Radderz’ Randomness

This year I am finally getting around to running my first (half) marathon in Hastings. I have chosen to use it as an excuse to raise money for Women’s Aid, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, a dear friend of mine and her children have been affected by domestic violence and have had a tough time the past few months trying to rebuild their lives. The second reason is that my sister adopted some children just over a year ago now, their birth mother had also been through a rough life, but wasn’t as fortunate.

I don’t publicly raise money for charities, but this is an exception as it is close to my heart, and hence anything you can give will be appreciated far more than usual. The monies will help repay the invaluable support my friend has received in protecting & relocating her and the kids, and make sure that it remains available for other people in need.

Donations can be sent via my ‘Just Giving’ page.

Also please keep up to date with my progress - Remember to look/make comments too!

Hasting Half Marathon for Womens Aid Personal, Running

I’ve just managed to get internet tethering working on an iPhone with OS 3.1. The significance is that most internet tethering hacks became unusable once upgraded from OS 3.0.

Internet tethering allows a laptop or computer to connect to the internet using an iPhone’s data connection. If you have an unlimited data contract with your mobile phone provider then you can take advantage of this. You do however need to jailbrake your phone; this may sound scary, but it’s quite easy to do, has many benefits and is reversible if things do happen to go wrong.

Here are the steps I have found that works for OS 3.1.2 (7D11):

• Jailbreak your phone. I use blackra1n. I’ll detail this later.
• Install Cydia to enable you to install apps from different providers other then from the approved App Store.
• Install PdaNet from Cydia.
• Either establish a wireless adhoc network with your computer, or install PdaNet Desktop on your computer to enable you to share the internet connection via USB.
• Launch the ‘PdaNet’ app on your iPhone, and PdaNet Desktop on your computer, and you will have internet tethering.
• I have multitasking enabled on my iPhone, another hack. This enables you to load more then one app at a time. You may find this to be useful so you can use your phone while maintaining your internet connection.

Techie iPhone

Mars could be seen as the brightest star in the sky, starting quite faint at the beginning of August, and becoming its brightest mid to late August.

I managed to get these shots of it with my camera. Although it’s far too far to focus, you can make out the red hue of the planet. I was stunned, I didn’t think I would get more then a small dot, but to get a red blur seemed pretty amazing.

Personal Camera

Back in September, I tried to take a few detailed shots of the Moon. I was impressed at what my new camera could do, you can make out quite clearly craters on the edge of the moon that can’t really been seen with the naked eye.

However, a few weeks later I tried to get some different shots, but during photographing, I noticed a weird black speck on the view finder. Slightly concerned that I had something on my lense or a dead pixel, I began moving my camera around, however the black speck remained relative to the Moon whichever direction or rotation my camera was in.

Furthermore, this black speck seemed to move over the space of 5-10 minutes, eventually moving outside of the Moons glow which was how I could see it.

Having ruled out the possibility of ‘dirt on lens’, the next viable option was that it was an object, and the blackness was the effect of it being somewhere between me and the Moon, blocking the light being reflected back. However, this speck seemed quite big in comparison to the moon, so either it had to be close, or it was a huge object. I would have thought that it would have been a satellite drifting past, however even if the object was in low orbit I would guess the object would be of far greater size to be one. Space station perhaps? Or maybe a passing meteor? However, it would have been too big to miss at least some media attention to alert people when where to look out for it - maybe.. Nothing on any news sites I spotted.

Anyway, I think this will remain a mystery, unless anyone else has some ideas

Personal Camera

The new update of Adwords Editor v7.5.2 seems to crash on my Vista machine.

At present, I have been unable to find a solution, however I am not sure if my previous fix for the editor crashing due to SQLite has resulted in the cause of this error for this particular update.

I’ve resorted to completely uninstall the application, and install a fresh copy of the previous version. (Still v7.5.2, but with file size of 15,760KB instead of 16,326KB)

I’m not sure if it just mine, or whether everyone is effected, so comments please

Techie AdWords, Quickies