According to the NZ Herald, Trade Me are banning all iPhone auctions as they can’t be sure that the sellers actually have the goods in their possession. Seems a bit drastic but I guess when you command the majority share of the market, you can afford to lose a few auctions here or there.

Upcoming auction sites like SellMeFree, are grabbing the opportunity to increase their profile. SellMeFree’s CEO, Josh Bortwick said: "There are a lot of people wanting to use this technology, and we don’t really think that it’s fair to make New Zealanders wait for another year or two before they can."

To be sure that SellMeFree sellers do actually have possession of the iPhones, they are contacting each seller on a case-by-case basis. Not Trade Me though – spokesman Dean Winter says that it’s easier to place a blanket ban on the iPhones: "It is very difficult, if we know that a product is not available in New Zealand, to know if they’re legitimate it or not."

This is a classic example of a company becoming all ‘corporate‘ and losing touch with it’s customers. I’ll certainly be using some of the competing auction sites from now on.

Well done to the Wellington based Ponoko team for getting good reviews at the huge TechCrunch40 conference over in San Francisco. They have a unique idea and I think they will do well. Especially when you look at all the other companies on display – very few good ideas, most of them are just new and improved search or video companies.

I checked out the site a long time ago and found it a bit daunting at the time, but they’ve got heaps of tutorials and great ideas available now, and I can definitely think of some cool things to make.

Unfortunately, due to the huge spike in traffic they’re having, you can’t register or login to the site, but you can still browse through the pages.

Also, I can’t find any easy way to open the ".eps" files that are provided as templates. I tried Inkscape but that can only export to ".eps", and the Adobe Illustrator trial I downloaded didn’t work – it kept asking me for a full version key, and I’m not going to splash out over $1000 just to experiment…

And for those that just read my blog in their favourite feed reader, you wouldn’t have noticed that I changed the theme of my site from the over-complicated Freshy theme, to the nice, simple, clean theme from Bob. Check it out and let me know what you think.

This is the first step towards getting my blogging back on track and a little more focused on infrastructure technologies. The next step is to actually publish all the technical posts that I’ve been building up. You can expect some quality content on Powershell, Windows Server 2008, and my home project to migrate from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

Another good result from my mountain bike trip to Rotorua, is that I came back to Wellington motivated to get back in to cycling to work. Just three days in to it, I feel great already – I’ve been waking up earlier, been more productive at work, and just feeling good all round.

It’s amazing what a bit of exercise can do for the body and mind!

As a result of the awesome mountain biking in Rotorua last weekend, I’ve adjusted my front forks to give them an extra bit of travel to 130mm. I also invested in a new front tyre, a Specialized Pro Resolution, as I was finding that the Kenda Karma tyres were a little bit too slippery in the wet.

A camera phone shot of Mt Ruapehu taken while driving up to Rotorua last weekend. Pretty cool…

Google have just released a couple of important updates to the Google Reader application. The biggest update is the search feature that has now been added. It seems strange that it’s taken them this long to add it, but it’s here now and it works well. This also gives you the ability to search in your shared items which is great for keeping track of posts that you’ve shared.

The other feature, which I haven’t yet heard anyone else mention yet, is that they have updated the number that displays your unread items to a larger number. Previously if you had more than 100 unread items, it would just say “100+” whereas now it gives you the exact figure. I don’t know how high the new number goes, perhaps if it gets to over a thousand it will say “1000+”.

I’ve been persevering with Vista 64 bit over the last few weeks, but I’m failing to see any benefit in sticking with it. Very few applications are native 64 bit and some applications just do not run at all.

Microsoft is probably the worst culprit – last year they released Exchange 2007 and forced all customers that wanted to use it to upgrade to 64 bit hardware and software. At about the same time as Exchange was released, Office 2007 and Vista were released too.

MS made a big deal about Vista 64 bit – just read the blurb on this page and you’ll think that 64 bit is the only way to go: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/64bit.mspx. But there was no 64 bit version of Office 2007 released. Sure Office 2007 runs fine on 64 bit, but why wasn’t there a 64 bit edition?

And today Microsoft is making a big deal about the new upgrades to the Live suite of products, including a new unified installer that lets you install a bunch of Live applications at once, like the Google Pack. BUT NO 64 BIT SUPPORT! None of the applications will install if you’re stupid enough to be running a 64 bit operating system, you’re just greeted with a lovely error.

So I’m running an operating system which Microsoft says, “… deliver premier performance, reliability, and security,providing you access to the next generation of PC innovations.” but I can’t install the latest updates to Microsoft’s own software. (end of rant)

There have been a lot of gadget related announcements over the last couple of days.

Apple Announcements

Obviously Apple stole the show with their latest lineup of iPods: (images © Apple)

iPod Shuffle

New colours, same form factor and still just 1GB storage.

iPod Nano

New, ’squashed’ form-factor, allows for a wide screen for watching videos and using the cover-flow feature. Not sure I like the look of this, but it may grow me – especially with the choice of cool colours.

iPod Classic

Similar form-factor to the 5th generation iPods, but thinner and an all-metal casing makes it look very cool. Incredible increase in storage means you can now get up to 160GB! This also gets the new cover-flow feature – this lets you flip through your album art like you were flipping through a stack of CDs.

iPod Touch

This was the big announcement. As expected, the iPhone form-factor comes to the iPod and includes 16GB flash storage, multi-touch screen, Wi-Fi, and internet browsing. Not to mention the beautiful, 3.5 inch widescreen display. Apple have also done what the Zune team couldn’t do, and that’s to allow downloads of tracks directly from the iTunes Store to the iPod Touch over wi-fi. Plus the awesome Safari web browser, gives you a great internet-browsing experience anywhere there’s wi-fi. Unfortunately no Bluetooth though – this is how I access the internet on my PDA, by using my phone’s 3G connection over wi-fi. It’s too cumbersome to use CafeNet on the PDA as you have to log in to the CafeNet website each time you connect.

HP Announcements:

In a more sensible, business-oriented approach, HP announced 5 new iPAQs aimed mainly at business users. (images taken from the press release)

HP iPAQ 100 Series Classic Handheld (Data sheet)

This is a standard looking PDA with a 3.5 inch screen and 240×320 resolution. Has all the goodies though, like wi-fi, Bluetooth 2.0, Windows Mobile 6.0, etc.

HP iPAQ 200 Series Enterprise Handheld (Data sheet)

This is the mother of all PDAs: 4 inch screen, 480×640 resolution! Designed for business use, this has all the features that a serious PDA user would want – apart from, oddly, no fingerprint reader. Runs Windows Mobile 6.0 with all the standard apps you would expect.

HP iPAQ 300 Series Travel Companion (Data sheet)

This is an interesting one as it isn’t actually a PDA but is a 3D navigation system with GPS functionality. It runs Windows CE 5.0 with an HP customised interface and has the most powerful CPU that I’ve heard of in a device this size – a dual-core 600MHz Titan processor. The 4.3 inch, 800×480 resolution screen makes it perfect for viewing maps in landscape mode.

HP iPAQ 600 Series Business Navigator (Data sheet)

This is my favourite of all the gadgets announced – it’s a PDA/phone with a 2.8 inch 240×320 resolution screen mounted above a standard phone keypad, with some additional function keys on either side of the key pad. It has been designed for single hand use and has a Smart Touch wheel and a three-way thumb wheel, but I’m not sure how these work yet. This also has GPS, wi-fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 as well as Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and Tri Band HSDPA. I’m really looking forward to checking these out and I may have to purchase the 610c model which has the additional 3 megapixel camera too.

HP iPAQ 900 Series Business Messenger (Data sheet)

This follows the more conventional, ‘Treo-like’ shape of a 320×240 resolution screen mounted above a full qwerty keyboard. This has similar specs to the 600 series.

Palm Announcement

The Palm announcement was the complete opposite to Apple and HPs announcements in that they announced a non-release of a product. Specifically, they announced that their controversial new product, the Foleo mobile companion, has now been canceled despite the face that it was due to ship shortly. The Foleo, was a device that looked like a small notebook, but ran a customised, stripped-down Linux operating system that operated in tandem with a Palm mobile phone such as a Treo. Many people couldn’t see the point of the device that was useless without an accompanying Palm device.

I think this was a brave decision by Palm, and usually brave decisions work out for the best as you’re more motivated to make them work. Here’s what the device would have looked like:

Elliot made me a lovely picture for Fathers Day, but I suspect that she had some help from Mummy too.