Apprentice (original file size 2.6GB) to an m4v file in a little over 40 minutes. The size of the m4v file was 575MB. I then converted the same file without the Turbo 264 plugged in. One hour later, the export was complete and the size of the m4v file was almost 700MB.

So how do you instruct the EyeTV to use the Turbo 264? Simple - you plug it in and then click the “Export to iPod” or “Export to AppleTV” button on the EyeTV toolbar. If the Turbo 264 is plugged in, the EyeTv will automatically use the Turbo 264’s processor to do the file conversion.

Turbo 264 can do more than convert eyetv files to H264. It comes with an easy “drag and drop” application that allows you to convert any video to H.264 (MPEG-4) format - either one at a time or in a batch

More information is available from Elgato’s website.

I don’t think that Siteground’s control panel likes to play nicely with Safari. On a number of occasions, I have received an error:

“Operation could not be completed. (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302.)”
(kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork:302) Please choose Report Bugs to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

This error has usually happened whilst installing, upgrading or removing an application (Siteground, like many webhosts, use the Fantastico one-click install application to allow customers to easily install applications on their websites). This error often causes the installation/upgrade to fail.

After upgrading 3 sites to WordPress 2.6 (this was the only option available via Fantastico - to install a different version would have required a manual install), I was confident that I could complete the installation on MacBites.

Oh, how wrong was I as the famous kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302 error reared its ugly head. When I opened the MacBites home page, the look of the pages was fine (I did not expect any problems because the upgrade should leave the WordPress theme alone) but there was no content.

When I logged into the admin section, a message popped up to advise that a database upgrade was needed. I duly clicked the button - and my content promptly disappeared (luckily I had taken a backup of the ENTIRE site before starting this whole fiasco).

To cut a long story short (just like the night which was also long)…

I uninstalled WordPress (via Fantastico) and re-installed WordPress 2.6 (via Fantastico) - I did this using Firefox.

Using FTP, I uploaded the theme to the wp-content/themes folder, uploaded the photos to the wp-content/uploads folder and uploaded the plug-ins to the wp-content/plugins folder - in other words, I restored the wp-content folder back to it’s previous state.

I then replaced the MySQL database with my backed-up local copy and fixed the Categories issue - as per my previous post.

The final problem was the Twitter Tools plug-in which displays the latest Twitter post from MacBites - it was displaying a blank space where the content should appear.

This plug-in actually copies the the Twitter posts to a database stored within your site (rather than live-linking to Twitter). When I opened the database there were over 300 blank records which I deleted.

So was it worth it? Well it does mean that when the aforementioned WordPress app for the iPhone is released, we’ll be able to blog live from the iPhone.

A Google search came up with this - http://iphone.wordpress.net. Logging into the Control panel at Siteground (our hosting company), I discovered that the installed version of WordPress was 2.2.1 and the minimum required for this app is 2.5.1.

However, using the Siteground 1-click Control Panel, I could upgrade to the newly-released 2.6. So I duly clicked the icon (after performing a back-up of the database and blog folder).

All seemed OK…until I visited my blog…and all the categories were missing!

By Googling “WordPress 2.6 Categories” I found that I was not the only one with this problem. Some people had a smooth upgrade, some had the same problem. Nobody could find a reason for it though several explanations were put forward - incompatible plug-ins was a popular reason.

However, I upgraded 3 instances of WordPress on my Siteground hosting account and all had the problem. I’ll be writing to their support team and will post any information that I receive.

Thanks to this website I have upgraded the blogs to 2.6, although it was a bit of a long-winded manual process, due to the large number of categories that each blog has.

So am I impressed? You bet I am! I’ve never been one for computer games but I’m addicted to Super Monkey Ball. I’ve also been scouring the Apps Store to see what else I can find (I can recommend Vicinity - it tells you what is available in your current location - bars, restaurants, supermarkets, etc (I’m sure they’ll add more categories in due course).

Then another colleague asked about converting kilograms to pounds:

And just to throw another one into the mix - The Google Calculator:

Today I was adding some new functionality to an Excel file. The file is stored on our network and when I came to save it, I got a message box saying “File not saved”. We had earlier experienced a network connectivity outage so, thinking that this was the problem, I tried to save it to the local C: drive - same problem.

I couldn’t simply copy and paste into a new file for several reasons - the file contains over 20 sheets, a large number of “Range Names” and several complex VBA procedures.

And the last straw came when I read the Microsoft Knowledgebase - Restart Windows in Safe Mode (which of course means I lose the changes to the file) and then try to save the Excel file to your local hard-disk drive.

Agggghhhh!!